Jeannette Rankin

Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, near Missoula in Montana Territory, nine years before the territory became a state, to school teacher Olive (née Pickering) and Scottish-Canadian immigrant John Rankin, a wealthy mill owner. One of her sisters, Edna Rankin McKinnon, became the first Montana-born woman to pass the bar exam in Montana and was an early social activist for access to birth control. As an adolescent on her family ranch, Rankin had many tasks, including cleaning, sewing, farm chores, outdoor work, and helping care for her younger siblings. She helped maintain the ranch machinery and once single-handedly built a wooden sidewalk for a building her father owned so it could be rented. Rankin later recorded her childhood observation that while women of the 1890s western frontier labored side by side as equals with men, they did not have an equal political voice—nor a legal right to vote. Rankin graduated from high school in 1898. She studied at the University of Montana and, in 1902, received a Bachelor of Science degree in biology. Before her political and advocacy career, she explored a variety of careers, including dressmaking, furniture design, and teaching. After her father died in 1904, Rankin took on the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings. == Activism and suffrage movement ==

At the age of 27, Rankin moved to San Francisco to take a job in social work, a new and developing field. After a brief period as a social worker in Spokane, Washington, Returning to New York, Rankin became one of the organizers of the New York Woman Suffrage Party, which joined with other suffrage organizations to promote a similar suffrage bill in that state's legislature. During this period, Rankin also traveled to Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). In February 1911, she became the first woman to speak before the Montana legislature, arguing in support of enfranchisement for women in her home state. ==House of Representatives==

First congressional term Rankin's campaign for one of Montana's two at-large House seats in the congressional election of 1916 was financed and managed by her brother Wellington, an influential member of the Montana Republican Party. She traveled long distances to reach the state's widely scattered population. Rankin rallied support at train stations, street corners, potluck suppers on ranches, and remote one-room schoolhouses. She ran as a progressive, emphasizing her support of suffrage, social welfare, and prohibition. Before her election she spoke on several occasions in favor of proportional representation. In the Republican primary, Rankin received the most votes of the eight Republican candidates. In the at-large general election on November 7, the top two vote-getters won the seats. Rankin finished second in the voting, defeating Frank Bird Linderman, among others, to become the first woman elected to Congress. During her victory speech, she said, "I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me" as the only woman in the nation with voting power in Congress. Her election generated considerable nationwide interest, including, reportedly, several marriage proposals. Shortly after her term began, Congress was called into an extraordinary April session in response to Germany declaring unrestricted submarine warfare on all Atlantic shipping. Rankin cast one of 50 votes in opposition. "I wish to stand for my country," she said, "but I cannot vote for war." Years later, she would add, "I felt the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war, she should say it." Although 49 male Representatives and six Senators also voted against the declaration, Rankin was singled out for criticism. Some considered her vote a discredit to the suffragist movement and her authority in Congress; but others applauded it, including Alice Paul of the National Woman's Party and Representative Fiorello La Guardia of New York. On June 8, 1917, the Speculator Mine disaster in Butte left 168 miners dead. Workers called a massive protest strike over working conditions. Rankin tried to intervene, but mining companies refused to meet with her or the miners, and her proposed legislation to end the strike was unsuccessful. She had greater success pushing for better working conditions in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Rankin listened to the grievances of federal workers in the bureau, which included long hours and an excessively demanding work pace. She hired investigative reporter Elizabeth Watson to investigate. As a result of her efforts to draw attention to the working conditions of the bureau, Treasury Secretary William McAdoo convened his own investigation and ultimately limited the work day to eight hours. and Rankin opened congressional debate on a Constitutional amendment granting universal suffrage to women. Attempting to appeal to Southern representatives committed to Jim Crow discrimination, Rankin argued that white women could be given the vote without raising the issue of votes for African Americans: "Are you going to deny them [white women] the equipment with which to help you effectively simply because the enfranchisement of a child-race 50 years ago brought you a problem you were powerless to handle?" The resolution passed in the House but was defeated in the Senate. The following year—after Rankin's congressional term had ended—the same resolution passed both chambers. After ratification by three-fourths of the states, it became the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. During Rankin's term, Montana's state legislature voted to replace the state's two at-large Congressional seats with two single-member districts. With little chance of reelection in the overwhelmingly Democratic western district, Rankin chose instead to run for the Senate in 1918. After losing the Republican primary to physician Oscar M. Lanstrum, she accepted the nomination of the National Party and finished third in the general election behind Lanstrum and incumbent Democrat Thomas J. Walsh. though many of its key provisions were incorporated into the Social Security Act of 1935. In 1920, Rankin helped found the American Civil Liberties Union and served as a vice president. In 1924, Rankin bought a small farm near Athens, Georgia. She lived a simple life there, without electricity or plumbing, although she also maintained a residence in Montana. Rankin made frequent speeches around the country on behalf of the Women's Peace Union and the National Council for the Prevention of War (NCPW). In 1928 she founded the Georgia Peace Society, which served as headquarters for her pacifism campaign until its dissolution in 1941, on the eve of the U.S. involvement in World War II. In 1937, Rankin opposed President Franklin Roosevelt's proposals to intervene on the British side against Germany and its allies, arguing that both sides wished to avoid a second European war and would pursue a diplomatic solution. She testified before multiple Congressional committees in opposition to various preparedness measures. When it became clear that her lobbying efforts were largely ineffective, Rankin resigned from her NCPW position and declared her intention to regain her seat in the House of Representatives. and former Representative Jerry J. O'Connell in the general election. She was appointed to the Committee on Public Lands and the Committee on Insular Affairs. While members of Congress and their constituents had been debating the question of U.S. intervention in World War II for months, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, galvanized the country and silenced virtually all opposition. Hisses could be heard in the gallery as she cast her vote; several colleagues, including Rep. (later Senator) Everett Dirksen, asked her to change it to make the resolution unanimous—or at very least, to abstain—but she refused. "As a woman I can't go to war," she said, "and I refuse to send anyone else." After the vote, a crowd of reporters pursued Rankin into a cloakroom. There, she was forced to take refuge in a phone booth until Capitol Police arrived to escort her to her office, where she was inundated with angry telegrams and phone calls. One cable from her brother read, "Montana is 100 percent against you." A wire-service photo of Rankin sequestered in the phone booth, calling for assistance, appeared the following day in newspapers across the country. While her action was widely ridiculed in the press, Progressive leader William Allen White, writing in the Kansas Emporia Gazette, acknowledged her courage in taking it: 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. Three days later, a similar war declaration against Germany and Italy came to a vote; Rankin abstained. Realizing she had all but ended her political career with her vote against the war resolution, she did not run for reelection in 1942. Asked years later if she ever regretted her action, Rankin replied, "Never. If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute." John F. Kennedy would write about Rankin's decisions, "Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty." ==Later life==

After leaving Congress, Rankin would withdraw from public life until the anti-Vietnam War protests of the 1960s. Over the next twenty years, Rankin travelled the world, frequently visiting India, where she studied the pacifist teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. She maintained homes in both Georgia and Montana. In 1972, Rankin—by then in her nineties—considered mounting a third House campaign to gain a wider audience for her opposition to the Vietnam War, but longstanding throat and heart ailments forced her to abandon that final project. ==Personal life==

Rankin never married, nor had any children. ==Death and legacy==

in the National Statuary Hall, Washington, D.C., by Terry Mimnaugh (1985) Rankin died on May 18, 1973, at age 92, in Carmel, California. There is a memorial stone dedicated to her in the Missoula Cemetery. She bequeathed her estate, including the property in Watkinsville, Georgia, to help "mature, unemployed women workers". Her Montana residence, known as the Rankin Ranch, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. The Jeannette Rankin Foundation (now the Jeannette Rankin Women's Scholarship Fund), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, awards annual educational scholarships to low-income women 35 and older across the United States. Beginning with a single $500 scholarship in 1978, the fund has since awarded more than $1.8 million in scholarships to more than 700 women. A statue of Rankin by Terry Mimnaugh, inscribed "I Cannot Vote For War", was placed in the United States Capitol's Statuary Hall in 1985. At its dedication, historian Joan Hoff-Wilson called Rankin "one of the most controversial and unique women in Montana and American political history." A biography of Jeanette Rankin titled ''Jeannette Rankin, America's Conscience'' was published posthumously in 2002 by historian Norma Longeteig Smith. In 2004, peace activist Jeanmarie Simpson produced and starred in the one-woman play A Single Woman, based on the life of Rankin, to benefit peace organizations. Simpson also starred in a film adaptation that was directed and produced by Kamala Lopez, narrated by Martin Sheen, and featuring music by Joni Mitchell. Opera America commissioned a song cycle about Rankin called Fierce Grace that premiered in 2017. In 2018, the Kalispell Brewing Company commissioned a mural on the side of its building in Kalispell, Montana, featuring a Rankin caricature and quotation. Rankin is the subject of the musical ''We Won't Sleep (formerly Jeannette) with music and lyrics by Arianna Afsar and a book by Lauren Gunderson. Under the title Jeannette'', the musical was part of the 2019 summer series at the National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in Connecticut. Although her legacy rests almost entirely on her pacifism, Rankin told the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1972 that she would have preferred otherwise. "If I am remembered for no other act," she said, "I want to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote." ==See also==