ON THIS DAY IN 1890, WYOMING BECAME A STATE: There’s an interesting backstory here: The Wyoming Territory’s constitution had been the first to guarantee women the right to vote. But when Wyoming initially applied for statehood, this created controversy. Fearing that women in long-established states would be emboldened by Wyoming’s example, some Members of Congress initially insisted that Wyoming withdraw women’s right to vote. But the Wyoming legislature stood its ground and cabled back to Congressional leaders, “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women.”That list of women’s suffrage favoring states might seem vaguely “western,” whatever that means. I ask you to either visualize where they’re located or check a map. In fact they form a compact cluster with shared borders.
Congress eventually relented, and before the turn of the century, there were four women’s suffrage states–Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Idaho.
Wyoming’s town of Jackson is supposed to have been the first city in the nation to have an all-female city council. The state has, for 23 years, been represented in Congress by a series of 3 women Representatives (WY has so few people we get the constitutionally mandated minimum of one).
When the DrsC first visited here 45 years ago and such things were seldom seen, little Jackson had a then-well-established woman dentist. None of this is precisely what you’d expect from a state whose license plate features a cowboy on a bucking stallion and gun ownership is well-nigh universal.
