page_title: Women in the United States Senate
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Women in the United States Senate / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Women senators seated around a coffee table (left to right): Patty Murray, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Carol Moseley-Braun, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Barbara Mikulski, Mary Landrieu and Dianne Feinstein
context_page_description: There have been 57 total women in the United States Senate since its establishment in 1789. The first woman who served as a U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922. The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway from Arkansas in 1932. Seventeen of the women who have served were appointed; seven of those were appointed to succeed their deceased husbands. The 116th Congress has 26 female senators, meaning for the first time in history, one-fourth of the members of the U.S. Senate are female. Of the 57 women in the U.S. Senate, 36 have been Democrats and 21 have been Republicans.
context_section_description: For its first 130 years in existence, the Senate's membership was entirely male. Until 1920, few women ran for the Senate. Until the 1990s, very few were elected. This paucity of women was due to many factors, including the lack of women's suffrage in many states until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, women's limited access to higher education until the mid-1900s, public perceptions of gender roles, and barriers to women's advancement such as sex discrimination.
  The first woman in the U.S. Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton, who served representing Georgia for only one day in 1922. Hattie Caraway became the first woman to win election to the Senate (Arkansas), in 1932. Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to serve in both the House and Senate; she first served in the House, and began serving in the Senate in 1949. Margaret Chase Smith won her 1960 race for Senate in the nation's first ever race pitting two women (her and Lucia Cormier) against each other for a Senate seat. Muriel Humphrey Brown was the first and only Second Lady to serve in the United States Senate. After her husband, Hubert Humphrey, was defeated in the 1968 presidential election, he won back his old Senate seat from Minnesota. Following his unexpected death in office, Brown was appointed by the Governor of Minnesota in 1978 to fill her late husband's Senate seat. She served for less than one year, and did not seek reelection.
  In 1978, Nancy Kassebaum became the first woman ever elected to a full term in the Senate without her husband having previously served in Congress. Since 1978, there has always been at least one woman in the Senate. The first woman to be elected to the Senate without any family connections was Paula Hawkins (R-FL), elected in 1980. There were still few women in the Senate near the end of the 20th century, long after women began to make up a significant portion of the membership of the House. The trend of few women in the Senate began to change in the wake of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings, and the subsequent election of the 103rd United States Congress in 1992, which was dubbed the "Year of the Woman." In addition to Barbara Mikulski, who was reelected that year (1992), four women were elected to the Senate, all Democrats. They were Patty Murray of Washington, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, and Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both of California. Carol Moseley Braun, who was African-American, was the first woman of color in the Senate. She was also the first woman to defeat an incumbent senator, winning the 1992 Democratic primary election over Alan Dixon. Later in 1992, Dianne Feinstein was the first woman to defeat an incumbent senator from a different party when she defeated John Seymour in a special election. Feinstein entered the Senate the same year as the first female Jewish senator.
  Bathroom facilities for women in the Senate on the Senate Chamber level were first provided in 1992. Women were not allowed to wear pants on the Senate floor until 1993. In 1993, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore pants onto the floor in defiance of the rule, and female support staff followed soon after, with the rule being amended later that year by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Martha Pope to allow women to wear pants on the floor so long as they also wore a jacket.
  The first time two female senators from the same state served concurrently was beginning in 1993; Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer (both D-CA) were both elected in 1992, with Feinstein taking office that same year (as the result of a special election) and Boxer taking office in 1993 until 2016 when Boxer retired and Feinstein was joined by Kamala Harris. In June 1993, Kay Bailey Hutchison won a special election in Texas, and joined Kassebaum as a fellow female Republican senator. These additions significantly diminished the popular perception of the Senate as an exclusive "boys' club." Since 1992, there has been at least one new woman elected to the Senate every two years with the exception o
caption: Eight women Senators meet in 1997. Left to right: Patty Murray, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Carol Moseley-Braun, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Barbara Mikulski, Mary Landrieu, and Dianne Feinstein.
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