After winning the Democratic primary to fill the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is poised to become the Bay State’s first female senator. It's a bit late. Indeed, many Northeastern states only recently entered the female-senate-representation club, while the first women senators were from the South and Midwest. Click through this TNR slideshow for a look back at the first ten women who made their way into the ultimate boys’ society.
Appointed to fill a vacancy caused by Senator Tom Watson's death, 87-year-old writer and reporter Rebecca Felton held her seat for only 24 hours. Though her appointment was mostly symbolic, she was the first woman to serve in the Senate. (This capped a lifetime of writing and Georgia politics, including time as her husband’s secretary while he was in Congress.) While Felton held progressive views on women’s suffrage, she was racially intolerant, even for her time, and didn’t think African Americans should be able to vote.
Caraway was the first woman actually elected to the Senate. Though she was originally appointed to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband--whom she had advised behind the scenes throughout his career--Caraway was elected in her own right in 1932 and 1938. Dubbed "Silent Hattie," Caraway quietly supported the New Deal, from which Arkansas benefitted greatly. Her first comment upon entering the Senate chamber? “The windows need washing!”
The quiet workhorse to her husband’s show horse, Rose McConnell Long became a senator in the special election after her populist husband, Huey Long, was slain. She did not stand as a candidate for reelection the following year, but her son, Russell, eventually became a senator--making her one-third of the first and only father-mother-son senatorial trio.
Dixie Graves was appointed to the Senate by her husband, Governor Bob Graves, to fill the seat opened up by Hugo Black's resignation to join the Supreme Court. She had previously spent years working on women’s issues as president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and as an activist in the women’s suffrage movement. Many Alabamans were outraged about Graves’s appointment, and the Birmingham Age-Herald called the decision “repellent to the point of being offensive.”
Gladys Pyle had a long career in politics before and after her ascension to the U.S. Senate. She was the first woman in the South Dakota House of Representatives, a member of the state securities commission, and an agent for Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Though she did come from a prominent political family, Pyle was the first woman elected to the Senate without the help of her husband.
The next woman senator was also a South Dakotan, though she didn’t exactly follow in Pyle’s footsteps: Bushfield was appointed to fill the vacancy caused by her husband’s death in October 1948, and resigned that December. As the Senate was in recess for her entire tenure, she never actually went to the Capitol.
Margaret Chase Smith worked as a secretary to her congressman husband, Clyde Smith, and won a special election to take his seat after his death in 1940. She was then reelected to four consecutive congresses and successfully ran for the Senate in 1948, becoming the first woman elected to both the House and Senate. Among many honors, in 1964 she became the first woman at a major party convention to be placed in nomination for the presidency.
Eva Bowring, a rancher, vice chairwoman of the Nebraska Republican Central Committee, and director of the Women’s Division of the Nebraska GOP, was appointed to fill a vacancy caused by Dwight Palmer Griswold’s death. She could not run for election to the seat--a quirk in state law barred her from serving past the date of the first general election following her appointment--and left in November, after six months in office.
Hazel Abel, a high school principal and businesswoman, ended up replacing Eva Bowring. She was elected on November 2, 1954, to fill the remaining two months of Griswold’s term and--though her tenure was brief--“Hurricane Hazel” cast a surprise vote to censure Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy for his red-baiting investigations.
Maurine Neuberger served in the Oregon state legislature and sat on the board of directors for the American Association for the United Nations. She won a Senate special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband, Richard L. Neuberger, and the former pack-a-day smoker went on to win another term and become a prominent critic of the tobacco industry.
Click here to read Martha Coakley and Elizabeth Warren on the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009.
Click here to read Isaac Chotiner on whether Caroline Kennedy was a victim of sexism in her recent Senate bid.
Click here to read Alexandra Starr on Kirsten Gillibrand and defending the new generation of “Tracy Flicks.”
Click here to read Seyward Darby on the woman who ended Elizabeth Dole’s Senate career.
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