The Equality State

On December tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, Wyoming Territory's governor John Allen Campbell signed a bill that made this the first government anywhere in the world to grant women the right to vote. The nation had not yet ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. Most American women would wait another fifty-one years. Wyoming acted then, in a remote territory of fewer than nine thousand residents, on a bill introduced by a Democratic saloonkeeper from South Pass City named William Bright.

The reasons historians cite are not purely idealistic. Democrats hoped to attract female settlers and outwit a Republican governor. The territory needed population. But the bill passed, and what followed was concrete. In eighteen seventy, Esther Hobart Morris was appointed the nation's first female justice of the peace in South Pass City. She decided roughly seventy cases during her eight-month tenure, and the appellate court overturned only two of them.

Women served on Wyoming juries beginning in eighteen seventy as well, a fact that scandalized observers from every direction. Eastern newspapers called it an experiment in chaos. The women on those juries disagreed.

When Wyoming applied for statehood in eighteen ninety and Congress balked at the women's suffrage provision, the territorial legislature sent a telegram that has been quoted ever since: We will stay out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without our women. They were admitted on July tenth, eighteen ninety, with the provision intact.

Wyoming's bronze statue in the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall depicts Esther Hobart Morris, placed there in nineteen sixty. Vice President Richard Nixon presided at the ceremony. The state calls itself the Equality State. By one count, it earned the name before any other.