U.S. Senator
Thaddeus H. Caraway died in office in 1931. Following the precedent of appointing widows to temporarily take their husbands' places, Arkansas governor
Harvey Parnell appointed Hattie Caraway to the vacant seat, and she was sworn into office on December 9.
Elections January 1932 With the
Democratic Party of Arkansas's backing, she easily won a special election in January 1932 for the remaining months of the term, becoming the first woman elected to the Senate.
1932 In May 1932, Caraway surprised Arkansas politicians by announcing that she would run for a full term in the upcoming election, joining a field already crowded with prominent candidates who had assumed she would step aside. She told reporters, "The time has passed when a woman should be placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job." When she was invited by
Vice President Charles Curtis to preside over the Senate she took advantage of the situation to announce that she would run for reelection.
Populist former
Governor and Senator
Huey Long of neighboring
Louisiana traveled to Arkansas on a seven-day campaign swing on her behalf. She was the first female senator to preside over the body as well as the first to chair a committee (Senate Committee on Enrolled Bills). Lacking any significant political backing, Caraway accepted the offer of help from Long, whose efforts to limit incomes of the wealthy and increase aid to the poor she had supported. Long was also motivated by sympathy for the widow and his ambition to extend his influence into the home state of his party rival, Senator
Joseph Robinson, who had been
Al Smith's vice-presidential candidate in
1928. Bringing his colorful and flamboyant campaign style to Arkansas, Long stumped the state with Caraway for a week just before the Democratic primary. He helped her to amass nearly twice as many votes as her closest opponent. Caraway went on to win the
general election in November, with the accompanying victory of
Franklin D. Roosevelt as
U.S. President.
Tenure Caraway's Senate committee assignments included Agriculture and Forestry, Commerce, and Enrolled Bills and Library, which she chaired. She sustained a special interest in relief for farmers, flood control, and veterans' benefits, all of direct concern to her constituents, and cast her votes for nearly every
New Deal measure. In 1938, she joined fellow Southerners in a
filibuster against an
anti-lynching bill that year. Although she carefully prepared herself for Senate work, Caraway spoke infrequently and rarely made speeches on the floor but built a reputation as an honest and sincere senator. She was sometimes portrayed by patronizing reporters as "Silent Hattie" or "the quiet grandmother who never said anything or did anything." She explained her reticence as unwillingness "to take a minute away from the men. The poor dears love it so." 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. She died on December 21 of the same year in Falls Church, Virginia, and was buried in Oaklawn Cemetery in Jonesboro, Arkansas. ==Legacy==