Published in 1999
316 pages
Janann Sherman Denfeld is an assistant professor of American history at the University of Memphis.
What is this book about?
Margaret Chase Smith served thirty-three years in the U.S. Congress (1940 to 1973). Her congressional tenure spanned the administrations of six presidents and three major wars, and marked significant changes in the roles of women in all aspects of American life. For most of her twenty-four years as a senator Smith served as the only woman. She was the first woman to seek the nomination of a major political party for the presidency of the United States.
By the time she left office, Senator Smith was the most powerful woman in American politics. From her positions on the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senate Appropriations Committee, and the Aeronautical and Space Sciences Committee, she exercised considerable influence over a broad range of military, foreign, and domestic policies. Yet Smith did not view herself as a feminist; In face, she disparaged feminism. For her, success required a special combination of hard work, masked ambition, and proper womanly behavior.
No Place for a Woman is the first biography to analyze Smith’s life and time by using politics and gender as the lens through which we can understand her impact on American politics and American women. Sherman’s research is based upon more than one hundred hours of personal interviews with Senator Smith, and extensive research in many primary documents, including those from the holdings of the Margaret Chase Smith Library.
No Place for a Woman is a first-class work of American history, taking the reader from rural Maine communities of the early twentieth century to the U.S. halls of power.
