Born on Grant Creek Ranch, six miles from Missoula in Montana Territory, she was the oldest of seven children: six girls and one boy. Her mother, Olive Pickering, of English ancestry, left her New Hampshire home in 1878 to become an elementary school teacher in Missoula; the next year she met and married John Rankin, a successful rancher and lumber merchant whose family had migrated from Scotland to Canada around 1800.

The Rankin household represented a curious amalgam of western informality, individualism and self-reliance, along with upper middle class aspirations. As a result, most of the Rankin children successfully pursued professional careers: Harriet became Dean of Women at the University of Montana; Mary an English instructor at the same institution; Edna a lawyer and pioneer in the field of planned parenthood; and Wellington one of Montana’s most famous trial lawyers and one of the country’s largest land owners.

The ambitions of all the Rankin women were aided in large measure by the open, loosely structured nature of a fast-disappearing frontier society in Montana, which provided them with unusual opportunities for careers. It also apparently instilled in them cooperative, humane, and democratic inclinations. All of these conditions subsequently led Rankin to join the social justice wing of the Progressive Movement and from there to suffrage and pacifism after she graduated from the University of Montana in 1902.

We also know that several women greatly influenced her views. Most important perhaps was pacifist Minnie J. Reynolds, a journalist whom she met in Washington State in 1909-1910 when they were both campaigning there for suffrage. It was Reynolds who convinced Rankin that the quest for peace had to be incorporated into the Suffrage Movement. Then there was Katherine Devereaux Blake, a New York school principal and co-worker with Rankin in the 1914 Montana Suffrage campaign. She had met Blake while studying social work at the New York School of Philanthropy in 1908. It was also during this time period that Rankin first came across the writings of English sociologist, Benjamin Kidd. His works not only convinced her that the environment influenced people’s lives, but also that women were the major civilizing power of the future.

In some mysterious and wonderful way all of these experiences and influences converged in 1916 when Jeannette Rankin decided to run for national office. She campaigned and won on a Progressive Republican platform calling for national suffrage for women, protective legislation for children, tariff revision, prohibition, and “preparedness that will make for peace.”

Ironically, on April 2, 1917, the day that Jeannette Rankin was introduced on the floor of the House of Representatives as the first Congresswoman, President Woodrow Wilson called a special session of Congress and gave his famous speech about making the world “safe for democracy.” Four days later on April 6, 1917, when she cast her first ballot in Congress as its only female member, she cast it against U.S. entrance into World War I.

© 2005, Allyson Adams • info@peaceisawomansjob.com