Appointed to the Senate in 1931, Hattie Caraway (D-AR) filled a vacancy caused by the death of her husband, Thaddeus Caraway. The second woman to serve in the Senate, Caraway became the first woman elected to the Senate in January of 1932, easily winning a special election to fill out the remainder of her husband's term. Most considered her a longshot for the general election of 1932, however, so "Silent Hattie" enlisted the help of controversial senator Huey P. Long of Louisiana to bolster her campaign. The highly publicized "Hattie and Huey" tour through Arkansas resulted in a landslide victory for Caraway. Reelected in 1938, she served until 1945. Hattie Caraway broke many gender barriers in the Senate, including becoming the first woman to chair a Senate committee in 1933 and the first woman to preside officially over the Senate in 1943.

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Featured_Bio_Caraway.htm

Norton’s crowning legislative achievement came with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which she personally shepherded through committee and onto the House Floor for a vote. The only significant New Deal reform to pass in President Franklin Roosevelt’s second term, the act provided for a 40–hour work week, outlawed child labor, and set a minimum wage of 25 cents per hour. To get the controversial bill out of the Rules Committee, which determined what legislation was to be debated on the floor and which was controlled by “anti–New Deal” conservative Democrats, Norton resorted to a little–used parliamentary procedure known as the discharge petition.

She got 218 of her colleagues (half the total House membership, plus one) to sign the petition to bring the bill to a vote. The measure failed to pass, but Norton again circulated a discharge petition and managed to get a revised measure to the floor, which passed. “I’m prouder of getting that bill through the House than anything else I’ve done in my life,” Norton recalled.10 In 1940, she teamed up with Majority Leader John McCormack of Massachusetts to fight off revisions to the act and scolded her colleagues for trying to reduce the benefits to working–class Americans, among which was a $12.60 weekly minimum wage. Norton declared, it “is a pittance for any family to live on … I think that when Members get their monthly checks for $833 they cannot look at the check and face their conscience if they refuse to vote for American workers who are getting only $12.60 a week.”

https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/N/NORTON,-Mary-Teresa-(N000153)/