During her tenure in the Senate, three other women – Long's widow, Rose McConnell Long, Dixie Bibb Graves, and Gladys Pyle – held brief tenures of two years or less in the Senate, but none of them overlapped, and so there were never more than two women in the body. She supported Roosevelt's foreign policy, arguing for his Lend-Lease bill from her perspective as a mother with two sons in the United States Army. While encouraging women to contribute to the war effort, Caraway insisted that caring for the home and family was a woman's primary task. Yet her consciousness of women's disadvantages was evident as early as 1931, when, upon being assigned the same Senate desk that had been briefly occupied by the first widow ever appointed to take her husband's place, she commented privately, "I guess they wanted as few of them contaminated as possible." Moreover, in 1943, Caraway became the first woman legislator to cosponsor the Equal Rights Amendment. In early 1944, she was an early sponsor of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the G.I. Bill. However, by supporting the bill, she placed herself in opposition to powerful congressmen who condemned the bill for being socialist.