Ever since 1619, when the first slave ship reached what would later be the United States of America, Black people have defined what it means to be an American, yet time and time again we see the erasure of Black history in accounts of the American experience. Unfortunately, this is no different in our own high school textbooks.
The American Pageant textbook writes, “the mining frontier had played a vital role in conquering the continent. Magnetlike, it attracted population and wealth, while advertising the wonders of the Wild West. Women as well as men found opportunity, running boardinghouses or working as prostitutes. They won a kind of equality on the rough frontier that earned them the vote in Wyoming (1896), Utah (1870), Colorado (1893), and Idaho (1896) long before their sisters in the East could cast a ballot.”
This excerpt gives students the false impression that the booming mining industry in states like Wyoming led to women’s suffrage. In fact, the root of women’s sudden voting rights in the frontier had much more to do with race than any supposed interest in gender equality.
According to the article, Right Choices, Wrong Reasons: Wyoming Women Win the Right to Vote: “Thanks to an uneducated Virginian who had no use for black people, Wyoming Territory became the first government in the world to guarantee women the right to vote.” Women in these mining frontiers did not gain suffrage because they suddenly “won a kind of equality.” These women gained suffrage to bolster their husbands’ conservative agendas.
After the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, granted Black men the right to vote, white Democrats were concerned that their conservative laws would not pass with the same ease they had before, as they anticipated that Black men would align with a more progressive agenda. These white Democrats in Wyoming found a loophole: women’s suffrage. If white women could vote, they would simply follow their husband’s lead. Therefore, conservative laws could be passed while quieting the voices of Black voters. Although women’s suffrage is always something to be celebrated, acting like race was not a main factor for these newly found rights is completely deceiving.
Although women’s suffrage in Wyoming might seem like a distant piece of history, it is not. Even today, the Black vote is continuously being suppressed, coming in the form of stricter voter ID laws and fewer voting centers in predominantly Black neighborhoods. To incite change, it is crucial to inform young adults on the long history of voter suppression, as this article has sought to do. This starts with textbooks.
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