Ashley Miller loves to tell visitors about Marilla Ricker when they walk into the State Archives. 

Years before women had the right to vote, Ricker demanded her name be on New Hampshire ballots.

She was the first female lawyer in the state and demanded year after year that women should be able to cast a ballot. In 1911, she received four votes for governor, but the talk of her candidacy was more important than the result. 

The point was “to get people in the habit of thinking of women as governors.”

“There isn’t a ghost of a reason why a woman should not be governor or president if she wants to be and is capable of it,” she said during her campaign, according to State Archive records.

New Hampshire voters will elect the state's fourth female governor on Nov. 5, as Republican Kelly Ayotte faces off against Democrat Joyce Craig. 

To replace Rep. Annie Kuster in Congress, Democrat Maggie Goodlanger and Republican Lily Tang Williams vie for the seat. 

As more female candidates run for office across the country, New Hampshrie’s all-female contests are less of an outlier than they once were. But the representation of women in top elected positions – which starts with Ricker – is ingrained into the state’s rich political history.

“Her story is inspiring and shows that anyone can make a difference,” said Miller. “She fought not only for our right to vote but to have a seat at the table.”

A rich history

Ricker’s portrait hangs on the walls of the State House – an honor first supported by then-governor Jeanne Shaheen and unveiled under then-governor Maggie Hassan.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Sen. Maggie Hassan fulfilled Ricker’s goal of having women serve as governor in the state. But they weren’t the first.

For eight days at the end of 1982 into 1983, Republican Senate President Vesta Roy served as acting governor of the state following the death of Democratic Gov. Hugh Gallen, before Governor-elect John Sununu was sworn in.

Roy was the state senator representing Salem, which is where Donna Sytek lived. She quickly became a role model and mentor for Sytek, who went on to become New Hampshire’s first female Speaker of the House in 1996.

“She was the one that encouraged me to get involved in politics,” said Sytek. “Having women as role models, asking other women to step up is an important thing.”

Sytek was first elected to the state house in 1977 and served for over two decades, chairing major committees like Judiciary, Ways and Means and Criminal Justice.

She still doesn’t forget what her colleagues told her, though, when she tried to run for Speaker of the House in 1990: “I can’t vote for a woman. I like you Donna, but I can’t support you for speaker.”

Another female representative said, “I just can’t support you because we both wear skirts.”

It made no sense to Sytek.

“You could be chairman of a committee, but they just didn’t see you as Speaker of the House,” she said.

A few years later, her colleagues were stumbling over referring to her as “Madam Speaker, instead of Mr. Speaker.” 

At the time, Shaheen was governor and Beverly Hollingworth was Senate president.

“I think that’s when we had crossed whatever barriers had existed in people’s minds,” she said.

Shaheen's resume is built with many milestones – the first woman to be elected the state’s governor in 1996, the first woman to be elected as both a governor and a Senator in the country, and a member of the first all-female federal delegation, along with then-Senator Ayotte, and Reps. Carol Shea-Porter and Kuster.

But she is quick to credit the long list of female candidates who came before her – Dudley Dudley, Susan McLane, Betty Tamposi, Liz Hager, Arnie Arnesen.

“Certainly I and others have benefited from years of women being very involved in the state,” she said. “New Hampshire voters have been willing to evaluate their candidates not based on their gender, but based on what they have to say about what they would do in the elective office.”

‘Robust representation’

When Tamposi ran for Congress in 1988 – in the Republican primary for the seat that her daughter hopes to hold – her male opponents had a clear message: “A woman’s place is in the home, not the House.”

“It was a reflection of the times that we lived in,” she said. “In 1988, believe it or not, people had a hard time imagining what it would be like for a woman to have two young children and still be a really excellent member of Congress. They just didn’t have that vision back then.”

Tamposi has watched her daughter, Goodlander, face similar barriers in her run for office – “the expectations for any woman in public life are very high… we’re smart but not too smart, we’re tough but not too tough, we’re nice but not too nice.” Still, she knows the winning slogan for her competitor in the ‘80s would be a losing message in a campaign today.

“Because of women like Hassan, Shaheen, Terie Norelli, Sylvia Larson, that is no longer the operational way of New Hampshire voters’ thinking,” she said.

With her daughter’s campaign, Tamposi sees a different New Hampshire – one where female candidates do not have to defend their gender on the trail.

Across the state, a slate of female candidates are continuing to run for office.

In Executive Council District 2, a seat vacated by Cinde Warmington, Democrat Karen Liot Hill will face Republican Kim Strathdee.

“Now we’ve eliminated gender bias,” said Strathdee in an interview with the Monitor after Tuesday’s primary. “If I lose you can’t say it’s because it was a male-female thing.”

In Senate District 15, a seat vacated by Becky Whitley, three female candidates vied for the nomination to represent Concord, Hopkinton and Bow. Tara Reardon won the contest, but without Whitley’s definitive support. She chose not to endorse a successor in the primary.

“I believe deeply in democracy. I don’t believe in hand-picking who is going to replace me,” she said after she announced she would not seek re-election. “There are three incredible women in the race and I look forward to hearing from all of them.”

While Terese Bastacharde was not successful in her primary for Executive Council District 4, she supported Tang Williams for Congress.

To her, she’s the “mama bear” that voters need.

“She’s got three beautiful children. She’s very passionate about letting them have the freedom I’m sure that she loves here in America,” she said outside the polls in Loudon on primary day.

A slate of female candidates accomplishes three main things when thinking about women’s representation, according to Kelly Dittma, the director of research at the Rutger’s University Center for American Women in Politics.

Female candidates help build a representative democracy, normalize women leading in political office and can bring lived experience to policy discussions previously dominated by men.

“When you have an all-woman contest, and you just say, ‘Hey, this is actually normal, because we’ve been having all-male contests for nearly all of our political history in the United States’,” said Dittma, “you start to change people’s perceptions of who can and should lead.”

In 2024, the New Hampshire legislature was 38 percent female – with 161 women out of 424 candidates, according to data from the center. Nationwide, the Granite State ranked 15th for female representation.

“It’s a state where the history is longer and there has been more robust representation of women,” she said. “Other states are now catching up.”

The next generation

When Shaheen first took the corner office, people would often ask her – “what’s it like to be the first woman governor?”

“I said, ‘you know, I don’t know because I’ve never been a man governor’,” she said.

To her, the power was just being there.

“You don’t have to talk about the fact that you’re a woman,” she said. “When people see you, it has an impact.”

She thinks back to the fourth-grade field trips, where young girls would see her and her female colleagues in the State House halls. That showed them they could run for office as well.

“There’s somebody in that position that I can aspire to, that I can do that,” she said. “That’s really important because what we want is for everyone to have equal opportunity.”

In 2017, the New Hampshire Women’s Foundation launched Women Run! – a nonpartisan program that empowers and trains women to run for office.

Past elections showed that voters were willing to elect female candidates, but there were not enough female candidates, said Tanna Clews, the CEO of the Women’s Foundation.

The program now provides a space for women to explore that potential run.

“When women run they win just as often as men, but they face internal barriers. Am I qualified enough? Can I do this? Do I have the experience necessary to run?” she said. “Our role really is to empower them to run for office.”

The Women’s Foundation hopes to build a pipeline of female candidates – from local school boards and town councils – through the State House.

“We have this great federal delegation where we’re electing women, but we need to see that down-ballot as well in our House races, and even more so in our towns,” said Devan Quinn, the director of policy for the foundation.

Since retiring, encouraging the next generation of female leaders has also been Sytek’s focus.

Sytek ran the Vesta Roy Excellence in Public Service Series, which helped train Republican women to run for office.

In recent years, the Women’s Foundation has seen a decline in Republican women in the legislature. Out of 400 seats, 48 were held by Republican women in 2024. In 2020, that number was as low as 25.

With Ayotte and Tang Williams atop the Republican ticket, Sytek is excited. Ayotte brings experience and familiarity to New Hampshire. Williams shows the party is diversifying, she said.

And to watch them face off against other female candidates, knowing that voters will support them, without fear that they all “wear skirts” like Sytek was told in the ‘90s, is indicative of the dozens of New Hampshire women who have made female leadership commonplace.

“It’s wonderful that you know it’s no longer an issue. A woman can run for anything from you know selectman to President of the United States,” Sytek said. “It’s just not an issue in most people’s minds.”