Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues

Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer (1835-1930)

Democrat Rebecca Felton of Georgia served in the U.S. Senate from November 21, 1922 to November 22, 1922. She was the first woman to serve in the U.S. Senate and had the shortest term: one day. Felton’s first exposure to politics came when her husband served in Congress in the 1870s and she served as his campaign manager and press secretary. In the early 1880s, she investigated convict camps, found them appalling, and persuaded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union to join her crusade to house male and female prisoners separately and to house juvenile offenders and adult criminals separately.

By the 1890s, Rebecca Felton had become established as a political leader in her own right, lecturing against convict leasing and liquor. In the early 1900s, she became active in the woman suffrage movement and in efforts to provide vocational training for poor white girls. By that time, she had begun writing a column for The Atlanta Journal, articulating her racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic views and her opposition to child labor laws.

When she was 85 years old, she helped elect her friend Thomas Watson to the U.S. Senate. Watson won, served two years of his term, and died in 1922. The governor of Georgia, who had opposed woman suffrage and wanted a symbolic gesture to appease women voters, appointed Felton to serve between the time of Watson’s death and the election of his successor. After the election, Felton convinced the newly elected senator to wait one day to present his credentials, giving her the opportunity to take the Senate seat on November 21, 1922 and to make a speech. After 143 years of an all-male Senate, Felton told her colleagues: “When the women of the country come in and sit with you, though there may be but a very few in the next few years, I pledge to you that you will get ability, you will get integrity of purpose, you will get exalted patriotism, and you will get unstinted usefulness.” The following day, she resigned, and the new senator was sworn in. It was almost 10 years before another woman, Hattie Caraway, was sworn into the Senate.

Born in DeKalb County, Georgia, Felton attended private schools and graduated from Madison Female College in 1852. The next year she married William Harrell Felton, who was a physician, Methodist clergyman, and farmer. During the Civil War years, the Feltons sought refuge in a farmhouse near Macon, where they experienced the horrors of war when outlaw members of the Union and Confederate armies and freed slaves pillaged their home and terrorized them.

Rebecca Felton wrote My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), The Subjection of Women and the Enfranchisement of Women (1915), Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919), and other works.

See also: Caraway, Hattie Ophelia Wyatt; Congress, Women in; Suffrage; Woman’s Christian Temperance Union

References: Boxer, Strangers in the Senate: Politics and the New Revolution of Women in America (1994); James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971); Office of the Historian, U.S. House of Representatives, Women in Congress, 1917-1990 (1991).

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer (1835-1930)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, edited by Suzanne O’Dea, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0333.
APA 7th
Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer (1835-1930). From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, In S. O’Dea (Ed.), Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0333.
CMOS 17th
"Felton, Rebecca Ann Latimer (1835-1930)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, Edited by Suzanne O’Dea. Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0333.