The stereotypical story of the American West conjures images of unforgiving terrain, rugged masculinity and a cowboy and ranching culture. But despite these Western tropes it also has a surprising history of offering women a way into political life long before it became the norm.
Every western state except for New Mexico gave women — though typically only White women — the right to vote before the 19th Amendment, which enfranchised women in 1920. Still some women were left out. Native American women, for example, could not vote until 1948. As with Black women in the American South, laws like literacy tests and poll taxes made it difficult for them to cast ballots.
But even before they were granted suffrage, women were making political history as elected officials. Colorado became the first state to elect women to a state legislature in 1894, while Utah elected the first woman state senator in 1896. Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1916, and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming became the first woman to serve as governor in 1925.
“A lot of the western states just really led the way,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director for the Center for American Women and Politics. “That sense of new frontiers, it really spills out into women’s representation.”
So it should come as no surprise that the West also has broken records this election, with New Mexico and Colorado joining Nevada to become the only three states in the country where women make up the majority in state legislatures.
This pattern stems from back when western states were being formed. As newer states, their governments were being built in more fluid environments and were less entrenched in the longer standing governance of the eastern colonies, Sinzdak said. The times offered more room for experimentation. “They were literally being formed as people were moving out there,” she said.
(Bettmann Archive | Getty Images) Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming became the first woman to serve as governor in 1925.
And because the number of people living in the West was so small, there was a greater need to include women as a formal part of the population for voting and elected office, and to earn statehood, which required proof of a functioning government. “You want to count everybody you possibly can to say we have enough people. And so oftentimes you’re going to say, ‘Well, women, yeah we need you over here, and we are going to need to have a convention, and we need to have somebody being in charge of education or Congress is not going to recognize us,’” said Sondra Cosgrove, a history professor at the College of Southern Nevada. “There literally was no one else. And so, it’s like, ‘OK, I guess it’s you guys.’”
Having women in these positions so early on normalized their leadership, making it less of a barrier for future generations. “You can now have a good old girls network, where you can have mentoring, and you can have people who are in power, bringing people on,” Cosgrove said.
While women’s political wins in the West are the foundation to today’s record-breaking numbers, an uptick in representation can also be attributed to a more recent concerted effort nationwide to elect women to office. The number of women running for office skyrocketed in response to the 2016 election, in which Hillary Clinton was poised to break the gender barrier for representation as president and was instead defeated by Donald Trump.
Before then, “the story of women’s representation in the state legislatures was one of complete stagnation,” Sinzdak said. “The 2018 midterms were just astonishing, and that’s when the needle, in a meaningful way, actually jumped.” Women previously held about 25 percent of seats in state legislatures. Today, they fill 33 percent of seats, though this year, the increase in representation was marginal, with an additional 19 seats so far (results continue to roll in).
“We would like to see a little less incremental change, and more big jumps,” Sinzdak said. “We do not see that this year.”
In addition to reaching gender majority status in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, women already hold a majority in the Arizona Senate. California will join them as a result of the 2024 election. Oregon will return to gender parity in the statehouse in 2025.
Organizations like Emerge, which supports Democratic women candidates, have been part of the reason why more women are running and winning elected office. According to their latest report for the 2024 election, of the 550 women they supported, 70 percent won their races, including women in New Mexico who now make up the majority of legislators. They also aided in the election of the first Black woman to Oregon’s congressional delegation, who joins the first Latina they helped elect. Sixty-six percent of Oregon’s congressional delegation are Emerge-supported candidates.
While Republicans are also making gains, they are far behind Democrats in electing women to office. According to the latest tally, 1,580 Democratic women will hold state legislature seats compared to 857 Republican women next year.
“It comes out of two things, one, which is that the party has just been more receptive to the idea that identity plays a role in how you legislate,” Sinzdak said. “But the other piece of it is the support infrastructure has been much bigger overall, nationally, and then in various states, much more robust for Democratic women. And it started decades ago, when you had groups like Emily’s List,”
“It’s so much smaller on the Republican side, but potentially growing. Newer [organizations] have been cropping up, but they are much, much smaller,” she said.
Whether having a majority of women in state legislatures makes a difference in terms of what bills get passed remains up for debate, according to Cosgrove, who has been studying how this dynamic plays out in Nevada.
“When this all started, we were all very hopeful that there was going to be noticeable change. And I do believe that there are bills that relate to women and children that have definitely gotten a better ability to be heard in our legislature,” she said. “But ultimately, what I’m seeing right now is there’s not systemic change, the women are still operating within a system that’s controlled by donors.”
They still have to worry about who is going to sign checks for their campaign, and the casino and mining industries have big pockets to influence candidates, she said.
One solution, according to Cosgrove, is a move away from closed primaries, which limit voters to register with a political party and then vote for that party’s candidates. This often means that candidates have to toe the party line in order to win, Cosgrove said. In an open primary, candidates can court voters from other parties.
Cosgrove used Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski as an example. “Alaska now has open primaries and ranked choice voting, and if you watch her, when she’s being interviewed about what’s happening, she speaks her mind and she does what she wants,” she said. “She is accountable to her voters, but she knows that over 20,000 Democrats helped her get through.”
For that reason, Cosgrove sees a move to open primaries as a feminist issue. “Women can’t act independently if they can’t act independent of the parties.”
This story originally appeared in The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.
