Lydia Taft reportedly cast a legal vote at an Uxbridge town meeting, traditionally cited as the first by a woman in colonial America.
On October 30, 1756, Lydia Taft is traditionally said to have cast a vote at a town meeting in Uxbridge, Massachusetts, becoming what many historians and popular accounts describe as the first woman to legally vote in colonial America. The vote reportedly concerned funding to support Massachusetts's military efforts during the French and Indian War.
Taft was permitted to vote, according to tradition, because she was a substantial property owner and widow-equivalent stand-in for her recently deceased husband, Josiah Taft, one of Uxbridge's wealthiest landholders and taxpayers. As the family's estate carried significant tax obligations to the town, local officials allowed Lydia to vote as a proxy for her family's financial stake in town affairs — an extraordinary exception to the universal exclusion of women from suffrage at the time.
This event, though contested by some historians who note the surviving Uxbridge town records do not explicitly document the vote by name, has become a celebrated symbol in American women's history. It is frequently cited in popular and educational accounts as evidence that limited, circumstantial exceptions to women's disenfranchisement existed more than a century before the broader women's suffrage movement. Whether strictly documented or partly legendary, the story of Taft's vote has endured as an early marker of women's civic participation in America, predating the Nineteenth Amendment by over 160 years.