In 2020, 127 women held seats in the US Congress, more than any other time in history. In 1925, Edith Nourse Rogers, the first woman from New England to be elected to Congress and at one time the longest serving woman in Congressional history, was just the seventh to do so. Her words, “Fight hard, fight fair, and persevere,” inspired other women to run for office.

Born in Sacco, Maine into an affluent family with deep roots in New England, Rogers’s Harvard-educated father worked as a manager of large textile mills, moving the family to Lowell, Massachusetts in 1895 when she was fourteen. Rogers was privately tutored as a child and attended a small private girls’ school, followed by a finishing school outside of Paris, France. After a grand European tour, she returned to Lowell and became active in civic activities while cultivating an active social life.

At twenty-six, she married John Jacob Rogers, a well-connected lawyer with political ambitions. Five years later he was elected to Congress. On a Congressional visit to France, Nourse was introduced to the “British Women’s Army Auxiliary,” germinating the idea of a similar model in the United States—an American Women’s Army to perform every task possible short of combat duty, if war should ever come to America again.

Rogers volunteered at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, joined the Women’s Auxiliary to the American Legion, and was appointed as a $1.00 a year inspector of new veterans hospitals, beginning what became a lifelong commitment to veterans.

Empowered by the passage of the 19th Amendment, Rogers ran for her husband’s seat in Congress after he died of Hodgkin’s disease in 1925. She won seventy-two percent of the vote in a special election.

In May 1941, just over six months before Pearl Harbor, Rogers introduced her first bill for a women’s army corps. While Congress rejected giving military status to women, in May 1942 it passed and signed into law, “An Act to Establish the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps.” WAACs received food, clothing, housing, medical care, training, and stateside pay, but not the same care and death benefits as military men.

Rogers continued her commitment to make women “citizen soldiers” equal to men in the armed forces. During a visit to Fort Devens in Massachusetts in January 1943, Rogers assured the WAACs she would continue to battle for them daily in Washington. Shortly thereafter, they were afforded full military status, including equal pay, benefits, and legal protections, although medical and personal issues still needed resolution.

Rogers championed Fort Devens, saving it from abandonment during the Depression. Instead, Fort Devens expanded and flourished for sixty-five years until deactivated as a military installation in 1996. Today, the Fort Devens Museum, established by volunteers, holds over five thousand artifacts, documents, and photographs, preserving its legacy.

During thirty-five years of public service, Rogers procured over one billion dollars in contracts for her state and co-sponsored more than 1,200 pieces of legislation pertaining to veterans benefits and hospitals. Her legacy is recognized in part by The Edith Nourse Rogers Memorial Veterans Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts.