02/28/2026
Women's History month starts March 1.
90 years ago, on February 28, 1936, Wyoming suffragist orator and temperance activist Theresa A. Jenkins dies in Cheyenne.
"To ‘Hold a More Brilliant Torch:’ Suffragist and Orator Theresa Jenkins" written by MaryJo Birt shares her story.
“Barthold’s Statue of Liberty enlightening the world is fashioned in the form of a woman and placed upon a pedestal carved from the everlasting granite of the New England hills, but the women of Wyoming have been placed upon a firmer foundation and hold a more brilliant torch.”
-- Theresa Jenkins, July 23, 1890, at the celebration of Wyoming’s statehood
Theresa Alberta Parkinson was born in Madison, Wisconsin on May 1, 1853. In December 1877, she left a teaching job to travel to Cheyenne, Wyoming’s territorial capital, to marry James F. Jenkins. Family records show that she was appalled at the number of saloons and dance halls in the city. She “immediately became interested in anything of civic welfare, education, and social environment for the betterment of women and children,” her daughter Agnes Wyoming Jenkins, wrote years later, “and became an ardent Temperance Worker and advocate for Woman's Suffrage.”
Her passions placed her at the center of two of the most powerful reforms moving through American politics at the time—votes for women and temperance. Organized, educated women like Theresa Jenkins were crucial to both movements." 📖 CONTINUE READING 🔗 https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/hold-more-brilliant-torch-suffragist-and-orator-theresa-jenkins
📷 Theresa Jenkins, shown here in the 1870s, was 24 when she left a Wisconsin teaching job in December 1877 to marry her husband in Cheyenne. Jenkins family photo.