Old Missoula

Missoula and Montana Voters in 1917 Send First Woman to Congress – Jeannette Rankin

Missoula and Montana produced the first woman member of Congress in 1917 – Jeanette Rankin.

Overnight she was in the national spotlight when as one of 56 representatives she gave an inaudible “nay” against the United States’s declaration of war on Germany. She had said on that fateful Good Friday morning, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.”

Only ‘No’ Vote

She was the single representative in 1941 to say no once more to war. Her 1940 campaign was conducted on the slogan: “Prepare to the limit for defense; keep our men out of Europe.”

Miss Rankin was defeated in 1918 in the primary for the Republican nomination for the Senate. She was defeated again in the November General Election on the National ticket by Sen. Thomas J. Walsh.

Miss Rankin supported prohibition, asked President Wilson for an investigation of labor conditions in Butte, opposed President Wilson’s conscription law, introduced a resolution encouraging Congress to recognize the “right of Ireland among those countries for whose freedom and democracy we are fighting.” Miss Rankin also advised coal miners at Klein to strike and made an appeal in the House for the continuance of the Federal Farm Loan System.

In her farewell address to the House she expressed regret at leaving Congress without woman suffrage by constitutional amendment being an accomplished fact. However, Miss Rankin’s election from Montana in 1916 preceded by four years the adoption of the constitutional amendment giving women through the country the right to vote. She also introduced a bill to let American women who married foreigners retain their citizenship.

Soon after she left Congress two years later, she became a leader in peace societies. For two decades she remained at the nation’s capital as legislative representative of the National Council for the Prevention of War.

Second Term

One of her first votes in the 1941 – 43 term was cast against the Roosevelt administration bill to make the United States an arsenal for Great Britain in her struggle against Germany.

She appealed to the House to insert a provision that no American troops could be sent out of the western hemisphere except with congressional consent. Fellow Republicans supported her amendment but the Democratic majority defeated it.

Born on Ranch

Miss Rankin was born on a ranch near Missoula June 11, 1880. Her father was John Rankin, who entered the state in the late ‘60s and worked as a contractor and boat builder. Her mother was Olive Pickering Rankin, a school teacher, who went from New Hampshire to Salt Lake City and then to Montana by wagon train.

She was graduated from Montana State University at the age of 22. She became interested in settlement work in San Francisco in 1908 – 09 and attended the New York School of Philanthropy. It was in New York that she became interested in woman suffrage.

In Social Service

Later she was engaged in social service work in Spokane and Seattle. In 1910 she was active in the woman suffrage campaign in the state of Washington. Afterwards she engaged in similar activities in California and then in Montana, where she was chairman of the committee in its successful campaign to give women the state vote.

Her interest in social work once took her to New Zealand for a study of conditions there: her interest in the cause of peace caused her to attend the World’s Peace Congress in Switzerland. Again in 1949 in the interest of peace, Miss Rankin headed for India to study the nonviolence theory which won independence for that country.

Mistaken for Lobbyist

In 1917 a story went the rounds in Washington that when she first arrived to take her seat in the House, the doorkeepers mistook her for a lobbyist. They tried to put her out. Not until she said, in a hesitant shy way, that she thought she had a right to the floor “because I am a member of the House, you see,” was she recognized.

 

Miss Rankin is currently a resident of Helena.