Suffrage History in the Northern Great Plains: Why It Matters

A quick glance at suffrage history will highlight one significant connection to the northern Great Plains: Wyoming. In 1869 Wyoming's first territorial legislature extended the vote to women, and when Wyoming joined the union in 1890 it became the first state to likewise enfranchise women. The northern Great Plains states of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska, in contrast, introduced or otherwise campaigned for the vote at least fifty times from their territorial days well into the first decades of the twentieth century when they began to see some success and, finally, ratification of the federal amendment in 1920. Most of these suffrage efforts ended in defeat, prompting historians to question the significance of this expansive state history. Is it worth the effort to sort through the many times a suffrage bill came before territorial or state legislatures? Or to research how women organized, time and time again, to no avail? As one historian asks of her own work, "Why study the failed woman suffrage campaigns?"¹ Does this state suffrage history matter?

Three recent publications provide a new opportunity to explore this question in the Great Plains. In 2019 the South Dakota Historical Society Press published a collection of twelve original articles and seven shorter "snapshot" essays that explore state suffrage in Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Edited by Lori Ann Lahlum and Molly Rozum, Equality at the Ballot Box: Votes for Women on the Northern Great Plains is organized into three parts, the first offering a political context for suffrage in each state, the second consisting of case studies on various suffrage topics, and the third providing analysis on particular suffrage women. The brief snapshots focus narrowly on certain aspects of a state campaign. History Nebraska of the Nebraska State Historical Society also published a collection of articles and essays in the same year. Votes for Women: The 19th Amendment in Nebraska, edited by David Bristow, is an illustrated special edition of previously published articles from Nebraska History Magazine as well as new essays highlighting Nebraska's connections to national suffrage. Sara Egge's 2018 monograph, Woman Suffrage and Citizenship in the Midwest, 1870– 1920, provides a comparative analysis of three counties in Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota to explore how suffrage intersected with ideas of citizenship, community, and civic activism to create a regional identity. Egge looks for "an upside" to failed suffrage campaigns, arguing that after decades of defeat, suffragists in the Midwest "eventually adopted civic responsibility as their winning argument for the vote."² Taken together, this rich body of scholarship not only reveals the breadth and depth of Great Plains state suffrage history but also creates an opportunity for a thematic approach to better understand this history. This essay explores a number of these themes, highlighting what historians have found significant about suffrage history even with, or perhaps because of, the many losses the region endured. These themes show why state suffrage history matters.

Historians often look for stories of achievement in their analyses of the past. The notion that history is written by the victor places significance on the winners or those who came first. There is no doubting the significance of Great Plains suffrage history with Wyoming's uncontested status as the first in the nation—if not globally—to enfranchise women. Montana also secured a significant "first" by electing Jeannette Rankin the first woman to Congress in 1916 after enfranchising women through a state amendment two years earlier.³ For states marginalized...