Doloris Bridges

Doloris Bridges (ca. 1916 – January 16, 1969), widow of 25-year U.S. Senator H. Styles Bridges, was the first woman to seek election to the U.S. Senate from New Hampshire. Considered an example of staunchly anticommunist women who emerged as leaders during the Goldwater era of the Republican Party in the mid-1960s, she died of cancer before the decade was over, without ever winning office.

Doloris May Thauwald was born in Gibbon, Minnesota, the daughter of Dr. Charles Casper Thauwald and Clara (Frediani) Thauwald. She was educated in St. Paul, Minnesota public schools and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1935. She attended Strayer Business College at Washington D.C., and the Foreign Service School of the U.S. Department of State. She entered government service in October 1937 in the U.S. Department of Internal Revenue, and later became an administrative assistant in the State Department's world trade intelligence division.

In February 1944, at age 29, she married U.S. Senator H. Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a widower then in his second term. Mr. Bridges would continue to serve in the U.S. Senate for seventeen more years. In 1955, during Senator Bridges’ fourth term, the New Hampshire Sunday News, a newspaper owned by conservative editor William Loeb III, suggested that Mrs. Bridges should be elected to New Hampshire’s other U.S. Senate seat. Late in the 1960 presidential campaign, she accused Senator John F. Kennedy of softness toward communism and of absenting himself from the Senate when anticommunist legislation reached the Senate floor.

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