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  ...