Abstract: Using the post-suffrage difference/equality conundrum posited by Nancy Cott and Joan Wallach Scott, this article analyzes the early Senate career of Margaret Chase Smith. Focusing on Smith’s career during the 1950s, it contends that her reliance on first wave feminist assumptions about women’s moral superiority made her a uniquely appealing candidate in the 1948 Senate election. However, once elected to the Senate, that same traditional persona accentuated Smith’s marginalization as the lone female member of the Senate. Throughout the decade, she struggled to gain political power and status both within the Senate and the Republican Party by employing several iterations of this gendered strategy. Yet, as American society in the 1950s grew increasingly conservative and in the absence of a broad-based women’s movement agitating for the legitimacy of women in politics, Smith’s efforts ultimately failed.