Which Major U.S. Cities Have Elected a Female Mayor?

After a week-long count, Democratic Congresswoman Karen Bass emerged as the winner in the race for Los Angeles mayor. Bass beat real estate developer Rick Caruso, who also ran as a Democrat after turning his back on the Republican Party in 2019. She will be Los Angeles' first elected female mayor and second African-American mayor.

Many major U.S. cities have yet to elect their first female mayor, among them the country’s largest, New York City. Out of the 37 cities with 500,000 or more inhabitants that exist in the U.S. according to the 2020 Census, 11 have not elected a female mayor. This includes Denver, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia as well as Memphis, Tenn., and Jacksonville, Fla. The Great Lakes, with the exception of Chicago, stand out as the only region with an overall lack of female mayors, while all major cities in Texas have elected at least one woman to the office.

No major U.S. city has had more than three elected female mayors, in part because women did not typically enter the office before the middle of the 20th century. Baltimore, Charlotte, N.C., as well as Sacramento, Calif., and Forth Worth, Texas, have achieved this feat, at times electing female mayors back-to-back. Sacramento started earliest - in 1948, when local college administrator Belle Cooledge was elected mayor by the city council. In Sacramento’s case, it took another 35 years for the next woman, progressive Anne Rudin, to assume the role in 1983.

Social activist Betha Knight Landes was elected as mayor of Seattle even earlier - in 1926 - and served one two-year term as the first female mayor of a major American city. In a difficult time for female politicians, her platform was cleverly coined as “municipal housekeeping”, hinting at the candidate’s plan to clean up corruption, bootleggers and amusement parlors during the age of Prohibition. The city’s second female office holder also followed much later, in 2017.