12 fascinating facts about women’s suffrage in Utah
Only 100 years have passed since the Nineteenth Amendment extended the right to vote for women in the United States. One century ago, women across the country were celebrating a hard earned victory that would mean so much to the generations who followed.
Utah has a particularly interesting history when it comes to women’s suffrage. Because of the work from strong women in the Relief Society organization, Utah was actually the first place in the nation where women citizens voted with equal suffrage rights, in 1870, 50 years BEFORE the Nineteenth Amendment.
“Were we the stupid, degraded, heartbroken beings that we have been represented, silence might better become us; but, as women of God,...we not only speak because we have the right, but justice and humanity demand that we should.”
If you’re anything like us, you may not have heard of some of the incredible Utah women who fought for the right to vote. The Relief Society program gave Utah women a unique strength to rally together for a cause, and their faith bolstered their conviction. Joseph F. Smith once said,
“God never did design that a woman should receive less for the product of her labor...than a man should receive for the same labor….Nor did He design that women should be required to bear equal burdens with men without sharing equally the benefit thereof. Why shall one enjoy civil rights and the other be denied them? Why shall one be admitted to all avenues of mental and physical progress and prosperity and the other be prohibited, and proscribed within certain narrow limits, to her material abridgment and detriment…?”
So, to get a little more familiar with these women and their cause, here are a few facts you may have not known about women’s suffrage in Utah:
Did You Know?
In 1870, Utah women were the first in the history of the United States to vote with equal suffrage rights, fifty years BEFORE the 19th Amendment passed.
After 17 years of voting, Congress revoked all Utah women’s suffrage as part of an anti-polygamy law.
Utah women regained the right to vote in 1896 when President Grover Cleveland signed a proclamation making Utah the forty-fifth state.
The Relief Society held protest meetings, petitioned Congress, lobbied for support from national suffrage leaders.
Emmeline B. Wells was Utah’s most prominent suffragist and editor of the pro-suffrage newspaper, the Woman’s Exponent.
“A woman who goes to the polls and deposits a ballot, feels her political independence and that she is virtually part and parcel of the great body politic, not through her father or husband, but in her own vested right.”
Emmeline B. Wells and Utah suffragist Elmina S. Taylor joined other officers and delegates of the national council of women in February 1895 at a conference in Washington, D.C.
In January 1896, women in Utah regained their voting rights and gained the right to hold public office. Seven women ran for the state legislature that year.
Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon made history as the first female state senator. AND she made headlines by running against and beating her own husband. (She was a doctor, a plural wife, and a suffragist. WOW)
“You give me a woman who thinks about something besides cook stoves and wash tubs and baby flannels, and I’ll show you, nine times out of ten, a successful mother.”
Idaho was the fourth state to grant women’s suffrage on November 3, 1896.
Susa Young Gates and Emmaline B. Wells were among the sixteen Utah women who attended the International Council of Women in London in 1899.
In 1900, Emma J. McVicker was the first woman named to a post in Utah state government when she was appointed state superintendent of schools.
Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Brigham Young, founded and edited both the Young Woman’s Journal and the Relief Society Magazine and authored the chapter on Utah women’s suffrage work in the final volume of NAWSA’s History of Woman Suffrage. She was also the mother of thirteen children!
Learn about all this and more in the new book, Thinking Women, available now at Deseret Book.