Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson was already a state senator when she first learned about Martha Hughes Cannon. As she discovered, she wouldn’t be senator at all if it were not for her.
In 1896, the same year Utah became a state, Cannon ran and won against her husband for a seat in the state Senate. The victory made her the first female state senator in the nation.
“You can't have an honest discussion about the women's suffrage movement in the United States without talking about Utah and the impact that Utah women had on that movement,” Henderson said.
Now, Henderson hopes that conversation will be elevated at a national level. After a lengthy wait, a statue of Cannon is heading to Washington D.C. Her figure will replace Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of the television, as Utah’s second statue at the Capitol. Cannon will reside in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center. Brigham Young, the state’s other statue, sits in National Statuary Hall.
Neylan McBaine, the co-founder and CEO of Better Days 2020 and author of “Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West,” was “surprised” to learn that Utah was the first state or U.S. territory where women cast a vote. Technically, it was the territory of Wyoming where lawmakers first passed women’s suffrage in 1869, but there was no election that year. (Wyoming became a state in 1890.) The territory of Utah followed suit in 1870 in a year when there was an election for women to vote in. Colorado, which became a state in 1876, passed a suffrage amendment by popular vote in 1893.
McBaine was also surprised Utah was where the first woman sat in a state senate chambers as an elected official. “But it turned out that really nobody knew that history,” she said.
“It’s a common fate” for a lot of women’s history to be downplayed during the 20th century, McBaine said, because “history has typically been written by the men about them.” Cannon’s backstory also went untold, however, partly because of her connection to polygamy. Cannon was a polygamist even though Utah banned it in order to become a state. She was the fourth wife to Angus Cannon and remained married in secret while she was serving in the Legislature. Then she became pregnant.
“She had to resign from the Legislature, and she had to go to California to have her baby,” McBaine said. “She lived out the rest of her days kind of in secret there, eventually burning all of her journals before she died because it was such a painful history for her.”
Despite the distressing aspects, Cannon was a successful, educated woman.
She graduated medical school and opened her own private practice in Utah during the 1800s. During her time in the Legislature, she pushed legislation related to public health, water quality, air pollution and even established what is now known as the Utah Department of Health.
The symbolism behind Cannon’s legacy, McBaine said, is for people to become aware of Utah’s “very illustrious history” around women's rights that doesn’t necessarily “fit the stereotypical narrative that other people tell about Utah or, frankly, that we tell about ourselves.”
“I just hope that it really challenges all the assumptions that people have about the monoculture that is assumed here in Utah,” she continued. “I think it's a challenge to the way we see ourselves. We are challenging our own monolithic expectations of our culture.”
Henderson also wants Cannon’s prominence in Washington to challenge perceptions people from all over the world may have about Utah. When people see Cannon and learn she was the first female state senator in America, Henderson wants their reaction to be “What? Utah?”
“I think Utah is given a bad reputation, and in many ways it's not deserved,” she said. “We don't even remember ourselves what our history is, which is why it's been so important for us to uncover it and to bring it out, and to help people see that we're not some backward state.”
More importantly, Henderson doesn’t want Cannon’s legacy to be swept under the rug anymore. She wants it to be honored, even if it’s 128 years later.
“Her’s is an incredibly important story, and it's been overlooked. Utah's participation in the women's suffrage movement has been overlooked, and it's time people started paying attention to us.”
