Tennessee

It was Tennessee’s legislature that provided the dramatic vote for crucial ratification of the 19th Amendment.  Its first female legislators at both the state and national level were remarkably similar.

Anna Lee Keys Worley (1876-1961)

    The 19th Amendment, which ensured the vote for all American women, was added to the US Constitution on August 26, 1920.  Just five months later, on January 25th, 1921, Anna Lee Keys Worley won a special election to replace her recently deceased husband in the Tennessee Senate.  She was the nation’s fifth female senator, following women in Utah, Arizona, Michigan, Oklahoma, and North Carolina. 

    A Democrat, Senator Worley represented Sullivan and Hawkins counties, a mountainous area northeast of Knoxville and hundreds of miles from the capital at Nashville.  She served just one term, leaving the Senate in 1923, but she lived on to age 95.

Willa Blake Eslick (1878-1961)

    Willa Blake Eslick also replaced her husband in office, but under even more traumatic circumstances.  She was watching him speak in the US House of Representatives, when he collapsed and died on June 14, 1932. 

    She went home to Tennessee and campaigned in a special election for this district, which was in south central Tennessee.  Less than two months later, she defeated two men for the Democratic nomination, which was tantamount to victory in this place and time.  She could not file for the general election and the full term, however, because that deadline had passed when her husband died. 

    Congresswoman Eslick ardently supported Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected in November, and during her brief tenure, until the term ended in March 1933, she worked hard for his New Deal and especially the Tennessee Valley Authority, which brought electricity to many poor people. 

    Like State Senator Worley, Willa Blake Eslick lived a long life.  Born in Fayetteville Tennessee, she had attended several colleges, including Tennessee’s prestigious Peabody, and studied music in New York City prior to marriage.  She lived in Pulaski, Tennessee, until her death at 93.