Women in the United States Senate After retiring from the Senate, she married former Senator Howard Baker (R-TN). Kassebaum has the distinction of being the first female elected senator who did not succeed her husband in Congress (Margaret Chase Smith was only elected to the Senate after succeeding her husband to his House seat). At the time of her retirement in 1997, Kassebaum was the second longest serving female senator, after Smith (Since 1997 five women have had Senate careers longer than Kassebaum's). The first woman in the Senate was Rebecca Latimer Felton, who served representing Georgia for only one day in 1922. Hattie Caraway became
Women in the United States Senate the first woman to win election to the Senate (Arkansas), in 1932. Senator Margaret Chase Smith was the first woman to serve in both the House and Senate (she first served in the House, and began serving in the Senate in 1949), and she also won a 1960 race for Senate which was the nation's first ever race pitting two women (herself and Lucia Cormier) against each other for a Senate seat. In 1978, Nancy Kassebaum became the first woman ever elected to a full term in the Senate without her husband having previously served in Congress. Muriel Humphrey Brown