If you answered “Margaret Chase Smith, the Senator from Maine,” you’d be close, but not close enough. Can you tell when she served, even?
David Parker is back from his vacation; in merely noting that he’s back, he pointed to this article about the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate. Having spent so much time prowling those halls, and having lived with so many people who are so steeped in Senate history, the information caught me a little off guard. 
Who is it, if it’s not Smith? Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, according to Dr. Parker. She was appointed to fill a vacancy created by the death of Sen. Thomas E. Watson, in September 1922. Gov. Thomas Hardwick appointed her, thinking he could easily defeat her in the special election to pick a permanent replacement, if she ran — but he hoped she would not. He knew that any incumbent who ran would have a good chance of winning, and he could not appoint himself.
Best laid plans of mice and men “go aft agly,” the poet says. Felton was 87 when she got the appointment on October 3, 1922, and she did not run. The Senate was in recess anyway, so it shouldn’t have mattered much.
When the session opened George allowed Felton to present her credentials before he claimed his seat. She was sworn in at noon on November 21. The next morning she made a speech thanking the Senate for allowing her to be sworn in and noting that the women who followed her would serve with “ability,” “integrity of purpose,” and “unstinted usefulness.” Senator-elect George was then sworn in. Felton’s term had lasted for just twenty-four hours.
Was Margaret Chase Smith even the second woman senator? Do you know how many women serve in the U.S. Senate today?
(Smith was a woman of infinite grace and charm. In a time when senators wrote their biographies to their own partisan and electoral advantage, Sen. Smith’s official biography in the Congressional Directory read: “Margaret Chase Smith, Senator from Maine.”)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 