100 years and a day before Hillary Clinton will cast her vote in a bid to become the first female president of the United States, Jeannette Rankin, a 36-year-old rancher’s daughter from Missoula, Montana, who had devoted her early career to women’s suffrage and progressive reform causes, voted in her state’s federal and local elections. That night, when all the ballots were counted, she made history, becoming the first woman ever to be elected to Congress. “I may be the first woman member of Congress,” she declared after her landslide victory. “But I won’t be the last.”
No less than Hillary Clinton, another trailblazer, Rankin was deeply controversial in her time. But her career—and the controversy surrounding it—tells us a great deal about what’s changed in the past 100 years, and what hasn’t.
For one, first-wave feminists like Rankin did not challenge the idea that there should be separate spheres for men and women; instead they embraced the prevailing orthodoxy and used it to their favor. Like many of her colleagues in the women’s movement, Rankin claimed a role in politics by insisting that women, not men, best knew how to safeguard public health, education and safety.
Ironically, though she fought a much lonelier battle and won a more improbable victory, in some ways, it was easier for Rankin than it is for Clinton today. When she was the only woman to hold elective office at the federal level, she was regarded by some as a “freak.” Few men anticipated a tidal wave of women in politics, which made her less threatening than Clinton—and her gender less a part of the conversation.
Which is not to say that they treated her with kid gloves. Rankin paid dearly for her politics—particularly, her deep-seated pacifism and support for labor rights, but not especially for her sex. What’s more, unlike Hillary Clinton, Rankin’s personal life remained off the table. No one seemed to care that she never married and enjoyed closer, intimate relationships with members of her own sex.
Compare this to today, when Hillary Clinton faces censure for the way she speaks, the frequency with which she smiles, the pant suits that she wears and the way she conducts her personal life. True, campaigns in 2016 make campaigns in 1916 look like garden-party affairs. Ours is a more coarse and bare-knuckle age. But it’s hard to divorce these scorching criticisms of Clinton from gender. 100 years after her first term, the story of Rankin reminds us that it was in some ways easier to be a woman in politics when you were the only one.
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Rankin was born in 1880 in Missoula, Montana. The eldest of seven siblings, she grew up in relative prosperity. Rankin’s father, a wealthy rancher and real estate prospector, built the first home in Missoula with indoor plumbing and central heat. Her two brothers attended elite universities and, at her parents’ urging, Jeanette studied biology at what is now Montana State University, where she was an indifferent student. After graduating, she taught school for a year but failed to pass the state teacher’s exam, a setback that only strengthened her determination to leave home for greater adventures. “’Go! Go! Go!’” she wrote in her diary. “It makes no difference where just so you go! go! go! Remember at the first opportunity go!’”
So Jeanette went—first to San Francisco, where she worked in a Settlement House and became animated by the spirit of progressive reform politics then sweeping the nation, and then to New York, where she completed a Master’s Degree at the New York School of Philanthropy, which later became the Columbia University School of Social Work.
Like many women of her era who studied social work and became involved in social reform movements, Rankin came to believe that the prevailing idea of separate spheres for men and women—home and hearth, for which women were chiefly responsible, and the rough and tumble world of work and politics, which was men’s domain—in fact gave women a mandate to become involved in politics. She took that faith seriously upon her return to Montana, where she became an outspoken evangelist for women’s suffrage.
“Babies are dying from cold and hunger,” she would proclaim in one of her congressional speeches. “Soldiers have died for lack of a woolen shirt. Might it not be that the men who have spent their lives thinking in terms of commercial profit find it hard to adjust themselves to thinking in terms of human needs? Might it not be that a great force that has always been thinking in terms of human needs, and that always will think in terms of human needs has not been mobilized? Is it not possible that the women of the country have something of value to give the Nation at this time?”
Such thinking was in concert with the general thrust of first-wave feminism. Instead of fighting the idea of separate spheres and demanding an outright elimination of gender distinctions, many suffragists used it to their advantage. In a rapidly industrializing and urbanizing nation where the line between public and private was often blurred, they claimed, a woman could not effectively fulfill her duty to safeguard the domestic sphere unless she enjoyed political rights.
The modern world was too complex to entertain rigid distinctions between public and domestic spheres. People now lived in closer quarters, bought most of their food and household items from stores, and came into daily contact with urban blight and vice. Without a voice in politics, said Jane Addams, the famed Settlement House leader, the average mother “cannot even secure untainted meat for her household [or] provide fresh fruit, unless the meat has been inspected by city officials, and the decayed fruit, which is so often placed upon sale … has been destroyed in the interests of public health.”
“Women’s place is Home,” another activist explained in 1910, “but home is not contained within the four walls of an individual house. Home is community. The city full of people is the Family. The public school is the real Nursery. And badly do Home and Family need their mother.”
This rationale for equal suffrage resonated with many Americans who were prepared to grant women a role in politics but weren’t ready to reject Victorian notions about gender difference. In the years just prior to World War I, at thousands of dramatic torchlight parades and petition drives, mainstream suffragists softened the potentially radical implications of their cause by insisting that women wanted the vote primarily to be better wives and mothers—not to engage in a power grab or to press unorthodox ideas on an unwilling nation. It proved a winning formula.
Running as a progressive Republican, Rankin won election to Congress in 1916. She wasn’t the first woman to stand for federal office: Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched a symbolic campaign (she did not appear on the ballot) in 1866, and in 1872 Victoria Woodhull declared her candidacy for the presidency, though she was ineligible both on account of her gender and age. By the time that Rankin announced her candidacy, the ground had shifted considerably. Most western states extended full or partial suffrage to women. Montana joined that category in 1914, when a majority of male voters endorsed a constitutional provision enabling women to vote in federal and state elections and to stand for office. So it was that Rankin ascended to the House four years before ratification of the 19th Amendment.
“She was one of the ablest campaigners that I ever saw,” a male state legislator later observed. “If she heard of a vote a hundred miles up in the mountains [or] in some isolated canyon up there, she would go up and see them, drive up there and it didn’t make any difference about the roads. … She would go anywhere. Anywhere—a house of prostitution, it didn’t make any difference to her what it was—she would make herself at home. … She was a tough person.”
After sweeping her congressional district, Rankin became the subject of intense national interest—so much so that in the weeks following her election, she felt obliged to fend off newspaper photographers who had invaded her city block. “I positively refuse to allow myself to be photographed and will not leave the house while there is a camera man on the premises,” the told the the York Times, which helpfully surmised that she did not “want to be classed as a freak.”
In Congress, Rankin was a reliable supporter of progressive domestic policies, including labor protections for working-class men and women and children. But her tenure was overshadowed when, just one month into her term, she joined 49 other members of Congress in voting against American entry into World War I. A committed pacifist, she affirmed, “I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.”
Now a deeply controversial figure, Rankin did not seek re-election in 1918 but instead ran for the Senate. After losing the GOP nomination—her main liability was her anti-war stance, not her gender—she served out her term, returned to social work and activism, and lived comfortably on an inheritance from her father.
In 1940—over 20 years after leaving Congress and after a long absence from Montana—she returned home and ran for the House. Once again, she won, and once again, she cast an unpopular vote against American entry into war. This time, she was the lone dissenter. Police officers had to stand guard as she took refuge in a phone booth inside the House Republican Cloakroom, for fear that angry bystanders would do her harm. Conceding to political reality, she did not stand for re-election in 1942.
After many years abroad, Rankin lived out her final years in the United States, where she became something of a cult figure among anti-war activists. When asked about the Vietnam War in 1970, she offered, “Surrender is a military idea. When you’re doing something wrong, you stop.”
She died in 1973, just shy of her 93rd birthday.
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One hundred years after Rankin hammered the first crack in the glass ceiling, much has changed. Women in politics no longer need to embrace the idea of separate spheres or use it to rationalize their participation in public affairs. That evolution didn’t occur overnight. Earlier in her life, Hillary Rodham felt compelled to take her husband’s last name and confine her work as First Lady of Arkansas to the crucial—but traditionally gender-specific—realm of children’s education. But in 2016, Americans widely accept the notion that a woman can serve in Congress, or in the White House—and can make decisions about national security as well as health and education.
But that doesn’t mean that everything is better for women today. Clinton faces a Republican opponent who has spoken of women in venomous terms that would have been wholly unacceptable in Jeanette Rankin’s age. Rankin struck many observers as a political “freak” because of her gender, but she never fundamentally threatened male dominance of political affairs. Critics focused mainly on her pacifism and support for fringe causes like workers’ rights, not her sex. Today, because women are full participants in the political process, candidates like Donald Trump can tap into simmering gender and racial anxieties with pointed candor.
More than that, Rankin’s personal life was never examined in the press. To be sure, the private lives of male politicians also bore considerably less scrutiny in her day than in ours. But prevailing Victorian norms held that one did not call into question a middle-class woman’s virtue. Rankin never married but maintained a lifelong, intimate relationship with Katherine Anthony, a noted journalist and biographer. Anthony and Rankin were not romantically involved with each other; on the contrary, Anthony’s life partner was Elisabeth Irwin, an educator, reformer and founder of the Little Red Schoolhouse. Like many educated middle-class women, particularly professionals and social activists, Anthony and Irwin formed a so-called “Boston marriages”—long-term domestic partnerships that were openly acknowledged but lacking any real legal standing. Such was the case for the settlement house founder Jane Addams and her life partner, Mary Rozet Smith; Mary Woolley, the president of Mount Holyoke College and her former student, Jeanette Marks; and Vida Scudder and Florence Converse, both professors at Wellesley College.
Rankin’s biographers disagree as to whether she was gay or straight. They generally agree that she was too consumed by work to pursue a romantic life. But it’s notable that her political opponents never thought to exploit her association with politically prominent lesbians. In her age, patriarchal power was so unassailable that women who preferred to live and associate primarily with other women were simply no threat to the standing order. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has withstood decades of dark aspersions by her political opponents: With no particular consistency, they alleged that she was a lesbian, that she had an affair with her male law partner, that she was somehow responsible for her husband’s sexual appetites. In Rankin’s time, such attacks were largely unthinkable, if only because Rankin was in most respects an anomaly, not an agent of real danger to male authority.
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Rankin spent her final days in 1973 watching the Watergate hearings from her comfortable retirement condominium in Carmel, California. She could not have known then that one of the anonymous young attorneys working for the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary Rodham, would stand poised to become the first female president of the United States, 100 years and one day after her own milestone election. But she remained in her final days a passionate advocate of women in the public sphere.
“I tell these young women that they must get to the people who don’t come to the meetings,” she said shortly before her death “It never did any good for all the suffragettes to come together and talk to each other. There will be no revolution unless we go out into the precincts. You have to be stubborn. Stubborn and ornery.”