Niwot Historical Society hosts lecture on the history of women's suffrage in Colorado

2020 marks the centennial anniversary of the 19th Amendment which guaranteed women the constitutional right to vote in the United States.

However, this year does not mark the 100th year of women voters in Colorado as the state actually granted women voting rights in 1893, 27 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920.

The Niwot Historical Society will be exploring the history of women's suffrage in Colorado with Dr. Rebecca Hunt in the latest NHS Now & Then fall lecture series.

Hunt's lecture will be recorded and made available on the Niwot Historical Society's YouTube channel, where you can also watch the previously recorded lecture on the history of the Switzerland Trail of America.

Hunt is a retired CU Denver history professor who taught women's history, immigration and ethnicity studies, and Colorado history as well as museum studies. She was the co-chair of the Colorado centennial commemoration committee.

For the last three years, Hunt has been working as a volunteer on the steering committee to create the Center for Colorado Women's History at the Byers-Evans House Museum, which is one of the community museums of History Colorado.

"One of the exhibits we did [at Byers-Evans] was on women getting the vote, but we also collaborated across the state to commemorate the 19th Amendment," she said.

Hunt also coordinated setting up a series of articles focused on women's suffrage into a digital repository called Colorado Encyclopedia which recently received a second National Endowment for the Humanities grant for their ongoing work.

Hunt's hour-long lecture for the Niwot Historical Society will take a broad look at the history of women's voting rights in the state of Colorado.

"It's going to be an overview. I start with early American precedents or issues around women voting and women as citizens. I actually start with First Nations and talk about how different their approach to women in their society was to Europeans," Hunt said.

From there, Hunt will move forward to cover key historic events like the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which was the first women's rights convention in the United States, the Colorado campaigns for women's suffrage, and the link of these events to the 19th Amendment and what Colorado women did to help bring about national women's suffrage.

Hunt noted that in Colorado, women could vote in school elections as early as 1877. Then in the 1893 election, men voted to grant women full suffrage in the state. While there were two earlier territories, which later became the states of Utah and Wyoming, where the territorial legislature granted women the right to vote in 1870 and 1869, respectively, Colorado was the first state in the Union where the men voted in favor of women's suffrage.

From 1877 on, Colorado continued to play a role in advancing women's voting rights. Susan B. Anthony campaigned in the state in 1877 for the general suffrage vote. "We were linked pretty closely to a lot of the national efforts. And certainly, after we got suffrage, we were one of the shining examples they held up to the rest of the country," Hunt said.

At the time, Niwot's own original Left Hand Grange was one branch of a larger organization that played a role in the push for women's suffrage. "One of the reasons '93 was a success was because there was a coalition of women's groups and women in general who were pushing for it, and one of the groups that was really, really key to that was The Grange," said Hunt.

For attendees of the Niwot Historical Society's lecture series who might be interested in learning more about women's suffrage or voting history more broadly, Hunt offered a few additional resources to explore. On Thursday, October 29, Hunt will be speaking at the Longmont Museum as part of a group of panelists who will give a slightly more modern perspective on women's suffrage.

She also encouraged people to visit the Byers-Evans House Museum to see the current women's suffrage exhibit. The History Colorado Center in Denver is currently featuring a Smithsonian exhibit on voting in general with an emphasis on Colorado. For more information on the museums and exhibits, visit http://www.historycolorado.org

And as we approach the November 3 election, Hunt strongly encouraged everyone to exercise their right to vote. "Every single vote counts. Sometimes people will say, 'My one vote won't make a difference,' but I can think of so many instances where one vote changed everything," she said.

"When the national suffrage amendment was going through Congress, it passed the House of Representatives by one vote. It passed the Senate by one vote. And when it went out to the states to be considered to be ratified by the states, the very last state was Tennessee, and it passed in Tennessee by one vote. That's pretty clear evidence that every vote counts," said Hunt.