Women in the United States Senate

There have been 50 total women in the United States Senate since its establishment in 1789. The first woman senator, Rebecca Felton, served in 1922 (for a single day), but the first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway in 1932. Fourteen of the women who have served were appointed; seven of those were appointed to succeed their deceased husbands. Currently (as of 2017), the 115th Congress has 21 female senators out of 100 (21%), one more than both the 113th and 114th congresses, and an all-time high.

Throughout most of the Senate's history, that legislative chamber has been almost 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, which still plays a factor in their limited numbers today.

The first woman in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton who served for only one day in 1922. Hattie Caraway of Arkansas became the first woman to win election to the Senate, in 1932. No women served from 1922 to 1931, 1945 to 1947, and 1973 to 1978. Since 1978, there has always been at least one woman in the Senate.

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. In fact, the first time there were three women in the Senate simultaneously was in 1992, when Jocelyn Burdick of North Dakota joined Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas and Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. The number increased to four in November, when Dianne Feinstein won a special election in California.

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