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“Apathy and over-confidence are the only factors that can possibly prevent a landslide victory…7,481 registered voters of the Fourth District, 19,326 men and 8155 women, have pledged their aid to her campaign, and 122 labor, civic, church, fraternal and women’s organizations have endorsed her candidacy.”

These rousing words from 1925 concerned a congressional candidate from San Francisco. But that candidate was not ordinary in any sense of the word — she was a woman, and more than that, a Jewish woman.

Before Bella Abzug and Barbara Boxer, there was Florence Prag Kahn.

Born in 1866, she was the first Jewish woman in Congress. Kahn was elected in 1925 — only eight years after the first woman made it to Congress and only five years after women got the right to vote.  She represented San Francisco for over a decade as an astute and well-liked Washington insider.

Florence Prag was born in Salt Lake City, but her family moved to San Francisco when she was an infant. It was a political family; her mother, a teacher, was a longtime member of the school board.

“Her daughter, Florence, followed in the mother’s footsteps. After being graduated from the University of California, she became a teacher of English and history. In 1889 she gave up her assignment at Lowell to become the bride of Julius Kahn, who already had launched on a career of public service,” we explained in 1948 in her obituary.

It was that marriage that first propelled Florence Kahn to prominence. Julius Kahn, born in Germany, was a former actor who rose to become perhaps the best-known Jew from Northern California. A Republican, in 1892 he became a state senator and in 1899 the congressional representative for his city.

Julius Kahn is now remembered mostly for his anti-Asian racism, once calling Chinese people “morally, the most debased people on the face of the earth.” He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted immigration of Chinese laborers. For this, we reported, Kahn’s name was stripped from a San Francisco playground in 2018.

Nevertheless, at the time, this newspaper was decidedly a fan. On Oct. 31, 1902, as an election was looming, we asked, “what should prevent any citizen from voting for Julius Kahn?”

“He is not merely by courtesy the people’s friend; not a man who deals in election phrases to laugh in his sleeve after having won his honors. He is absolutely a man of the people; he sprang from the people, and he knows, as his father knew before him, the meaning of toil and hardship and perseverance and industry…”

Kahn won that vote and others, serving in Congress for almost 20 years before dying in office.

“Passing of Congressman Julius Kahn Causes Nation-Wide Grief,” our headline read in 1924.

By then Florence Prag Kahn was well-known, both in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., having been at her husband’s side during his entire political career. With goodwill and a network of contacts, for many she seemed an obvious replacement for her late husband. It was a challenge she accepted.

“Mrs. Florence Prag Kahn, widow of the late Congressman Julius Kahn, has responded to the urge of her friends in all walks of life and has announced that she would be a candidate to succeed her husband,” we reported in 1925.

But it was not a given that she’d prevail in the special election, held early that year, to succeed her husband.

“It should be emphasized by all of Mrs. Kahn’s friends and well-wishers that she has a fight on her hands and that at least one of her opponents is making fraudulent representations as to his status, experience, and connections, in a desperate effort to ride into public office under false pretenses. To circumvent such tactics and secure Mrs. Kahn’s election, it will be necessary to get out the biggest possible vote on Tuesday,” her campaign manager stressed to this paper in 1925.

She won the election, and subsequent ones, until finally losing — and ending her Washington career — in 1936, although she continued to wield considerable local influence. Though she entered Congress as a sort of posthumous carrier of her husband’s legacy, her own time in the nation’s capital was successful. In Washington, she was admired for a combination of smarts, agreeability and humor, and praised for her statesmanship, we reported in 1934.

“They state that she not only has the ability to comprehend national problems, but the personal charm and technical experience that are required for their practical disposal,” we wrote.

In 1933, Kahn became the first woman appointed to a major committee (in this case, the Appropriations Committee, responsible for allocating funding). She was also on the committee for military affairs. She secured funding for Hamilton Air Force Base and the Naval Air Depot in Alameda, and worked for the completion of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. She opposed Prohibition and was close personal friends with J. Edgar Hoover.

She died in 1948, having lived a life that spanned a number of incredible technological and political transformations, from the invention of the automobile, through women’s suffrage, Prohibition and two world wars, as well as the Holocaust.

While praises were sung at her death, her political success was often presented as a sort of add-on to her wifely faithfulness.

“For 26 years Julius Kahn represented the Fourth District of San Francisco in the halls of Congress,” we wrote in her obituary. “Through that quarter of a century his faithful wife sat in the galleries and listened as laws were proposed and debated.”

But despite those platitudes, it’s clear from the many articles in this paper covering her activities that Florence Prag Kahn was a clever and ambitious woman of her own, with a quick wit and a strong sense of self.

“On Capitol Hill they tell a story of Mrs. Florence P. Kahn, representative from California, who is generally regarded as a standpatter [a more conservative Republican]. On one occasion when Mrs. Kahn was following in line with the reactionary Senator Moses on a certain proposition she was chided by a fellow member in the House of Representatives for her adherence to the Senator’s point of view. She quickly flared back: ‘Why shouldn’t I choose Moses as my leader? Haven’t my people been following him for ages?’”