‘‘MoreThan She Deserves’’: Woman Suffrage Memorials in the ‘‘Equality State’’

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Abstract: How is it that the first significant victory in the history of the woman suffrage movement—the enfranchisement of women in Wyoming Territory in 1869—is also the most poorly remembered and understood? This article argues that the terms by which woman suffrage was deemed memorable in Wyoming were at odds with the historical material itself: Political women were frowned upon in Wyoming; hence memorials were erected to women who had played a relatively minor role in the movement, while the most active suffragists were demonized as mannish office seekers. Buildings most closely associated with woman suffrage, such as the site where the first woman jurors deliberated, were allowed to go to ruin while monuments to early suffrage ‘‘mothers’’ were erected on sites of dubious provenance. This fragile foundation rendered these memorials vulnerable to critique by twentieth-century historians who characterized suffrage as a gift given to women by a chivalrous legislature. Meanwhile, the woman activists who had sacrificed their reputations for the sake of the cause have been all but forgotten.