A 69-year-old grandmother votes in Laramie; no American woman has voted legally in 63 years
Wyoming Territory had written women's suffrage into law the year before, an experiment no other American government had tried since New Jersey briefly allowed it and then took it back in 1807. On the morning of September 6, 1870, Louisa Ann Swain, 69, walked into Laramie carrying a tin pail she'd filled with yeast at the merchant's, and cast her ballot before the polls had drawn much of a crowd. Ninety-two Wyoming women voted that day. Swain, most accounts agree, was first.
Swain's ballot gave the suffrage movement its first working proof that women could vote without incident in a general election. Wyoming rode that precedent into statehood in 1890 as the first state where women voted on equal terms with men, and the territory's 1869 law became the model suffragists cited for the next fifty years.
QHow many other women voted alongside Swain that same day in Wyoming?
Ninety-two women cast ballots in Wyoming Territory on September 6, 1870, the same day as Swain. The territorial legislature had passed the suffrage law in December 1869, so the election was the first real test of whether the experiment would work in practice, not just on paper. No court challenge or crisis followed. Ninety-two quiet ballots became evidence suffragists across the country cited for years whenever someone claimed women voting would bring disorder.
QWho else voted in Laramie that morning besides Swain?
Augusta C. Howe voted roughly thirty minutes after Swain. She was married to Church Howe, the U.S. Marshal for Wyoming Territory, which meant the second woman to vote legally in America after 1807 was married to a federal law enforcement officer. Her name rarely makes the headlines Swain's does, but she voted at the same polling place that same morning, one of ninety-two Wyoming women who cast ballots that day.
QWhat building carries Swain's name today, and where is it?
In 2022, Congress designated the federal office building at 308 W. 21st Street in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the Louisa Swain Federal Office Building. It sits in the territorial and later state capital, more than a century and a half after the vote it commemorates took place about fifty miles away in Laramie. The naming came fourteen years after Congress had already set aside September 6, 2008, as Louisa Swain Day through House Concurrent Resolution 378, a naming that came fourteen years after the day was first set aside, for a woman who left Wyoming for good within a couple of years of making it famous.
