As X-chromosome conventioneers swarm into Denver this week and exert their vast political clout, they can think back on the rallying cry: “Let the women vote! They can’t do any worse than the men have!”
That was the slogan 115 years ago when Colorado women were making their successful push for the right to vote. The right wouldn’t be granted nationally for another 27 years.
“From the very beginning, Colorado has had women activists,” noted Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien. “That’s one of the reasons we’ve always been a bellwether state.”
Women activists say it’s fitting then that Colorado will play host today when Hillary Rodham Clinton addresses the Democratic National Convention as the candidate who came closer than any other woman in history to being her party’s nominee for president. Her talk comes 88 years to the day that the 19th Amendment went into effect, giving all American women voting rights.
“The door is open. The path has been beaten down,” said Awilda Marquez, a Clinton delegate and longtime women’s rights advocate. “How appropriate that on the anniversary of such an important day for women we have a woman who went as high, as far and as successful as she did.”
Clinton’s dogged campaigning and subsequent failure to win the nomination — and attacks on her by other women — mirror the efforts of the early suffragist backers.
In Colorado, women’s suffrage went to the voters first in 1877 and failed even with well-known suffragist Susan B. Anthony campaigning to rally support from Grange halls to mining camps to the busy streets of Denver.
But the women couldn’t be kept out of the voting booths for long in Western states where women rode and roped and politicked along with men. Western states stayed at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement.
Colorado’s eventual passage of women’s suffrage was bolstered with support from such disparate groups as unions and saloon girls. It was also helped by a relief effort women carried out in conjunction with their campaign. They gave aid to thousands of unemployed and homeless workers living in tent camps along the South Platte River in Denver and in mining camps across the state during the Panic of 1893.
Wyoming, when it was still a territory, in 1869 passed the first law allowing women to vote. Eliza “Grandma” Swain made history when she cast the first female vote in 1870 elections. Soon Wyoming had female justices of the peace and women sitting on juries.
Wyoming stuck to its guns when it was admitted to the union as a state in 1890 under pressure to drop the out-West notion of women voting.
Eastern critics of suffrage were decrying Wyoming’s “pestiferous freelove doctrine” and Congress threatened to withhold statehood as long as suffrage was allowed. But Wyoming politicians said they would give up statehood for another century if statehood meant giving up women’s right to vote. Wyoming would go on to elect the country’s first female governor, Nellie Ross, in 1924.
In Utah, the right was first approved by the territorial legislature in 1870 but revoked seven years later by Congress as part of a battle over polygamy. Women did not regain the right to vote until 1895, when it was written into the constitution as Utah became a state.
Even though the West was first when it came to women’s suffrage, there were other women paving the way for Clinton. In 1872, Wall Street broker Victoria Woodhull ran for president, and in 1884 and 1888, attorney Belva Lockwood did the same.
For those conventioneers wishing Clinton had been the nominee and eager to see the first woman in the Oval Office, it is worth remembering: It took 30 failed campaigns over many years before women’s suffrage was finally added to a plank at a presidential party convention.
And it came 70 years after a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., started the suffrage movement in earnest.
O’Brien doesn’t think women have that much longer to wait for this next milestone.
“Hillary Clinton showed that any woman can be president,” she said. “All sorts of young women will be fearless about going forward and throwing their hat in the ring now.”
Nancy Lofholm: 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com
