1912: New Mexico becomes the 47th state admitted to the Union.
1917: Suffragist Nina Otero-Warren is appointed superintendent of Santa Fe County schools. She would win a race to retain the position in 1918.
1919: Congress passes the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. It guarantees “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”
1920: After years of advocacy by local suffragists like Otero Warren, the New Mexico Legislature votes to ratify the 19th Amendment. By August 1920, at least two-thirds of states adopted the constitutional amendment, making it the law of the land.
For many women in New Mexico, however, ratification of the amendment was just one step in a much longer fight for the vote. At the time, Native Americans were not considered U.S. citizens, meaning the amendment did not give them the right to vote. The passage of federal legislation in 1924 guaranteed citizenship to Native people, though individual states continued to prevent Indigenous women from voting as late as the 1960s.
1922: Two years after ratification of the 19th Amendment, New Mexico’s female politicians celebrate historic wins in statewide elective offices and the Legislature.
Democrat Isabel Eckles is elected to serve as New Mexico’s superintendent of public instruction, according to the Center for American Women and Politics, and Soledad Chávez de Chacón, another Democrat, is elected secretary of state, cementing her legacy as the first Hispanic woman in the U.S. to serve in an elective statewide executive office.
Chávez de Chacón’s win sets off a kind of chain reaction: Women would hold the position of New Mexico secretary of state for the vast majority of the next 100 years.
Bertha Paxton, a Doña Ana County Democrat, also wins her legislative race in 1922.
When the Lone Star State’s first female legislator, Edith Wilmans, would complain of long hours, hard work and constant criticisms, Paxton would have strong words for the Texan.
“In plain English, I think she’s a quitter,” Paxton said in February 1923, weeks after taking her seat in the previously all-male Legislature, according to a story in The Santa Fe New Mexican.
Paxton would serve just two years in the Legislature. But she frequently extolled her treatment by the 72 male lawmakers to encourage other women to participate.
“When I came here two months ago, I came with fear and trembling,” Paxton said soon after her election. “I didn’t know how I would be accepted in this house. … You accepted me just as I hoped to be accepted, as an American citizen, and one interested in the affairs of our state as any man here.”
Otero-Warren, the first Hispanic woman to run for Congress, wins the Republican Party’s nomination in the 1922 primary but would be defeated in the general election.
1924: Tragedy strikes amid Chávez de Chacón’s term as secretary of state.
While then-Gov. James Hinkle is out of state, Lt. Gov. José Baca dies unexpectedly. Next in the line of succession, Chávez de Chacón steps up to serve as acting governor for about two weeks, making her the first woman to govern the state.
1925: Democrat Louise Holland Coe is the first woman elected to the New Mexico Senate, going on to serve 16 years.
She would write in her 1981 memoir that despite her efforts to speak out on bills, “I was, in the lexicon of the day, a ‘lady senator,’ that is, a lady first and a senator second. At that time, few women, besides Eleanor Roosevelt, could speak their minds and expect men to listen, and even this great lady was the subject of many ugly jokes and hostile arguments as a result of her efforts.”
1930: Republican Fedelina Lucero Gallegos and Democrat Porfirria Hidalgo Saiz are elected to the state House of Representatives, becoming the first Hispanic women in the U.S. to serve as legislators, according to the Center for American Women and Politics.
1947: Democrat Georgia Lee Lusk, the first woman elected to represent New Mexico in Congress, steps into office.
Some things never change: Lusk would say in 1947 her initial opinion was that Congress “didn’t seem to get anywhere.” After a few months, the former schoolteacher and longtime state superintendent for public instruction would say she had changed her mind about that, but she was still disappointed in the progress made on federal support for education.
Lusk, who served two years in the U.S. House of Representatives, was a firebrand for education. The mother of three World War II veterans, her “support for educational measures was second only to her concern for veterans’ benefits and civil defense,” according to the U.S. House of Representatives Office of History, Art and Archives.
1951: Inez Gill becomes a member of the founding staff of the New Mexico Legislative Council Service. Over the course of her nearly 30-year tenure, she earned admiration from lawmakers, governors and journalists by bringing order to New Mexico’s finances and developing the state’s financial procedures.
1968: Maralyn Budke becomes the first female director of the powerful Legislative Finance Committee, which is instrumental in crafting the state’s budget. She would hold the position until 1982, just one part of her more than four decades in public service.
New Mexican file photo
1984: Democrat Mary Coon Walters becomes the first woman on the New Mexico Supreme Court — but it isn’t her first “first.” In 1971, Coon Walters had become the state’s first female district judge. And back when she studied at the University of New Mexico’s law school, she was the only woman in her class.
Coon Walters’ law career was impressive, and she made an effort to encourage other women in the profession, receiving the Henrietta Pettijohn Award from the New Mexico Women’s Bar Association in 1997. Before landing in law, however, Coon Walters served in World War II as a pilot, flying transport planes, according to the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program.
1994: Democrat Debbie Jaramillo is elected Santa Fe’s first (and so far, only) female mayor, serving one term.
1998: Republican Heather Wilson, a former Air Force officer, wins a special election for the state’s 1st Congressional District seat, becoming the first female veteran nationwide to serve in Congress. She would win a general election race to retain the seat later that year and go on to serve for over a decade. Wilson was just the second congresswoman from New Mexico, elected almost 40 years after Lusk left office.
Wilson, who also had served as Cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, later served as U.S. secretary of the Air Force during President Donald Trump’s first term. She has been the president of the University of Texas at El Paso since 2019.
Democrat Patricia Madrid, a former candidate for lieutenant governor, becomes the first woman elected state attorney general. She previously served as a state district judge.
New Mexican file photo
1999: Pamela Minzner, a Democrat, is elected by her colleagues to become the first female chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court. Minzner, who graduated from Harvard Law School as one of about 20 women in a class of 500, served as a faculty member at the University of New Mexico Law School before becoming a judge.
2003: After Bill Richardson’s landslide gubernatorial victory, his running mate, Democrat Diane Denish, takes office as New Mexico’s first female lieutenant governor. That February on the Senate floor, Richardson congratulates Denish on her daughter giving birth — making Denish the first grandmother, too, to hold the position of lieutenant governor.
She would serve eight years in the position and go on to seek the governor’s office, unsuccessfully. Now, she writes a regular column for nm.news, fundraises and works on early childhood issues — a focal point of her time in office.
2011: Republican Susana Martinez, a three-term district attorney in Doña Ana County, takes office as the state’s first female governor and the first Hispanic female governor in U.S. history, after beating out Denish in the 2010 general election. She would go on to serve eight years in New Mexico’s top job.
Martinez doesn’t focus on her identity as a Hispanic woman or historic firsts.
“It is outrageously important that we have effective, strong leaders, regardless of their gender or their ethnicity or race. That is what New Mexicans deserve,” she said in a recent interview. Martinez has not ruled out another run for the governor’s office.
2018: Democrat Deb Haaland of Laguna Pueblo is elected to New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District as one of the first two Native American women to serve in Congress. (The other, also elected that year, is Sharice Davids of Kansas.)
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is elected as New Mexico’s second female governor. Like Martinez, she would win a second term in the office. She faces her final legislative session in January.
Democrat Stephanie Garcia Richard is elected as the first woman to serve as the New Mexico state land commissioner. She would go on to win her reelection bid in 2022. She initially announced a bid in 2026 for lieutenant governor but announced she was putting her campaign on pause after her husband was diagnosed with cancer.
2021: Women take office in all three of New Mexico’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, with Democratic Reps. Melanie Stansbury and Teresa Leger Fernández representing much of Northern and Central New Mexico and Republican Rep. Yvette Herrell representing the state’s southern 2nd Congressional District.
Haaland is confirmed as U.S. secretary of the interior under President Joe Biden. This makes her the first Native American Cabinet secretary in the nation’s history. Haaland is now campaigning to become New Mexico’s third female governor.
2025: For the first time in the state’s history, female lawmakers in the New Mexico Legislature outnumber men. Women make up 55% of the seats in the Legislature, far above the national average and second only to Nevada.