Coretta Scott King (left) joins 87-year-old Jeannette Rankin in Atlanta on Jan. 5, 1967, in a call for an anti-Vietnam War march on Washington by American women. | AP Photo First woman elected to Congress is born in Montana, June 11, 1880

On this day in 1880, Jeannette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to Congress, was born on a ranch near Missoula, in what was then the Montana Territory. She was to become the oldest of 11 children.

In 1904, while visiting her brother Wellington at Harvard, Rankin became appalled by the Boston slums and entered what was then the new field of social work. She enlisted in the women’s suffrage movement in 1910, and, working with various suffrage groups, she campaigned for granting women the right to vote.


In 1916, two years after women could vote in Montana, she ran for Congress as a Republican. Her platform called for nationwide women’s suffrage and neutrality in World War I. After Congress convened, members debated for a month whether a woman should be admitted as a member.

On April 2, 1917, the same day Rankin took her seat in the House, President Woodrow Wilson, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, called for a declaration of war against Germany. She inadvertently violated House rules by making a brief speech when casting her "no" vote — one of 50 lawmakers to oppose the declaration of war. “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she told the House.

The Helena Independent likened her to “a dagger in the hands of the German propagandists, a dupe of the Kaiser, a member of the Hun army in the United States, and a crying schoolgirl,” even though Montana mail to Rankin’s office ran against U.S. intervention.

When a special House committee reported out a constitutional amendment on female suffrage in January 1918, Rankin opened the debate on the issue, “How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen,” she asked. “How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” The resolution narrowly cleared the House amid the cheers of women in the galleries, only to die in the Senate.

In 1918, Rankin unsuccessfully ran for the Senate, and left the House to serve in various pro-suffrage and pacifist organizations.

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In 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and Asia, she was again elected as a pacifist representative from Montana. She argued against war preparations initiated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. On Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Rankin cast the sole dissenting vote against a formal declaration of war. Her vote created a furor in Montana, and Rankin declined to run again in 1942. She continued, however, to be an important advocate for pacifism and social reform.

In 1967, she organized the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, which staged several widely publicized protests against the Vietnam War. Rankin died in 1973 at the age of 92.

SOURCES: “JEANNETTE RANKIN, AMERICA’S CONSCIENCE,” BY NORMA SMITH (2002); HISTORY.HOUSE.GOV/PEOPLE/LISTING/R/RANKIN,-JEANNETTE-(R000055)/

