Following a suffrage bill that recognized women’s right to vote and hold public office in Wyoming, Black women there voted on September 6, 1870. This was nearly 50 years before the 19th Amendment, adopted in 1920, recognized full women’s suffrage across the nation.
Votes for Women a Success map by the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1912. Source: Reddit
In the Wyoming Historical Society article “Then I breathed freely:” Black Women Vote in Wyoming, 1870, Jennifer Helton writes,
The idea of Black women voting generated controversy, both in Wyoming and across the country. Indeed, one common argument against woman suffrage was that it would enfranchise women of color as well as white women. During the debate around women’s rights in the 1869 Wyoming territorial legislative session, Representative Benjamin Sheeks tried to derail the suffrage bill by proposing an amendment to enfranchise “all colored women and squaws.”
Sheeks apparently believed that the mere thought of women of color voting would be sufficient to kill the bill. But he was mistaken. His amendment was rejected, and a bill that unambiguously enfranchised all women citizens, regardless of race, passed the legislature on December 4. It was signed a few days later by Governor John Campbell.
It is important to note that while this law did enfranchise Black women, it did not enfranchise Wyoming’s Indigenous women. For the most part, Indigenous women were not considered American citizens until the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
National Geographic notes that a majority of the one thousand women eligible to vote in Wyoming in this September 1870 election did so, and quotes Laramie Daily Boomerang editor Bill Nye as saying,
No rum was sold, women rode in carriages furnished by the two parties, and every man was straining himself to be a gentlemen because there were votes at stake. A Wyoming election, as I recall it, was a standing rebuke to every Eastern election I ever saw.
A mural in Laramie depicts Swain and some of the city’s other well-known historical figures. Source: Visit Laramie/BBC
In Laramie, Wyoming, on Sept. 6, 1870, 70-year-old grandmother Louisa Ann Swain became the first woman to vote in a general election in the United States since 1807. In 2008, Congress passed a resolution making September 6 “Louisa Swain Day.”
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