In 1896, Martha Hughes Cannon ran for state senate against her polygamist husband, and won! But becoming America’s first female state senator was only one chapter of Cannon’s story. A whirlwind of triumph and heartbreak dominated her life: wagon trains, Victorian medicine, the suffrage movement, evading federal prosecution, she lived it all!

Read Martha Hughes Cannon’s Speech to the Senate Judiciary Committee, or her Senate Health Bill (including rules on quarantine and school safety!) Or read her 1885 letter to a friend which discusses her fears of being forced to testify before a grand jury about her knowledge of polygamous marriages.

Visit the Better Days 2020 website for more information on women’s suffrage in Utah. There you can also download a free Martha Hughes Cannon coloring page! The Exponent II Magazine continues the work of the original Women’s Exponent today.

Guest Rebekah Clark is co-author of the recently-released book Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah. She holds a law degree from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University and studied as a visiting student at Harvard Law School. She graduated with a degree in American History and Literature from Harvard University, where her honors thesis focused on Utah women’s activism in the national suffrage movement. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Utah State Historical Quarterly, Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, Pioneer Magazine, and BYU Law Review and in podcasts by the National Conference of State Legislatures, Zion Art Society, Church News, and the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. She serves on the board of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team and currently works as the Historical Research Associate at Better Days, a nonprofit public history organization dedicated to expanding education about Utah women’s history.

Music featured in this episode was used by permission of the University of Glasgow Chapel Choir and the Smithsonian.

Want to help us “make history”? Become a Patron or Donate here!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices