Meet the Woman Who Was the First Female Senator and the Last Senator to Be an Enslaver. She Served for Just One Day

Rebecca Latimer Felton, a “grand old woman from Georgia,” was 87 years old when she took the oath of office on November 21, 1922, becoming the first female senator in American history.

Suffragists in the Senate chamber cheered. The 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, had only been ratified two years earlier, and Georgia was the first state to oppose it. Now, it was the first state to appoint a woman as a senator.

But this victory for women’s rights was a thorny one: Felton was hardly a progressive champion.

“The day marked a historic first for American women,” journalist Laura Mallonee wrote for Smithsonian in 2022. “But it’s complicated by Felton’s record as an outspoken white supremacist and the last member of Congress to have enslaved people.”

Felton was born on a wealthy plantation near Decatur, Georgia, in 1835, and married enslaver, farmer, surgeon and Methodist preacher William Harrell Felton in 1853. She entered political life as the manager of his successful campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent Democrat in 1874. For decades, she remained in the limelight of the post-bellum South as a virulent white supremacist, advocating lynchings, drumming up racial hate in speeches and newspapers, and decrying Black men as dangers to white women’s virtue.

“If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from ravening human beasts,” Felton once said, “then I say ‘lynch’ a thousand times a week if necessary.”

Felton’s vision of women’s rights was tightly entwined with her racist worldview. White men were failing to protect white women from Black men, she reasoned, so white women needed to take matters into their own hands by obtaining the right to vote.

Her local suffrage efforts, however, were futile. Georgia refused to ratify the 19th Amendment, but it became federal law anyway in August 1920 after 36 of the 48 states voted in its favor. Even then, Georgia blocked its women from voting in the 1920 elections on a technicality because they had failed to register before local deadlines. Felton responded by calling the state legislature “the most uncompromising woman-haters in the known world.”

But Georgia’s Governor Thomas Hardwick knew women would inevitably become a powerful voting bloc once registered. To curry their favor, he appointed Felton to a Senate seat left vacant by another senator’s death. Hardwick himself wished to run for the seat and figured a woman would not oppose his candidacy.

As it happened, Hardwick lost the election to Walter F. George, and suffragists rallied to have Felton seated for just one day before George was sworn in.

Even though Congress was out of session, President Warren G. Harding relented and held a special legislative session on November 21—not just because of Felton’s appeals, but also because he needed to iron out a bit of maritime shipping legislation.

The event was historic, if largely symbolic. In her remarks, Felton, a self-described “remnant of the Old South that has never flickered in her patriotism,” thanked “the noble men of Georgia” and their “chivalric governor” for the opportunity to speak on the Senate floor.

Her first speech was her last, and George promptly took office thereafter. It would be another 16 years until Gladys Pyle, a Republican from South Dakota, became the first woman elected to the Senate without having first been appointed to fill a vacancy.

Felton never returned to public office, dying at the age of 94 in 1930. Her groundbreaking victory for the suffrage movement laid bare the contradictions in American Progressivism, making it all the more essential to consider all her successes, failures and flaws as part of the nation’s messy past. As historian Crystal Feimster put it to Smithsonian, “we can’t relegate her to the dustbin of history.”

Eli Wizevich | | READ MORE

Eli Wizevich is a history correspondent for Smithsonian. He studied history at the University of Chicago and previously wrote for the El Paso Times.