Spoiler: She didn’t win.

Fitzpatrick’s next subject, Maine’s formidable Margaret Chase Smith, gained her seat in Congress via the “widow’s mandate” in 1940. Smith was the first woman elected to the Senate in her own right and the first to serve in both ­houses of Congress. She was hilariously ­single-minded: Dispatched in 1938 as her dying anti-interventionist husband’s surrogate, Smith simply began giving speeches in opposition to him, advocating increased military spending in the lead-up to the war. Smith governed with so little regard for party line — ­advocating the use of nuclear weapons against North Korea and China alongside support of labor unions; sharply denouncing Joseph McCarthy’s Communist witch hunt from the Senate floor but supporting the ­McCarran Act — that one of her Republican colleagues would say, “If she votes with us, it is a coincidence.”

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For years the only woman in the Senate, Smith was forced to use the public restroom since there was no ladies’ room; she regularly declined White House invitations because she was never invited to bring a male companion. In one of the book’s loveliest details, Fitzpatrick writes of how, when Jackie Kennedy explicitly suggested that Smith might bring a date, Smith wrote to her, “This is one of the most thoughtful things ever done in my 25 years in Washington.” But if gendered loneliness affected Smith, she gave no sign. “I ignored any discrimination,” Fitzpatrick quotes Smith as saying. “I never, never acknowledged it. Never.”

Of Smith, who ran for the Republican nomination in 1964, Fitzpatrick writes: “Surely no woman in American history before her, and few after, brought such rich and deep experience in mainstream electoral politics to a run for the presidency.” Yet her run barely made a dent; born in 1897 and running in an age of youthful Kennedy enthusiasm, Smith was of another era. And then there was the Times columnist Russell Baker, musing bizarrely about the widowed Smith’s “first man”: “At every airport stop, he will have to be photographed accepting huge bouquets of roses. Women reporters will badger him for his favorite recipes and advice on child care.”

Spoiler: She didn’t win.

Four years after Smith became the first woman to have her name entered into nomination at her party’s convention, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to Congress, despite The Wall Street Journal’s concern that sending her to the House “might tend to perpetuate the matriarchal society said to prevail in the Negro slums.” When she got to Washington, Chisholm was promptly appointed to the Agriculture Committee. “Apparently all they know here in Washington about Brooklyn is that a tree grew there,” she remarked, before objecting and getting reassigned to Veterans Affairs.

Fitzpatrick covers Chisholm’s frustration with sexism and bigotry from her own progressive peers, and her disappointment with some of her feminist colleagues, including her National Women’s Political Caucus co-founders Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, all of whom offered sometimes too tepid support during her historic 1972 run for the Democratic nomination.