In the Margins

- If voting was not so important, there wouldn't be people fighting so much to try to take that right away from you.

- Women, they get the vote, they lose the vote.

It would really be easy to lose hope.

- When you think of women's suffrage, you might think of the famous Seneca Falls Convention or the 19th Amendment that passed in 1920.

But Utah played a revolutionary role in extending suffrage to women.

Women had the right to vote here in 1870, 50 years before the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote nationally.

But all that glitters isn't gold.

Utah women's suffrage was part of a larger plan by some to end polygamy and weaken the control that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had in the region.

The plan completely backfired, and Utah women's right to vote was taken away just 17 years after it was granted.

- This suffrage story has been told as this like, nice little like, and then they got the vote.

Like, it's like, very passive and tidy.

But no, voting rights have never been tidy.

- Through trial and tribulation, prejudice and oppression, this is the story of how Utah became an unlikely player in the road to a hard fought liberty, women's right to vote.

I'm Harini Bhat, and this is In the Margins.

For most of the early history of the US, civic engagement and voting, along with countless other rights like owning property, were liberties enjoyed predominantly by white men.

But by the mid-1800's, women around the country, and even some men, were banding together to demand equal suffrage under the law.

These efforts all played a role in Utah becoming one of the first US territories to enact equal suffrage for women.

But extending the vote to Utah women wasn't simply virtuous.

There were other political motives at play.

After seeing slavery abolished in 1865, the Republican Party turned their attention toward ending polygamy, a religious custom commonly practiced by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

The church had huge political and social power in Utah, and the Republican Party saw the benefit of ending polygamy as twofold.

Free women from what they saw as an oppressive practice and weaken the church's influence.

- The Republican Party at the time, felt that slavery and polygamy were like two sides of the same coin, and they really were opposed to both.

And the women of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, many of them were polygamist.

And so, the Republican Party really wanted to get rid of polygamy, and they felt that giving women the vote, those women would vote against polygamy.

They would, you know, free themselves with the vote.

- But leaders of the church had a different perspective.

They too wanted women to vote and believe that extending suffrage to women would change negative perceptions of Mormonism.

In contrast to the Republican Party, LDS leaders believed that Utah women would use their vote to support polygamy rather than dismantle it.

- Polygamy gave some women a lot of freedom, that they had other women to take care of children, to do other household duties.

You see women in Utah going and becoming doctors, going to school on the East coast, coming back, and bringing those skills and that knowledge to Utah.

So, they really did feel that it gave them a lot of liberation and freedom compared to women who were in monogamous marriages.

- Leaders of the national suffrage movement also had a stake in what was happening in Utah.

They thought equal suffrage in Utah would set an example for all women across the country.

If the enslaved women of Utah could be liberated by the vote, the same could be true for them.

In January 1870, several thousand women gathered in Salt Lake City to protest an anti-polygamy bill.

They also demanded equal suffrage.

And within a month, the Utah's Woman Suffrage Bill was unanimously passed by the all-male legislature.

But there were big limitations.

The new law technically allowed Black women to vote, but sources are scarce when it comes to whether or not they were allowed to exercise this right.

The law also excluded Asian and Native American women on the basis of citizenship.

So, it's February 12th, 1870, and most women in Utah have the right to vote.

Two days later, a white woman named Seraph Young cast her ballot in Salt Lake City and was the first woman to vote in the US under an equal suffrage law.

Thousands of women in Utah would follow in her footsteps.

And in the years that followed, they organized and joined the national suffrage movement.

- So it's not like Utah women were like, we got the vote, see ya, right?

They were traveling across the country and being involved in these big national events like protesting at the White House, being involved in huge suffrage parades, having national suffragists coming to Utah, standing on our Capitol steps, speaking to big audiences.

And people don't think about that Utah women were part of this movement for women's rights.

- Gaining the right to vote was a massive win for white women in Utah.

But in the eyes of Congress and national anti-polygamy and suffrage leaders, the whole plan had backfired.

They had assumed that Utah Mormon women would vote to end the practice of polygamy.

Instead, Mormon women elected pro-polygamy leaders who advocated for their religious freedom.

- You see political cartoons at the time depicting the women literally as slaves, as like the Mormon church being this like, evil empire that's enslaved these women, taken them to Utah.

But the women here did not feel that way.

- Emmeline B.

Wells, a prominent Mormon suffragist said, "It is currently reported that Mormon women vote as they are told by their husbands.

I most emphatically deny the assertion.

Our women vote with the same freedom that characterizes any class of people in the most conscientious acts of their lives."

Anti-polygamy pressure ensued when the Mormon majority in Utah elections increased to more than 95%, and so Congress decided to take things into their own hands.

They introduced several anti-polygamy bills and passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887.

The act outlawed the practice of polygamy nationwide, enabled the federal government to seize Church of Jesus Christ's property, and took 17 years of women's suffrage along with it.

The idea was to weaken the church as much as possible.

In response, Latter-Day Saint women organized and wrote numerous suffrage articles and essays in the Woman's Exponent, a newspaper created by women for women.

Soon after, Utah's women of color were hard at work advocating for their rights, including the right to vote.

In 1895, Elizabeth Austin Taylor co-founded one of the states' first Black newspapers, the Utah Plain Dealer.

She wrote and published articles advocating for Black men and women's voting rights and access to the polls.

And in 1899, Hannah Kaaepa, a native Hawaiian, advocated for the suffrage of women by speaking at the 1899 National Council of Women in Washington, DC.

In 1890, due to the mounting pressure from the federal government, LDS President Wilford Woodruff published the 1890 Manifesto, officially ending the practice of polygamy.

With polygamy denounced by the Church of Jesus Christ, the federal government would now allow Utah to apply for statehood under the Utah Enabling Act.

This meant that Utah was charged with writing its state constitution, and Utah women organized, wrote petitions and marched in parades to ensure that their suffrage and other political rights would be included.

And their hard work paid off.

The new constitution went into effect in 1896 and included both women's suffrage and their right to hold political office.

Well, some women.

Ten months later, a suffragist named Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon was elected to the Utah State Senate, defeating her own husband in the race.

This made Cannon the nation's first female state senator.

That same year, 13 other women were elected to state and county offices.

Although some Utah women legally gained the right to vote for a second time in 1896, many women of color were excluded and would continue to be for decades.

And even though the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 and removed biological sex as a barrier to voting, racial bears across the country were still in place and more would come.

Several Jim Crow laws and other discriminatory practices kept Black women from the polls.

- After I got into office, I learned that my family on my father's side was heavily involved in voter rights initiatives in the Civil Rights Movement and registering people to vote.

We know that when the Voter's Rights Act passed, it was because of different tactics that was being used to prevent certain populations of people from voting.

- And while the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted citizenship to Native Americans, it did not clearly state that this came with the right to vote.

Many states continued to disenfranchise indigenous folks from the political process, including Utah.

The hard work of suffragists of color during this time was vital.

And over the next 40 years, many of those racist citizenship laws would be repealed.

If there has been a pattern to voting rights throughout US history, it's that the work is never truly finished.

Over the last two decades, countless states have engaged in voter suppression tactics, cutting voter times and locations, restricting registration, imposing strict voter ID laws and purging voter rolls.

And in 2023, state legislatures, including Utah's, passed a mere record number of restricted voting laws, many of which have disproportionately impacted people of color and the working class.

- I come in contact with young people who don't wanna vote, who feel disenfranchised, feel that their vote don't matter.

I encourage people, let your voice be heard.

This is how you let people know how you feel, is when you get out there and vote.

- We often think of once you're given rights that they're fixed, like, you have them.

Yet we see even now, that rights are definitely fluid.

That they're not necessarily this like, set in stone thing.

We don't all agree on what rights should be given or what exists.

- [Harini] Today, only 25% of US Senate seats and 29% of House seats are occupied by women.

Only 22 states have ever elected a Black woman to Congress.

And women make up a mere 16% of the Utah legislature, ranking the state 39th in the country for female leadership.

- We still have a lot of work to do.

We're still behind in getting people of color in particular to run for office, especially here in the state of Utah.

I'm more encouraged now because we have people who are running who are from the Pacific Island community, the Asian community, the Black community, right now, who are running for state level positions.

And I am very encouraged by that.

- Utah's unique trailblazing suffrage story has shown us the power that we as women have when we join forces to make our voices heard.

And if we can learn anything from the fight for equal suffrage over the last two centuries and generations of activists, it's that true progress happens when we all work together to amplify one another's voices across race, gender, religion, class, and all other forms of identity.

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