Wyoming Women's Suffrage: The Vote That Was a Political Gamble

On December tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, the legislature of Wyoming Territory voted seven to four to grant women the vote. It was the first such law in American history. The national suffrage movement, which had been campaigning for decades, had nothing to do with it.

The bill was introduced by a legislator named William Bright, whose motivations were practical rather than principled. Wyoming Territory was desperately under-populated, with a male-to-female ratio of roughly six to one. Bright, whose wife had argued the case to him directly, calculated that granting women suffrage might attract women settlers, embarrass the opposing Democratic party, and possibly draw enough attention to help Wyoming achieve statehood sooner. The territorial governor, John Campbell, took several days to decide before signing it. It passed because enough legislators saw it as useful, not because they believed in it as a principle.

Nine months later, in September of eighteen seventy, a sixty-nine-year-old woman named Louisa Swain walked to the polls in Laramie with her market basket and cast the first ballot under the new law. The Laramie Daily Sentinel reported her vote without ceremony.

Esther Hobart Morris, who had lobbied for the bill, became the first female justice of the peace in the United States in eighteen seventy, in South Pass City.

When Congress moved to repeal the suffrage law in eighteen seventy-one, Wyoming's legislature sent a reply that has since been quoted on historical markers: 'We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women.'

Nellie Tayloe Ross was inaugurated as Wyoming's governor on January fifth, nineteen twenty-five, the first woman to hold a governorship in the United States. She later served as director of the United States Mint for twenty years.