brief enlistment as a private in an artillery training battalion, the 29th Training Battery, 10th Training Battalion, Field Artillery, Fourth Central Officers' Training School from September 2, 1918, until his honorable discharge on November 29, 1918. During this period, Edith Rogers volunteered with the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) in London for a short time, then from 1917 to 1922 as a "Gray Lady" with the American Red Cross in France and with the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. This was the start of what became a lifelong commitment to veterans. She also witnessed the conditions faced by women employees and volunteers working with the United States armed forces; with the exception of a few nurses, they were civilians, and received no benefits including no housing, no food, no insurance, no medical care, no legal protection, no pensions, and no compensation for their families in cases of death. In contrast, the women in the British Army loaned to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France were military, with the attendant benefits and responsibilities. At the end of the war, her husband joined the American Legion veteran's organization, and she joined the auxiliary. Her experience with veteran's issues led President Warren G. Harding to appoint her as the inspector of new veterans' hospitals from 1922 to 1923, for $1 USD a year. She reported on conditions and her appointment was renewed by both the Coolidge and Hoover administrations. Her first experience in politics was serving as an elector in the U.S. Electoral College during Calvin Coolidge's 1924 presidential campaign. Congresswoman This experience served her well when her husband died on March 28, 1925, in the middle of his seventh term in Washington, D.C. Spurred by pressure from the Republican Party and the American Legion who approved of her stance on veteran's issues and wanted the sympathy vote, she was urged to run for her late husband's seat. She ran in a special election as the Republican candidate for Representative to the 69th United States Congress from the 5th District of Massachusetts, and beat Eugene Foss, the former Governor of Massachusetts, with a landslide 72 percent of the vote. Like Mae Ella Nolan and Florence Prag Kahn before her, she won her husband's seat. Her term started on June 30, 1925, making her the sixth woman elected to Congress, after Jeannette Rankin, Alice Mary Robertson, Winnifred Sprague Mason Huck,