What women dressed up as a man and voted?

Answer 1

Charley Parkhurst dressed as a man and voted.

For several decades in the 1800s, stagecoaches were the main mode of transportation for people, baggage and mail in Northern California. And one of the best-known stagecoach drivers in the 1850s and 1860s was Charley Parkhurst.

Parkhurst drove stagecoaches over areas that are now largely dominated by freeways, houses and malls, routes that included Mariposa to Stockton, San Francisco to San Jose, San Jose to San Juan to Watsonville, and a lot of runs between Santa Cruz and Watsonville.

Driving a stagecoach took a lot of skill and courage, as drivers never knew what kind of situation--from holdups to incredibly hazardous conditions--they might have to deal with. Parkhurst had a reputation for being able to deal with whatever came along, and was known as one of the fastest and safest stagecoach drivers of the time.

Of course, there were many other competent stagecoach drivers. So what was the big deal about Parkhurst?

The big deal was that Charley Parkhurst was a woman. For most of her life, however, she disguised herself as a man, and both her unusual life as a cross-dressing stagecoach driver and her status as a registered voter in Santa Cruz County have made her a figure of local legend. There has been controversy over the years over whether Parkhurst ever actually voted, which would have made her one of the country's first woman voters, since national women's suffrage would not be won in the United States until 1920. Even New Zealand, the first country in the entire world to grant women the right to vote, did not do so until 1893.

According to the records of her former employer, Wells Fargo, Parkhurst "was small (only about 5' 6"), slim and wiry, with alert gray eyes. Apparently shy, Parkhurst never volunteered information about himself. Not an uncommon trait in those days. When he did speak, it was in an oddly sharp, high-pitched voice." In some older accounts of Parkhurst, her first name is given the masculine spelling "Charlie." On her tombstone and in her obituary, it is spelled "Charley."