The Senate's First Elected Woman
On January 12, 1932, Arkansas voters elected Hattie Caraway to the U.S. Senate with 92 percent of the vote — the first woman ever elected to that chamber.
It was a cold, drizzling day in Arkansas, and the polls were run almost entirely by women. On January 12, 1932, voters went to the polls in a special Senate election — and when the ballots were counted, Hattie Wyatt Caraway had won with 92 percent of the vote. No woman had ever been elected to the United States Senate before.
Her path there began in tragedy. Her husband, Senator Thaddeus Caraway, died suddenly in November 1931 in the middle of his second Senate term. It was then common for governors to appoint a senator's widow as a temporary placeholder, and Arkansas Governor Harvey Parnell did just that. Caraway, a Tennessee-born homemaker who had raised three children while her husband practiced law and then served in Congress, was sworn in on December 9, 1931. But the appointment only lasted until a special election — and instead of stepping aside, she ran. Hundreds of women volunteered as unpaid election officials, and reports said more women than men turned out to vote.
Almost everyone expected her to serve out her husband's term, ending in March 1933, and then quietly go home. Instead, in May 1932, Caraway stunned Arkansas by announcing she would run for a full term of her own — against six male Democratic opponents, including the very governor who had appointed her. "The time has passed," she told reporters, "when a woman should be placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job." She won.
They called her "Silent Hattie" because she rarely spoke on the Senate floor in her early years, but she was anything but idle. She became the first woman to preside over the Senate, the first woman to chair a Senate committee, and the first woman in Congress to co-sponsor the Equal Rights Amendment. She served in the Senate until 1945 — fourteen years after a grieving widow was handed a seat nobody expected her to keep.
She was not the first woman to serve in the Senate — that distinction belongs to Georgia's Rebecca Felton, appointed for just two days in November 1922. But Caraway was the first a state had chosen for itself, and her election cracked a door that generations of women would walk through after her.
Photo: Senator Hattie Caraway in her office, 1936, by Harris & Ewing — public domain (Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons).
