A white woman wearing a yellow toga with a torch in her hand, walking across a map of the continental US. Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, & all states west of there are white, while all states to the east are dark & depict masses of people desperately reaching up towards the light of the woman carrying suffrage east.

The women’s suffrage movement started in the east but had its earliest successes in the west. Nine western states permitted women to vote before Alaska.

Image credit: Henry Mayer, "The Awakening," Puck, February 20, 1915