December 10, 1869 – Governor of Wyoming Approves 1st US Law Granting Women Suffrage

On this day in history, the governor of the Wyoming Territory, John Campbell, approved the first law in U.S. history explicitly granting women the right to vote.

This was only the beginning of firsts for women in Wyoming. As the Library of Congress explains, “Twenty years later, on November 5, 1889, Wyoming voters approved the first constitution in the world granting full voting rights to women. Wyoming voters again made history in 1924 when they elected Nellie Tayloe Ross the first woman governor in the United States.”

It should be noted that Ross succeeded her husband as governor after his unexpected death while serving in that office. She served as the 14th governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927 and 28th director of the United States Mint from 1933 to 1953. She was the first woman to serve as governor of a U.S. state and remains the only woman to have served as governor of Wyoming.

Nellie Tayloe Ross via Wikipedia

An article by Mary Schons for National Geographic speculates why this law was passed in Wyoming in 1869, in spite of resistance to women’s suffrage elsewhere. She cites various reasons offered by historians. The foremost was that legislators were hoping to attract women to the territory and increase their population. Also, some men no doubt thought the issue was only a joke or thought it would never pass the legislature anyway.

Schons reports that for the first election in which women could vote, in 1870, Approximately one thousand women were eligible to vote in Wyoming, and most of them turned out to vote.

The woman suffrage bill not only gave women the right to vote, but also to sit on juries and to run for political office. In February 1870, three women were commissioned as justices of the peace in Wyoming, although only one, Esther Morris, was known to have actually served as a judge. She tried more than forty cases in the territory. She lost none on appeal and was widely regarded as a good judge, but wasn’t nominated for re-election when her term ended.

In 1890, Wyoming became the 44th state and the first state to have full voting rights for women. Wyoming became known as The Equality State. The national suffrage convention in 1891 included this tribute: “Wyoming, all hail; the first true republic the world has ever seen!”

A full text of the 1869 law is here.