Historic Women’s Suffrage Sites

5 Locations | Curated by Megan Salinas, Northern Arizona University

Women fought long and hard for their right to suffrage, or legal voting, in the United States. For centuries, men in America and in Europe before had tied women’s value to being submissive, raising children, and keeping a home, and such patriarchal societies insisted women had no place voting. Women knew otherwise, and they fought for the right to vote for decades in an active campaign that ultimately spanned nearly a century. It began in the 1820s in United States territories and finally came to fruition when, in 1920, the United States ratified the Nineteenth Amendment and women finally gained the right to vote in all elections to government office in the United States. In the time between the beginning of the suffrage movement and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Intermountain West was a place where the women’s suffrage movement was alive and thriving. This tour surveys several sites which were places of significance for the movement both locally and beyond.

South Pass City, Wyoming, has long been considered “the birthplace of the women’s suffrage movement” in the West. It is here that women first secured a codified right to vote, and it was also home to the first woman Justice of the Peace.
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In 1871, national women’s suffrage leaders met at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, a year after Seraph Young cast the nation’s first vote by a woman under an equal suffrage law. Both Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were present and spoke to the crowd that gathered.
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