J.W. Kingman

In 1869, the Wyoming Territory became the first part of the United States to allow women to vote in all elections (some states had by then allowed women to vote in local matters such as school board elections). In their collection of suffrage writings called History of Woman Suffrage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage called upon J.W. Kingman, an associate justice for the Wyoming Territory, to narrate the story of how suffrage was extended to women in Wyoming. In Kingman’s view, the addition of women voters had a positive impact on the first elections in which Wyoming women were legally allowed to cast ballots. Kingman also describes how the Democrats in the Wyoming legislature were nearly able to overturn this law, but their efforts were thwarted by Wyoming’s Republican...