When it comes to electing women to the United States Congress, New England does not have a history for voting early or voting often. The first woman elected to the House of Representatives from any New England state was Edith Nourse Rogers, who took office in 1925. Succeeding her husband in the 5th District of Massachusetts (a swath of Boston’s northwestern suburbs), Rogers was the sixth woman in the country to be elected to Congress since Jeanette Rankin was the first in 1917.
Despite Roger’s work in Congress, by the time she died in office in 1960, only three other women had ever joined her in the region’s delegation: all in the House, with only one moving up to the Senate. By comparison, the states of the former Confederacy saw significant growth through the first half of the 20th century, sending four women to the Senate and 11 women to the House of Representatives — close to four times that of New England — by 1960. And to this day, New England still has only sent seven women to the Senate and twenty women to the House of Representatives.
However, there are two firsts that New England can claim: both the first House and the first Senate races in which the major-party nominees were women. These races — the Connecticut House race in 1944, and the Maine Senate race in 1960 — set the tone for many of the woman-versus-woman Congressional races to follow: a dignified duel between the candidates, bracketed by sexist mudslinging by outside male interests.
1944: A Sharp-Tongued Glamor Girl… of 40 and Carpetbagging Celebrities
Clare Boothe Luce was a fascinating character. Born to high-society, Luce had progressed from writer to editor, political pundit to politician. In 1935, she married archconservative Henry Luce, the publisher of Time and Life. After working as a war correspondent from 1939 to 1942, Luce ran for Congress as a Republican in 1942, defeating an incumbent Congressman on a platform critical of President Franklin Roosevelt’s conduct of World War II. Notably, that race also saw a competitive Socialist Party candidate pull 11% of the vote — far more than Luce’s margin of victory. The first Congresswoman elected from New England to not succeed her husband in office, Luce spent her first term in Congress supporting select welfare programs and working to alleviate the plight of refugees, while continuing to criticize Roosevelt’s “dictatorial bumbledom” in conducting the war.
But 1944 saw Luce running for her second term as a Connecticut Representative, seeking re-election in the 4th district — an area encompassing both the affluent, suburban Fairfield County and working-class Bridgeport. This time, her opposition came in the form of Margaret Connors, a young but experienced lawyer who served as Connecticut’s Deputy Secretary of State.
The administration took notice of this race, with FDR referring to Luce as a “sharp-tongued glamor girl of 40” at a Connors endorsement rally, and Vice President Wallace making no less than 17 campaign stops for Connors. According to Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, the second volume by Luce biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris, the Democratic nominee herself desribed the Congresswoman as “perfectly charming, lovely to look at, puts on a wonderful show… but I have long considered her a menace.” Other writers and Democrats piled on; radio personality Clifton Fadiman said that Luce was “a refugee from a Park Avenue foxhole,” that Connecticut had no need of this “photographer’s delight,” and that no woman had “gone further with less mental equipment.”
Luce, meanwhile, campaigned aggressively around all corners of her district just as she had in her first election. She spoke out against Roosevelt and his “carpetbagging celebrities” in over a hundred sharp and memorable stump speeches, including famously saying that Roosevelt was the only President who “lied us into a war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it.” She ducked Connors’ open telegram asking six knockout questions about the Congresswoman’s stances on hot-button Republican policies and votes she had missed, including the GI Bill. While this attack may have lost Luce some suburban votes, she compensated by pursuing factory workers in Bridgeport and other urban centers.
On election day, as FDR won his fourth term, Luce managed to prevail over Connors by two thousand votes, a margin again slightly smaller than the vote count for the Socialist candidate opposing them both. She said that “I wasn’t running against Miss Connors, but against the New Deal and the [local labor organization].” While this would be Clare Boothe Luce’s final term in the House, she went on to serve as President Eisenhower’s Ambassador to Italy, and became the first female member on Congress to receive a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Margaret Connors would go on to be appointed a Judge of the Connecticut Superior Court — but never ran for elected office again.
1960: Widow vs. Spinster
While the House saw Luce v. Connors in 1944, the nation’s first Senate election with two female nominees would have to wait until 1960.
Senator Margaret Chase Smith had represented Maine in the Senate from 1949, and in the House from 1940, after winning her late husband’s seat in a special election. A famously moderate Republican, she became a Senate institution after her “Declaration of Conscience” speech in 1950, which condemned the ruinous innuendos slung by her colleague, Senator Joe McCarthy.
Running for her third term in 1960, she was opposed by Lucia Cormier, Democratic floor leader in the Maine House of Representatives, who had been recruited for a Senate campaign by Maine’s other Senator, Democrat Ed Muskie.
From Rumford, in northwestern Maine, Cormier was the proprietress of a local stationary store and a former schoolteacher. She had served in the State House since the late 1940s, with a break to run a nearly-successful campaign for Congress, as Maine began to turn away from its historically Republican roots in 1950. Notably, in 1960 Cormier was on the same ticket as the Democratic nominee for President, fellow-New Englander and fellow-Catholic John F. Kennedy.
According to the United States Senate's historical highlights, the incumbent and the challenger both planned to run serious campaigns, but outside media coverage dubbed the race “Widow v. Spinster” and predicted “a real fur-flying political cat fight.” And with that, it seems, the gloves came off. The incumbent urged voters not to “trade a record for a promise” and said that “I was so successful in overcoming the campaign argument that ‘the Senate is no place for a woman,’ that I must have overdone it.” Meanwhile, Sen. Muskie breached decorum by bringing Lucia Cormier onto the Senate floor, introducing her as “the next Senator from Maine,” and urging her to sit at one of the Senate desks.
The weekend before the election, Cormier and Smith met in a televised debate. Here, too, the candidates kept it civil, and Cormier resisted entreaties to “slug it out” with Smith. This may not have been to her benefit — Smith won with 62% of the vote on election day, and Cormier ended up running about 20,000 votes behind Kennedy (who also lost the state). Smith went on to serve two more terms in Senate before being defeated for re-election in 1972, while Cormier was appointed Portland’s Customs Collector by President Kennedy.
If you want more iconic American political races, check out
5 Elections That Shaped American Politics, here on WGBH.
