First Woman Votes in America: Wyoming Leads the Way

Louisa Ann Swain, a 69-year-old housewife, walked into a bakery that served as a polling place in Laramie, Wyoming, on September 6, 1870, and became the first woman in the United States to cast a legal vote in a general election since New Jersey had revoked women's suffrage in 1807. Wyoming Territory had passed the nation's first women's suffrage law in December 1869, granting women the right to vote and hold public office without restriction. Swain cast her ballot before most of the men in town had arrived at the polls, making her the first to exercise a right that women in the rest of the country would not gain for another 50 years. Wyoming's suffrage law passed for reasons that were pragmatic as much as principled. The territory had a population of roughly 9,000 people, overwhelmingly male, and its legislators understood that granting women's suffrage would attract female settlers, generate national publicity, and signal that Wyoming was a progressive place to build a life. William Bright, the legislator who introduced the bill, was married to an advocate of women's rights, and Governor John Allen Campbell signed it on December 10, 1869. The law made no distinctions based on race, though in practice the territory's tiny non-white population had limited access to polling places. The 1870 election in Wyoming was closely watched by both suffragists and their opponents nationwide. Anti-suffrage commentators predicted chaos, marital strife, and the collapse of social order. None of it materialized. Women in Laramie and across the territory voted in orderly fashion, and the election proceeded without incident. The Laramie Daily Sentinel reported that women's participation had a calming effect on the polls, noting that male voters cleaned up their language and behavior in the presence of women. Wyoming's commitment to women's suffrage was tested when Congress pressured the territory to repeal the law as a condition of statehood in 1890. The territorial legislature reportedly sent a telegram to Washington declaring, "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without women's suffrage." Congress relented, and Wyoming entered the Union as the first state with full women's voting rights, earning its enduring nickname: the Equality State.