By Sunday, newspapers all across the nation shared the news of the country’s first “lady congressman.” The Indianapolis Sunday Star on Nov. 19, 1916, led its front-page story with the headline “‘Lady From Montana’ Expert Bread-Baking Fox-Trotter.” Every article highlighted her feminity and “womanly” qualities. Most shared the story of little brother Wellington’s lawyer friends teasing him that his big sister had won when his own run for political office had failed—and watch out! Little sister Edna was graduating from college soon and had eyes on politics, too. (For his part, Wellington, the little brother and campaign manager, seems to have been proud of his sister. Later, he said of Jeannette, “She was one of the best single-handed campaigners I ever saw.”)
Few Congressional terms are easy, but Jeannette took her seat during particularly troubled times. In what was only her sixth vote as Montana’s representative, she had to vote yes or no on a very serious question: Should the United States enter World War I?
On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson had addressed the “Gentlemen of the Congress” in an “extraordinary session,” urging the voting body to agree to raise arms in the ongoing conflict abroad. Debates raged in the House until, at nearly 3 a.m. on April 6, the voting began.
This put Jeannette at the crosshairs of a political and social movement far larger than herself. “Many feminists in the first two decades of the twentieth century argued that women should have the vote and participate in the formal political process because they were morally superior and more peace loving than men,” said Mary Murphy in an article for Montana: The Magazine of Western History in 2015. “These were arguments based on a politics of difference, a belief that men and women were profoundly dissimilar not merely in the physiological sense, but psychologically, emotionally, and morally—and those differences were all to the good. Scholars have labeled the arguments that women activists used to advocate reform based on this thinking ‘maternalist politics.’” In this, Jeannette was most certainly a product of her day and an “exemplar of ‘maternalist politics.’”
But like Eva Gore-Booth over in Ireland facing questions about the same war, Jeannette was also a devout pacifist.
While her male colleagues could consider their constituents, the president’s arguments, and their own moral compasses, Jeannette weighed all that, along with bearing the burden of representing all women and their potential for political office. As Mary Murphy wrote, “Some suffragists had urged Rankin to vote ‘yes’ on the declaration of war, fearing that a ‘no’ vote would signal that women were incapable of voting for war and by extension of participating in the rough-and-tumble of formal politics.”
As she’d so often done before, Jeannette followed her own moral guidance. On April 6, 1917, she did not respond for the first call. At the second, she stood and said, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.”
Mary Murphy noted, “Her fellow freshman legislator Fiorello La Guardia later recalled that he was asked if Miss Rankin was crying when she voted. He replied that he could not say, for he had not been able to see through the tears in his own eyes.”
In all, 50 members of the House voted against war, but Jeannette’s vote received all the attention and scorn. “Denounced in Demark,” reads one subheading in an article about Jeannette’s bote. Anaconda, Montana’s newspaper shared an April 8 overseas wire asserting that “Among women here interested in politics there is great indignation over the course of Miss Jeannette Rankin in opposing the war resolution in congress. … [T]he action of the first congresswoman is sure to be appropriated as proof that women are unfitted for public life.” This sentiment was not rare; Jeannette’s vote was, to many, the death knell of women in politics.
The climate of criticism was compounded by The Sedition Act of 1918, which made it punishable by a fine or imprisonment to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, or scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of the government of the United States...or the military or naval forces of the United States.” Those who had been brave enough to write letters or speak support for Jeannette’s choice quickly fell silent.
Despite these challenging conditions, Jeannette continued working for her constituents, including advocating for the working rights of miners following the Granite Mountain Speculator Mine disaster that killed 168 men. She pushed for legislation to empower mothers. As she said in 1911 when she first spoke to Montana’s legislature, “It is beautiful and right that a mother should nurse her child through typhoid fever, but it is also beautiful and right that she should have a voice in regulating the milk supply from which typhoid resulted.” And in 1918, as a member of the House of Representatives, she voted to give women the right to vote. She said later, “If I am remembered for no other act, I want to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.” (This particular bill would be defeated in the Senate, only to later pass in 1919 and be ratified as the 19th Amendment in 1920.)
As her term reached its end, Jeannette wanted to keep serving, but the negative press around her vote to stay out of World War I had done its damage. Her second campaign was a failure; she’d lost the support of Montana voters.
Jeannette found new ways to keep helping others. Back to the streets of advocacy, she wrote and spoke on the topics of labor laws, particularly against child labor, and family welfare. Her pacificism may have alienated her from her fellow Congresspersons, but amongst activists and conscientious objectors, her convictions found companions, including several who would go on to found the American Civil Liberties Union.
In 1924, in her mid 40s, Jeannette bought a sixty-four-acre farm in Georgia. “It had a plain one-room cabin, and no running water or electricity,” said Mary Barmeyer O’Brien. “She bought it for 500 dollars.” While living this quieter life, Jeannette’s nature didn’t change. “Children from surrounding homesteads often gathered at Jeannette’s cabin. On warm summer evenings, they clustered around her as she told them stories about Montana, her term in congress, and her ideas for world peace. She organized social clubs for the children. Together they read, cooked, or played games. Some learned to sew bathing suits, while others working on building crystal radios.”
She continued to tour and speak on the subject of peace. “By the late 1930s, she was known throughout the nation as a strong leader of the country’s pacifists,” wrote Mary. “Jeannette had perfected her public speaking style. She had a clear voice that carried well and she seemed to speak personally to each member of the audience. She had the ability to make war seem pointless. ‘You can no more win a war than you can with an earthquake,’ she once commented.”
In the 1930s, war began brewing again in Europe. Jeannette watched as closely as anyone. She testified before Congress to express her views, but wanted to be in a position to effect more change. In 1939, Jeannette returned to Montana to launch another campaign with brother Wellington.
Now nearly 60 years old, she did as she’d done in 1916. She traveled across the state, meeting with as many voters as she could; she spoke at nearly every high school in Montana; and in November 1940, she was elected to another term in the House of Representatives.
She was not the lone woman this time. In the intervening years and with the passage of the 19th Amendment, the number of women in United States Congress entered the double digits for the first time in history with 10, including 1 woman in the Senate.
On Dec. 7, 1941, planes from Imperial Japan bombed the Pearl Harbor naval base in Honolulu, Hawaii. On Dec. 8, the House and the Senate voted on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s request to declare war on Japan. This was familiar ground to Jeannette and she knew the consequences well. When time for her vote came, she said ‘no’ to war once again. Around her, hissing and booing Congresspeople urged her to change her vote to make it unanimous, or at least abstain rather than having one lone dissent.
She replied, “As a woman I can’t go to war and I refuse to send anyone else.”
The booing and hissing didn’t abate even as she left the chamber, only to be surrounded by reporters. She fled into the cloakroom and finally into a phone booth. With an escort of Capital Police, she returned to her office where angry phone calls and telegrams awaited her.
While the 1917 press had focused on her and ignored 49 other ‘No’ votes, in 1941, Jeannette truly was the sole opposition. “Miss Rankin Weeps After Anitwar Vote,” The Salt Lake Tribune printed on Dec. 9, 1941, before stating that “Police who escorted the frail gray-haired woman from the capitol building where she was almost mobbed by newsreel and press photographers, said that Miss Rankin was hysterical.” Days later, when the votes had to be counted to declare war on Italy and Germany, Jeannette voted “present.”
Few gave Jeannette any public support, though a small blurb attributed to Progressive newspaper editor William Allen White appeared in Emporia, Kansas’s The Emporia Gazette. It read, “Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. ... When, in a hundred years from now, courage, sheer courage based upon moral indignation, is celebrated in this country, the name of Jeannette Rankin, who stood firm in folly for her faith, will be written in monumental bronze—not for what she did but for the way she did it.”
Newspapers around the nation shared the story and photo of Jeannette chased into a phone booth. Much as it had in 1917, her vote against war diminished her chances of re-election. She again served a single term for the voters of Montana. In response to their vocal criticism, Jeannette penned a letter to her constituents, reminding them that she’d been a pacificist when they voted for her; she voted as she’d believed they elected her to vote.
Following her second time in office, she returned to Montana to care for her ailing mother. She helped brother Wellington with his own campaign for U.S. Senate, though it was unsuccessful. Her mother died in 1947. Despite her “maternalist politics,” Jeannette was never a mother herself and never married. Most who have studied her closely suspect she was simply too busy with her projects and goals.
For the remaining decades of her life, Jeannette traveled frequently to India. She was especially interested in meeting with noted pacifist Mohandas K. Gandhi, also known widely as Mahatma Gandhi. His assassination in 1948 meant this meeting never happened, but Jeannette still devoted time to learning his ideas.
When the Vietnam War broke, it’s no surprise that Jeannette was right there in the thick of the anti-war protests. Some of her writings indicate that, had her health permitted, she might have run for Congress a third time. In 1963, Jeannette, now in her 80s, was asked if time or the outcomes of the World Wars had given her any regrets regarding her two ‘No’ votes in Congress. She said:
“Both of my votes were votes against the war method. They were against war, not against or for the issues that we were told we were fighting for. If you’re against war, you’re against war regardless of what happens. It is a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute. I can’t settle a dispute with a young man by shooting him. And a nation can’t settle a dispute with another nation by killing their young men. We kill women and children with bombs, even the land and everything. War is a method, and you can be either for or against it and I’m against it because of its futility, its stupidity, and its ultimate destruction of humanity—of civilization. ... I felt at the time that...the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war she should say it.”
Jeannette died at age 92 on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, California. Just three years later, her Montana home, the Rankin Ranch, joined the National Register of Historic Places. She gave her land in Georgia to help “mature unemployed women workers.” That homestead has now become the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, which awards “scholarships to women college students 35 and older with low income.” She’s been the subject of, or included in, songs and plays performed across the country.
And as Kansas’s The Emporia Gazette had once predicted, Jeannette now stands in “monumental bronze.” In the building where she was booed and badgered by her fellow Congresspeople, her bronze statue rests atop a plinth labeled “Montana,” inscribed with the very words that earned her scorn: “I cannot vote for war.”
Sources:
Jeannette Rankin: Bright Star in the Big Sky by Mary Barmeyer O’Brien
The Indianapolis Sunday Star: Nov. 19, 1916
The Anaconda Standard: April 16, 1917
When Jeannette Said ‘No’: Montana women’s response to World War I by Mary Murphy
Speaking While Female: Jeannette Rankin at Carnegie Hall - March 2, 1917
Wikipedia: Jeannette Rankin, Women’s Suffrage in Montana
The Salt Lake Tribune: Dec. 9, 1941
Archives.gov: Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (1917)
The Lady from Montana by John C. Board
ConstitutionCenter.org: Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918
Brittanica: History of Women in the US Congress
The Emporia Gazette: Dec. 10, 1941
Jeannette Rankin Foundation: Our Story