What Is the Mystery of Jeannette Rankin's "Whitehall Embarrassment?"

She remains so admired there are bronze statues of her at the Montana state capital in Helena and in Emancipation Hall in Washington, D.C. 

So why, you might ask, are there odd blanks in her personal history that still provide the basis for intriguing rumors nearly four decades after her death?  And why did Rankin choose to live the majority of her long life outside of her home state?  

The Missoula girl was born in 1880, the first of John and Olive Rankin’s seven children, and her wealthy father’s favorite. A builder by trade with a gift for investment and ranching, he taught her carpentry, and animal husbandry but also expected her to fill in for her perpetually pregnant mother as a homemaker.  To please him, young Jeannette ably shouldered the load, which included helping Rankin run his hotel and serving as cook for a lumber camp in which he invested.  

“If you can take care of Jeannette, I can take care of the rest of the children,” the former schoolteacher promised her husband.  But even that became too much.  Sick with some undefined malady (probably thyroid), Olive developed a laissez-fair attitude toward childcare and Jeannette took over the management of her bickering but precocious siblings with a dedication that sometimes seemed harsh.

Jeannette sewed their clothing, helped with their homework, took care of her complaining mother and nursed her father when he was dying of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever in 1904.  Then her brilliant brother Wellington, just 20 and a student at Harvard University, took on their father’s role while Jeannette became his Montana arm in addition to her other family duties.

Meanwhile, the girl struggled to create a life of her own.  No scholar, she put partying ahead of her studies in biology at University of Montana, barely scraping by to graduate with a major in which she had no interest.  A willowy, chestnut haired beauty, she had plenty of beaux but declared early on that she had no intention of becoming a baby factory like her mother and refused to marry.

Teaching seemed to be her only option but she hated her first job in a one-room school next to the family ranch.  A similar assignment in Whitehall, a bustling railroad town in 1903, proved more entertaining because she fell in with a crowd of young professionals who organized delightful parties, concerts, literary presentations and theatricals. However she apparently got into serious trouble of a romantic nature there—something her brother Wellington referred to mockingly as her “embarrassment”—and her teaching contract was not renewed.

Some insist Jeannette survived an unwanted pregnancy or at least had fallen in love with a married man.  There are hints of a lesbian affair.  However, shortly thereafter, a tornado took out the Whitehall school with all its records, and the experience made the young woman so cautious that we know virtually nothing about her personal life from that point on.

In 1907, having gotten her siblings through early childhood and suffering a near-nervous breakdown, she visited friends in San Francisco where she began working in a settlement house.  Then, motivated by social conscience, she graduated in very good standing from the New York School of Philanthropy and worked briefly as a social worker. Denied field assignments because of her sex by the Washington State agency with which she had contracted, she found herself consigned to babysitting children destined for foster homes from which they “could be returned like puppies,” and angrily resigned.

Since her family money was under the control of her financially astute but tight-fisted brother, she signed up for courses in economics, political science and public speaking at the University of Washington, supporting herself as a seamstress.  But it was an advertisement for volunteers to promote women’s suffrage that changed her life.

After working hard on a campaign that won women the vote in Washington State, she was hired by the New York Women Suffrage party, and was soon recognized nationally for her outstanding work in Oregon, Kansas, Arizona and her own home state.

“I saw that if we were to have decent laws for children, sanitary jails, and safe food supplies, women would have to vote,” she had maintained while campaigning for suffrage.  And, while most of the legislation she introduced was not passed during her term, it soon would be.

This stint in Congress also produced evidence that at age 36, Rankin was still game for romance.  Fiorello LaGuardia, a fellow freshman Congressman and eventual mayor of New York, was so much taken by her that he made it clear to her family he would marry her if she would have him.  And she apparently adored him.  But married women in that day had few rights, and Jeannette was determined to control her own destiny.