The United States Cabinet has had 25 female officers. No woman held a Cabinet position before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920, which prohibits states and the federal government from denying any citizen the right to vote because of that citizen's sex. Frances Perkins was the first woman to serve in the Cabinet; she was appointed Secretary of Labor in 1933 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Oveta Culp Hobby became the second woman to serve in the Cabinet, when she was named head of the then newly formed Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953. This department was subdivided into the departments of Education and Health and Human Services in 1979. Patricia Roberts Harris, who was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare before the department split and had earlier served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1977, became the first female Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1979. Harris was also the first African American woman to serve in the Cabinet.
Former North Carolina Senator Elizabeth Dole is the first woman to have served in two different Cabinet positions in two different administrations. She was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as Secretary of Transportation in 1983, and was the Secretary of Labor during the tenure of George H. W. Bush—Reagan's successor. Czechoslovakia-born Madeleine Albright became the first foreign-born woman to serve in the Cabinet when she was appointed Secretary of State in 1997. Her appointment also made her the highest-ranking female Cabinet member at that time. Condoleezza Rice was appointed Secretary of State in 2005, and thus became the highest-ranking woman in the United States presidential line of succession in history. In 2006, Nancy Pelosi replaced Rice as the highest-ranking woman in line when she was elected Speaker of the House. President George W. Bush appointed six women to Cabinet-level positions, the most of any Presidency.
In 2009, President Barack Obama named four women to the Cabinet—former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano as Secretary of Homeland Security, former First Lady and New York Senator Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, former California Representative Hilda Solis as Secretary of Labor, and former Kansas governor Kathleen Sebelius as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Clinton became the first First Lady to serve in the Cabinet and the third female Secretary of State. Napolitano became the first female Secretary of Homeland Security.
The Department of Labor has had the most female Secretaries with seven. The departments of Health and Human Services and State follow with three, and the departments of Commerce, Education, Housing and Urban Development and Transportation have each had two. The defunct Department of Health, Education, and Welfare has also had two female Secretaries. The three existing departments of Defense, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs have not had women Secretaries.
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“Love’s boat has been shattered against the life of everyday. You and I are quits, and it’s useless to draw up a list of mutual hurts, sorrows, and pains.”
—Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“The admission of the States of Wyoming and Idaho to the Union are events full of interest and congratulation, not only to the people of those States now happily endowed with a full participation in our privileges and responsibilities, but to all our people. Another belt of States stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
—Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)
“In a cabinet of natural history, we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish, and insect.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)