I’m currently reading a biography of President William Howard Taft and it mentioned in passing that women in some states voted for president in the 1912 election. This is before the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 which allowed white women in all states to vote. (Non-white men and women were technically able to vote as well, but voter suppression tactics in several states effectively disenfranchised them until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

Out of curiosity, I tried to look up which presidential election was the first one women could vote in. Was it 1912 or was it an earlier election? Unfortunately, doing internet searches isn’t as easy as it used to be, so it took me a long time to get an answer.

Wyoming Territory gave women the right to vote back in 1869. Utah Territory followed in 1870. However, Utah held an election before Wyoming did, making Utah the first state in which a woman voted. Here in Utah, we even have license plates celebrating this fact. Utah women lost the right to vote 1887, but got it back again in 1896 when Utah became a state.

While browsing the internet, I was surprised to learn wealthy women in New Jersey were actually able to vote as early as 1776, making Utah’s license plates a lie. However, women in New Jersey lost the right to vote in 1807. Further internet searching revealed that one Lydia Taft voted even earlier in Massachusetts Colony in 1756!

All this is interesting, however it didn’t answer my original question of which presidential election was the first one with female voters. Lydia Taft only voted in town meetings. My original searching seemed to indicate the women who voted in New Jersey between 1776 to 1807 didn’t vote in presidential elections. So I continued my search.

I tried a different tactic and googled variations on “first woman to vote for president” instead of “first state where woman could vote for president”. Google’s AI claimed women in Wyoming voted in presidential elections in the 1870s, but this is before Wyoming was a state. No one in Wyoming was voting in presidential elections in the 1870s. Yahoo’s AI did even worse, claiming Jeannette Rankin of Montana was the first woman to vote in a presidential election. (She was actually the first woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.) So AI failed me twice.

A website called Greener Pasture claims the first woman to vote for president after passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 was Phoebe Jordan. Wikipedia claims Marguerite Cole was the first woman to vote in the United States, although she also didn’t vote until 1920. Wikipedia’s article on Louisa Swain of Wyoming is closer to being correct, calling Swain the first woman to vote since 1807. Swain voted in September, 1870. However, according another Wikipedia article, Seraph Young Ford of Utah voted in February, 1870 earlier in the year. Of course, both Swain and Ford lived in territories at the time, not states, and thus weren’t voting for president.

According to Rutgers Eagleton Institute of Politics, Illinois was the first state to allow women to vote for president in 1913, which would make the election of 1916 the first one they could take part in. Obviously wrong. The Theodore Roosevelt Center gets closer, claiming Helen J. Scott of Washington state was the first women to vote for president in 1912. A website called County10 claims the first woman to vote for president was Harriett Scott of Wyoming who voted in the 1892 election after Wyoming became a state in 1890. Is this finally the correct answer?

I decided to double-check my work. Wikipedia’s article on women’s suffrage in New Jersey confirms that wealthy women and black people in New Jersey voted in the first five presidential elections. Who knew? So wealthy women in New Jersey voted in the presidential elections from 1788 to 1804, no women legally voted for president between 1808 to 1888, then women in Wyoming started voting in presidential elections in 1892, with women in other states joining over the next few elections, until white women in all states were allowed to vote in 1920. Finally, in 1965, all women were able to vote.

It took way too long to find out this information using Google and Yahoo. I’ve heard ChatGPT is a better search engine than Google, so I tried that out. ChatGPT initially claimed 1892 was the first presidential election in which women voted, but I only had to prompt it once for it to mention that some women in New Jersey who met certain requirements were able to vote over a hundred years earlier. If I didn’t know this already, I wouldn’t have known to prompt it a second time. ChatGPT does seem to be a better search engine than Google and got me a pretty good answer quicker, but it still requires that you double-check its information and dive deeper to get a better answer.