These midterm elections have been so poisoned by partisan politics that all political discourse in this country is now so incredibly toxic that it's impossible to carry on a civil, intelligent discussion anymore. It's sickening and sad, and even in the aftermath of the elections, the rhetoric, name-calling, and posturing still hasn't stopped. So I've decided to buck that trend and bring you a story about positive politics. Here's a collection of facts about Jeannette Rankin of Montana, America's first female member of Congress.

1. Jeannette Rankin was born on June 11, 1880, 9 years before Montana would become a state.
2. In 1902, she earned her Bachelor of Science in Biology from the University of Montana. However, when she visited the slums of Boston she was appalled at the conditions and chose to become a social worker.
3. In 1914, Montana voters (who were all men, BTW) voted to grant women the right to vote. Two years later, in 1916, the state elected Rankin to the House of Representatives, making her America's 1st congresswoman. What's most fascinating about this is that she was elected four years before the passage of the 19th amendment, meaning that she wouldn't have been eligible to vote for herself (or even run for that matter) in most other states.
4. Unfortunately for Rankin, she was a pacifist during a period of great turmoil. Barely a month after being sworn into office, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, and Rankin was one of 50 representatives that voted against the resolution. Eight months later, when Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Austria-Hungary, Rankin was the only representative to vote against the resolution. With her popularity decimated, she chose not to run for re-election to the House in 1918. In 1940 though, she ran for Congress again, this time on an anti-war platform, and she won a second term. When President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan, she was again the only representative to vote no. When asked why, she said,

   "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else. It is not necessary. I vote NO."

   Thus, Rankin was the only member of Congress to vote against entry into both World Wars. This vote sealed her political fate, though, and she didn't seek re-election in 1942 and never ran for public office again.
5. After her first stint in Congress, Rankin decided to become a lobbyist and was the founding Vice President of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1921, she successfully lobbied for the Sheppard–Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, which provided federal funding for maternity and child care and was the first federal social welfare program that specifically targeted women and children. Fun Fact: the law was allowed to lapse in 1929 when the American Medical Association successfully lobbied against it because of its socialist tendencies.

To this day, Jeannette Rankin is the only woman to be elected to Congress from Montana, and in case you were wondering, she was a Republican.