Column: Wyoming and women, a perfect match

Today, August 18,  the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, might be the ideal time to look back on a piece of American history that, surprisingly enough, is not mentioned in any of the excellent films about the Women’s Suffrage movement (“Iron Jawed Angels,” “Suffragists,” for example) but deserves closer scrutiny.

Why? Because it just might tell us something, not about political truth, but about personal truth and how men come to see women.

Most Americans of a certain age know that women gained the vote, by federal action, in 1920. They may not know that over 20,000 American Army nurses served in World War I, more than 10,000 overseas. These women had arrived before the American Expeditionary Forces to set up field hospitals and be prepared to receive American casualties.

They were eligible to serve their country and eligible to die for their country, which many of them did. They were not eligible to vote in that same country. If any of them were enraged by this, they never said so. But that’s just a footnote.

The piece of history I want to bring to your attention, and might be new to some of you is this: Did you know, that decades before, and in at least one instance, more than a half-century before 1920 and women’s suffrage, a number of states and territories had, on their own initiative, given women the right to vote?

Of the 15 states or territories that had done so, 14 were on the west side of the Mississippi. For the sake of space (for this column, that is) let’s just deal with one, Wyoming, which became the first state not only to give women suffrage before the federal government did, but to elect the country’s first woman governor in 1916.

In 1869, 50 years before the 1920 suffrage amendment, William Bright, who was then president of the upper house of the Wyoming Territory — Wyoming was not yet a state — introduced a bill granting women suffrage. The bill passed the all-male legislature and was signed into law on December 10, 1869, by a Republican governor. It also allowed women to serve on juries and to hold public office.

Explanations (in my view, superficial) have been offered for this ground-breaking event: Men outnumbered women in the territory, by a ratio of six to one; some thought that enfranchising women might entice more of them to the territory, thus upping those odds that when/if the vote for statehood came, those women might remember what they had been granted and thus vote in favor.

I’d like to suggest a different explanation and one, I believe, that’s closer to the experience of the men who made that decision.

What had the women they knew actually done? When a family of settlers, fighting to keep a given ranch, were attacked by Indians and the man picked up a rifle, did his wife gather up her petticoats and rush to hide in the nearest closet? You know she didn’t. She was probably already wearing trousers, riding her horse astride, and what she did do was pick up another rifle and stand, shoulder to shoulder, with her husband. And if he was wounded, she continued to fire.

The men of Wyoming knew this. Because they had lived it. They understood what equality meant; they had relied upon it and been sustained by the women in their lives for decades. They valued women, knowing them, both in their hearts and minds, to be their equals. One imagines that the vote never gave them a moment’s hesitation.

Should you choose to celebrate today, as I will? Think Wyoming! Raise a glass to those enlightened men.

This column originally appeared in a slightly different form in August 2016.