Hattie Wyatt Caraway (February 1, 1878–December 21, 1950), the first woman elected to the United States Senate, only went to Washington because her husband, Arkansas senator Thaddeus Caraway, died of a blood clot in his coronary artery.
Everyone expected she would step aside once Thaddeus’s original term was up. It was, after all, the polite thing for a woman to do—to let the men do the running for office. Hattie, who never remarried, wasn’t a particularly political woman prior to taking her husband’s Senate seat, didn’t even show a real interest in the issue of women’s suffrage, said that adding voting to her duties was the same as adding more cooking and sewing. In other words, just another pain, but when it came time to abandon her place in the Senate, Hattie surprised everyone when she decided to run for reelection. “The time has passed when a woman should be placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job,” Hattie declared. She wrote in her journal that she planned to test “my own theory of a woman running for office.”
One of Hattie’s theories involved employing an army of male campaign workers to rally new women voters and soothe their crying infants with lollipops so the women could listen to Hattie’s speeches without being distracted by their wailing children.
After winning the general election of 1932, Hattie became a champion of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, veterans’ benefits, and farmers’ relief. Her relative silence in the chamber was often derided by male journalists who gave her the nicknames “Silent Hattie” and “The Quiet Grandmother.” Her response to this was accompanied by a calculated smile. She simply didn’t want to take a minute of public pontificating away from her male counterparts, she explained, since “the poor dears love it so.”