By Photo: Jim Bowen / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
On January 5, 1925, Nellie Tayloe Ross took the oath of office in Cheyenne and became the first woman to serve as governor of a U.S. state. It fit Wyoming’s history: the territory had given women the right to vote in 1869, and the state was known as the Equality State.
An unexpected campaign
Ross was born on November 29, 1876, in Missouri and moved west as a young woman. She married William Bradford Ross, a lawyer, and the couple settled in Cheyenne. He was elected governor of Wyoming in 1922 as a Democrat. When he died in office in October 1924, the state’s Democrats nominated his widow for the special election to finish his term. She did not campaign for herself in the usual way, but she won the November election.
Texas also elected a woman governor that year, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, but Ross was inaugurated about two weeks earlier, making her the first.
In office
As governor, Ross continued her husband’s agenda, calling for tax relief for struggling farmers, banking reform and protections for workers and children. She ran for a full term in 1926 and lost narrowly. Many historians attribute the loss in part to her support for Prohibition.
A national career
Ross remained active in the Democratic Party and in 1928 became vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her director of the U.S. Mint, the first woman to hold the job. She led the Mint for twenty years, through the Depression and World War II, when coin production soared, and oversaw the opening of new facilities.
Later life
She left the Mint in 1953 and lived in Washington, D.C., until her death on December 19, 1977, at age 101. She is buried in Cheyenne.
Visiting
The Historic Governors’ Mansion in Cheyenne, where the Ross family lived, is a state historic site open to visitors. The Wyoming State Archives and the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming hold papers and photographs from her career. For more on Wyoming’s women’s suffrage history, see our walking guide to downtown Laramie, where the first woman voted in a general election in 1870.
Sources
- Wyoming State Archives; Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office, Historic Governors’ Mansion.
- National Governors Association, governor biographies.
- United States Mint, history of the directors.
- American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
