The Precarious Career of Hattie Caraway, America’s First Woman Senator
Elected to the ‘World’s Most Exclusive Club’ From Arkansas in 1932, Caraway Was Ignored by Her Peers But Hounded by the Press
The first woman elected to the United States Senate is not a household name. That woman, Hattie Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas, kept a very low profile. She is not considered a political trailblazer. Indeed, she voted with the rest of the Southern delegation against the Anti-Lynching Bill of 1934, intended to make lynching a federal crime. But though her name has become a historical footnote, Caraway, who was born in the shadow of post-Civil War Reconstruction and died at the dawn of the atomic age, offers a fascinating study in …
