Wyoming was the first US state to allow women to vote and first state to have a female governor. How, exactly, did a sparsely populated frontier land of cowboys end up on the cutting edge of gender equality decades ahead of the 19th amendment? In a uniquely Wyoming way, including frontier politics that bamboozled the patriarchs of congress, and what was called at the time the “only thoroughly trained and fully equipped Companies of Girl Guards in the world.”
During the civil war, the manufacture of powder and explosives was often handled by the most vulnerable, young women and children, whose labor was needed when so many men had been sent off to war. On March 13, 1863, the confederacy experienced a munitions disaster, in the confederate capitol of Richmond.