News
Women’s Suffrage Subject of Talk
Fifty-One Years of Freedom: Wyoming’s Suffrage Story, 1869 – 1920, was held on Saturday, May 16, at the Museum at the Bighorns.
Kylie McCormick, Historian & Editor of WyoHistory.org presented the talk. She is based out of Casper and holds a Master of Arts degree in History from University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
Carrie Ida Edinger, Museum Director introduced the speaker.
McCormick has also worked with the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center in Casper, Wyoming. She is the current editor of WyoHistory.org, an online historical encyclopedia.
McCormick said she was honored to be speaking at the Museum at the Bighorns. She said the talk will cover 51 years, from when the Wyoming Territory first gave women the right to vote, up to when the United States ratified the 19th amendment.
The tea party story today is largely considered a myth, McCormick said. As the story goes, Esther Hobart Morris, who went on in 1870 to become the nations first woman judge and justice of peace in South Pass City, hosted a tea party.
One of those attended, so the story goes, was William Bright.
McCormick added there are a lot of what if’s. Who influenced William Bright, why did he introduce the bill, and the story of the tea party has been put on Dr. Grace Raymond Hebard and it is said she was the inventor of the tea party story.
McCormick said that this perspective came in part from T.A. Larson, noted Wyoming historian who wrote the book, History of Wyoming. He thought that Hebert was a ‘militant feminist.
However it came about in 1869, Wyoming made history as the first U.S. territory to give women the right to vote.
Other territories and states followed, Colorado in 1893; Utah and Idaho in 1869.
Women not only had the right to vote in Wyoming, but the new state held a lot of other freedoms for women that they did not enjoy back east. One that celebrated the freedom in Wyoming was May Preston Slosson,
She said that later Slosson and her husband moved from Wyoming and she lost the right to vote until 1920.
McCormick talked about several other women who enjoyed roles such as doctors and university professors, which were not acceptable as roles for women for several more years in other parts of the country.
As a state, Wyoming ratified the 19th Amendment in January of 1920 along with the rest of the nation.
This community program accompanied, The Voices and Votes: Democracy in American exhibition that examines the nearly 250-year-old American experiment of a government “of, by and for the people,” and how each generation since continues to question how to form “a more perfect union.” The exhibit is open at the Museum till Saturday, June 13th.
A second program will be held this evening, May 19 at 6:30 p.m. at the museum. Carrie Edinger explains.
All are welcome to attend, and the program is free.
