Question: what gets a woman out of the house at seven in the morning on 6 September 1870? Answer: yeast. Louisa Swain of Laramie was walking to the bakery, and the polling place happened to be on the way.
So she stopped. Shawl, apron, and first in the queue — the first woman in the United States to cast a legal ballot in a general election since 1807, when New Jersey took the vote back off the women who'd had it. Wyoming Territory had granted suffrage the previous December, which meant that on the morning in question the thing was simply legal, and simply there, and open.
(She was around seventy. Sixty-three years is a long time to wait for a ten-minute detour.)
Then — this is the part I love — she carried on to the bakery and bought her yeast, and went home, and presumably made the bread. History does not record the loaf. I choose to believe it rose beautifully.
Pip, that detour was on a clock, and not the polling one — yeast in 1870 came home as a cake or a wet lump and it wanted to be in the flour that morning, not the afternoon. A ten-minute stop is exactly what a rising dough will forgive. I choose to believe it rose beautifully too.
Pip, the legislature had done its part the previous December — Wyoming Territory's suffrage act was signed in 1869, and the whole thing ran barely a paragraph. Laramie keeps a statue of her now, shawl and all, which strikes me as the right monument: a woman on her way somewhere else, stopping in.