Utah Women received the vote in 1870. Utah’s Constitution gave women the vote in 1896. The USA finally gave women the vote nation wide through a Constitutional amendment at the late date of 1920.
The voters of the USA have been notoriously slow in electing women to government. Montana elected the first female rep in 1916.
Georgia appointed a woman senator for a full day in 1922.
Arkansas appointed a woman senator in 1931, then elected that woman the first female elected senator in 1932. Senator Hattie Caraway served in that seat from 1931 to 1944.
President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Frances Perkins as the first female cabinet secretary in 1933. In 1940, Wendell Willkie was the Republican sacrificial lamb against Roosevelt’s third term. Roosevelt was so popular that he could have and should have nominated Perkins for vice president in 1940. She would have, in the long view, probably proved less problematical politically to Roosevelt than his almost socialist Vice President Henry Wallace.
In 1944, the Democratic convention might have replaced her with Harry Truman anyway. The delegates that year assumed that the vice president nominee would soon become president either through the death of or resignation of Roosevelt: the typical political men of that era might have balked at a women vice president when she had an even chance of becoming president. Still Roosevelt could have made the historic selection in 1940.
Ike appointed the next female cabinet secretary in 1953.
In 1960 or in 1968, Nixon could have selected Senator Margaret Smith as his VP running mate. Johnson could have selected Senator Neuberger in 1964. But no. We got Humphrey and we got Agnew, and we find it hard to fathom how Smith or Neuberger could have been worse.
Gerald Ford appointed the third female cabinet secretary in 1975.
Walter Mondale became the Democratic sacrificial lamb candidate against Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984. He selected Geraldine Ferraro Zaccaro as his vice president running mate in 1984, despite her minimal experience as a representative from Queens, New York. He had few options for this gimmick. At that time, both women senators were Republican, and the one Democrat woman governor of Kentucky had less experience that Mrs. Zaccaro.
It took 24 full years for a presidential candidate to choose another female vice president candidate. This time, a Republican candidate selected a female vice presidential candidate. Heaven only knows if a female veep candidate would have really improved John McCain’s chances as a presidential candidate, especially if he had selected a female veep of substance, someone like Senators Kay Bailey-Hutchinson or Olympia Snowe or a Republican female governor with more than a year and a half of experience. Instead he decided to select a gimmick: she can be best described as a inexperienced loose canon from Alaska by the named Sarah Palin.
In 220 years, major parties selected only 2 women VP nominees. It’s a pathetic historical record.
Utah may have given the vote to women in 1870, and elected its first woman state senator in 1896, but its record of female office holders remains substandard in other ways.
A woman lieutenant governor assumed the governorship in November 2003, and the Republican old boys network went to some length to get rid of her. Years later when a male lieutenant governor named Gary Herbert assumed the governorship from retiring Jon Huntsman, he got renominated and reelected. Not Olene Walker. Wrong gender apparently for the Republican convention.
Utah elected a woman to the U S House of Representatives as early as 1948, but has in total elected only 3 women to the House since 1896. It has elected no female U S senator.
THE CALL TO ACTION
Utah should amend its state Constitution requiring one male U S senator and one female U S senator.
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