Rebecca Latimer Felton, a “grand old woman from Georgia”, was 87 years old when she took the oath of office on 21 November 1922 and became the first female senator in American historyy.

Suffragists in the Senate Chamber cheered. The 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote, had been just that ratified two years earlier, and Georgia was the first state to oppose the. Now it was the first state to designate one woman as a senator.

But this victory for women’s rights was difficult: Felton was hardly a progressive champion.

“The day marked a historic first for American women,” journalist Laura Mallonee wrote for Smithsonian in 2022. “But that’s complicated by Felton’s record as an outspoken white supremacist and the last congressman to have enslaved people.”

Felton was born on a fortune plantation near Decatur, Georgia, 1835, and married slavery, farmer, surgeon, and Methodist preacher William Harrell Felton 1853. She entered political life as the manager of his successful campaign for the US House of Representatives as an independent Democrat in 1874. For decades she remained in the spotlight in the post-bellum South as a violent white supremacist, advocating lynchings, drumming up racial hatred in speeches and newspapers, and denouncing black men as a danger to the virtue of white women.

“If it needs lynching to protect woman’s dearest possessions from ravenous human beasts,” Felton once said said“then I say ‘lynch’ a thousand times a week if necessary.”

Felton’s vision of women’s rights was closely intertwined with her racist worldview. White men failed to protect white women from black men, she reasoned, so white women needed to take matters into their own hands by getting right to vote.

However, her local suffrage efforts were futile. Georgia refused to ratify the 19th Amendment, but it became federal law at least in August 1920 after 36 of the 48 states voted in its favor. Even then, Georgia blocked its women from voting in the 1920 election on a technicality because they had failed to register before local deadlines. Felton answered off calling state legislators “the most uncompromising misogynists in the known world.”

But Georgia’s governor Thomas Hardwick knew that women would inevitably become a powerful voting bloc once registered. To gain their favor, he appointed Felton to a Senate seat vacated by another senator death. Hardwick himself wanted to run for the seat and thought that a woman would not oppose his candidacy.

As it happened, Hardwick lost the election to Walter F. Georgeand suffragists rallied for Felton to sit for just one day before George was sworn in.

Although Congress was out of session, President Warren G. Harding relented and held one special legislative session on Nov. 21 — not only because of Felton’s pleas, but also because he needed to vent a little maritime legislation.

The event was historic, if largely symbolic. In her remarksFelton, a self-described “remnant of the old South who has never flickered in her patriotism,” thanked “the noble men of Georgia” and their “chivalrous governor” for the opportunity to speak on the Senate floor.

Her first speech was her last, and George immediately took office then. It would take another 16 years Gladys Pylea republican from South Dakotabecame the first woman elected to the Senate without first being appointed to fill a vacancy.

Felton never returned to public office, dying at the age of 94 in 1930. Her groundbreaking victory for the suffrage movement revealed contradictions in American progressivism, which makes it all the more important to consider all her successes, failures, and shortcomings as part of the nation’s troubled past. As a historian Crystal Feimster put it on Smithsonian“we cannot relegate her to the dustbin of history.”