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Not every U.S. senator makes history just by taking the oath of office. Darline Graham, who wrapped her first full week on the job Friday, has already done so twice over. Appointed to finish the term of her brother Lindsey Graham, who died this month at 71, Darline is the first person to directly succeed a sibling in the Senate’s 237-year history. She’s also South Carolina’s first female senator.

Yet despite her novelty, Graham is also part of a long tradition. Since the early 20^th century, sitting lawmakers’ deaths have often cleared the way for more women to become members of Congress. In many cases, those women were widows appointed by governors or chosen by voters to take over their deceased husbands’ seats. In other instances, they were daughters, state officials, or even the spouses of the governors doing the appointing. And as with Graham, most of them had never before held political office.

Succession was making history long before Graham, 62, took her seat. America got its first female senator not after an election, but after a death. In 1922, Georgia’s governor appointed Rebecca Felton, an 87-year-old feminist and racist who advocated both equal pay and lynching, after the state’s incumbent senator died unexpectedly. As the New York Times rhapsodized at the time, “reverence for Woman and determination to give her precedence in all things, which is the fairest tradition of American life and is never more eloquently proclaimed than in the South, go hand in hand with political progress.” But Felton’s was at best a ceremonial appointment; she technically served for only a single day (which, given her politics, might have been for the best).

Since then, though, succession has become a surprisingly powerful engine of gender equality in Congress. Of the 65 women who have ever served in the Senate, 21—nearly a third—were initially appointed. (Not every appointment followed a death. Lisa Murkowski succeeded her father after he became Alaska’s governor; others replaced senators who left to join presidential Cabinets or the Supreme Court.) The fraction is smaller in the House, where hundreds of women have served. But over the years, 41 women directly followed their deceased husbands into the lower chamber. Another four succeeded their fathers. The pattern continues into the present day: Rep. Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat, was elected to replace her late father last year. (Just one woman has directly succeded her mother: former Rep. Erica Lee Carter, a Texas Democrat, did so in 2024.)

Lindsey Graham never married (speculation that he was gay swirled throughout his life), so spousal succession wasn’t an option. But from the moment his sister took over his Senate seat, Washington has been buzzing about how her politics might differ from his. Besides campaigning for Lindsey, Darline has a scant track record. She made her living helping South Carolinians with disabilities. Some who know her describe her as largely apolitical; her one candidate donation since 1990 went to a Republican state senator who supported disability rights legislation. Despite inheriting her brother’s committee seats and winning President Donald Trump’s support to succeed him, Darline’s own Senate colleagues are still feeling her out. In a Fox News interview this week, her list of political priorities sounded more like platitudes. “The price of groceries, the price of gas, healthcare, insurance, those kind of things,” she said. “That’s what I’m worried about.”

But the long history of spousal and familial succession in Congress also means we also have plenty of examples of how Graham might behave in her brother’s stead. And if that history is any guide, we should expect her to hew pretty closely to his politics.

One reason is that the annals of Congress are full of female successors who did exactly that, partly out of fidelity to their seats’ previous occupants. Take Muriel Humphrey. In 1978 she replaced her late husband Hubert, who represented Minnesota in the Senate after serving as Lyndon Johnson’s vice president. “I believe I can help complete some of the very important legislative business that Hubert hoped to finish,” Muriel said at the time. Once in office, she championed issues that had mattered to him, including ceding control of the Panama Canal. Muriel skipped a family vacation to vote on the measure, which passed with a single extra vote.

Early signs point to Darline Graham choosing a similar path. Despite acknowledging subtle differences with Lindsey—“I have my own way of doing things,” she wrote in a note to constituents last week—she has emphasized that they shared the “same values.” Darline, whose brother helped raise her after both their parents died, quickly declared a host of right-wing positions that match his, including supporting several anti-abortion measures and a Trump-backed bill that would create new hurdles to voting. (“If you’re wondering what kind of Senator @DarlineGrahamSC is going to be, here’s a clue,” a spokeswoman posted on X this week.) Graham told Fox that she prefers domestic issues to foreign policy, but she’s also pushing a bipartisan effort her brother spearheaded that would place more economic sanctions on Russia (the bill has been named in his honor).

But there’s another reason successors like Graham often adopt their male predecessors’ stances: political expedience. This week, Graham announced her candidacy for a special GOP primary next month to replace her brother on the November ballot; if she wins, she’ll almost certainly clinch a full six-year Senate term of her own. Darline has locked down Trump’s support, but her thin résumé hasn’t scared off rivals: two sitting congressmen, a businessman named Mark Lynch, and former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (best known for once visiting a mistress under the guise of hiking the Appalachian Trail) are also running. If Darline hopes to hang onto a seat her brother won four times in an overwhelmingly Trump-friendly state, it makes sense to hug both him and the president tight.

Other successors have navigated similar dynamics. Grim though it sounds, grief can bring electoral advantages. In 1931, the governor of Arkansas nominated Hattie Caraway to temporarily replace her husband after he died of a blood clot. But Caraway easily won the special election that followed, becoming the first woman elected to the Senate. She served until 1945. Something similar happened after Sen. Huey Long’s assassination in 1935. His widow Rose took his place, at first temporarily. Voters ended up sending her back to Washington to finish the rest of Long’s term.

Sometimes, though, sympathy isn’t enough. After her husband died in 1978, Maryon Pittman Allen represented Alabama in the Senate for five months. She was considered the front-runner to win another term until she gave an interview to the Washington Post in which she badmouthed Gov. George Wallace, the man who’d appointed her, and his wife. Allen insisted the Post had distorted her meaning (she’d previously worked as a journalist), but the damage was done. If Darline Graham hopes to avoid similar missteps, lukewarm Fox interviews may be the right approach after all.

At this point it’s worth stepping back to acknowledge the strangeness of all this. The impulse to replace a deceased lawmaker with a grieving spouse, child, or other family member is faintly absurd. Male politicians have long paid lip service to women’s behind-the-scenes civic talents. In 1922, Georgia’s governor credited Felton with having “all the qualities of heart and head that equip one for broad and constructive statesmanship.” Others seem to think of them as fitting monuments to deceased men. Trump posted that appointing Darline “would be a fabulous tribute to Lindsey, who loved her dearly!” But being a member of Congress is a job, and in few other fields do we judge someone qualified just because they’re related to someone who was. If your pilot suddenly keeled over, would you trust their spouse to fly the plane?

Perhaps for that reason, there can be a tendency to minimize successors as dilettantes, caretakers, or (as a Bloomberg column put it this week) “nepo senators.” Occasionally, the criticism is earned. When Vera C. Bushfield succeeded her late husband in 1948, she didn’t even bother to move to Washington. The Senate was in recess, so Bushfield instead handled constituent services from North Dakota. She also reportedly admitted that she was more interested in her grandchildren than in politics.

Yet many of these widows, daughters, and other female successors were also savvy political operators, leaving behind genuine legislative legacies or winning office in their own right. And savviness sometimes means saying less. After Muriel Humphrey agreed to finish her late husband’s Senate term, she told reporters that she and Hubert hadn’t “had any real differences” on political issues. But by 1988, a decade after her 10-month Senate stint ended, she had something to get off her chest. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to say for a long time,” she said. “I’m a liberal and I’m proud of it. In fact, I was probably a little more liberal than Hubert was.” So if Darline Graham really does think differently about politics than her brother did, we might not know it until she too is a former senator.