December 10 · This Day in America
In a frontier territory of fewer than ten thousand people, an all-male legislature passes a bill with a plain, radical title: an act to grant to the women of Wyoming Territory the right of suffrage, and to hold office. Governor John Campbell signs it on December 10, 1869. It is the first law in American history to give women the vote in every election, with no asterisk. The reasons were a tangle of principle and politics and a hope of luring settlers west. The result was simple. The next September, a gray-haired Laramie woman named Louisa Swain walked to the polls before breakfast and cast a ballot, the first by a woman in the United States. Half a century before the nation caught up, the answer to whether a woman could be trusted with a vote had already been given here, on the high plains, and it was yes.
Source: www.wyohistory.org
Also on this day · 1830
She will rarely leave the homestead, dress in white, and let the world come to her through a window and the mail. When she dies, her family opens a drawer and finds nearly 1,800 poems, hand-stitched into little booklets, almost none of them published. America did not know it had one of its greatest poets until she was gone. "This is my letter to the World," she wrote, "that never wrote to Me."
Source: www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org
“This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me —”Emily Dickinson, c. 1862