Nellie Davis Tayloe Ross was the first woman to serve as governor of an American state and later the first woman to direct the United States Mint. Born on November 29, 1876, near St. Joseph, Missouri, she lived to the age of 101 and spent much of her long life in public service after an early adulthood centered on home and community. Her career began not with a personal bid for office but with the sudden death of her husband, yet she used that unexpected opening to carry forward a progressive Democratic program in Wyoming and then to hold a major federal post for two decades.
She was the daughter of James Wynns Tayloe, a merchant and farmer from Tennessee, and Elizabeth Blair Green. The family later moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where she attended public and private schools. She trained for two years as a kindergarten teacher and taught briefly in Omaha. In 1902 she married William Bradford Ross, a lawyer she had met while visiting relatives in Tennessee. The couple settled in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he had begun his practice the year before. They had four sons: twins George and Ambrose, born in 1903; Alfred, born in 1905, who died young; and William Bradford II, born in 1912. Three sons lived to adulthood. In Cheyenne she took part in the Woman’s Club, church work, and support for the Boy Scouts, while remaining largely outside formal politics. She later said that she had been content as a wife and mother, and even after she entered public life she continued to argue that a woman’s primary fulfillment came from the domestic role.
William Ross rose in Democratic politics and was elected governor of Wyoming in 1922, taking office in January 1923. His term was short. On October 2, 1924, he died from complications following an appendectomy. Party leaders nominated his widow to complete the unfinished work in a special election the next month. She refused to campaign in the usual sense, declining speeches and public appeals, but she accepted the nomination because she believed she could carry out her husband’s policies. On November 4, 1924, she defeated the Republican nominee, Eugene J. Sullivan, an attorney from Casper with ties to oil interests, by 43,323 votes to 35,275, or about 55 percent to 45 percent. The margin was larger than many observers had expected. Wyoming was a Republican-leaning state, and the same day brought a national Republican landslide. Sympathy for the widow, distrust of oil interests in the wake of the Teapot Dome scandal, and the symbolic weight of Wyoming’s early grant of women’s suffrage all helped her. She received more votes than any previous candidate for the office.
She was inaugurated on January 5, 1925, becoming the fourteenth governor of Wyoming and the first woman governor in the United States. Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas, elected the same day, was inaugurated on January 20, so Ross holds the distinction by fifteen days. She remains the only woman to have served as governor of Wyoming. As governor she continued the program her husband had advanced: tax reduction, aid to hard-pressed farmers, banking reform, and protective measures for children, women workers, and miners. She supported Prohibition and urged the state to ratify a pending federal amendment against child labor. A progressive Democrat facing a Republican-controlled legislature, she saw few of her initiatives enacted. The office nonetheless gave her a national profile at a moment when women had held the vote nationwide for only a few years.
In 1926 she sought a full term and lost narrowly to the Republican candidate. The defeat ended her time in Cheyenne but not her political work. She lectured on her experience as governor and campaigned for the Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith in 1928. From the late 1920s into the early 1930s she served as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, one of the highest party posts then open to a woman. That record of loyalty and organizational skill brought her to the attention of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
On May 3, 1933, Roosevelt appointed her director of the United States Mint, the first woman to hold the office. She served until April 1953, through the administrations of Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, and the early months of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a tenure of roughly twenty years and four five-year terms. The appointment placed her in charge of coin manufacture and the custody of the government’s stocks of gold and silver. Early on she worked closely with Mary Margaret O’Reilly, the assistant director and one of the highest-ranking women in the federal civil service; initial wariness gave way to a durable working partnership. Demand for coinage rose sharply as the economy recovered from the Depression and then surged again during the Second World War. During her years at the Mint the bureau introduced the Jefferson nickel, the Roosevelt dime, and the wartime steel penny, an emergency substitute when copper was needed for military use. She was the first woman whose likeness appeared on a Mint medal, designed by Chief Engraver John R. Sinnock, and the first to have her name placed on the cornerstone of a government building. In 1940 she headed the Treasury Assay Committee that tested coins from the previous year.
She left the Mint with the change of administration in 1953 and retired from active politics. In later years she wrote for women’s magazines and traveled widely. She returned to Wyoming for the last time in 1972, at the age of ninety-six. She died in Washington, D.C., in December 1977, at 101, and was then the oldest former governor in the country. She was buried in the family plot at Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.
Ross’s public life was shaped by circumstance as much as by ambition. She entered the governorship as a widow asked to finish another person’s term, and she did not campaign for the office in any conventional way. Once in place, however, she treated the job as a continuation of a definite program rather than a symbolic gesture, and after the voters turned her out she built a second career in national party work and federal administration that lasted far longer than her time in the statehouse. Her governorship proved that a woman could win and hold a state’s highest office only a few years after the Nineteenth Amendment. Her twenty years at the Mint showed that the same person could manage a large technical bureau through depression, war, and postwar reconversion. The two offices together made her one of the most durable women in American government in the first half of the twentieth century, and they anchored her reputation long after the novelty of a woman governor had faded.
CONCLUSION
Turned her grief into achievement.