Rightfully Ours by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

Author:Kerrie Logan Hollihan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Wonderful Wyoming Women

Two thousand miles from and 21 years after the first Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, the state of Wyoming granted suffrage to women. Ever since, Wyoming’s nickname, the “Equality State,” has stuck.

When Wyoming’s governor signed the law in 1869, a Wyoming woman named Esther Morris cheered. Morris had started her working life as a seamstress and bonnet maker in New York, but when she married a man with three sons, they moved west during a gold rush.

The following year, Morris was appointed justice of the peace in South Pass, which made her the first woman in the United States to serve in public office. Six feet tall and strong featured, Morris heard cases as she sat on a bench in her log cabin. Her grown sons served as court clerks. Her first order was for everyone to keep their shooting irons outside.

Historians disagree whether Morris worked for suffrage, but there is no doubt that she held court in Wyoming. She heard criminal cases (most involving men who were charged with assault) and civic cases (such as when people fell into debt). As a judge, she also married people, including a scandalous couple who had lived together for two years “without benefit of clergy or the law.”

Esther Morris wanted to run in the next election to keep her job. But neither political party would nominate her, and she stepped down. She was proud to have passed the test of a woman’s ability to hold public office. The same year she ran her courtroom, Wyoming had its first all-woman jury.

When Wyoming became a state in 1890, women’s suffrage became part of its constitution. Morris died in 1902, privileged to vote in Wyoming’s elections but not for president of the United States.

Wyoming also boasted the nation’s first woman governor, Nellie Tayloe Ross. Ross became the state’s top official in 1924. Her husband the governor had died in office, and Ross won a special election to succeed him. Then Ross went on to a national job. In 1930, she became the first woman to serve as director of the US Mint.

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