Margaret Chase Smith died in her hometown of Skowhegan, Maine, at the age of 97.
Margaret Chase Smith died on May 29, 1995, in Skowhegan, Maine, the same town where she had been born nearly a century earlier, at the age of 97. Her death marked the end of a life that had spanned enormous transformations in American women's political participation—from an era when women had only just won the right to vote to a period in which women, though still underrepresented, were increasingly present in Congress, statehouses, and presidential politics.
By the time of her death, Smith had long been celebrated as a pioneering figure: the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress, the author of the courageous Declaration of Conscience against McCarthyism, and the first woman placed in nomination for the presidency by a major party. She had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989 and had a Navy ship, the USS Margaret Chase Smith, and numerous buildings, scholarships, and the Margaret Chase Smith Library and Policy Center in Skowhegan named in her honor.
Her death was widely covered in national media as the passing of a trailblazer whose independence, integrity, and courage had reshaped expectations of what women could achieve in American politics. She remains, decades later, a touchstone figure cited whenever historians discuss the long struggle for women's political representation and the value of political courage over partisan loyalty.