When Jeannette Rankin graduated from the University of Montana in 1902, she was unsure of what to do next.
It wasn’t until she went to Boston to visit her brother two years later that her path in life began to take shape.
That experience, Jodie Foley, the Montana state archivist, said in an interview, helped mold Rankin’s views on social welfare and politics. If the rights and well-being of women and children were to be protected by their government, women would need a seat at the table.
In the decades that followed, Rankin sharpened her political and ideological views. Back in Montana, she became the first woman to address the state’s all-male legislature about a nascent suffrage bill. By 1914, women won the right to vote there, half a decade before the 19th Amendment granted it nationwide. And in 1916, Rankin made history as the first woman to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.
In Washington, Rankin proved instrumental in the creation of the Commission on Women’s Suffrage. Most famously, Rankin joined 49 other representatives and six senators in voting against a declaration of war against Germany and the United States’s entrance into World War I in 1917.
Rankin served in the House from 1917 until 1919, and once again from 1941 until 1943. She was the only member of Congress to vote against the declaration of war on Japan that marked America’s formal entrance into World War II.
— Max Greenwood
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