Jeannette Pickering Rankin

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born June 11^th 1880, on the Grant Creek Ranch in Montana Territory to John Rankin, rancher, developer and lumber merchant and Olive Pickering a former school teacher. She was the oldest of eleven children, seven of whom survived childhood.  She attended Missoula public schools graduating in 1902 from the University of Montana with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology.

During a trip to Boston to visit her brother at Harvard in 1904, after witnessing conditions in slums, Jeannette took up a new field of social work.  She was a resident in a San Francisco Settlement House for a while.  After completing a degree in social work at Columbia School of Social Work in New York, she worked in Spokane Washington in a children’s home.  In 1910 she joined the suffrage movement, determined to combine her quest for peace with suffrage.  She spent the next few years lobbying for suffrage in fifteen different states and was a major force in acquiring the vote for women in Montana in 1914. In 1916 she campaigned for Congress as a Republican, endorsing prohibition, suffrage, child protection laws and “preparedness that will make for peace”.  She won the election, becoming the first woman in the House of Representatives.  Just four days after her arrival in Washington in April 1917 she voted against the U.S. entry into World War I.  Fifty six congressmen voted with her, and although it was falsely reported that she cried as she cast her vote, in fact several of the men did cry.

Having lost a bid for election as a Montana senator, Jeannette finished out her term as a congresswoman and moved on to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  In 1924 she established the Georgia Peace Society.  From 1929 to 1939 she was an organizer and lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War.  In 1939 she again ran for Congress in Montana.  With the support of women, labor and citizens against war; she defeated her liberal Democratic opponent.

In 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor she cast the only opposing vote to America’s entry into World War II becoming the only member of Congress to oppose both World Wars.  After losing her bid for re-election in 1942 she traveled extensively abroad studying pacifism. She was fascinated by Ghandi’s work and made seven trips to India between 1946 and 1971.