The West Old & New Vol. III Issue II February 2014 | Page 7

1908 to 1909, then moved to Spokane. After briefly serving as a social worker she attended the University of Washington and became involved in the women's suffrage movement. She became an organizer for the New York Women's Suffrage Party and a lobbyist for the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), facilitating suffrage victories in both Washington and
Montana.
Rankin later compared her work in the women's suffrage movement to the pacifist foreign policy that defined her Congressional career. She believed, with many suffragists of the period, that the corruption and dysfunction of the United States government was a result of a lack of feminine participation. As she said at a disarmament conference in the interwar period, “The peace
problem is a woman’s problem."
Rankin's brother Wellington, a power in the Montana Republican Party, financed and helped manage her first campaign for the
Congressional election of 1916. The campaign involved traveling long distances to reach the large state's scattered population.
Rankin rallied support at train stations, street corners, potluck suppers, and one-room schoolhouses. On the evening of the election,
the Missoula daily newspaper reported her as having almost certainly lost. But results continued to trickle in over the next several
days, and Rankin won by over 7,500 votes.
On November 7 she was elected to Montana's at-large seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first female
member of Congress. During her term in the 65th Congress women did not have universal suffrage, but many were voting in some
form in abo