Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to hold a federal political office, was elected to the House of Representatives on November 7, 1916 — almost exactly a century before the first time Americans at the ballot box would encounter a woman as a major party candidate for President. While Rankin is still the only woman to have been elected to Congress from Montana, there are currently 104 women in office, representing just under 20 percent of the congressional total (75 percent of them Democrats, a disproportion that has prevailed since the early 1990s).
A prominent figure in the women’s suffrage movement, Rankin said after the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1918 that she was proud to have been “the only woman who ever voted to give women the right to vote.” But Rankin is also remembered for another vote, one that became influential in unintended ways. Elected just as America was poised to enter WWI, Rankin was a pacifist as well as a feminist, as was the more famous Alice Paul. In A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot, Mary Walton recounts how Paul made a point of visiting Rankin in Washington on April 5, 1917, the two women sitting together in solidarity in the visitors’ gallery just hours before the vote to enter the war was taken. Walton describes how Rankin, torn between her patriotism and her pacifist principles, rose in the House to say, in a strained voice, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war,” her no vote then uttered “with what many thought a sob”:
Although 50 legislators opposed the resolution, against 373 in favor, headline writers singled out the congresswoman from Montana. She was the one who had cried, who had covered her face in her hands, who had left the chamber immediately afterward to applause from pacifists in the galleries. The war was now a reality. But so, too, was the impression that women could not be relied upon when the nation was under siege.
Whatever the damage to the women’s movement, Rankin went down to defeat in the next election. That her statue on Capitol Hill today is inscribed with “I cannot vote for war” is surely a disservice to her role in suffrage history and to her wider legacy, says Cokie Roberts. Herself the daughter of a congresswoman, Roberts has a handful of books — Ladies of Liberty, Founding Mothers, and most recently the Civil War history Capital Dames — on women who, though not elected, held great political influence. In We Are Our Mothers’ Daughters, Roberts notes that while in office Rankin worked on many underrepresented issues relating to women and children, as did those who came after her:
When you call the roll of women in Congress in the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, you find that they toiled in the corridors and the cloakrooms of the Capitol pressing their colleagues on equal pay, tax relief for single parents and working mothers, school lunches, consumer safety, food stamps, and the place of women in the military. Equally important, they came to the table of government with different sensibilities. Women simply experience life differently from men. And these mothers, sisters, daughters, and wives brought and continue to bring the perspectives of those roles to governing.
In her memoir My Beloved World, Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina Supreme Court justice, says that the perspective she brings to the bench was shaped by her upbringing in an immigrant Bronx neighborhood that offered life lessons in support, empathy, and tolerance. Of paramount influence, writes Sotomayor, were the two women who raised her:
If I try to imagine my most immediate examples of selfless love, instinct leads me first to those who were closest: Abuelita [grandmother], healer and protector, with her overflowing generosity of spirit; and my mother, visiting nurse and confidante to the whole neighborhood . . . Suffice to say, somehow a synergy of love and gratitude, protection and purpose, was implanted in me at a very young age. And it flowered in a determination to serve. My childhood ambition to become a lawyer had nothing to do with middle-class respectability and comfort. I understood the lawyer’s job as being to help people.
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Sig Nordal 