Madame Senator

 

  Women have always wanted a say in things. Things may have been better in hunter-gather days. The men did most of the hunting. If they didn't catch anything it was hoped the women would have gathered something for supper. Once people settled down, the men went out and did stuff and the women had the house and kids to consume their attention. 

  Most men had no say in things either unless they were kings or noble. Further developments led to men of property getting the vote and eventually everyone was able to vote. Women began serious agitation for the vote in the nineteenth century. The men in Congress feared that if women had the vote they would unite and kick the men out of their cushy jobs. 

  But when women got the vote in 1920, the woman's bloc proved to be just as fractured as men's. Consider Hattie Caraway of Jonesboro, Arkansas.  Even though her husband Thaddeus was a U.S. senator, she just considered the vote another household duty. When Thaddeus died in 1931, she was appointed to take his place until the next election.

  Mrs. Caraway wasn't the first woman in the Senate. That honor goes to Rebecca Felton, a political activist from Georgia who at age 87 received a symbolic one day appointment in 1922. After Caraway's initial appointment, she won a special election to fill the remaining months of her husband's term. It was expected she would then step down, but instead she declared she would seek a full term in the 1932 election.

  Arkansas was as Democratic then as it is Republican now. The Democratic primary was the race to win. Caraway was a long shot to win the primary until the charismatic Huey Long of Louisiana campaigned for her in the last week of the campaign.  Long was full of tricks. If there was a crying baby in the crowd, one of Long’s staffers would give the baby a lollipop so the crowd could hear Long's speech.

   Caraway won the primary and went on to become the first woman elected to the Senate on her own. And she was also the first woman to be re-elected, in 1938. Caraway was a hardworking senator but spent little time campaigning or schmoozing constituents. In 1944 she lost the  primary election to the young William Fulbright.

  Caraway was generally a supporter of President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and provided a valuable precedent for women wanting to get into politics. On the minus side she was a prohibitionist which was impractical and she voted against legislation to prevent lynching, which was hateful.  But then her predecessor Rebecca Felton was an even bigger fan of lynching.

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