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How women won the vote: in the pleasant haze of half-remembered history, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment is surrounded by images of determined suffragist on the march over the protests of buffoonish men. The reality was a lot more interesting than that.

Article Excerpt
In August 1920, with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, some 10 million American women finally became the full political equals of men, eligible to vote in all local, state, and federal elections. In terms of sheer numbers, the Woman Suffrage Amendment represented the single biggest democratizing event in American history. Even the extraordinary feats of the Founding and Reconstruction had brought about the electoral empowerment or enfranchisement of people numbering in the hundreds of thousands, not millions.

Woman suffrage came as a thunderclap. As late as 1909, women voted on equal terms with men only in four western states, home to less than two percent of the nation's population. How did they get from the Wilderness to the Promised Land in so short a span? First, it's necessary to ask how they got from bondage to the Wilderness--that is, how they managed to get equal voting rights in four Rocky Mountain states in the late 19th century.

The process began when the Wyoming Territory broke new ground in 1869 and 1870 by giving women equal rights with men to vote in all elections and to hold office. Twenty years later, Wyoming entered the Union as the first woman-suffrage state. Colorado, Utah, and Idaho soon followed suit.

Conditions in the West were especially favorable for woman suffrage. Women were a rare and precious resource in the region; under the laws of supply and demand, men had to work that much harder to attract and keep them. The city of Cheyenne's leading newspaper was quick to tout the significance of woman suffrage: "We now expect at once quite an immigration of ladies to Wyoming. We say to them all, 'come on.'" Just as the Constitution's original promises of freedom and democracy in the 1780s were meant to entice skilled European immigrants to travel across the ocean, so these immigrants' pioneer grandsons evidently aimed to persuade American women to journey through the plains and over the mountains.

The 1890 census provides some support for this admittedly crude theory. For every 100 native-born Wyoming males, there were only 58 native-born females. No other state had so pronounced a gender imbalance. Colorado and Idaho were the fifth and sixth most imbalanced states overall in 1890. The other early woman-suffrage state, Utah, had a somewhat higher percentage of women (a consequence of its early experience with polygamy), but even it had only 88 native-born females for every...