THE UNITED STATES
At the November election, 1910, the men of Washington, by a vote of three to one, enfranchised the women of that State. Eleven months later, in October, 1911, a majority of the voters conferred the suffrage on the 400,000 women of California. These two elections doubtless marked the turning-point in this country. In 1890 Wyoming came into the Union with suffrage for women in its constitution after they had been voting in the Territory for twenty-one years. In 1893 the voters of Colorado, by a majority of 6,347, gave full suffrage to women. In 1895 the men of Utah, where as a Territory women had voted seventeen years, by a vote of 28,618 ayes to 2,687 noes, gave them this right in its constitution for Statehood. In 1896 Idaho, by a majority of 5,844, fully enfranchised its women.
It was believed then that woman suffrage would soon be carried in all the Western States, but at this time there began a period of complete domination of politics by the commercial interests of the country, through whose influence the power of the party "machines" became absolute. Temperance, tariff reform, control of monopolies, all moral issues were relegated to the background and woman suffrage went with the rest. To the vast wave of "insurgency" against these conditions is due its victory in Washington and California. As many women are already fully enfranchised in this country as would be made voters by the suffrage bill now under consideration in Great Britain, so that American women taken as a whole can not be put into a secondary position as regards political rights. While women householders in Great Britain and Ireland have the municipal franchise, a much larger number in this country have a partial suffrage—a vote on questions of special taxation, bonds, etc., in Louisiana, Iowa, Montana, Michigan, and in the villages and many third-class cities in New York, and school suffrage in over half of the States.