top of page

Jeannette Rankin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1916 Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to the United States Congress. Moreover, because women were not appointed to judicial and cabinet positions until ten years later, Representative Rankin, taking office in 1917, became the first woman to occupy a leadership position in the US federal government.**

 

Jeannette Rankin went to Congress as a Republican from Montana at a time when women had just won the vote in that state (led by Jeannette Rankin) and had not yet achieved universal suffrage in the United States. The only woman elected to any position in the Federal Government before adoption of the 19th Amendment (giving women the right to vote, 1920), she won without benefit of great wealth, a family in national politics, or privileged political connections. Still the only woman elected to Congress from Montana, Rankin managed somehow to do it twice, in 1916 and twelve congresses later in 1940. Her two widely separated congressional terms tell a remarkable and unparalleled story.

 

On 6 April 1917, shortly after taking her seat in the House, Rep. Rankin became one of fifty representatives and six senators to vote against declaring war on Germany. A woman alone in Congress with 528 males, her unpopular vote against war required the courage to accept its probable consequences. Accordingly, in 1918 Montana's legislature found a way for her to lose her bid for reelection.  Replacing its at-large elections, it divided the state into two districts giving Rankin a district comprised largely of Democrats.  After that defeat, she put together a bid, as an independent, to be the first woman in the Senate, but she lost that race as well and left politics for the next twenty years. In 1941, soon after her second election to the House and one day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Rankin was asked to make unanimous the congressional vote for war with Japan. In spite of her vote against war in 1917 and its disastrous effect on her career in politics, Jeannette Rankin, again in 1941, voted against a declaration of war. The combined vote of Congress was 470 to declare war, 1 opposed (388-1 in the House, 82-0 in the Senate, and a total of 60 abstentions).

 

After the vote, William Allen White, writing in the Kansas Emporia Gazette, wrote:  

Probably a hundred men in Congress would have liked to do what she did. Not one of them had the courage to do it. The Gazette entirely disagrees with the wisdom of her position. But Lord, it was a brave thing! And its bravery someway discounted its folly. 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.

 

One hundred years after Rankin's first vote for peace, election debate in 2016 seldom addresses the global plunder of the United States. US militarism in service to corporate hegemony, the collaboration in that effort of mainstream media, and the underlying indifference of Americans to the subject of foreign policy, together determine our global agenda. Jeannette Rankin, pressured in 1941 to support her colleagues in yet another call to war, instead stood completely alone in and against Congress to advocate for an alternative vision.  She stands, still today, to ask that America reconsider its calamitous commitment to profits and empire, weapons and war.   JL

 

 

 

 

 

 

*   According to Wikipedia, the United States has been involved in 108 wars and rebellions in its 250 years, 5 are current (2021).  It sells weapons to 96 countries and accounts for 36% of the world's arms sales.  Continuous war is essential to the US, its corporations, its wealth, its power in the world. Economically dependent on global conflict, the US is unlikely to celebrate the only person in the federal government to vote against US participation in both World Wars as well as the only person to vote against the US entry into World War II.

**  In the 19th century several women were appointed by governors to serve out the congressional terms of their deceased husbands, but those were honorary appointments intended to show respect for the former congressmen (and, in some cases, to avoid an interim election).

 

 

    The First Great Woman in American Government,

                          Now Almost Forgotten*

bottom of page