On this day in 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross became the first female to serve as a governor in the United States. She was governor of Wyoming from 1925-1927.
Nellie Tayloe Ross (November 29, 1876 – December 19, 1977) was an American politician, the 14th Governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927, and director of the United States Mint from 1933–1953. To date, she remains the only woman to have served as governor of Wyoming.
Nellie Davis Tayloe was born near Amazonia, in Andrew County, Missouri (now part of the St. Joseph Metropolitan Statistical Area) to James Wynn Tayloe, a native of Stewart County, Tennessee, and his wife, Elizabeth Blair Green, who owned a plantation on the Missouri River. In 1884, when Nellie Ross was seven years of age, her family moved to Miltonvale in Cloud County in northern Kansas. The relocation happened after their Andrew County home burned, and the sheriff was about to foreclose on the property.
After she graduated from Miltonville High School in 1892, her family moved to Omaha, Nebraska. During this time she taught private piano lessons, and also attended a teacher-training college for two years. She then taught kindergarten for four years. Nellie was sent on a trip to Europe in 1896 by two of her brothers.
In 1900, while on a visit to her relatives in Dover, Stewart County, Tennessee, she met William Bradford Ross, whom she married on September 11, 1902. Ross practiced law and planned to live in the American West. He moved to Cheyenne and established a law practice, bringing his wife to join him there. Ross became a leader in the Democratic Party in Wyoming. He ran for office several times, but always lost to Republican candidates.
In 1922, William Ross was elected governor of Wyoming by appealing to progressive voters in both parties. However, after little more than a year and a half in office, he died on October 2, 1924, from complications from an appendectomy. The Democratic Party then nominated Nellie Ross to run for governor in a special election the following month.
Nellie Tayloe Ross refused to campaign, but easily won the race on November 4, 1924. On January 5, 1925, she became the first female governor in the history of the United States. As governor she continued her late husband’s policies, which called for tax cuts, government assistance for poor farmers, banking reform, and laws protecting children, women workers, and miners. She urged Wyoming to ratify a pending federal amendment prohibiting child labor.
Ross ran for re-election in 1926, but was narrowly defeated. Ross blamed her loss in part on the fact that she had again refused to campaign for herself and the fact that she supported prohibition. Nevertheless, she remained active in the Democratic Party and campaigned for Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election though the two disagreed on prohibition. At the 1928 Democratic National Convention, she received 31 votes from 10 states for vice president on the first ballot. She also gave a speech seconding Smith’s nomination. After the convention, she served as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee and as director of the DNC Women’s Division.
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her as the first female director of the U.S. Mint on May 3, 1933, where she served five full terms until her retirement in 1953, when Republicans under Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon regained the executive branch of government.
After her retirement, Ross contributed articles to various women’s magazines and traveled extensively. She made her last trip to Wyoming in 1972 at the age of ninety-six. Five years later, she died in Washington, D.C., at the age of 101; at the time of her death, she was the oldest ex-governor in the United States. She is interred in the family plot in Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.
Note: Miriam Ferguson was elected governor of Texas on the same day as Nellie Tayloe Ross won her election. However, Ross was inaugurated fifteen days prior to Ferguson.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Tayloe_Ross
3 Comments
As a modern Wyoming woman who has seen her share of hard winters and back country isolation I do think many of the ladies who settled the west had to be strong or they and their families would have died. The truth behind much of Wyoming’s suffragist movement was the population was so low at the time that they had to make women full blown citizens to be accepted as a state. So women won their right to vote, run for office and stand on a jury because of the low population of men. Maybe Nellie saw that women had not gained their rights out of true equality and was disheartened by it?
From what little I’ve read, she wasn’t an active supporter of the Suffragists! Am fascinated by that and might dig a little deeper.
So interesting how the states in the Western US had been more favorable to women in politics. Most of the West had passed women’s suffrage, either in a full or limited capacity, before the East and South were required by Federal law. I guess those tough, pioneer women really earned their equality among men through sharing the work and burdens of isolation, hard winters and ranch work! There is a sense of enduring strength and independence that is uniquely American, in those women with that pioneer, homesteading spirit. I wonder if Nellie ever met any of the original suffragists during her years in Washington? Did she ever change her stance on prohibition?