Sallie C. Booker

Sallie Catherine Cook Booker (August 28, 1857 – December 20, 1944) was a schoolteacher and politician from Virginia. She was the third woman elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and to the Virginia General Assembly as a whole.

Life and career Sallie Catherine Cook was born in Franklin County, Virginia. On May 22, 1877, she married Jesse Wootten Booker, with whom she had seven children. Early in married life the couple moved to Martinsville, where she became active in a number of clubs and civic organizations, including the First Methodist Church and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. She was politically active as well, being a member of both the Fifth District Congressional Committee and the Democratic Executive Committee, and also spent over twenty-five years as a schoolteacher. A plot of land which she owned was used to demarcate one of the boundaries of Martinsville in 1892 when it was rechartered an independent city.

Booker first ran for the House of Delegates in 1926, on the Democratic ticket; she was unopposed. She began the 1928 election season without opposition as well, but soon was challenged by Republican R. L. Stone, of Bassett, who ran under the slogan, "Membership in the General Assembly is a man's job".