Connie Nordhielm Wooldridge begins the story, When Esther Morris Headed West: Wyoming, Women, and the Right to Vote, in 1869 with Esther Mae Hobart McQuigg Slack Morris heading to South Pass City, Wyoming on a stagecoach. She was 55 years old.
Morris believed women should be able to vote and to hold elected office. In South Pass City, a booming gold mining town, she met Colonel William Bright. He was a member of the Wyoming Territorial Council and had already proposed An Act to Grant to the Women of the Wyoming Territory the Right of Suffrage and to Hold Office. The act passed toward the end of 1869.
Not long after, Morris applied for the position of Justice of the Peace for South Pass City. The previous Justice of the Peace had no intention of cooperating.
Along with seven other South Pass City women, the judge cast her vote for the very first time on September 6, 1870. She later claimed she had her personal physician by her side, and he determined the operation of voting had no ill effects on a woman’s health.
Morris’s term as Justice of the Peace ended shortly after that, and she “handed the court docket over to the same judge who wouldn’t turn his loose eight months before.”
Once gold fever died down, people left South Pass City in droves, and the city became a ghost town. Morris moved to Laramie, Wyoming and later to the capital, Cheyenne. She died in 1902 at the age of 97.
Wooldridge ends with a story from 1920 of a University of Wyoming professor building a monument in South Pass City. She used stones from the homes of William Bright, Esther Morris, and Ben Sheeks, another representative who had become a supporter of women's suffrage. 1920 was the year all women in the United States won the right to vote.
I Could Do That: Esther Morris Gets Women the Vote by Linda Arms White begins with Morris as a child growing up in New York and wanting to learn to do everything anyone else can do. She learns a skill and starts a business.
Morris marries and is widowed. She marries again and has three sons. In 1869, her husband and oldest son head west to South Pass City, Wyoming because of the gold rush. Esther and the younger boys join them, and she gets busy working in the community. One day she sees a sign calling all the men to vote in the first territorial elections. She says, “It’s time I did that.”
“When Esther’s sons watched her march toward home, they knew it was more likely that things were about to change than that things would stay the same.”
She invites the two candidates for the territorial legislature and the town’s men to her house for tea and to talk about introducing a bill that would allow women to vote. “Esther had seen that things that were not likely to happen, happened every day. She wrote letters and visited legislators to make sure this bill would happen, too.”
Her own son swore her in.
One year after Esther’s tea party she walked to the polls with her husband and sons. When her husband tried to coach her on who she should vote for, she said, “I can do this.”
