Women in the United States Senate Women in the United States Senate There have been 52 total women in the United States Senate since its establishment in 1789. The first woman who served as a U.S. Senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922. The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway from Arkansas in 1932. Fifteen of the women who have served were appointed; seven of those were appointed to succeed their deceased husbands. As of April 9, 2018 when Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi was sworn in, the 115th United States Congress has 23 female Senators out of 100
Year of the Woman set out to raise the necessary funds, two other women several hundred miles to the south in California began work on their own Senate campaigns. As a result, on January 3, 1993, for the first time in American history, California became the first state in the nation to be represented in the Senate by two women. In the 1992 elections, Dianne Feinstein, a former Democratic mayor of San Francisco, running for the balance of an uncompleted term, beat her opponent with a margin of nearly two million votes, while Barbara Boxer—a 10-year veteran of the U.S. House of Representatives who