edit: I have changed my title to match the new NYTimes headline. Sorry about the all caps, I guess they are really excited about this lol

Also shoutout to @SayJess@lemmy.blahaj.zone who shared a gift article link in the comments. I hope you don’t mind but I kinda stole it and updated the post

  • tal@lemmy.today
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    6 months ago

    I thought of that, but the first state to do so was well after her run.

    https://www.history.com/news/the-state-where-women-voted-long-before-the-19th-amendment

    When Wyoming sought statehood two decades after its historic vote, the territory’s citizens approved a constitution that maintained the right of women to vote. When Congress threatened to keep Wyoming out of the Union if it didn’t rescind the provision, the territory refused to budge. “We will remain out of the Union one hundred years rather than come in without the women,” the territorial legislature declared in a telegram to congressional leaders. Congress relented, and Wyoming became the first state to grant women the right to vote when it became the country’s 44th state in 1890.

    The West continued to be the country’s most progressive region on full women’s suffrage. Colorado approved it in 1893, and Idaho did the same three years later. Congress had disenfranchised women along with outlawing polygamy in Utah in 1887, but women regained the right to vote when the territory became a state in 1896. After 1910, they were joined by Washington, California, Arizona, Kansas, Oregon, Montana, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota and the territory of Alaska. (Even before the passage of the 19th Amendment, Montana elected a woman, Jeannette Rankin, to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916.) According to the National Constitution Center, by 1919 there were 15 states in which women had full voting rights, and only two of them were east of the Mississippi River. The dozen states that restricted women from casting ballots in any election were primarily in the South and the East.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      6 months ago

      Wyoming wasn’t the first state to allow women to vote for President. At the very least women could vote in New Jersey as early as 1790, presuming they had the equivalent of 50 British pounds of wealth (because the wealth requirement was the only requirement). Women later lost the right to vote in New Jersey when New Jersey embraced Jacksonian democracy and extended the right to vote to all white men of age, regardless of wealth.

      But again, women’s right to vote was a state issue prior to the 19th Amendment and as such it was kinda all over the place with some states allowing women to vote but only in some elections (often different rules for municipal, county, state and federal elections).