Jan. 5 marked 100 years since the first woman was sworn in as a governor in the United States. It was Wyoming Governor Nellie Tayloe Ross. Wyoming Public Radio’s Kamila Kudelska asked Wyoming historian Kylie McCormick who Ross was.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
Kyle McCormick: [Ross]was an ambitious woman in a time where ambition was not a valued trait in women. She was born in St. Joseph, Missouri during reconstruction, 1876. Her family had been slaveholders. They had a large plantation and they came to financial ruin after the Civil War.
She was raised in poverty and her family was selling off bits of the farm in order to try and keep up with their back taxes. She experiences hard work at a really young age. Her mother was also contributing to the household and there was really economic equality between her mother and father.
She had graduated high school. She worked as a piano teacher in Omaha, Nebraska before becoming a kindergarten teacher. While visiting family in Paris, Tennessee, she met her future husband, William B. Ross, who moved to Wyoming in 1901.
Kamila Kudelska: So, who was William Ross?
KM: He was politically ambitious. He was a Democrat. He ran for office several times, mostly unsuccessfully [but] some very close races. It's finally the Teapot Dome scandal that happened in 1922 that makes people very suspicious of Republicans and gets a lot of wins nationally for Democrats, including here in Wyoming.
That's the race that William Ross wins. Unfortunately, in his term, he had a terrible case of appendicitis and passes away in October, 1924.
KK: How does she become governor? How does that happen?
KM: It was a very difficult decision. Her family was telling her that she probably shouldn't run. I think that there's two things that really motivate her to decide to go ahead and run. One is that she wanted to carry on her husband and his legacy and what he was trying to implement as governor. The other was that she was ambitious. She wanted the job. Being first lady of Wyoming, she had a taste of politicking. I think that she had a vision for what she could do in that position and she had some things that she wanted to get done for the state. So, she does end up running.
KK: At the time, Wyoming was already known as the Equality State. Can you explain if you think that helped with Ross's success?
KM: I think that it did. There were some of her surrogates that really made that point: How great it would be with Wyoming being the Equality State, the first to recognize women's right to vote and also electing the nation's first woman governor?
It's not necessarily an argument that she embraced. This is a quote that she gives later on in her life to People's Magazine in the 1970s.
She said, “I've always thought candidates for public office should not be chosen on the basis of sex. Being a woman should not mitigate for or against someone.”
KK: What did she do during her tenure? What were her priorities?
KM: There were three of her husband's policies that she wanted to carry on. She wanted to continue spending cuts, which is something that he had tried to accomplish while he was in office. He also wanted to provide state loans for farmers and ranchers, and a strong enforcement of Prohibition.
Then she had eight other additional things that she was trying to do. She wanted cities, counties and school districts to have budgets and to operate under budgets. She also wanted to earmark state mineral royalties for school districts and improve safety for coal miners, as well as protecting women in industrial jobs.
KK: Did she succeed with any of those?
KM: She succeeded with a couple of them and a few of them we see implemented later on in Wyoming that didn't get implemented in her term.
Some of the things that she did worked against her, [like] the stronger enforcement of Prohibition. She ends up firing a few people in her cabinet and that comes back to bite her when it comes time for reelection.
KK: Did she champion anything else that today we would say are women’s issues?
KM: I think that Prohibition was strongly associated with women and women's rights. When we think about Prohibition today, we seem to forget really the context from which that emerged. It really started as a women's rights movement and a fight against domestic violence. That's really at the heart of Prohibition, is trying to cut down on domestic violence.
KK: She does ultimately lose her second run as governor, but at that point she had become pretty famous. What did she do with her career after?
KM: In 1928 during the presidential election, she campaigned on behalf of the Democratic nominee, Al Smith. He loses that campaign to Herbert Hoover, but it really puts Nellie Taylor Ross in this prominent position in the National Democratic Committee. So they offer her the salaried position of director of the women's division for them, and she runs the campaign for the women's vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he runs for office. When he wins that seat in 1933, he names her as director of the U. S. Mint. She's the first woman to ever hold that role as director of the U. S. Mint. She serves a total of 20 years. That's the longest serving director, period, man or woman.
KK: We're at the 100 year anniversary and we have not had another woman governor. Just thinking of her impact leading the way for women in Wyoming 100 years later, where do you think we are with that?
KM: There's a couple of different ways to look at the story of equality in Wyoming. There's a very negative way, that we did not live up to our founding ideals. When we were a territory, the first legislative session passed not only the law recognizing women's right to vote and hold office, but also an equal pay clause, which we have one of the worst pay gaps in the nation today.
They also passed rights for women to have rights to their children, which was very unique at the time. And we also passed laws that recognized married women's right to hold property.
We can see that's something that we failed to reach. It kind of gives this impression of, “Well, what's the point of even trying?”
But there's also a positive way to look at this and that is by looking at that history and looking at people like Nellie Taylor Ross, we can see them as inspirations. We can also see how hard they worked to make this happen and to establish it. I think that's a much more positive way to read this story and be inspired by it.
