Representative Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), By Matzene, 1917; Courtesy of the Senate Historical Office
On November 7, 1916, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman elected to Congress, 4 years before woman suffrage was added to the Constitution in 1920 with the 19th Amendment. Since Rankin, there have been nearly 200 women elected to Congress.
To me, Jeannette Rankin was one of the most impressive women in US history, and I’m not impressed by much. She felt privileged to have had such a good upbringing and education and always worked to make the world as good for others as she had it.
Rankin was strong suffragette (an organizer with the National American Women Suffrage Association), anti-war (“As a woman, I cannot go to war, and I refuse to send anybody else”), believed in the power of education to raise one’s standard of living, was an advocate for women’s health and nursing programs to reduce infant mortality, and was a supporter of child-protection laws. Initially a strong proponent of the temperance movement and Prohibition Act, she lost faith in the concept and admitted her error a couple of years after its inception, when violence and organized crime were rising alarmingly fast.
Thanks primarily to suffragette movements like NAWSA (and, in some cases, for reasons pertaining to attaining statehood), Montana women, and women throughout the west, had the right to vote before most of the country. Nevertheless, the population data for the state of Montana at the time shows that Rankin’s supporters would still have been, in vast majority, male.
Between her two terms in congress (she was elected again in 1940), she lobbied for the Sheppard-Towner Act (the first federal social welfare program to provide healthcare and assistance to women and children - unfortunately, repealed 8 years after its 1921 inception), was the Vice-President of the ACLU, and helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
After her second term in congress, Rankin continued working for women’s rights, anti-war policies, and disarmament of countries. She traveled to India seven times between the late 1940s and her death in 1973, and was a student of Gandhian principles of non-violence and self-determination - lessons she emphasized in her anti-war and women’s rights speeches.
Her stance on active pacifism led to her to voting against engaging in the war in WWII, speaking out against the Korean war, and later, the Vietnam war. Despite this, she was always pushing the importance of buying War Bonds, because if we decided to send our boys over there, we absolutely needed to provide the best we could for them.
Even up to just three years before her death, Rankin was leading women on marches in Washington DC, against the war, against disenfranchisement of all sorts (racial, ethnic, gender, or religious), and pushing to end the US policy of getting militarily involved in conflicts that do not threaten us (though she did support aiding civilians and wounded combatants from both sides).
By the time Rankin died in 1973, at the age of 92, she had accomplished more than most people could in many lifetimes. She had stayed true to her principles throughout her life, but was not afraid to admit error when things were clearly not as she had expected them to be. There was no need to be married to be happy, and indeed, she never was. She was an anti-war fighter, a staunch advocate of women’s rights, and a true believer in the power of a solid education. She was elected twice, on those platforms (which she made clear in her campaign), as a Republican, and as an unmarried woman, in the state of Montana.
Montana has not elected a female representative since then. She would be laughed out of the Republican party, and be told she has to “be flexible” with her ideals and “work more with the other side” if she were to become a Democrat.
It’s depressing that people who truly break new ground and who stand firm (and DON’T “compromise”) for something that’s not a religion or a lobby would never make it in Congress today.
/end history editorialization