Jeannette Rankin (June 11, 1880 – May 18, 1973) was the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and the first female member of Congress. A Republican and a lifelong pacifist, she was the only member of Congress to vote against United States entry in both World War I and World War II. She was also the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan after Pearl Harbor. She also led resistance to the Vietnam War.
Biography
Rankin, the daughter of a rancher and a schoolteacher, was born in Grant Creek, Montana. She attended the University of Montana and graduated in 1902. In 1908 she moved to New York City, where she started a career as a social worker. She later moved to Seattle, Washington, and then enrolled at the University of Washington, where she joined the incipient suffrage movement. She played an instrumental role in the movement’s fight to grant women the right to vote in Montana, brought to fruition in 1914.
On November 7, 1916 she was elected to the House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana, becoming the first female member of Congress. She took her seat in the House on April 4, 1917. Only four days into her term, the House voted on the resolution to enter World War I. Rankin cast one of 49 votes against the resolution, earning her immediate vilification from the press. Suffrage groups cancelled her speaking engagements. Despite her vote against entering the war, she devoted herself to selling Liberty Bonds and voted for the military draft.
In 1918 she ran an unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination to represent Montana in the United States Senate. She then ran an independent candidacy, which also failed. Her term as Representative ended early in 1919. For the next two decades, she worked as a lobbyist in Washington, DC for various causes.
In 1918 and again in 1919, she introduced legislation to provide state and federal funds for health clinics, midwife education, and visiting nurse programs in an effort to reduce the nation’s infant mortality. While serving as a field secretary for the National Consumers’ League, she campaigned for legislation to promote maternal and child health care. As a lobbyist, Rankin argued for passage of the Sheppard-Towner Act, an infant and maternal health bill which was the first federal social welfare program created explicitly for women and children. As an effect of the bill, maternal and infant mortality rates had improved significantly. The legislation, however, was not enacted until 1921 and was repealed only eight years later.
In 1940, Rankin was again elected to Congress, this time on an anti-war platform. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she once again voted against entering a World War, the only member of Congress to do so.
She did not run for re-election. During the remainder of her life, she traveled to India several times, meeting with fellow pacifists such as Mahatma Gandhi.
In 1968, she led more than 5,000 women who called themselves “The Jeannette Rankin Brigade” to the United States Capitol to demonstrate their opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.
Rankin died in Carmel, California at the age of 92 from natural causes. Rankin bequeathed her property in Watkinsville, Georgia to help “mature, unemployed women workers”. This was the seed money for the Jeannette Rankin Foundation, a 501(c) 3 organization that gives educational grants annually to low-income women all across the United States. In 1985 a statue of her was placed in the United States Capitol’s Statuary Hall.
Source: Wikipedia
