What Was the First State to Allow Women to Vote

When Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby affixed his signature to the 19th Amendment on August 26, 1920, women across the United States gained voting rights. The new constitutional amendment, however, brought no change to one region of the state where women had been casting ballots for decades, one often thought of as a breastwork of rugged masculinity and "no place for a woman"—the Wild West.

While the right of women to vote had not been specifically enshrined in the U.S. Constitution prior to the 19th Amendment, information technology hadn't been prohibited either. For instance, single women owning property "worth fifty pounds" were allowed to vote in New Jersey betwixt 1776 and 1807 before the correct was restricted to white males. In 1838 Kentucky allowed widows with school-historic period children to vote in school elections, and Kansas followed in 1861.

READ More than: The Women's Suffrage Movement Started with a Tea Party

Wyoming suffrage legislation.

Women's suffrage, withal, was still nearly nonexistent when in 1869 William Brilliant, a saloonkeeper and president of the upper house of the Wyoming Territory, introduced a neb granting all female residents 21 years and older the correct to vote. Co-ordinate to the Wyoming State Historical Gild, the territorial legislature had already passed progressive measures guaranteeing women teachers the same pay as men and granting married women belongings rights apart from their husbands. Bright'southward measure backing universal women's suffrage, however, would be groundbreaking in the United States.

The bill passed both houses of the all-male legislature and was signed into law on Dec x, 1869, by Republican Governor John Campbell. The following September, 69-year-old Louisa Young man, described by a local newspaper as "a gentle white-haired housewife" became the first women to cast a election under the law in her town of Laramie, Wyoming. At that place was no protest. "There was besides much proficient sense in our community for any jeers or sneers to be seen on such an occasion," reported the Laramie Sentinel. The new police force as well allowed women to serve on juries and concur public office. Esther Morris became Wyoming's first female justice of the peace in 1870, and she tried more 40 cases during her tenure.

Why was this sparsely populated territory on the rough edges of the frontier in the vanguard of women's rights? While Bright and others believed in ideals of gender equality, the Wyoming Country Historical Gild says at that place were other factors as well.

In a territory where men outnumbered women by a 6-to-1 ratio, some hoped the publicity from the measure out might attract single women to Wyoming to rectify the gender imbalance as well equally to help it reach the population threshold required to utilize for statehood. Politics also played a function as some Democratic legislators hoped the bill would put the Republican governor in a tough spot. If Campbell, whose political party championed African American voting rights, vetoed the measure, he would wait hypocritical. If information technology passed, Democrats thought women voters would reward them for introducing the measure out.

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Much to the chagrin of those Democrats, however, Republicans gained seats in the territorial legislature and won the vote for the territorial representative to Congress in the 2 years afterwards Campbell signed the law. Blaming the newly enfranchised voters for their defeats, Democrats passed a nib to outlaw women's suffrage, but they cruel one vote short of overriding Campbell'south veto.

"Wyoming is the first place on God's green world which could consistently claim to be the country of the free!" declared women'due south suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony. The neighboring territory of Utah quickly followed Wyoming's lead by passing women's suffrage in Feb 1870. The Western territories of Washington and Montana passed similar measures in the 1880s.

Program for the 1913 suffrage march in Washington, D.C.

When Wyoming sought statehood ii decades after its historic vote, the territory's citizens approved a constitution that maintained the right of women to vote. When Congress threatened to keep Wyoming out of the Union if it didn't rescind the provision, the territory refused to budge. "We volition remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come up in without the women," the territorial legislature alleged in a telegram to congressional leaders. Congress relented, and Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote when information technology became the land's 44th land in 1890.

The West continued to be the country's most progressive region on full women'southward suffrage. Colorado approved information technology in 1893, and Idaho did the same 3 years later. Congress had disenfranchised women forth with outlawing polygamy in Utah in 1887, but women regained the right to vote when the territory became a state in 1896. After 1910, they were joined past Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, S Dakota and the territory of Alaska. (Fifty-fifty before the passage of the 19th Amendment, Montana elected a adult female, Jeannette Rankin, to the U.South. House of Representatives in 1916.) According to the National Constitution Centre, by 1919 there were xv states in which women had full voting rights, and just two of them were east of the Mississippi River. The dozen states that restricted women from casting ballots in any election were primarily in the South and the East.

Even after the adoption of the 19th Amendment, Wyoming continued to blaze a trail for women in politics when Nellie Tayloe Ross was elected the land's first female governor in 1924. For its trailblazing role, Wyoming has adopted the nickname of the "Equality State," and its motto is "Equal Rights."

READ More: 19th Amendment: A Timeline of the Fight for All Women'southward Right to Vote

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Source: https://www.history.com/news/the-state-where-women-voted-long-before-the-19th-amendment

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