Jeannette Rankin’s Historic Election: A Centennial Celebration

In 1916, Rankin became the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. 

You can watch historic footage and memories of the first woman to serve in Congress at the U.S. House of Representatives' History, Art & Archives website

Woman suffrage was won in Montana in 1914.

In the first state election with women voting, the state elected the first woman in Congress.

The House debated the war resolution on April 5th. Given Rankin’s strong pacifist views, she was inclined against war. Colleagues in the suffrage movement urged caution, fearing that a vote against war would tarnish the entire cause.

Rankin sat out the debate over war, a decision she later regretted.  “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” she told the House. “I vote no.”  The final vote was 373 for the war resolution and 50 against.

For many years, gallery passes were steel engravings like this one, featuring a personification of Liberty.

She wears a liberty cap and holds the House Mace, the symbol of the institution’s authority. With Rankin's election, women moved from allegorical to actual presence in Congress.

Jeannette Rankin signed this gallery pass just two months after she became the first woman to serve in Congress.

Rankin was an unsuccessful candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in 1918, engaged in social work for the next three decades. She ran and was re-elected to the House in 1940. 

This campaign button was the start of Jeannette Rankin’s second successful campaign for Congress during the looming crisis of World War II.

Jeannette Rankin was en route to Detroit on a speaking engagement when she heard of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.  She returned to Washington the next morning determined to oppose U.S. participation in the war.  Immediately after President Roosevelt addressed a Joint Session of Congress, the House and Senate met to deliberate on a declaration of war.

Rankin repeatedly tried to gain recognition once the first reading of the war resolution was completed in the House. In the brief debate on the resolution, Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas refused to recognize her and declared her out of order.

Other Members called for her to sit down. Others approached her on the House Floor, trying to convince her to either vote for the war or abstain.

When the roll call vote was taken, Rankin voted no amid what the Associated Press described as “a chorus of hisses and boos.”  Rankin went on to announce, “As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”  The war resolution passed the House 388 to 1.

Unveiled in 2005, Jeannette Rankin’s portrait communicates both the cultural importance and the loneliness of her position as the first woman elected to Congress.

Standing in the empty corridor adjacent to the House Chamber, Rankin is depicted holding the Washington Post, in which her 1917 swearing-in was front-page news.

The vacant, cool-toned space and her look of resigned calm reflect her singularity as a woman in the legislative branch three years before women’s suffrage became federal law.

Jeannette Rankin did not seek re-election in 1942. Rankin divided her time between Montana and Georgia in the years after she left Congress. Rankin predicted that more women would follow her to Congress. 

In this U.S. House of Representatives oral history project, women Members from across the country give credence to Rankin’s bold words, recalling the many ways they made a lasting impact on the institution.

During the Vietnam War, she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, numbering 5,000, in a protest march on Washington in January 1968 that culminated in the presentation of a peace petition to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts.

At the time of her death, on May 18, 1973, in Carmel, California, Rankin was considering another run for a House seat to protest the Vietnam War.