The first woman to run for governor of Virginia was Lillie Davis Custis. It was 104 years ago and she was a Socialist.

Shortly after noon on Jan. 17, 2026, a woman will stand outside the State Capitol, place her hand on the Bible and, for the first time in history, take the oath of office as the governor of Virginia.

We just don’t know yet which woman that will be: Democrat Abigail Spanberger or Republican Winsome Earle-Sears.

Only one other woman in Virginia has come this close to the governorship: Former Attorney General Mary Sue Terry was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1993 but lost the general election.

Other women have certainly tried. Four years ago, Amanda Chase sought the Republican nomination; Jennifer McClellan and Jennifer Carroll Foy sought the Democratic nomination. All fell short.

Over the years, we have seen other women occasionally make the ballot as third-party candidates, including Alice Burke, a Communist Party member who polled 0.9% of the vote in 1941. That share of the vote, however meager it might have been, was better than most.

Before we move on and make history by electing our first female chief executive, let’s pause to remember Lillie Davis Custis — or Mrs. George Custis, as she preferred to identify herself — who was the first woman to run for governor of Virginia.

The year was 1921, the first state election after women won the right to vote in 1920 (no thanks to Virginia, which rejected the constitutional amendment when it was first sent to the states and then didn’t get around to ratifying it until well after the fact in 1952).

Custis was also a Socialist.

And she remains so unknown that even the authors of “The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia” had trouble finding information on her.

Custis did not make much of an electoral impression at the time: She received just 251 votes, or 0.12% of the total votes that year. She entered the race late, but ballots were printed later in those days, so it’s unclear whether she was officially on the ballot. 

However, she is the first woman to receive votes for governor of Virginia, and that ought to count for something.

Here’s what little we do know about Custis: She was from Keller, in Accomack County on the Eastern Shore, and she declared her candidacy via a series of letters to the editor to multiple newspapers. They were dated Oct. 20, just 19 days before the election that was won by Democrat Elbert Lee Trinkle of Wytheville in an era when the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election.

Custis’ late timing was such that even her hometown paper, the weekly Accomack News, didn’t get the announcement news right away. The first newspaper to announce her candidacy appears to be the now-defunct Portsmouth Star, on Oct. 22.

Her letter was as short as the time remaining:

“Editor, Portsmouth Star Sir,” she began. “Would you kindly announce my candidacy for the office of Governor of Virginia through the columns of your valuable paper? I am running as an Independent Socialist. Many of us feel that the time is at hand when our conception of government functioning must be broadened to meet the crisis that changing economic conditions are precipitating. In this crisis private initiative is failing to coordinate production and distribution, industry is breaking down and unemployment and want has overtaken a large part of our population through no fault of their own. To stand pat and wait for this condition to remedy itself is to court revolution and disaster. Only the powers of government, wisely directed in initiating and coordinating production and distribution can cure the ills which beset us and which, after all, are only symptomatic of the changing order.”

The Associated Press wired the announcement across the state; that afternoon the news appeared on the front page of the Roanoke World-News, then that city’s evening newspaper: “Woman will run for governor of the Old Dominion.” The brief story said “she is the first woman on record ever to aspire to the gubernatorial honors in the Old Dominion.” It also said she was campaigning on the slogan of “Help us purify politics.”

The most extensive account of Custis that’s been found ran in the Virginian-Pilot newspaper in Norfolk just a day before the election. It called her an “Eastern Shore matron” and said she was “educated in the public schools of Philadelphia.” It also said she was “related to one of the old families” in Frederick, Maryland, where her grandfather taught school. He was described as “a noted free thinker and a relative of Andrew Jackson.” He also was a Union veteran, which likely wasn’t a selling point for Custis in the Virginia of 1921 where there were still people who were alive during the Civil War.

The story mentioned two policy initiatives that Custis supported: referendum and recall.

Beyond that, we know very little about Custis. We know she was born in Pungoteague in Accomack County, that she she had three children, a daughter and two sons, because they were mentioned in her obituary when she died in 1950 at age 83. The obituary called her “an estimable Christian woman” but made no mention of her historic foray into politics. Marianne Julienne of the Library of Virginia and one of the authors of “The Campaign for Woman Suffrage in Virginia” says that was typical for her era. In the aftermath of the 19^th Amendment, there was a small flurry of women seeking office across Virginia. “We found that obituaries for other Virginia women who were unsuccessful candidates for public office did not always mention that fact two or three decades later,” Julienne said by email.

So what can we make of Custis, more than a century after she made history that was soon forgotten?

At the very least, we can set the scene for her times. In 1921, Virginia did not yet have what came to be known as the Byrd Machine — at the time, Harry Byrd Sr. was still a state senator — but it did very much have a political machine that ran the Democratic Party, which, in turn, ran the state. That machine had been run by Sen. Thomas Martin. Martin, though, died in 1919 and there was a leadership vacuum until Byrd eventually asserted control.

The 1921 Democratic primary saw a battle between the leaderless machine and its critics, who were newly energized by what seemed an opportunity. Those critics rallied around Henry St. George Tucker III, a prominent attorney who at one time had been the dean of the law school of Washington & Lee University. Tucker had three drawbacks, though. He was old (74), he opposed prohibition and he had opposed women’s suffrage, which was definitely a problem now that women had the franchise. The leaders of the old Martin organization coalesced around Trinkle, who was younger (45), backed prohibition and had supported allowing women to vote.

Trinkle won the Democratic primary with 57% of the vote and that was that, although there are some aspects to that 1921 fall campaign worth noting. The sacrificial Republican candidate was Richmond attorney Henry Anderson, who had a colorful history. He had once been engaged to the writer Ellen Glasgow, and they once tried to write a novel together. The Library of Virginia’s biography of Anderson calls them “two brilliant eccentrics, who did not easily fit into Richmond society.” During World War I, Anderson tried to enlist but was turned away as too old. Instead, he wound up leading the American Red Cross in Romania where the Library of Virginia says he “became infatuated with Queen Maria.” How far that relationship went is hard to say, but apparently far enough that it led to many rumors. Glasgow broke off their engagement and, according to the Library of Virginia, “obtained some measure of revenge by grafting recognizable details of his life onto her weak-willed and faithless heroes in various novels.”

Another sign of Anderson’s eccentricism: He was a Republican, at a time when that wasn’t customary in Virginia. The Library of Virginia says Anderson was determined to make the party more viable in the state and that led to a controversial pronouncement: He said that Republicans should be a whites-only party. Ever since the Civil War, Black voters had generally been Republicans, both in Virginia and nationally. Anderson drove them away. What few Black Republicans there were split away and reorganized as “Black and Tan Republicans.” They nominated John Mitchell Jr., the editor of the Richmond Planet. Richard Nixon is credited (or blamed) for his “Southern strategy” to attract Southern whites to the Republican Party, but Anderson beat him by almost half a century.

Anderson came from a staunchly Democratic family and led what the Library of Virginia called an “extravagant lifestyle [that] provided grist for Richmond gossipmongers for half a century.” Whether for political or personal reasons, “even his mother and brother refused to vote for him,” the Library of Virginia says.

The outcome that fall was predictable: Trinkle took 66.15% of the vote, Anderson 31.24% and Mitchell 2.39%. That was the field of candidates that Custis joined in the final weeks of the campaign.

Two other women that year made history in another way: They became the first women listed on a statewide Virginia ballot. Virginia then elected its superintendent of public instruction, and two women were on the ballot for that position: Elizabeth Otey, an academic from Lynchburg who ran as a Republican, and Maggie Walker, the famous Richmond banker who ran on the Black-and-Tan Republican ticket. Both lost but made history simply by having their names on the ballot.

None of that history, though, answers one key question about Custis: Why was this “Eastern Shore matron” a socialist?

While we can’t answer that, we can put Custis into the context of her times. Socialism in the early 1900s was on the rise in the United States, relatively speaking. In the first two decades of the 1900s, more than 1,000 socialists were elected to office across the United States, according to a database maintained by the University of Washington. The most famous of those was Victor Berger, a congressman from Wisconsin who was elected in 1910 and held office off and on until early 1929. There appear to have been as many as three socialist members of Congress (and several others who were former socialists but ran under the banner of either the Democratic or Republican parties). There were multiple socialists elected to state and local offices. The height of socialist power was 1911, when there were 185 socialist officeholders across the country, according to the University of Washington.

Custis was late to the party, so to speak, because by the early 1920 socialists were in decline, although they may not have realized that yet. In 1920, the longtime socialist leader Eugene Debs ran for president for the fourth time — this time from a prison cell — and received 3.4% of the vote. Even Otey, the Republican candidate for superintendent for public instruction in Virginia, admitted to voting for Debs.

Most of these socialists were in the Northeast and industrial Midwest — the rise of socialism was intertwined with rapid industrialization — but the University of Washington database says three socialists were elected in Virginia. These were two council members in what was then East Radford in that red-letter year of 1911 and B.F. Ginther, who was elected mayor of Brookneal in Campbell County at some date that database doesn’t say. Next door in West Virginia, there were six socialist mayors and at least one socialist constable. Today, Campbell County — and West Virginia, too — are bright red politically, but in the 1910s, they were a different type of red.

While the word “socialist” is a red flag today (yes, I’m going to work that angle for all it’s worth and a little more), it’s worth looking at what socialism stood for in 1921. Yes, the platform that Debs ran on in 1920 called for “railroads, express service, steamship lines, telegraphs, mines, oil wells, power plants, elevators, packing houses, cold storage plants and all industries operated on a national scale” to be “taken over by the nation” — the classic “seize the means of production” Marxism.

That would still be considered radical today. However, that 1920 platform also called for abolishing child labor, giving women the right to vote and granting full civil rights to Black Americans. In a way, some things we take for granted today are apparently socialist. The only issues ever cited in connection with Custis — referendum and recall — still aren’t things we have in a widespread way in Virginia, but in some states they’re pretty standard. (We have only a limited number of referendums, but no voter-driven initiatives the way California does. Except in a few isolated instances, Virginia doesn’t have recall elections, either.)

When Custis called herself an “independent socialist,” we don’t really know what that means. Maybe it means she considered herself a socialist but hadn’t formally been nominated by a Socialist Party so was running as an independent. Maybe it means she didn’t adhere to every iota of the Socialist Party platform — although her letter does invoke some general principles of socialism. She wanted government to have a greater role in running the economy. She saw industrialization creating “changing economic conditions.” She warned of “revolution and disasters.” This was a time when there had been revolutions, most notably the Bolshevik revolution in Russia that brought Lenin and the communists to power and sent the Romanovs sent to a basement to be gunned down.

How did this Eastern Shore woman, who hailed from an “old family,” become a socialist? The reference to her grandfather being a “free thinker” is our only clue and is ultimately an insufficient one.

All we know is that she was, and she was recognized in 1921 as the first woman to run for governor. Whether we agree with her politics or not, we can still honor the history she made.

In my search for information on Custis, I contacted Ted Shockley, the editor of the Eastern Shore Post. He’d never heard of her but published an item asking his readers for information. None of them offered any. The offer, though, still stands. If anyone has more information on Custis, I’d love to hear it. (I wouldn’t mind hearing about the socialist mayor in Brookneal, either.)  In the meantime, maybe someone should pay a visit to Custis’ grave in the Onancock Cemetery and leave a flower at her gravesite. Roses are nice — and, obviously, a red one. 

Update: Her death certificate shows she was buried in the Mount Holly Cemetery in Onanock; I’m not sure if that’s the the same as the Onancock Cemetery mentioned in her obituary or not.