Happy Birthday, 19th Amendment!

"Today is the 88th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote." Read more from Jessica at feministing who shares her first-time-voting story and gets others sharing theirs too.

Lydia Taft was the first woman voter in America, voting as "the widow Josiah Taft" on October 30, 1756 some 164 years before the 19th Amendment.

And "in 1776 [the] New Jersey State Constitution gave the vote to 'all inhabitants' who had a certain level of wealth. This included both women and blacks; although not married women, who could not own property. Both sides, in several elections, claimed that the other side had had unqualified women vote, and mocked them for use of 'petticoat electors' (entitled to vote or not); on the other hand, both parties passed Voting Rights Acts. In 1807, the legislature passed a bill interpreting the constitution to mean universal white male suffrage, excluding paupers."

Then a woman's right to vote came to "States and territories of the USA, progressively, starting with the Wyoming Territory in 1869 and Utah Territory in 1870. The latter was repealed by the U.S. Congress through the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887. Wyoming acquired statehood in 1890 (Utah in 1896) and thus 1892 was the first United States presidential election in which women cast legal votes. The USA as a whole acquired women's suffrage in 1920 through the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution; voting qualifications in the U.S., even in federal elections, are set by the states, and this amendment prohibited states from discriminating on the basis of sex."

Here's the international timeline of women getting to vote.