Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory.

I'm Brian Ballot.

If you're new to the podcast, we're all historians in each week, along with my colleagues, Joanne

Freeman, Ed Ayers, and Nathan Connelly, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Today on the show, we're bringing you a compilation of past segments and celebration of March as

Women's History Month.

With over 100 women serving in Congress and already a record number of women announcing

their 2020 presidential candidacy, this year marks the strongest female presence in American

political history.

But for most of American history, of course, the US government was almost exclusively

male.

That is, until Margaret Chase Smith, the Republican Senator from Maine, ran for president in

1964 and made it all the way to the party's convention.

A few years back, the podcast Radio Diaries ran this piece about her campaign.

The farthest any woman had gotten in major party politics up to that point.

There are those who make the contention that no woman should ever dare to aspire to the

White House.

But this is a man's world and that it should be kept that way.

My name is Janay Ann Sherman and I wrote the book No Place for a Woman, a Life of Senator

...