Jeannette Rankin

Montana suffragist who in 1917 became the first woman elected to Congress.

Overview

A pacifist and lobbyist for national suffrage, Rankin won Montana's at-large seat in 1916, four years before the Nineteenth Amendment. In one of her first votes, she joined 49 others against entering World War I, a stance that helped end her first term. Returning in 1941, she cast the sole vote against declaring war on Japan after Pearl Harbor, declaring as a woman she could not go to war and refused to send anyone else. She later marched against Vietnam in her eighties. Her statue represents Montana in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.