With Republican Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Joyce Craig facing off in the gubernatorial race, New Hampshire’s next governor will likely be a woman. (The Libertarian candidate for governor, Stephen Villee, is trailing by about 40 points in recent polls.)

And she won’t be the first in New Hampshire, a state with a strong tradition of electing women. Both Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan served as governor before running for the U.S. Senate, where they worked with Annie Kuster, who served in the U.S. House.

New Hampshire was the first state to simultaneously have a female governor, a Senate president and a speaker of the House of Representatives, the Associated Press points out, and also the first state with a female majority in the Senate. The nation’s first all-female congressional delegation also came from New Hampshire.

According to Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, female candidates in New Hampshire have an advantage of about 3 percentage points over male candidates.

“There is a certain percentage of people who will vote for a candidate just because she is a woman, or there are men who will vote for a candidate just because he is a man,” Smith said, adding that Democrats in New Hampshire are aware took advantage of the trend and nominated women to run for office.

But female candidates are not always viewed positively. Documents from the state archives in Concord illustrate a long history of women in politics, as well as the female pioneer who had little success running for office but foresaw a political future not unlike ours today.

Marilla Marks Ricker was the first woman to run for governor of the state in 1910, according to Ashley Miller, the state archivist. Ricker was also an attorney and the first woman admitted to an organized bar in the state, and one of the first to practice before the United States Supreme Court, according to the New Hampshire Women’s Bar Association.

Ricker was born in New Durham, NH, in 1840. In 1870, she became the first woman in New Hampshire to attempt to vote. “She repeatedly tested the boundaries of what was considered acceptable female behavior at the time by attempting to vote annually in her hometown of Dover and challenging the restrictions on women entering the professions,” according to the New Hampshire Historical Society.

The 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified in 1920, the year Ricker died.

According to Miller, Ricker was a suffragist, a freethinker and an author.

“She was a powerhouse and she ran knowing she wasn’t going to win, but she ran to get people into the idea and comfortable with the idea of ​​women being governors and even president someday,” said Miller.

According to the 1911 House Journal, Ricker received only four votes during her governorship. “I’m running for governor to get people in the habit of thinking of women as governors,” Ricker said when she announced her candidacy. “There is no reason why a woman should not be governor or president if she wants and is able to do so.”

This story first appeared in Globe NH | Morning Report, our free newsletter focused on the news you need to know about New Hampshire, including great reporting from the Boston Globe and links to interesting articles from other places. If you would like to receive this by email from Monday to Friday, you can register here.

Amanda Gokee can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @amanda_gokee.