The Equality State

On December tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, the territorial legislature of Wyoming granted women the right to vote. It was the first such law in the United States, passed by a rump legislature in a territory that had fewer than nine thousand residents and barely enough adult men to form a quorum. Wyoming did not become a state for another twenty-one years, but when it did, in eighteen ninety, it carried that guarantee into its constitution and became the forty-fourth state and the first to enter the union with women's suffrage already written into its governing law.

The reasons for Wyoming's pioneering step are debated by historians. Some point to the practical argument made by territorial politicians: there were far more men than women in the territory, and women's suffrage might attract more female settlers. Others suggest the Democratic-controlled legislature passed it partly to embarrass the Republican governor, expecting him to veto it.

He signed it instead. Whatever the motive, the result was real. In eighteen seventy Wyoming also appointed Esther Hobart Morris as the first female justice of the peace in the United States.

And in eighteen seventy women served on Wyoming's grand and petit juries, another national first. The equality tradition had a second chapter. On January fifth, nineteen twenty-five, Nellie Tayloe Ross was inaugurated as governor of Wyoming, becoming the first woman to serve as governor of any American state.

She had won a special election following the death of her husband, Governor William Ross, and she governed with notable competence through difficult budget circumstances. In nineteen thirty-three, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed her director of the United States Mint, a position she held for twenty years. The state did not forget her.

Her portrait hangs in the Wyoming State Capitol, and her name appears on the Wyoming state quarter.