Wyoming has from its
earliest days offered women unprecedented opportunities and freedoms.
The reason why is not certain. One explanation has to do with the
extreme scarcity of women. In Wyoming's early days, women were so rare
that towns like Laramie advertised for women emigrants in eastern
newspapers. Perhaps women were more highly valued as a result, or
perhaps they were too few to have much impact, no matter what they did, and
so were granted greater freedoms. Or perhaps Wyoming's general
attitude of egalitarian independence -- of minding your own business and
letting your neighbors mind theirs -- simply included women neighbors as
well as men. Whatever the reasons, here are a few feminist firsts that
we are proud to say happened in Wyoming.
Wyoming was the first territory in the United States to extend women the
right to vote, doing so with little fanfare in its 1869 territorial
legislature with a bill introduced by William H. Bright, a saloon keeper
from South Pass City. He was ably assisted by Edward Lee, the
Secretary of Wyoming Territory and a prominent suffragist. The
legislators' motives were undoubtedly mixed. One big incentive was the
notion that giving women the vote would attract attention and settlers to
the territory, but the legislature's overall work does showed consistent
concern for the rights of women. Other laws adopted were not as
radical as the voting issue, but were still on the leading edge of what was
happening with women's rights elsewhere in the United States. These
laws gave women control over their personally owned property and earnings,
required that men and women heirs be treated equally when a person died
without a will, and specified that mortgages taken out against a homestead
were not binding on a wife unless she had signed it as well as her husband.
When Wyoming's women got their first chance at the polls in September of
1870, the majority of them turned out and voted two to one for the
Republican party, even though it had been a Democratic legislature that had
given them suffrage. Although the Democrats schemed ways to punish the
women for their lack of gratitude, the suffrage act was never repealed.
In the same year, Secretary Lee had another South Pass City resident, Esther
Hobart Morris, appointed to fill a vacant justice of the peace position,
making her the nation's first woman judge. Morris has been widely but
wrongly credited for providing the impetus for her legislator's suffrage
bill. Rather, Morris seems to have been simply a competent person
seeking to supplement the family income. She would have liked to have
run for a second term, but could not get a political party to nominate her
for the position.
In the following year, women were called to sit on the nation's first
mixed-sex jury for a murder trial in Laramie. Despite scandalous
rumors nationwide, the women were conscientious and capable jurors and
indeed took their jobs more seriously than their male counterparts.
The women influenced the jury to hand down a manslaughter verdict when an
all-male jury would almost certainly have acquitted the suspect.
According to one source, such an unsympathetic view of general frontier
wildness convinced a number of the town's riffraff to move on, pleasing the
town's women greatly.
Although Wyoming didn't necessarily become a central bastion for women's
rights -- women here were generally too overworked and isolated to have
time, energy, or money for extra activities -- it continued to demonstrate
an egalitarian attitude. There were movements to delete the suffrage
statute from the constitution when Wyoming applied for statehood, but the
movements failed. Wyoming thus became the first state to allow women
the vote. In 1894, Mrs. Estelle Meyer was the first woman in the
United States to be elected to a state office when she became Wyoming's
State Superintendent of Public Instruction. The town of Jackson
elected the nation's first all woman town government in 1920, and in 1924,
Mrs. Nellie Tayloe Ross became the nation's first woman governor.
(Although Texas also elected a woman governor on the same day, Wyoming
claims priority since Ross was inaugurated before the Texas governor.)
If you enjoyed this excerpt from
Tastes and Tours of
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