September 22
On September 22, 1880, Jeannette Rankin was born near Missoula, Montana. She would become the first woman elected to the United States Congress — four years before women had the right to vote nationally — and the only member of Congress to vote against American entry into both World War I and World War II. She voted "no" twice and was called a traitor twice.
Rankin was elected to Congress from Montana in 1916, when Montana had already granted women the right to vote at the state level. Women could not vote for her in most of the country. In April 1917, three days after she was sworn in, she voted against the United States' declaration of war against Germany. She was one of 50 members of Congress to vote no. She was the only woman. Her vote was reported as a sobbing breakdown by newspapers that described male votes against the war as principled dissent.
She lost her Senate race in 1918 and spent two decades as a peace activist. She won a congressional seat again in 1940. On December 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor, she cast the single vote against the declaration of war against Japan — the only member of Congress to vote no on both wars. The House vote was 388 to 1.
She was mobbed when she left the Capitol building. She locked herself in a phone booth and called the police.
She spent the 1960s opposing the Vietnam War and led an antiwar march on Washington in 1968 at age eighty-seven.
Rankin's two votes against war declarations are the most principled acts of political isolation in twentieth-century American congressional history. The treatment of her 1917 vote — reported as emotional breakdown rather than deliberate dissent — reflects the basic asymmetry in how women's political decisions are interpreted. She voted the same position twice, twenty-four years apart, without apology.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.