Rebecca Latimer Felton

Early life

Latimer was born in Decatur, Georgia on June 10, 1835. She was the daughter of Charles Latimer, a prosperous planter, merchant, general store owner. Charles was a Maryland native who moved to DeKalb County in the 1820s, and his wife, Eleanor Swift Latimer, was from Morgan, Georgia. She was the oldest of four children and her sister, Mary Latimer, became prominent in women's reforms in the Early 20th century as well. At 15, her father had sent her to live with family members in the town of Madison, Georgia so she could attend Madison Female College, where she graduated at the top of her class at age 17 in 1852.

In 1853, she married her husband William Harrell Felton at her home and moved to live with him on his plantation just north of Cartersville, Georgia. She gave birth to five children, however only Howard Erwin Felton survived childhood.

Women's suffrage

A prominent suffragist in the women's suffrage movement in Georgia, Felton found many opponents in anti-suffragist Georgians such as Mildred Lewis Rutherford. During a 1915 debate with Rutherford and other anti-suffragists before the Georgia legislative committee, the chairman allowed each of the anti-suffragists to speak for 45 min but demanded Felton stop speaking after the allotted 30 min. Felton ignored him and spoke for an extra 15 min, at one point making fun of Rutherford and implicitly accusing her of hypocrisy. However, the Georgia legislative committee did not pass the debated women's suffrage bill. Georgia was later the first state to reject the Nineteenth Amendment when it was proposed in 1919, and unlike most other states in the Union, Georgia did not allow women to vote in the 1920 presidential election.

Felton criticized what she saw as the hypocrisy of Southern men who boasted of superior Southern "chivalry" but opposed women's rights, and she expressed her dislike of the fact that Southern states resisted women's suffrage longer than other regions of the US. She wrote, in 1915, that women were denied fair political participation

except in the States which have been franchised by the good sense and common honesty of the men of those States—after due consideration, and with the chivalric instinct that differentiates the coarse brutal male from the gentlemen of our nation. Shall the men of the South be less generous, less chivalrous? They have given the Southern women more praise than the man of the West—but judged by their actions Southern men have been less sincere. Honeyed phrases are pleasant to listen to, but the sensible women of our country would prefer more substantial gifts....

Racial views

After she got married at age eighteen, Felton and her husband owned slaves before the Civil War, and she was the last member of either house of Congress to have been a slave owner.

Felton was a white supremacist. She claimed, for instance, that the more money that Georgia spent on black education, the more crimes blacks committed. For the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition, she "proposed a southern exhibit 'illustrating the slave period,' with a cabin and 'real colored folks making mats, shuck collars, and baskets—a woman to spin and card cotton—and another to play banjo and show the actual life of [the] slave—not the Uncle Tom sort.'" She wanted to display "the ignorant contented darky—as distinguished from [Harriet Beecher] Stowe's monstrosities."

Felton considered "young blacks" who sought equal treatment "half-civilized gorillas," and ascribed to them a "brutal lust" for white women. While seeking suffrage for women, she decried voting rights for blacks, arguing that it led directly to the rape of white women.

In 1899, a massive crowd of white Georgians tortured, mutilated, and burned a black man, Sam Hose, who purportedly had killed a white man in self-defense but had not committed the rape of the (white) woman whites accused him of. The crowd sold parts of his physical remains as souvenirs. Felton said that any "true-hearted husband or father" would have killed "the beast" and that Hose was due less sympathy than a rabid dog.

Felton also advocated more lynchings of black men, saying that such was "elysian" compared to the rape of white women. On at least one occasion, she stated that white Southerners should "lynch a thousand [black men] a week if it becomes necessary" to "protect woman's dearest possession."

Senator

In 1922, Governor Thomas W. Hardwick was a candidate for the next general election to the Senate, when Senator Thomas E. Watson died prematurely. Seeking an appointee who would not be a competitor in the coming special election to fill the vacant seat and a way to secure the vote of the new women voters alienated by his opposition to the 19th Amendment, Hardwick chose Felton to serve as senator on October 3, 1922.

Congress was not expected to reconvene until after the election, so the chances were slim that Felton would be sworn in. However, Walter F. George won the special election despite Hardwick's ploy. Rather than take his seat immediately when the Senate reconvened on November 21, 1922, George allowed Felton to be sworn in. This was due in part to persuasion by Felton and a supportive campaign launched by the women of Georgia. Felton thus became the first woman seated in the Senate and served until George took office on November 22, 1922, one day later.

Final years

Felton was engaged as a writer and lecturer and resided in Cartersville, Georgia. She died in Atlanta, in 1930. Her remains were interred in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Cartersville.