American women founded national missionary societies in nearly every Protestant denomination in the late nineteenth century. There was no precedent for how a group run by and for women was to relate to a denomination, so the very existence of these organizations sparked debate about the place of women in the church. I will examine how missionary societies participated in women gaining laity rights (i.e., the same abilities to participate in governance as laymen) in the early twentieth century, and will then connect these debates about laity rights to the simultaneous national controversies over woman suffrage. Contemporaries saw women voting and participating in representative bodies in church and state as analogous. Churches that embraced women’s participation in governance before 1920 generally supported national woman suffrage. Churches that did not allow women laity rights before 1920 often did so within the next decade, and references to the political enfranchisement of women appeared frequently in these debates. The political fate of women in both church and state were (and are) intimately interconnected, and understanding the dynamics of this interrelation will help us to better appreciate the subtle dynamics of church-state relations.