Jeannette Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, on her family's ranch at Grant Creek, just outside Missoula, when Montana was still a territory. Her father had come from Canada and her mother from New England, and the family spent every summer on the ranch. She graduated from the University of Montana in 1902, tried teaching and social work, and found her cause in the campaign for women's votes. Montana women won it in November 1914, years ahead of most of the country.
In 1916 Rankin ran as a Republican for one of Montana's two at-large seats in the House of Representatives. She beat seven men in the primary, crossed the state to reach its scattered voters, and on November 7 finished among the top two. She was the first woman elected to Congress, sent there by a state where women could vote, at a time when most American women still could not.
April 1917
She was sworn in on April 2, 1917, the day President Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Four days later the House voted. Rankin was one of fifty members who voted no, against 373 who voted yes, and the line attributed to her that day is the one she is remembered by: she wanted to stand by her country, but she could not vote for war. The Helena Independent called her a dupe of the Kaiser. She ran for the Senate in 1918 and finished third, and for the next two decades she worked for peace organizations as a private citizen.
December 1941
In 1940, at sixty, she ran for the House again and won. On December 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress voted on war with Japan. Rankin voted no, the only member of either chamber to do so, while hisses came down from the gallery. Reporters followed her into a cloakroom, and she shut herself in a telephone booth until the Capitol Police came to walk her back to her office, where the telegrams were already arriving. One, from her brother, told her that Montana was one hundred percent against her. Her explanation was short: as a woman she could not go to war, and she refused to send anyone else. She did not run again.
She was not finished. On January 15, 1968, at eighty-seven, she led about five thousand women in a march on the Capitol against the Vietnam War, on the opening day of Congress; they called themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade. She died in 1973. A memorial stone to her stands in the Missoula Cemetery, and the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center in town carries on the work in her name. She used to say she wanted to be remembered as the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote, which she did in 1918, in the term between her two votes against war.