Geoffrey O'Gara

The 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has arrived, a moment to celebrate women’s right to vote and reflect on the way gender inflects our politics today. But there is another milestone in women’s suffrage in the United States that took place a whole 50 years earlier, a breakthrough moment that paved the way for the epochal event of 1920, and it originated in the unlikely setting of a whiskey-soaked gold mining town on the American frontier.

In 1869, half a century before we inscribed in the nation’s Constitution that the right to vote could not be denied “on account of sex,” at a time when women were barred from participating in government elections all over the world, the Wyoming territorial legislature recognized the right of women to cast ballots on an equal footing with men. It’s one of those historic transitions overlooked in part because there is so little documentation of how it came about, and in part because it was largely left out by hagiographic myth-makers like Susan B. Anthony.

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