The Senator from Maine
On September 13, 1948, Maine voters elected Margaret Chase Smith to the U.S. Senate, making her the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress.
"Why send a woman to Washington," one candidate's wife wondered aloud in the summer of 1948, "when you can send a man?"
On September 13, 1948, the voters of Maine answered her.
Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican congresswoman from the mill town of Skowhegan, won election to the United States Senate that day, defeating her Democratic opponent by more than two to one — roughly 71 percent of the vote to 29 percent. The victory made her the first woman in American history to serve in both houses of Congress, and the first woman ever elected to a full Senate term in her own right, rather than appointed to fill out a dead husband's term.
Nobody had expected her to get there. Smith had entered politics almost by accident. Her husband, Clyde Smith, was a Maine congressman who suffered a serious heart attack in 1940, just before filing for re-election. He persuaded his politically savvy wife to run in his place — and then he died. Weeks later, Margaret won the special election to finish his term, and then kept winning: re-elected to the House in 1940, 1942, 1944, and 1946.
In 1947, when Maine's senior senator announced his retirement, Smith decided to aim higher. In the Republican primary she faced the sitting governor, a former governor, and a minister — and took more votes than all three men combined. In the general election, held in September because Maine then voted ahead of the rest of the country, she overwhelmed her Democratic opponent, a Portland physician. Women made up nearly two-thirds of Maine's registered voters, and they turned out for her in force.
What she did with the seat made her famous far beyond Maine. On June 1, 1950, with anti-Communist hysteria sweeping the country, Smith rose on the Senate floor and delivered her "Declaration of Conscience" — a calm, devastating rebuke of fellow Republican Joseph McCarthy and his reckless accusations, four years before the Senate finally censured him. She paid a price for it: party leaders stripped her of committee assignments. She did not back down.
For years she was the only woman in the Senate, instantly recognizable by the single red rose she pinned to her lapel every day. In 1964 she became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency at a major party's convention. She served four terms in the Senate, until 1973.
Why does it matter? When Smith took her Senate seat, the idea of a woman wielding real power in Washington was still treated as a curiosity — something a candidate's wife could mock in public. She answered mockery with work: independent, stubborn, and unwilling to trade her conscience for her party's approval. Decades later, women serve in the Senate in numbers she could hardly have imagined. The door she walked through on a September day in 1948 has never closed since.
Photo: Senate Democrats, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
