| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

*How the Vote Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914.* By Rebecca J. Mead. (New York: New York University Press, 2004. 273 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00.)
On 6 September 1870, Louisa A. "Grandma" Swain of Laramie, Wyoming, became the first fully enfranchised woman in America to cast her ballot. By 1914, over four million women of all races in twelve western states and territories voted in local, state, and national elections. But voting booths remained men-only in most eastern states until passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Southern black women and men struggled for four more decades to win the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Theodore Roosevelt noted in 1913: "I think civilization is coming Eastward gradually" (p. 1).	1
Rebecca Mead's new synthesis finally de-mystifies the West's "radical and fundamental challenge to the existing political status of women" (p. 3). Scholars have long asked but never answered the question: Why did women in the American West gain early access to the voting booth? Western suffragists debunked the Turnerian-based "gift theory" (which holds that western men "gave" women the vote in exchange for their help as "gentle tamers" of the frontier). As Mead points out, "gentle tamers" never won a suffrage campaign by civilizing a rowdy mining camp!	. . .

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