Why were some of the Western states open to woman suffrage long before the Eastern states?

“That was because of the boom of the transcontinental railroad, which is going across,” said Virginia Scharff, distinguished professor emeritus at the University of New Mexico and senior scholar at the Autry Museum of the American West.

She says that was a “way that the United States was trying to say, let’s get this place organized as a territory...get white settlement into there and unsettle the Native People who live there.”

Territories like Wyoming wanted more white settlers, so they figured they could bring more white women out by allowing them to vote.

“Long story short, if they could get white women out here, white men would be more likely to settle down,” Scharff said.

She added that these laws were exclusively aimed at white women. One lawmaker in Wyoming even tried to sink the bill by adding in wording that explicitly gave voting rights to women of other races. But his amendment failed “because everybody said ‘look we know we’re only talking about white women here.’”

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explanation:

this act gave the federal government the power to relocate any native in the east to territory west of the mississippi river.