Nellie Tayloe Ross Becomes the First Woman Elected Governor

A Widow Called to Run

Nellie Tayloe was born in Missouri in 1876 and moved west after marrying William Bradford Ross, a Wyoming lawyer, in 1902. He entered state politics, and in 1922 he was elected governor. He died in October 1924 after an operation, less than two years into his term. The state’s Democrats then asked his widow to run in the special election to complete it. She stayed away from active campaigning, remained at home in mourning, and let her supporters carry the effort. The party’s candidate, a woman and a political newcomer, won with about 55 percent of the vote.

The Equality State

Wyoming was a fitting place for the milestone. Its territorial legislature granted women the right to vote in 1869, decades before most of the country, and women there served on juries and held local office early. The state’s nickname, the Equality State, reflected that tradition. Ross was elected on the same day as another woman, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in Texas, who had also been nominated after her husband’s political troubles. Ross took the oath on January 5, 1925, about two weeks before Ferguson, and so holds the title of first woman governor.

Governing Wyoming

Ross served from January 1925 to January 1927. She supported enforcement of Prohibition and backed measures on children’s labor, and she kept up the spending economies her husband had favored. She was a capable and cautious executive who did not claim to be a pioneer, and in interviews she said that she approached the office as a job to be done. Her years in office showed that a woman could run a state government without trouble. She ran for a full term in 1926 and narrowly lost.

After the Governorship

Her political career continued. Ross became a leading Democratic Party official and spoke at national conventions, and in 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her Director of the United States Mint, the first woman to hold the post. She stayed there until 1953, through the Great Depression and the Second World War, overseeing coinage and the Mint’s large wartime production. She lived to be 101 and died in 1977. Her election in 1924 is remembered as an early step toward women’s full participation in American political life.

A First, Not Yet a Trend

Both of the women elected governors in 1924, Ross and Ferguson, entered politics through the careers of their husbands, and that pattern held for some decades. It was not until 1974 that Ella Grasso of Connecticut was elected governor in her own right, without having been married to a previous governor. Since then the number of women in state government has grown steadily. Ross’s election in 1924, only four years after the Nineteenth Amendment, remains a marker of how quickly some women moved from the ballot box to executive office.