Gathering celebrates suffrage vote of 1914

One hundred years ago this weekend, famed feminist and suffragette Jeannette Rankin was in Havre giving speeches imploring men to vote for extending voting rights to women.

A referendum on women’s suffrage would be Nov. 3, 1914.

Saturday, Suzette Dussault from the Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau was at the Great Northern Inn reciting a speech that was very similar to what Rankin would have said in her Havre talks the weekend before the historic vote.

Rankin must have been convincing. Hill County narrowly approved the proposal at the polls, just as Montana voters narrowly OK’d the measure. It narrowly lost in Blaine County.

The audience of history buffs at the Great Northern Inn Saturday — mostly women — were wearing yellow sashes, just as Rankin’s supporters did a century ago.

The re-enactment of Rankin’s speech was sponsored by the H. Earl Clack Memorial Museum and Humanities Montana.

The room was decorated in purple and gold, the suffragette colors. It was just a coincidence that the colors are also the Carroll College football team’s colors, said Judi Dritshulas, the inn’s co-owner, laughing. The team was staying at the inn for Saturday’s football game with Montana State University-Northern.

Men's votes in favor of women’s suffrage, Dussault said, allowed Montana women to vote six years before the U.S. Constitution was amended to grant women the vote. But most western states had already passed suffrage, following the lead of Wyoming territory, which granted women the right to vote in 1869.

Rankin, speaking through Dussault, told the crowd what an uphill fight the women had in trying to get the referendum passed.

The copper mining interests, all-powerful in the western part of the state, especially Butte, were against women voting, as were the railroad interests.

Women were more likely to support candidates favoring reform legislation such as child labor laws and minimum wage regulations that big businesses opposed, she told the crowd.

They had little coverage in the newspapers, she said.

Most of the large newspapers in Montana were owned by Anaconda Copper Co., she said. Some smaller independent newspapers supported the cause, she said.

“We have only $9,000 in the campaign kitty,” she said. “And we lost $1,000 of that in a Butte bank failure.”

Just the same, she said, the supporters conducted a massive, yet inexpensive, campaign, talking at powwows, rodeos and rallies. They met with miners at shift change and gathered at gates of smelter plants.

In Eureka, she said, women went into the lumber camps to spread the word.

“We are asking people to stand with us against tyranny,” she said.

After celebrating their victory at the polls in November 1914, women went to work to elect candidates to their liking.

Rankin was elected to Congress in 1916, the first year she was eligible to run, Dussault said.

Even her brother and campaign manager, Wellington Rankin, advised her not to run, but she entered the race anyway.

Montana had two representatives in the House, Dussault said, and Rankin, a Republican, finished second in a four-way race, becoming the first woman ever elected to congress.

Rankin was a pacifist and a social reformer, Dussault said. She was torn on the vote to enter World War I, but in the end could not betray her anti-war views, and she voted against the war, joining a handful of others.

Before the 1918 elections, Montana decided to create two congressional districts. Rankin figured the lines were gerrymandered to make it impossible for her to win re-election, so she went for the United States Senate seat as a Progressive. She lost the election and moved to Georgia, Dussault said, where she continued to work for peace and social justice.

In 1940, still living in Georgia, she ran and was elected to Congress once again from Montana.

In 1941, after Pearl Harbor, she was the only member of either house of Congress to vote against going to war with Japan.

Rather than run for re-election, she retired from politics, returned to Georgia and continued her campaign for peace.