This Day in History — Wyoming Joins the Union
On this day in 1890
On July 10, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed Wyoming into the Union as the 44th state — the first state in U.S. history to enter with women's suffrage written into its constitution, after refusing to abandon it despite congressional pressure.
The Off-Key Bard looks westward across the vast, open plains, where a young territory was already challenging the nation's oldest political assumptions…
"Some states enter the Union carrying vast lands, rich resources, and quiet ambition. Wyoming arrived carrying an uncompromising promise of human equality."
On this day in 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed the legislative act officially admitting Wyoming as the 44th state in the United States. Though rugged and sparsely populated, the new state had already captured national attention by taking a revolutionary stand on civil and political rights.
More than two decades earlier, in December 1869, while still a territory, Wyoming's legislature passed a historic bill granting women the full right to vote and hold public office — the first government in the United States to codify women's suffrage. On September 6, 1870, a 69-year-old woman named Louisa Swain stepped up to a polling place in Laramie and cast her ballot, reportedly on her way into town to buy yeast, becoming one of the first women in the United States to cast a legal vote under a permanent general election law.
As statehood approached, the conservative political establishment in Washington balked at Wyoming's progressive stance, demanding that the territory strip women of their voting rights before being admitted to the Union.
Wyoming refused:
The Ultimatum: Facing intense pressure from a hostile Congress, the Wyoming legislature is famously reported to have fired back a telegram that read: "We will remain out of the Union a hundred years rather than come in without the women." While the telegram's original document has not been located in the historical record, the message appears in multiple period sources including Susan B. Anthony's own published biography, and it captures the spirit of what Wyoming delegates made clear in the congressional debates: the suffrage clause was not negotiable.
Stand for Sovereignty: Congress ultimately backed down, narrowly passing the statehood bill. For the first time in American history, an incoming state constitution legally guaranteed women's political equality.
A Legacy That Held
By entering the Union with its progressive principles intact, Wyoming paved a path the rest of the country wouldn't follow until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment thirty years later. The territory's record of political firsts only continued to grow:
Absolute Political Parity: Wyoming ensured that women could serve on juries, manage property independently, and earn equal pay in public teaching roles — rights that would remain out of reach for women in most states for decades.
The First Woman Governor: In 1924, Wyoming voters elected Nellie Tayloe Ross to the governorship following the death of her husband, Governor William Ross. Inaugurated on January 5, 1925, she became the first woman to serve as governor of any U.S. state, beating Texas's Miriam Ferguson to the milestone by more than two weeks.
These achievements permanently cemented Wyoming's proud nickname: The Equality State.
"Across the plains, beneath the sky,
A wider claim was lifted high…
For freedom's meaning must expand,
Or remain unfinished in the land."
History reminds us: true equality rarely waits for a convenient permission slip from the status quo. It requires communities willing to draw a line in the sand, place their principles above political convenience, and demand that the law expand to recognize the dignity of all its people.