Review of Governor Lady: The Life and Times of Nellie Tayloe Ross By Teva J. Scheer

Authors

Jennifer Pierce, University of Iowa

Date of this Version

Summer 2007

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 3, Summer 2007, pp. 212-13.

Comments

Copyright 2007 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

Nellie Tayloe Ross, governor of Wyoming from January 5, 1925-January 3, 1927, was sworn into office fifteen days before Miriam Ferguson in Texas, a precedence that earned the former a lasting legacy as the nation's first woman governor. The novelty of her status and her elegant charm won Ross the attention of her contemporaries. A series of autobiographical essays titled "Governor Lady," published in 1927 by Good Housekeeping, fed the interests of an admiring public. A more recent tribute is Teva Scheer's Governor Lady: The Life of Times of Nellie Tayloe Ross. "How should history evaluate the nation's first woman governor?" asks the author. For despite Ross's later accomplishments as an organizer for the national Democratic Party and director of the U.S. Mint, it is as Wyoming's governor that she is most remembered. Scheer's evaluation, reflecting extensive research, is an affirmative one that recognizes Ross's historical significance and argues her continuing importance.

Even as Ross extolled the virtues of hearth and home, after her husband's death in 1924 she would seldom devote her own energies there. Ross's story involves copious context, ranging from late nineteenth-century farming conditions to early twentieth-century monetary policy, from the nuances of Wyoming state politics through the years to postsuffrage feminism. Ross is described as a kindergarten teacher in Omaha and wife in Cheyenne, as gubernatorial candidate in the West and Chautauqua speaker in the East, as a political outsider among former suffragists and a Washington, D.C., insider during a succession of administrations. Explaining these shifts involves introducing a swelling cast of characters and conditions as much as portraying the woman herself.

Scheer describes Ross as the Missouri-born child of former slave owners, accounting for her Southern manners and perhaps some racist comments revealed in Ross's later correspondence. She connects Ross with the "typical middle-class American woman" of her era, in contrast to her college-educated contemporaries who also distinguished themselves as female firsts in the public sector.