About Women's Right to Vote Day

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Who said religious societies and conservatives aren't progressive? Islam was educating women for centuries before Christianity emerged from the dark ages. And then there are the Mormon women of the territory of Utah.

Wyoming and Utah granted women the right to vote 50 years before the United States government on December 10, 1869, and February 12, 1870, respectively. In Wyoming, the women almost lost their rights two years later but squeaked by in a territorial congressional vote. Attacks against their right ceased after 1873. The women of Utah had it a little rougher.

The US Congress wasn't too happy about women's suffrage or plural marriage and passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887, stripping Utah women of their voting rights by hiding it in this anti-polygamy bill. Utah was a territory at the time, hoping for statehood. Polygamy was a big part of the new Mormon faith (created in the 1820s), and it was the reason given as to why Utah, unlike Wyoming, was not invited into the union.

Not to be deterred, the women of Utah, Mormon and not, would have none of that—they had been voting for 17 years! It wouldn't happen overnight, but once the LDS Church (the predominant authority in the faith) ended its support of polygamy in 1890, the path to statehood was revived. Upon Utah achieving statehood in 1896, part of the deal was that women retained the right to vote—and hold office. To ensure the US government didn't stage another pull-back, Utah's women ensured their voting rights were enshrined in the state constitution, something they learned from their counterparts in Wyoming when it became a state in 1890.

Though the Wyoming Territory had granted the right to vote to its female citizens eight weeks before Utah, the first actual vote cast by a woman in the US or its territories occurred in Utah on February 14, 1870, Valentine's Day.