Review of Neylan McBaine, Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West (Salt Lake City: Shadow Mountain, 2020). 240 pages. $19.99 (hardback).

Abstract: Pioneering the Vote by Neylan McBaine provides a cogent and concise history of the role of Latter-day Saint women in the suffrage movement. McBaine interweaves a fictionalized narrative centered on Emmeline Wells with primary source excerpts and summaries of particular events. The book brings to life the women described and succeeds in explicating many of the important barriers that Latter-day Saint women faced while trying to participate in the suffrage movement — namely, polygamy. McBaine accurately portrays the aversion to polygamy, but she could have spent more time describing why and how Latter-day Saint women found polygamy empowering. While the book succeeds in recounting history and begins to analyze Latter-day Saint women’s role in this movement, more interaction with Latter-day Saint theology as a way of showing why women would feel passionately about obtaining suffrage while still maintaining polygamous relationships would create a more complete picture. Nevertheless, McBaine’s historic contribution to this field of study acts as a milestone from which we can advance to more nuanced discussions about the way polygamy empowered women.

February 14, 1870, marks the first day a woman ever cast a ballot in the United States.1 Seraph Cedenia Young Ford, the grandniece of Brigham Young, cast her vote in a Salt Lake City municipal election on [Page 412]this day in response to the passage of an equal suffrage law in Utah. One cannot ignore the role polygamy had in the subsequent drafting of disenfranchisement laws, reacting to the widespread, women-based support for polygamy. Polygamy cast Utah’s suffrage in a different light, and many famous suffragettes such as Susan B. Anthony vocally opposed this practice, which complicates our understanding of the suffrage movement. For a time following 1870, Utah did not permit women to vote, but in 1895, when proposing statehood, Orson F. Whitney argued in favor of woman suffrage, saying: “She was designed for it. She has a right to it.”2 Utah included this proposal while petitioning for statehood, and it was subsequently granted. Although the Nineteenth Amendment passed in 1920, not all women had the right to vote at that point because of naturalization laws.3 Just over a hundred years later, all women have secured the right to vote within the United States of America.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a distinct relationship with promulgating women’s suffrage. Sarah Kimball in Woman’s Exponent wrote:

Mrs. Wells, Editor of the Exponent, saying the women of Utah as a body MUST fight for the maintenance of the right to vote, and also to get national guarantee for all women in the nation. President Smith the Prophet said women should ask us for advice,