Jeannette Rankin: suffrage organizer who voted against entering both world wars

Jeannette Rankin once said she wanted to be remembered as the only woman who voted to give women the right to vote. The article behind this page, by Winifred Conkling, says her contributions go far beyond that: she was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and she voted against American entry into both world wars, which the article says makes her the only person to have done so.

Jeannette Rankin. Collections of the Library of Congress.

From teacher to suffragist

Rankin was born in the Montana Territory in 1880, before it became a state. Unlike most women of her day she attended college, studying biology in the first class of students at the University of Montana. She began as a teacher but changed course after visiting her brother Wellington in Boston and seeing urban slums for the first time. Back in the West she worked at a settlement house for poor women and children, then studied social work at the New York School of Philanthropy, which later became Columbia University's School of Social Work. In 1909 she moved to Washington State and worked at an orphanage, but concluded that handling one case at a time could never meet the needs of the poor. Seeking systemic change, she enrolled at the University of Washington to study finance, public speaking and government.

There she found suffrage. In 1910 an ad in the school newspaper asked for volunteers for the women's suffrage campaign in Washington State, and an afternoon putting up posters convinced her that suffrage and social reform were linked: women with the vote could support laws that improved the lives of children and families. That fall Washington became the fifth state to give women the vote.

Jeannette Rankin (right) holding The Suffragist newspaper. Collections of the Library of Congress.

Montana

Back in Montana, Rankin worked for suffrage there. The Equal Franchise Society asked her to address the state legislature, and as the first woman to do so she caused a stir: legislators were banned from smoking in the room, spittoons were removed, they were warned not to swear, and they bought her a bouquet of violets. She opened by saying she was born in Montana, which gave her credibility since most people there had moved from elsewhere, and she presented the vote in a non-threatening way, arguing that suffrage would not upset the social order but would make women better caretakers of children and families.

Jeannette Rankin (right) and Carrie Chapman Catt (left) on the balcony at NAWSA headquarters. Collections of the Library of Congress.

The bill failed that year. Rankin kept going, traveling thousands of miles across Montana and working with the National American Woman Suffrage Association. In 1914 Montana became the tenth state to give women the vote. She then decided to run for Congress, saying her main motive was to advance the suffrage movement nationwide. She believed women needed a voice in government to speak against war and for children's issues, and her brother Wellington offered to manage her campaign. She also backed an 8-hour work day for women and legal protections for children, especially orphans. When critics said a woman's place is in the home, she answered that the way to protect the home is to have a say in government. In 1916, at thirty-six, she became the first woman elected to the U.S. House.

The vote against war

On April 2, 1917, suffragists honored Rankin at a breakfast before her first day on Capitol Hill. Her friends feared that voting against the war then intensifying in Europe would make women look weak and unfit for politics. The same day President Woodrow Wilson called an emergency session and asked Congress to enter the war. Rankin had promised in her campaign to do everything she could to keep the country out of war. She was not a Quaker, but she had held pacifist beliefs since childhood. Wellington urged her to "vote a man's vote" and save her political career.

After only six days in Congress, at three o'clock in the morning, her name was called and she said she wanted to stand by her country but could not vote for war. The measure passed without her and fifty other members of Congress. Told she would not be re-elected, she replied that she was interested only in what people would say fifty years later.

Jeannette Rankin (standing right) and Carrie Chapman Catt (standing left) in a car outside NAWSA headquarters. Collections of the Library of Congress.

Suffrage in the House, and a second term

Rankin kept her promise on suffrage. On January 10, 1918, she addressed Congress, asking how it could explain democracy while refusing women this small measure of it. The resolution passed the House 274 to 136, though not the Senate. As expected she lost her next election. After she left office Congress passed the 19th Amendment, which gave women in all states the vote after ratification in 1920.

She then moved to a farm in Georgia and worked with the Georgia Peace Society. In 1940 she ran for the House in Montana again, promising to keep America out of war, and won. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, she voted the next day against entering the war, this time the single vote against, which the article says makes her the only person to have voted against American involvement in both World War I and World War II. Her second term was also her last, which she did not see as the point; she later told a friend she had nothing left except her integrity.

Sources

• National Park Service page reproducing an article by Winifred Conkling (author of Votes for Women! American Suffragists and the Battle for the Ballot), first published on May 6, 2020 on the blog of the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/jeannette-rankin-one-woman-one-vote.htm; pictures from the Library of Congress; rewritten in hubnx's own words.