Jeannette Rankin voted against United States entry into World War I in 1917 and did not run for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1918. Ever since, historians have assumed that Rankin’s “no” vote cost the Congresswoman her seat in Congress.
Some of her contemporaries certainly believed it did. “I knew she couldn’t be elected again if she did vote against the war,” her brother Wellington Rankin said. “I didn’t want to see her destroy herself.” The formidable head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, charged that Rankin’s vote lost the woman suffrage cause “a million votes.” At the time, Catt announced, “Miss Rankin was not voting for the suffragists of the nation.”
Credit: History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “Jeannette Rankin: “I Cannot Vote for War”,” https://history.house.gov/Blog/2017/April/4-5-Rankin-War/ (March 15, 2023)
Jeannette Rankin voted against United States entry into World War I in 1917 and did not run for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1918. Ever since, historians have assumed that Rankin’s “no” vote cost the Congresswoman her seat in Congress.
Some of her contemporaries certainly believed it did. “I knew she couldn’t be elected again if she did vote against the war,” her brother Wellington Rankin said. “I didn’t want to see her destroy herself.” The formidable head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Carrie Chapman Catt, charged that Rankin’s vote lost the woman suffrage cause “a million votes.” At the time, Catt announced, “Miss Rankin was not voting for the suffragists of the nation.”
Credit: History, Art & Archives, U.S. House of Representatives, “Jeannette Rankin: “I Cannot Vote for War”,” https://history.house.gov/Blog/2017/April/4-5-Rankin-War/ (March 15, 2023)