Colorado Voters Approve Women's Suffrage Through Referendum in Historic First

On November 7, 1893, Colorado held a referendum on women’s suffrage that resulted in voter approval, making it the first time in U.S. history that voters—as opposed to legislators—approved women’s voting rights. The referendum passed with support from the short-lived Populist Party, which had endorsed women’s suffrage as part of its broader agenda of democratic reforms and challenges to concentrated corporate power. This marked Colorado as the first state to grant women voting rights through a constitutional amendment approved by popular vote, following Wyoming’s 1890 statehood with women’s suffrage already established through territorial legislation. The victory demonstrated that democratic expansion could succeed through direct democracy when voters themselves decided, bypassing legislative gatekeepers often captured by corporate interests opposed to expanding the electorate.

The Colorado victory reflected a unique political moment when the Populist movement’s challenge to corporate power aligned with women’s suffrage advocacy. The Populist Party, which emerged from agrarian discontent with railroad monopolies, banking interests, and the gold standard, saw women’s suffrage as part of a broader democratization agenda. This alliance between economic reform movements and suffrage activism proved more successful than the suffrage movement’s earlier partnerships, which had fractured over the 15th Amendment’s extension of voting rights to Black men. The Colorado campaign benefited from sophisticated organizing by suffragists including Carrie Chapman Catt and Ellis Meredith, who built coalitions across political factions and demonstrated women’s capacity for political participation through the referendum campaign itself.

Colorado’s success established an important precedent but also revealed the limitations of western victories in advancing national suffrage. Following Colorado, Idaho granted women voting rights in 1896, also with Populist Party support, demonstrating the reproducibility of the coalition strategy. However, the geographic concentration of these victories in western states allowed eastern political and corporate establishments to dismiss them as irrelevant to more “civilized” regions. The liquor industry, textile manufacturers dependent on female and child labor, political machines, and railroad interests continued their fierce opposition to suffrage in the East and South, where they held greater power. The Colorado referendum model would later inspire Progressive Era reforms including initiative and referendum processes, but these tools for direct democracy also faced intense opposition from corporate interests preferring to work through captured legislatures. Nevertheless, Colorado’s 1893 victory provided crucial evidence that male voters would support women’s suffrage when given the opportunity, undermining paternalistic arguments that men would never voluntarily share political power with women.