Gena's Genealogy: Women's History Month 2020: Suffrage in Wyoming

Women Suffrage in Wyoming Territory. Scene at the polls in Cheyenne. Wikimedia Commons

The Equality State, that's Wyoming's nickname. Why? The story goes something like that the men of Wyoming told the federal government that they were not going to become a state without their women and so they entered statehood with suffrage.

The end.

That's a great story but like any story there's more to it then that. And the truth is probably not as heartwarming as that summary.

It's a long story that you can read in full at the WyoHistory website. But it involves racism and politics and then the hope that the party that gave women the vote would get votes by those same women. And of course the fact that there were more men than women in the territory and that suffrage may attract women to move there didn't hurt. Suffrage was only one such act that provided rights for women in Wyoming at a time where women were demanding equal rights.

"The Legislature met in October 1869 in Cheyenne. All those Democrats seem to have had it on their mind not to protect black people’s rights, like the Republicans wanted to do, but to protect women’s rights. They passed a resolution allowing women to sit inside the special space where the lawmakers sat. They passed a law guaranteeing that teachers—most of whom were women—would be paid the same whether they were men or women. And they passed a bill guaranteeing married women property rights separate from their husbands." [1]

Louisa A. Swain, Wikipedia

So white women over the age of 21 were given the right to vote in Wyoming Territory in December 1869. Attempts to enfranchise African American and Native American women failed. But there was also an attempt to disenfranchise white women since it didn't really seem like a good idea in the first place to some men, but that effort failed. [2]

It's estimated that 1,000 women went to the polls in 1870, the first opportunity for women to exercise their new right.[3] The honor of the title of the first female voter goes to "Louisa Swain of Laramie, about 70 years old, cast the first documented vote by a woman in Wyoming on September 6, 1870. According to the Laramie and Cheyenne newspapers, Swain beat Augusta C. Howe, the 27-year-old wife of the U.S. Marshall Church Howe of Cheyenne, to the polls by 30 minutes."[4]

So yes, Wyoming gave their female citizens suffrage 50 years before the 19th amendment and 20 years before statehood. But those women were not the first to vote.

The women who were the first to vote (other than the limited suffrage we talked about a few weeks ago) are the women we will discuss tomorrow.