The first woman elected to the U.S. Senate lived in Riverdale Park, but she didn’t represent Maryland.
Hattie Wyatt Caraway first moved to the historic Riversdale Mansion in the late 1920s with her husband, Democratic Sen. Thaddeus Caraway of Arkansas. But in 1931, he died from a blood clot in a coronary artery, and she was appointed to fill his seat.
Caraway was the second woman to serve in the Senate but the first to serve meaningfully. Nearly a decade earlier, Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia was appointed and served a symbolic 24 hours as a capstone to a long career in journalism and politics.
Party leaders presumed Caraway would not actually run for the seat, but as the deadline approached to file for office, she began to worry about becoming too dependent when she left office.
On May 9, 1932, as she noted in her diary, she made a “snap judgement” and chose to preside over the Senate despite being nervous about the task. She then literally flipped a coin.
Made history. Presided over the Senate … It was snap judgement and I was scared. Nothing came up but oh, the autographs I signed. Well, I pitched a coin and heads came three times, so because the boys wish and because I really want to try out my own theory of a woman running for office, I let my check and pledges be filed. And now I won’t be able to sleep or eat.
The men running against Caraway joked that she would be lucky to get one percent of the vote, and at first that seemed like it might be the case. Caraway grew frustrated, lashing out at a question over whether she would withdraw.
“I am going to fight for my place in the sun,” she said. “The time has passed when a woman is placed in a position and kept there only while someone else is being groomed for the job.”
With most of the state’s political operators already pledged to other candidates, “the little lady from Arkansas” went for a hail Mary pass and joined forces with controversial Louisiana Sen. Huey Long for a week-long barnstorming road trip across Arkansas they called the “Hattie and Huey Tour.”
“We’re here to pull a lot of pot-bellied politicians off a little woman’s neck,” Long would say in his stump speech.
Caraway won the election with double the vote of the next candidate, and she won re-election in 1938 without any barnstorming with Long, serving until 1945. By then, she’d moved out of the Riversdale mansion because she couldn’t afford to keep up payments, selling it to former Congressman Abraham Lafferty.
In office, Caraway was more of a work horse than a show horse, preferring to get things done in committee rather than give big speeches on the Senate floor. For this, the male-dominated D.C. press corps gave her the nickname “Silent Hattie.”
But she learned to give big speeches at rallies when needed, and when she retired in 1945, her colleagues gave her a standing ovation.
