Women, the White House and presidential campaigns
Hillary Clinton’s nomination as a major-party presidential candidate is indeed historic. But that doesn’t mean women haven’t played important roles in politics and political campaigns since the Founding era.
This week, Clinton became the first woman to earn the nomination for president at a major-party convention. She came close to gaining that honor in 2008 when Clinton received more than 17 million votes during the nomination process. She trailed Barack Obama by 103 delegates at the end of the 2008 nomination process, which Obama won.
Since 1789, the Constitution had never directly prohibited women for running for President. Article II, Section 1 spells out the basic qualifications for office:
“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States,” the Article reads.
In the early years of our nation, the states controlled voting requirements and major political party nominations. However, that didn’t mean certain women lacked influence in politics.
Don’t Forget The (Early First) Ladies
During the critical period in 1776 before the Declaration of Independence was drafted, Abigail Adams told her husband, John, “in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
Back in 2014, Siena College, C-SPAN and the White House Historical Association partnered with 242 scholars to rank the political and social influence of First Ladies. Abigail Adams, the wife of the second President, only trailed Eleanor Roosevelt as the most-influential First Lady of all time. Two other early First Ladies, Dolley Madison, and Martha Washington, were ranked 4th and 9th in the survey.
And in the category of direct value to the President, Abigail Adams was ranked first, with Eleanor Roosevelt second, Dolley Madison third and Martha Washington fifth, out of 44 administrations.
Early Voting Controversies And Candidates
Just before Civil War, the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum, and some pioneering women decided to run for elected office. A project called “Her Hat Was In The Ring” maintains a database with the names of more than 3,000 women who ran for elected office between 1855 and 1920. It lists the election of Lydia Hall and Marietta Patrick to the Ashfield, Mass., school board in 1855 as one of the earliest known cases of women gaining elected office.
A decade later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Tennie Claflin campaigned for election to federal office in the House of Representatives. Stanton ran for the U.S. House of Representatives from New York State in 1866 knowing she would get few votes, and she told her children that she entered the race “in order to impress the public with the fact that constitutionally women had a right to run for office.” Claflin campaigned in the same New York congressional district in 1871, without success. Claflin, like Stanton, wanted people to know that women could run for federal office.
A year later, Victoria Claflin Woodhull, Tennie Claflin’s sister, became the first woman to declare herself as a candidate for president. Woodhull was announced as the Equal Rights Party candidate in May 1872, with Frederick Douglass proposed as her running mate. Author Jo Freeman, in her book “We Will Be Heard: Women’s Struggles for Political Power in the United States,” said Woodhull’s campaign effectively ended there. No one told Douglass he was on the ticket, and personal problems prevented Woodhull from campaigning. Also, Woodhull was 33 years of age at the time, which made her constitutionally ineligible to serve as president.
In 1884, attorney Belva Ann Lockwood made the first serious attempt by a woman to run for the White House. A determined Lockwood earlier confronted the United States Supreme Court in 1875 about its refusal to allow a woman to argue in front of it, and in 1879, she became the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar. Lockwood’s presidential campaign as the Equal Rights Party candidate received national attention, not all of it positive. But in the end, Lockwood received about 5,000 votes in the presidential election.
Three years later, Susanna Madora Salter became the first woman to win a significant public office when she was elected in 1887 as mayor of Argonia, Kansas. Salter was reportedly nominated without her knowledge by men in the community as a joke, but as the daughter of the town’s first mayor, Salter easily won the election, and she served a one-year term. (Just before the election, Kansas granted women the right to vote in city elections.)
Suffrage and More Firsts For Women
In 1916, Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to a federal office when she ran as a Republican candidate from Montana for the House of Representatives in a multi-candidate race. Women in Montana had gained the right to vote by an act of the state legislature, and Rankin was a well-known suffrage leader in the state. “I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me,” Rankin said in a statement released after her election. Rankin’s first term in Congress was marked by her objection to the United States’ entry into World War I and her support of what became the 19th Amendment. She failed in a bid for the Senate in 1918, but Rankin was later elected again in 1940 to the House.
By September 1920, the 19th Amendment giving all women the right to vote nationally had been ratified, and some women were making headway as political candidates.
In 1924, Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam Ferguson of Texas were elected as governors but also as surrogates for their husbands. Ross also received 31 votes on the vice presidential ballot at the 1928 Democratic National Convention. (Ellen Grasso of Connecticut was the first woman elected in her own right as a state governor in 1974.)
Also in 1924, Bertha Landes became the first woman to serve as a mayor of a major city when she was named the acting mayor of Seattle. In 1926, Landes won the election outright in a campaign run by women.
Hattie Wyatt Caraway was the first woman to win an outright election to the United States Senate in 1932. Caraway’s husband, Thaddeus, was a Senator who represented Arkansas, and his wife was an important part of the Caraway campaign team. When Senator Caraway died in 1931, Arkansas’ governor appointed Hattie to serve out her husband’s term. Hattie Caraway then unexpectedly ran for the Senate seat a year later. She told reporters that, “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.” Caraway received the open support of Huey Long, the Louisiana Senator who came to Arkansas to campaign for her. Caraway won the election easily and she served for 14 years in the Senate.
Women On The Presidential Campaign Trail
While women were making headway in some elected positions, it would take decades for the next significant female presidential candidate to emerge after Belva Ann Lockwood’s second campaign in 1888.
In 1948, Margaret Chase Smith from Maine became the first woman directly elected to the Senate without having been appointed or elected to the same seat as a surrogate for her husband. (In 1940, Smith won election to the House to fill a seat occupied by her late husband.) Smith had been in Congress for 24 years when she decided to oppose Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Republican primary season.
Smith received 227,007 votes in the 1964 primaries and she won 27 delegates at the 1964 Republican Convention. Smith was the first woman to have her name placed in nomination at a major party convention.
In 1972, Shirley Chisholm became the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination as well as the first major-party black candidate. Chisholm came in fourth at the convention where George McGovern won the Democratic nomination. At the Democratic National Convention, Frances (Sissy) Farenthold finished second in voting for the vice presidential nomination. Also in 1972, Libertarian vice presidential candidate Tonie Nathan was the first woman to receive an Electoral College vote, when a faithless elector in Virginia voted for Nathan and her running mate for president, John Hospers, instead of Spiro Agnew.
Since then, women have made more appearances on the campaign trail as candidates for President and Vice President.
In 1976, Ellen McCormack received 22 votes at the Democratic convention won by Jimmy Carter. Eight years later, Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York became the first woman to run on a major party’s national presidential ticket when she was picked by Walter Mondale as his Democratic running mate.
In 1987, Patricia Schroeder explored running for the Democratic nomination the following year, but she opted against it. Schroder said at a press conference that she feared being typecast as ”a woman running for president” or ”the woman’s candidate for president.”
Similarly, in 1999, Elizabeth Dole dropped out of a prospective campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, citing a lack of fundraising. “I have been all but overwhelmed by women of all ages who’ve invested me with their hopes and their dreams,” Dole said when she announced her decision. Dole also hoped she had “paved the way for the person who will be the first woman president.”
Other women candidates in recent years for the presidential nomination of a major political party include Carly Fiorina, Michele Bachman, and Carol Moseley Braun. And Sarah Palin became the first woman to run for vice president on the Republican ticket in 2008 when she joined John McCain on the campaign trail.
Until Clinton’s campaign in 2016, the most-successful female presidential candidate, in terms of aggregate votes in a general election, was Jill Stein of the Green Party, who received 469,000 votes in 2012.
Quotes On Women, Campaigns and The Constitution
The Constitution on women’s eligibility to run for president:
“No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States,” – Article II, Section 1
Abigail Adams on women’s rights in the new Republic (1776):
“I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton to her children on why she ran for Congress (1866):
“In order to impress the public with the fact that constitutionally women had a right to run for office.”
Belva Ann Lockwood to reporters on her second presidential campaign (1888):
“Men always say, ‘Let’s see what you can do.’ If we always talk and never work we will not accomplish anything.”
Jeannette Rankin on winning her House seat (1916):
“I am deeply conscious of the responsibility resting upon me.”
Hattie Wyatt Caraway on running for the Senate outright after replacing her husband (1932):
“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.”
Margaret Chase Smith on running for president (1964):
“There are those who make the contention that no woman should ever dare to aspire to the White House—that this is a man’s world and that it should be kept that way. So because of these very impelling reasons against my running, I have decided that I shall enter the New Hampshire preferential primary and the Illinois primary.”
Shirley Chisholm on running for president (1972):
“I stand before you today, to repudiate the ridiculous notion that the American people will not vote for qualified candidates, simply because he is not white or because she is not a male. I do not believe that in 1972, the great majority of Americans will continue to harbor such narrow and petty prejudice.”
Elizabeth Dole on her failed 2000 campaign:
“I have been all but overwhelmed by women of all ages who’ve invested me with their hopes and their dreams,” Dole said when she announced her decision to end her campaign. Dole also hoped she had “paved the way for the person who will be the first woman president.”
Scott Bomboy is editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
