Feisty Female Friday: Jeanette Rankin

The FFF this week is Jeanette Rankin.

Jeanette was an American politician, suffragist, and lifelong pacifist who became the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress.

She was born in Montana and graduated with a biology degree and worked as a teacher before moving into social work and reform studies in NY and WA. Jeanette led the successful 1914 campaign to grant women the right to vote in Montana and worked as a field secretary and lobbyist for the NAWSA and helped introduce the constitutional amendment that became the 19th Amendment. She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and helped establish the Women's Peace Party. She served twice in Congress elected from Montana to the U.S. House and first took office three years before the 19th Amendment guaranteed nationwide women's suffrage.

She voted against U.S. entry into World War I in 1917, joining 49 other members in opposition. She served a second term Elected again to Congress in 1940. Jeanette also cast the sole dissenting vote against U.S. entry into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, she says because she could not go to war,she refused to send anyone else. In 1946 she traveled to India to study Gandhi's teachings on nonviolent resistance. At age 87, she co-led the "Jeannette Rankin Brigade," a march of 5,000 women on Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War.

Her estate established the Jeannette Rankin Foundation in 1976 to support low-income women. A statue of her can be found in the U.S. Capitol's National Statuary Hall Collection. Her words to always remember: “I may be the first woman member of Congress but I won’t be the last.”

She passed away on May 18, 1973, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.