“NO ORDINARY FEELINGS”: MORMON WOMEN’S POLITICAL ACTIVISM, 1870–1920

This dissertation explores the rhetoric and strategies Mormon women employed in their efforts to defend and secure suffrage in the 19th and 20th centuries. Women citizens in Utah Territory became the first in the United States to cast ballots under an equal suffrage law in 1870. Their votes immediately attracted national scrutiny, enmeshing their suffrage rights in the national conflict over the Mormon practice of polygamy. They entered the suffrage movement to defend their voting rights against Congressional legislation and to support the push for a federal suffrage amendment. From indignation meetings and petitioning to printing a newspaper and lobbying public officials, Mormon women’s activism shaped and was shaped by the evolving national struggle for women’s voting rights over the next 50 years. Because Utah women’s voting rights were entangled in the conflict over Mormon polygamy from the beginning, their contributions and connections to the national suffrage movement have been obscured in public memory. This dissertation weaves this early and important part of the suffrage story back into the narrative, showing where Utah women’s experiences and choices fit into national trends and where they do not. Mormon women’s newspaper, petitions, diaries, and female Relief Society records reveal the politically astute strategies they employed to mobilize local organizations and build connections with open-minded suffragists in the east. Neither pawns nor militants, they drew on established patterns of women’s political engagement to speak in their own behalf, claim the rights and privileges of citizenship, and push for a federal women’s suffrage amendment. They also pioneered a new era of women in politics after Utah statehood in 1896. Telling their story from their perspective reframes U.S. suffrage history to include the women who pioneered the vote and first countered anti-suffrage arguments with their own experience.