Episode Details

December 8, 1941, one day after Pearl Harbor. A 61-year-old woman hides in a Capitol phone booth, calling the police for an escort past a furious mob of reporters. She has just cast the single solitary vote against entering World War II. Jeanette Rankin, the first woman ever elected to federal office in the United States, built a life that is a master class in moral conviction, startling contradiction, and the crushing price of standing alone.

This episode follows her from a Montana frontier childhood, where she once built an entire wooden sidewalk by hand, through a restless decade of trial and error into social work and suffrage organizing, to the grassroots machine she rode into Congress in 1916. It covers her votes against both world wars, the maternal pacifism that linked gender to peace, and the irony that the woman remembered for "I cannot vote for war" wanted to be remembered for something else entirely.

• The wooden sidewalk: a frontier childhood that produced a builder who refused to wait for permission
• Finding her calling by elimination: dressmaking, furniture, teaching, and finally suffrage organizing
• Trains to the end of the line: the logistical campaign that made her the first woman in Congress
• "The peace problem is a woman's problem": the philosophy behind two lonely anti-war votes
• What she actually wanted on her statue, and the double standard her pacifism may have helped create