“I  may be the first woman of Congress, but I won’t be the last,” said Jeannette Rankin of her election to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from Montana in 1916. She subsequently served a second term in the U.S. Congress when elected again in 1940. Both of her Congressional terms coincided with the initiation of U.S. Military intervention in wars in Europe—World War I and World War II. Rankin voted against U.S. involvement in both wars, adding that, “The peace problem is a woman’s problem.” Rankin was a life-long pacifist and champion for social and electoral reform.

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) was born on the family ranch outside of Missoula in Montana Territory—it became the 41st state of the United States in 1889. She graduated in 1902 from the University of Montana with a B.S. in biology and explored a variety of careers before delving into politics and advocacy. Those occupations included dressmaking, furniture design, and teaching. But first, she took on the responsibility of raising her younger siblings after her father’s death in 1904. She was the oldest of seven children.

In 1907, she took a job in the new and developing field of social work in San Francisco, California and then in Spokane, Washington. It was through this lens of need that Rankin saw the necessity for women’s suffrage and worked to help pass legislation for women’s right to vote in Washington, New York, and Montana.

Rankin’s run for one of Montana’s at-large congressional seats was financed and managed by her brother—an influential member of the Montana Republican Party who later became Montana’s Attorney General and then a justice on the Montana Supreme Court. Jeannette Rankin ran as a progressive, supporting suffrage, social welfare, and prohibition. She took office as the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives on April 2, 1917.

During her years in Congress, Rankin introduced the first bill that would have allowed women citizenship independent of their husbands and also supported government-sponsored hygiene instruction in maternity and infancy. Because of her vote against involvement in WWI, she lost the support of the Republican Party and ultimately lost the election when she ran as an independent. But her anti-war stance was pivotal in her winning back her seat in 1940. “If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.”

Jeannette Rankin wisely stated, “Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.”