<P> There have been 52 total women in the United States Senate since its establishment in 1789 . The first woman who served as a U.S. Senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922 . The first woman elected to the Senate was Hattie Caraway from Arkansas in 1932 . Fifteen of the women who have served were appointed; seven of those were appointed to succeed their deceased husbands . As of April 9, 2018 when Cindy Hyde - Smith of Mississippi was sworn in, the 115th United States Congress has 23 female Senators out of 100 (23%), three more than both the 113th and 114th Congresses, and an all - time high . </P> <P> For its first 130 years in existence, the Senate's membership was entirely male . Until 1920, few women ran for the Senate . Until the 1990s, very few were elected . This paucity of women was due to many factors, including the lack of women's suffrage in many states until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, women's limited access to higher education until the mid-1900s, public perceptions of gender roles, and barriers to women's advancement such as sex discrimination, which still plays a factor in their limited numbers today . </P>

Who was the first woman elected to the us senate