Smokin' in the Boys' RoomA Case Study of Women State Legislators in Nevada, 1919–1931 Dana R. Bennett (bio) The smoke-filled room is an enduring image in American politics, signifying a male domain cloaked in secrecy and deal-making. The lobbyist with the fat cigar and the wisps of cigarette smoke rising above a gathering of politicians are assumed to have been as much a part of the lawmaking process as bills and amendments. Such an image rarely includes women. It was not considered socially appropriate for a woman to smoke in public, and many people believed that women were naturally averse to the habit. When women began to be elected to those supposedly smoke-filled political institutions, they were expected to clean up the place. Observing the first three women serving in the Colorado state legislature in 1895, the Arizona Republican complained that the female legislators "have not been conspicuous in any way except that one of them arose frequently to demand the enforcement of the rule against smoking." A closer examination of that statement, however, reveals fresh insights into state legislatures and into women as politicians. For one, those Colorado solons were actually more than conspicuous, engaging in—and winning—floor fights in the Denver statehouse and attracting attention from Susan B. Anthony and hundreds of women around the country.1 For another, the mere mention of an antismoking rule challenges the assumed existence of smoky lawmaking chambers. Considering female state legislators elected just after suffrage within the context of their interactions with men's smoking habits illuminates new dimensions of both the experiences of women as elected officials and the legislative institution itself. In the case of Nevada, as we will see, the first female legislators maneuvered the antismoking rule to their benefit, and its ultimate repeal exposed men's antagonism toward their new colleagues. The women elected to the Nevada legislature before the New Deal era demonstrated women's readiness to take advantage of their expanded opportunities in electoral politics. It took fifty years—from statehood in 1864 to suffrage [End Page 89] in 1914—for women to obtain the right to vote in Nevada, but much less time for women to be elected to the state's lawmaking body in significant numbers. In half of the biennial sessions between 1919 and 1929, women constituted 10 percent of Nevada's assembly. The thirteen women who campaigned for and won election to the Nevada legislature exhibited certain similarities, most notably their relationships to and previous experiences with the state's political structure. Nevada's small, albeit overwhelmingly male, population facilitated women's success as candidates in a state where politics was primarily relational.2 These women did not wake up the day after the 1914 general election suddenly made political by the acquisition of the franchise. Their natal families, their educations, and their experiences in both paid work and volunteer organizations informed their political development. When the prospect arose to run for a state office, they were ready to campaign, be elected, and serve. In August 1920 the Tennessee state legislature took the final action necessary to add the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which allowed women to vote in all elections across the country. In analyzing this event, historians have concentrated on explaining the process by which women obtained the vote, one of the fundamental rights (or, perhaps more accurately, rites) of citizenship. Little discussion has ensued about the other political opportunity then afforded to women: the right to run for and hold public office. Indeed, the Nineteenth Amendment is silent on that issue, which meant that several states continued to preclude women, either by statute or constitutional fiat, from holding office. In Iowa, for example, women could vote for state legislative candidates in 1920, but they could not be one of those candidates until 1928, after their state's constitution was amended. As soon as they could, women around the country stood for election to their states' lawmaking bodies with varying degrees of success. The same year that national suffrage was ratified, "women in both major parties made a grand start" by getting elected to legislatures in twenty-one states; by...