Being female and a politician in the United States represents a combination of identities that remains replete with controversy and lack of clarity, perhaps not surprisingly for a nation in which women were granted the right to vote less than one hundred years ago, in 1920, with the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The case of Alaska, which became the 49th of the 50 U.S. states in 1959, is especially relevant to discussions of women in politics, as it has been closely associated with Republican politics since at least statehood, and recently attracted widespread attention with the nomination of then Alaska governor Sarah Palin as the Republican Party nominee for vice president in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.