Statehood and the Equality State Constitution

Wyoming became the forty-fourth state of the Union on July tenth, eighteen ninety. The road to statehood was not entirely smooth. Congress debated whether the territory was populous enough or wealthy enough to sustain statehood, and some members objected to the women's suffrage provision in the proposed constitution on grounds that it set a troubling precedent for the rest of the country.

The territorial legislature sent Congress a reply that has been quoted in Wyoming ever since, though the exact wording is disputed in its details. The sentiment was clear: Wyoming would enter the union with women's suffrage or not at all. Wyoming was admitted.

The constitutional convention that met in Cheyenne in September of eighteen eighty-nine produced a document that was, for its time, unusually progressive in some respects. It guaranteed women the right to vote and to hold office. It contained provisions protecting the rights of labor that were more explicit than most state constitutions of the era.

It also contained the standard provisions protecting property rights and limiting government that reflected the concerns of the ranching and mining interests who dominated the territory's economy. Governor Francis Warren, who had served as the last territorial governor and became one of Wyoming's first two United States senators, was a sheep rancher and one of the largest landowners in the territory. Joseph Carey, a cattle baron who had served as Wyoming's territorial delegate to Congress, became the state's other original United States senator.

The politics of the new state were shaped from the beginning by the interests of the men who controlled the open range, even as the constitution they ratified guaranteed rights to the women those men had largely excluded from political life. The tension between those two facts is a thread that runs through all of Wyoming's history.