Jeannette Rankin
Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, in Missoula, at a moment when questions of women's civic participation were pressing against the boundaries of law and custom. The American West in which she came of age provided the political ground from which her public life would eventually grow, and Montana in particular would remain bound to her identity and career throughout her life.
Rankin pursued her education across several institutions, studying at the University of Montana, the University of Washington, and the Columbia University School of Social Work. She worked as a social worker and became active as a suffragist, a feminist, and a women's rights advocate — commitments that shaped her entry into electoral politics. In 1916, she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana, becoming the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. She served one term, then returned to Congress when she was elected again in 1940. Across both periods in office and beyond them, she sustained her work as a pacifist and peace activist, efforts that earned her the War Resisters League Peace Award.
Her recognition extended across a range of communities. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and received the Georgia Women of Achievement award. She remains, as a matter of historical record, the only woman ever elected to Congress from Montana — a distinction that has held for more than a century since her first election.
Rankin died on May 18, 1973, in Carmel-by-the-Sea. The War Resisters League Peace Award she received stands as one concrete marker of how she spent the decades of her public life — as a politician, a social worker, a suffragist, and a peace activist working in the English language on behalf of causes she pursued from her earliest years in Missoula to the end of her life.
Quotes by Jeannette Rankin
Jeannette Rankin's insights on:
Go! Go! Go! It makes no difference where, just so you go! Go! Go! Remember, at the first opportunity, go.
There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.
How can people in other countries who are trying to grasp our plan of democracy avoid stumbling over our logic when we deny the first steps in democracy to our women?
We reasoned that the men would find it difficult to vote against the women in their home states when a woman was sitting with them making laws.
We have to get it into our heads once and for all that we cannot settle disputes by eliminating human beings.
It will be hard to convince people that their welfare is safe in the hands of a federal government when they feel themselves the victims of unjust sectional discrimination.
It is important for people to be able to read all sides of every question; for a feeling of national unity does not come from one-sided or inadequate information, but from a sense of freedom impartially secured and of opportunity equalized by a just government.
If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.
Might it not be that a great force that has always been thinking in terms of human needs, and that always will think in terms of human needs, has not been mobilized? Is it not possible that the women of the country have something of value to give the nation at this time?
If they are going to have war, they ought to take the old men and leave the young to propagate the race.