Jeanette is the French diminutive of Jeanne — from the Hebrew Yochanan ("God is gracious"). A top-100 US baby name from 1917 to 1937. Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) — American politician; the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress (R-Montana, 1917), three years before the 19th Amendment gave most American women the right to vote. A lifelong pacifist; the only member of Congress to vote against US entry into both World War I (1917) and World War II (1941) — the latter vote was 388-1. Co-founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association; led the 1968 Jeannette Rankin Brigade march on Washington against the Vietnam War at age 87. Jeanette MacDonald (1903-1965) — American soprano and actress; eight Oscar-nominated musical films with Nelson Eddy (1935-1942). Jeanette Winterson (born 1959) — British author; Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011); OBE. Jeanette Lee — "The Black Widow" pool champion. Jeanette Bouvier — Jackie Kennedy's middle name was Bouvier.
Featured throughout 20th-century American history.
Jeanette does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Jeanette reduce to 8, The Visionary. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.