Who Was the First Woman to Vote Legally in the US 1756 Twist

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About the Author

Marcus J. Holloway is a civic historian writing for Culture Mosaic, where he covers American political history, voting rights, and the overlooked people who shaped early democracy. He has spent over a decade combing through town records and state archives, chasing down the small, stubborn facts that popular history tends to skip. You can reach him through the Culture Mosaic contact page.

Who Was the First Woman to Vote Legally in the US?

Ask most people who was the first woman to vote legally in the US, and you’ll probably hear “Susan B. Anthony.” It’s a reasonable guess. It’s also wrong. Anthony voted in 1872, in Rochester, New York, and she was arrested for it three weeks later. Her vote wasn’t legal. It was an act of civil disobedience that made headlines precisely because it broke the law.

The real answer sits more than a century earlier, in a cold Massachusetts meeting hall, in the middle of a war most Americans have forgotten. Her name was Lydia Chapin Taft, and on October 30, 1756, she cast a vote that no woman in the colonies had cast before her, at least not one anyone bothered to record.

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career tracing these early voting records, and Taft’s story still catches me off guard. It shouldn’t have happened. It happened anyway, because a widow’s tax bill was too large for the town of Uxbridge to ignore.

The Short Answer: Lydia Chapin Taft’s Vote in 1756

Here’s the fast version, for readers who want the fact before the story. Lydia Chapin Taft is widely recognized by historians as the first woman known to vote legally in what would become the United States. She voted at an open town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts Colony, sixty-four years before the Nineteenth Amendment and twenty years before independence was even declared.

She didn’t win the vote through activism. She won it through grief and arithmetic. Her husband and eldest son had just died, and the town needed her family’s money to fund the French and Indian War. Someone had to cast that family’s vote. The town decided it would be Lydia.

Setting the Scene: Uxbridge, Massachusetts in the French and Indian War

Why the Town Needed Lydia’s Vote

Uxbridge in 1756 was a small farming town in Worcester County, the kind of place where a handful of large landowners paid most of the local taxes. Josiah Taft was one of them. He’d served as selectman, town clerk, and town moderator, and by 1756 he was the largest taxpayer in Uxbridge.

That autumn, tragedy hit the family twice. Their eighteen-year-old son Caleb fell ill while studying at Harvard and died in September. Josiah traveled to bury him, caught an illness of his own on the trip home, and died days later. Their oldest surviving son, Bezaleel, was still a child, too young to vote or manage the estate.

What Happened on October 30, 1756

The town needed to vote on funding troops for the French and Indian War, and Josiah’s estate represented too much tax money to leave unrepresented. Only free male property holders could vote under colonial law. Lydia Taft didn’t fit that description on paper. She fit it in every practical sense that mattered to her neighbors.

So the town did something unheard of. It let her vote by proxy for her husband’s estate. She cast her ballot in favor of funding the war effort, and her vote broke what would otherwise have been a tie. Town records don’t spell out why the men of Uxbridge made this choice, but the reasoning that survives points to a simple idea: no taxation without representation, applied to a woman two decades before that phrase became a rallying cry for a revolution.

She would vote again in Uxbridge town meetings in 1758 and 1765, cementing her place as more than a one-time exception.

Was Lydia Taft’s Vote Truly “Legal”?

This is where I have to be honest about the messiness of the historical record. Taft’s vote wasn’t authorized by any written statute granting women suffrage. It was authorized by the collective decision of an open town meeting, which under Massachusetts colonial custom had real legal standing to set its own local voting rules for a given session.

That’s an important distinction, and I think it’s the right one. A town meeting wasn’t a mob deciding on a whim. It was a recognized governing body making a binding decision within its own jurisdiction. When it seated Lydia Taft and accepted her ballot, that vote counted, and it stood. No court overturned it. No later record disputes that it happened. By the standard historians generally use, that makes her vote legal, even though it was also, without question, exceptional.

Some historians push back on calling her “the first,” pointing out that the event survives only through an 1864 account written by a descendant, Judge Henry Chapin, rather than the original town records. I take that caveat seriously. But even the skeptics don’t dispute that something like this happened in Uxbridge, and no earlier, better-documented case has surfaced to replace her.

New Jersey’s Forgotten Era of Women Voters, 1776 to 1807

The “All Inhabitants” Loophole

If Lydia Taft’s vote was a single, remarkable exception, New Jersey’s early constitution created something closer to a genuine practice. On July 2, 1776, two days before the Continental Congress voted for independence, New Jersey adopted a state constitution granting the vote to “all inhabitants” of full age who held fifty pounds of property and had lived in the county for a year. The word “inhabitants” carried no gender attached to it, and in 1790 the state legislature made the point explicit, revising election law to read “he or she.”

Unmarried and widowed women who met the property threshold could vote in New Jersey. Married women generally couldn’t, since a wife’s property legally belonged to her husband at the time. Still, researchers working from surviving poll lists have identified at least 163 women who cast ballots in New Jersey between 1797 and 1807. That’s not a footnote. That’s a working electorate.

Why New Jersey Took the Vote Away in 1807

It didn’t last. A contested 1807 referendum over the location of a county courthouse in Essex County turned into a mess of accusations, with claims that voters cast ballots more than once and that men dressed as women to vote twice. Lawmakers used the scandal as cover to rewrite the rules, restricting the vote to white male citizens and closing New Jersey’s thirty-one-year experiment in female suffrage.

Whether women voters actually caused the fraud is disputed by historians who’ve studied the episode. What isn’t disputed is the outcome. New Jersey shut the door, and it stayed shut for over a century.

The Gap Years: No Legal Women Voters, 1807 to 1870

Between 1807 and 1870, no American woman could cast a legal vote in a general election anywhere in the country. This is the stretch of history that gets compressed into a single sentence in most textbooks, jumping straight from the Founding to Seneca Falls in 1848 to the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. The gap itself matters. It’s the span in which the Seneca Falls Convention happened, in which the Declaration of Sentiments was written and signed, and in which a movement built almost entirely without any of its members holding a single legal ballot.

You can read more about how that movement unfolded, decade by decade, in our deeper look at Women’s Voting Rights USA.

Wyoming and the Return of Legal Women’s Suffrage

Louisa Ann Swain’s Historic Ballot

On September 6, 1870, a seventy-year-old woman named Louisa Ann Swain walked into a polling place in Laramie, Wyoming Territory, and cast a ballot in that year’s general election. She’s often described as the first woman since 1807 to legally vote in a general election anywhere in the United States, beating another Wyoming voter, Augusta Howe, to the polls by about thirty minutes.

Wyoming’s territorial legislature had passed a women’s suffrage law the previous year, in December 1869. Lawmakers had mixed motives. Some genuinely believed women deserved the vote. Others hoped it would draw more women to a sparsely populated territory where men outnumbered women roughly six to one. Whatever the reasoning, the law was unambiguous, and it enfranchised women regardless of race, a detail that matters given how many suffrage laws of the era carved out exceptions.

Seraph Young and Utah’s Claim

Swain wasn’t actually the very first woman to vote under a nineteenth-century suffrage law. That distinction belongs to Seraph Young, a grand-niece of Brigham Young, who voted in a Salt Lake City municipal election on February 14, 1870, under Utah’s newly passed equal suffrage law, about seven months before Swain’s vote in Wyoming. Utah women also voted in that territory’s general election in August 1870, roughly a month ahead of Swain.

So the honest answer has layers. Lydia Taft holds the earliest known legal vote by a woman in colonial America. New Jersey women voted legally and repeatedly under state law from 1776 to 1807. Seraph Young holds the first vote cast under a formal nineteenth-century women’s suffrage statute. Louisa Swain holds the distinction of the first woman to vote in a general election since New Jersey’s law was repealed. Depending on which milestone a reader means by “first,” a different name answers correctly, and I think all four deserve to be remembered rather than collapsed into one simplified story. You can find the full timeline, sourced from primary records, on Who Was the First Woman to Vote Legally in the US.

Susan B. Anthony’s Illegal Vote and Why It Matters

Susan B. Anthony voted in the 1872 presidential election in Rochester, New York, alongside a group of other women she’d recruited for the act. She was arrested two weeks later, tried, and fined one hundred dollars, which she refused to pay for the rest of her life. Her vote gets remembered more than Taft’s, Swain’s, or Young’s largely because Anthony was already a famous activist, and because the trial itself became a public platform for the suffrage cause.

But her vote was never legal. It was civil disobedience, deliberate and strategic, meant to force a legal confrontation over the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause. That’s a different kind of historic moment than Taft’s or Swain’s, and I think conflating the two does a disservice to both. Anthony broke an unjust law on purpose. Taft and Swain worked, at least on paper, within the law as it existed where they stood.

How the Nineteenth Amendment Changed Everything in 1920

The Nineteenth Amendment, ratified on August 18, 1920, ended the state-by-state patchwork that had defined American women’s voting rights for over a century. It read, in plain terms, that the right to vote could not be denied on account of sex. For the first time, a woman’s legal right to vote didn’t depend on which territory, state, or town meeting she happened to live in.

It’s worth saying plainly that 1920 didn’t deliver full voting access to every American woman. Black women, particularly in the Jim Crow South, continued facing poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright intimidation for decades afterward. Native American women weren’t uniformly recognized as citizens until 1924, and even then, states found ways to keep them from the polls. The fight for a genuinely universal vote stretched on through the What Was Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law worth understanding in its own right.

Why This History Still Matters Today

I think the temptation with a question like who was the first woman to vote legally in the US is to want one clean, tidy answer, wrapped up with a bow. History rarely obliges. The real answer is a chain of small, local, often accidental victories, stretched across more than 160 years, each one won or lost by people who mostly weren’t trying to make history at all. Lydia Taft wasn’t a suffragist. She was a grieving widow standing in for a dead husband’s tax bill. Louisa Swain was reportedly just out running an errand when she stopped to vote.

That’s what I find most striking about this history, honestly. It wasn’t built by a handful of famous names alone. It was built by ordinary women, in ordinary towns, who happened to be standing in the right meeting hall on the right afternoon, and who said yes when the door cracked open.

Frequently Asked Questions About the First Woman to Vote Legally in the US

1. Who was the first woman to vote legally in the US?

Lydia Chapin Taft is generally recognized as the first woman known to vote legally in colonial America. She cast a ballot at a town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, on October 30, 1756, standing in for her deceased husband’s estate.