Jeannette Rankin's Legacy PDF

# 17 Jeannette Rankin ## June 11, 1880-May 18, 1973 ### How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen? Jeannette Rankin liked to make hats. Big, dramatic hats trimmed with ribbons and flowers and swooping plumes of feathers. Little did she know that one day she would wear a hugely symbolic, hist...

# 17 Jeannette Rankin ## June 11, 1880-May 18, 1973 ### How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen? Jeannette Rankin liked to make hats. Big, dramatic hats trimmed with ribbons and flowers and swooping plumes of feathers. Little did she know that one day she would wear a hugely symbolic, history-making hat - that of the first woman elected to Congress. Jeannette was born in Montana before it was a state. It was a wild, rugged territory that had long been home to Native Americans and, more recently, fur trappers, gold miners, and cattle ranchers. Her family had a ranch outside Missoula, where Jeannette spent most of her childhood. Jeannette helped her mother with family chores. She cooked at her father's lumber camp and helped run his hotel. She took care of her five siblings. But she was bossy, and when she didn't get her way, she threw tantrums. One day, her mother said to Jeannette's father, "If you can take care of Jeannette, I can take care of the rest of the children." To be fair to Jeannette, no one in the family was a shrinking violet. They loved to argue, and when tempers flared, they were known to throw dishes, silverware, and glasses of water at each other. Jeannette rode horses across the windswept plains and into mountain canyons. The classroom couldn't contain her. "I was a very poor student and I didn't enjoy going to school," she admitted. In the West, newly arrived settlers were driving Native Americans from their ancestral lands. Jeannette's father was angry about their cruel treatment. He argued that war solved nothing - it just led to more bloodshed. Jeannette absorbed his opinions. ## Image: A cartoon image of a woman wearing a hat with "VOTES FOR WOMEN" written on it. She is standing next to a building in the background that likely represents the Capitol Building along with the text: "I may be the FIRST Woman member of CONGRESS, but I won't be the LAST." Above her is a cartoon image of another woman riding a horse with the Capitol Building in the background. ## All the while, Jeannette was impatient with her domestic life. "Go! Go! Go! At the first opportunity go!" she urged herself in her diary. After getting her degree from Montana State University in 1902, Jeannette took the familiar path of teaching, but she became bored. For a change, she took a job with a milliner, a person who makes hats. Making hats really brought out Jeannette's creative side! She looked regal, with her confident manner and outrageous, wide-brimmed hats. In 1907, at the age of twenty-seven, Jeannette moved to San Francisco to take a job in social work. Later, she enrolled in a social worker's course in New York City, where she was horrified by the conditions in urban slums. She then moved to Spokane, Washington, to continue her career in social work. Again on the move, Jeannette went to Seattle for further studies. It was in Seattle that Jeannette found her true cause. While there, she spotted a poster seeking volunteers for suffrage work. In 1910, she began working for the vote in Washington State. ### Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas was the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She was appointed to her husband's seat when he died in office in 1931, but then won election to the seat in 1932 and again in 1938. When she returned to Montana in 1911, Jeannette pressed for reforms in Missoula's judicial and prison systems, and she was relentless. "My God, that woman again!" one judge cried when he saw her coming. At the same time, she started organizing local suffrage groups. On February 1, 1911, Jeannette became the first person to address Montana's state lawmakers about suffrage. Her success at grassroots organizing attracted the attention of Carrie Chapman Catt, and soon she was working at the national level. Jeannette's passion did cause trouble at times. One night at a suffrage office, she lost her temper and began throwing things. A friend gently led her away and later scolded her. "Once in a while I want to spank you good and hard," she wrote to Jeannette. "Now, will you be good?" Montana granted women the right to vote in 1914, and Jeannette had an idea. What if I run for Congress? Montana had two seats in the House of Representatives, so she could win an election even if she came in second. Her brother, a powerful lawyer, agreed to help run her campaign. Jeannette put her skill at campaigning and grassroots organizing to work again. On November 6, 1916, Jeannette voted for the first time - for herself! The next morning, the results were tallied, and Jeannette had won the second seat. On April 2, 1917, suffragists honored her at a special breakfast in Washington, DC. Jeannette swept into Congress that day cradling a bouquet of purple and yellow flowers - the colors of the radical suffragists. Her colleagues and the crowd of suffrage supporters in the galleries rose and applauded her wholeheartedly. That day, President Woodrow Wilson called on Congress to vote for war against Germany. Along with forty-nine men, Jeannette voted against war. She firmly believed - despite her epic outbursts - that violence solved nothing. Even so, Jeannette was always up for the suffrage fight. "How shall we answer their challenge, gentlemen?" she asked her fellow lawmakers. "How shall we explain to them the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?" By the time she left office in March 1919, Congress was just months away from passing the Nineteenth Amendment. Denying women the vote no longer made sense when one of their number was sitting in a congressional seat. ## Western states were more open to the idea of woman suffrage than eastern states. Why was that? Women in many western states could vote for president long before the Nineteenth Amendment was enacted. In 1869, when it was still a territory, Wyoming granted women the vote. When it became a state in 1890, it entered the Union as the first state in which women could vote. Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Arizona - one by one, western states gave women the vote. These states might have wanted to attract more women, believing they would improve the moral tone of their rough-and-tumble frontier towns. Or, it might be that women had already proved their worth there, working just as hard as men to settle the West. Perhaps at times politics had something to do with it. One story goes that the ailing wife of a politician in one western state was treated by a local doctor, and in gratitude, the politician asked what favor he could do for the doctor. The doctor's wife had the answer - she wanted the vote!