AUTHOR’S NOTE

Jeannette Rankin wouldn’t meet the reporters trampling her front lawn after she won a seat in Congress. But that didn’t stop them making up stories about her. This verse by Christopher Morley appeared in the New York Times just days after the election. It treated Jeannette’s future in Congress as a joke. As for a chaperone, Jeannette certainly didn’t need one. She could take care of herself!

The Congresslady

We have so many Congressmen

Whose ways are dark and shady—

How joyfully we welcome then wonder, is she old and stout

The coming Congresslady!

Or is she young and pretty?

How long the members will stay out

Who are on her committee!

We’ll hear no more of shabbiness

Among our legislators—

She’ll make them formal in their dress

They’ll wear boiled shirts and gaiters.

Her maiden speeches will be known

For charm and grace of manner;

But who on earth will chaperone

The member from Montana?

Jeannette Rankin in Congress and Beyond

Congress was the ideal place for Jeannette Rankin. She could use her boundless energy, fierce determination, and publicspeaking skills to work for change. She always voted her conscience, even if she made enemies—which she did. She kept her promise to work for women and children, but she was a woman ahead of her time. Many of the measures that she supported only became law after she left Congress. However her achievements include:

• She was the first member of Congress to hire an all-woman office staff.

• She cosponsored a health bill for women and children.

• She cosponsored a bill against child labor.

• She introduced a bill calling for equal pay for men and women.

• She supported a bill for a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage.

• She supported women workers in organizing a union at the Bureau of Printing and Engraving in Washington, DC.

• She cast her first vote against bringing the United States into World War I. She was vilified for it. In later years she said, “I felt at the time that the first woman [in Congress] should take the first stand, that the first time the first woman had a chance to say no to war she should say it.”

• When war was declared, she voted for military bills in order to end the war quickly.

• She voted against bills that limited free speech in wartime.

Jeannette Rankin was not reelected in 1918 because of her unpopular vote against the war. She spent the next two decades working for peace and social welfare.

In 1940 she was reelected to Congress and worked to keep America out of the war in Europe. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war. Rankin, an unwavering pacifist, was the only member of Congress to vote against entering World War II. Senator John F. Kennedy, who later became president, wrote of her 1941 vote against war in a magazine article, “Three Women of Courage”:

Few members of Congress since its founding in 1789 have ever stood more alone, more completely in defiance of popular opinion, than former Representative Jeannette Rankin of Montana. . . . Most of us do not associate the quality of courage with women in public affairs. We neither expect it nor reward it.

In her final years Jeannette Rankin came out of retirement to campaign against the war in Vietnam. In 1968, when she was eighty-seven, she led a peace march of five thousand women in Washington, DC. The marchers called themselves the Jeannette Rankin Brigade.

And the trail she blazed to Congress? Since Jeannette’s victory in 1916, 397 women have served in Congress, including 94 women of color. In 2022, 24 women served in the US Senate, 125 served in the House of Representatives, and one as vice president. In addition, women are elected to office at all levels, from city councils and mayors to state legislatures and governors. And the White House? We’re still waiting. It won’t be long now.