Question

What were the roles and rights of women in the West?

Answer 1

Hint: The rights and entitlements claimed by women and girls around the world are known as women's rights. They were the basis for the 19th-century women's rights movement as well as the feminist movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Complete answer:
The West is also known for being a testing ground for women's rights; in Wyoming, for example, women were given the right to vote in 1869.

"In 1920, Congress passed the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Wyoming, on the other hand, had been the first state to grant women full voting rights when it joined the Union more than fifty years before. Colorado (1893); Utah and Idaho (1896); Washington (1910); California (1911); and Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona (1912) were the next eight states to grant women full suffrage”.

During the westward expansion, women were responsible for a variety of tasks, including managing household movement overland, establishing social activities in pioneer settlements, and sharing the hard work of farming new land.

Women participated in many activities with their neighbours on the frontier, such as barn raising, corn husking, and quilting bees. In the early mining towns, some women found work in the sex trade.
Frontier towns eventually attracted laundresses and seamstresses, as well as organised church societies and other reform movements. Many prominent women from the western frontier, such as Annie Oakley, Pearl Hart, and Nellie Cashman, defied conventional gender roles.

Note: Women in the West were the first to have full voting rights in the United States. Many new territories and states considered and granted women the right to vote as they formed. Western women voted and served in public office for decades until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed. Though they had defeats along the way, their early wins were critical in securing the passage of a federal suffrage amendment.