From the 1930’s through the 1960’s she urged women to eradicate war as an instrument of diplomacy. Over the years she advocated a variety of ways for them to accomplish this task-ranging from inculcating their children with what she called “peace habits,” to participating in peace societies and antiwar demonstrations, to organizing consumer boycotts in an attempt to influence U.S. foreign policy.
Congresswoman Rankin with shovel.
Belle Fligelman at left, Arbor Day, 1917
Photo: Montana Historical Society
In the last years of her life, beginning in 1968 at the age of 88, Jeannette Rankin toyed with the idea of running for Congress in order once again to vote against war. In that same year she led the Jeannette Rankin Brigade in a Washington D.C. demonstration opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Then in 1972 the National Organization for Women chose her as its first inductee into the Susan B. Anthony Hall of Fame. In this third and last cycle of national attention, she remained convinced that women held the keys to peace if only they would implement their power by voting and taking other actions as a group.
Jeannette Rankin’s strong views about peace and disarmament were unique for their time because they did not make her an isolationist. Today there is a tendency to equate pacifism and disarmament with isolationism. This should not be done in Rankin’s case because she emerged from World War I believing that the United States could no longer isolate itself from international affairs. “We are living in a world,” she repeatedly said in the 1920’s “We are no longer living in a community, state or nation…whatever happens in one part of the world affects every other part sooner or later…”
Jeannette Rankin’s commitment to international cooperation stemmed from her belief that the world was becoming interdependent. She subscribed to the view that “isolation is a myth…because all nations are entangled…financially, commercially, and agriculturally.” In the interwar years she remained a “nationalist,” or one who supported very limited American commitments around the world. She was not, however, an isolationist. She did not support isolation from European affairs while accepting the use of force in the Far East or Latin America like most isolationists in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Instead, Rankin remained true to her pacifist ideals; she objected to the use of American military force anywhere in the world, except for the defense of the continental United States. Consequently, she supported international cooperation, but opposed American interventionism. “It is not cooperation with the rest of the world that the American people object to,” she said many times, “They object, and I believe rightly,…to use of our military or naval forces in coercing or punishing a nation…in which we have no interest or at most a remote one.”
As a specialist in U.S. history, I have always been amazed that she held such views and how modern many of them sound to us today. Was it Rankin’s Montana background and western upbringing as she claimed, or were there other factors which produced this most unique and controversial figure among American women leaders in this century? We shall probably never have a definitive answer to this question because Rankin was a deplorable record keeper. Documentation for her early formative years is especially scant. However, we do know the following about her life.
