When news reaches Missoula that Rankin has won the general election by a plurality of 7,567 votes, reporters and photographers crowd the front lawn of her house in town, curious to bring back news of the “lady from Montana”— specifically what she looks like, what she’s wearing. (From across the country, her colleague Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, questions Rankin’s credentials; the first woman in office should be an “intellectual”—certainly not a Westerner without a law degree.) Rankin morphs in the press from small and slight with “locks of fire” to “tall and slender, with frank hazel eyes, sandy hair, and energetic mouth.” She gets several marriage proposals by mail; a toothpaste company offers her five thousand dollars for a photograph of her teeth. It is reported that she can “dance like a boarding school girl” and that she makes her own hats. “I am glad glad glad even to Pollyannaism,” one newspaperwoman writes, “that Jeannette is not ‘freakish’ or ‘mannish’ or ‘standoffish’ or ‘shrewish’ or of any type likely to antagonize the company of gentlemen whose realm has hitherto been uninvaded by petticoats.” [...]
Rankin enters the House on April 2, 1917, in an extraordinary session called by President Wilson to debate war with Germany. The question is not how Rankin will vote but how a woman will vote. (Catt and many of the leaders of the national suffrage movement have urged her to vote for war; anything less, they assure her, will irrevocably set back the cause.) The men stand and applaud as she enters the House, dressed in blue and carrying a bouquet of flowers. She later remembers that, as she walks in, she’s a little worried, unclear where she should sit: at thirty-six and unmarried, she does not want to be accused of flirting. [...]
Twenty-two years later, at the age of sixty, the Candidate tries again for Congress and wins. She has spent the intervening years working for peace and disarmament organizations and travelling the world. She returns to the House in 1941 and achieves instant notoriety and a swift end to her political career when she casts the sole vote against going to war with Japan.
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