3 Awaiting Change: 1876–1878

Philadelphia, July 4, 1876. Night fell and the city came alive, despite the heat. The excitement was contagious. As officials gave last-minute instructions, musicians assembled, torches were lit and graceful street arches illuminated. Soon, the city was a sweaty mass of light and heat as hundreds of thousands of marchers began moving in a long stream toward Independence Hall. At midnight the throng cheered when the new Liberty Bell rang in the day.¹

Among the half-million who were celebrating the Centennial, woman suffragists came to mark the occasion in their own way. Suffragists from the American Woman Suffrage Association had met the day before to commemorate New Jersey’s women who had voted from 1776 to 1807.² The National Woman Suffrage Association had a more sensational plan in mind. They planned to storm the official ceremony and, unannounced, present their “Declaration of Rights” to the vice-president of the United States.³ They came “not to give a Centennial shout,” but “to give a Centennial growl.”^{4 [163]}

For both branches of the woman suffrage movement, the Centennial was not an occasion to celebrate liberty; rather, it was a bitter reminder that America’s women remained politically enslaved. Deciding not to boycott the official proceedings, both wings went to Philadelphia simply to make their presence felt. Despite this similarity and their continuing expectations that their cause would prevail, their Centennial protests illustrate real differences in their tactics, priorities, and participants.⁵

No event better symbolizes the continuing differences between the two wings of the national woman suffrage movement in the nineteenth century than the way each chose to mark the Centennial. As leader of the American Woman Suffrage Association, Lucy Stone refused to sign the National Association’s “Declaration of Rights,” stating she wanted nothing to do with its “presentation” and regretting it was done in such a “sensational” manner. At the same time, the National’s co-founder, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, characterized the American’s rationale for their July 2 protest as “absurd” and their meeting as “stupid.”⁶

This conflict between Stanton and Stone illustrates the contrasting styles and strategies of the movements, but it was the National’s second tier of leaders who ^[164] particularly personified these differences during the Centennial summer. From its beginnings in 1869, the National Association had been a magnet for women who were attracted by its scope of concern, all-female leadership, and militance. Many of these lesser-known women, including Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, Phoebe Couzins, and Sara Andrews Spencer, helped plan and execute the National’s Centennial “growl.”⁷ They also implemented a partially successful campaign to expand the recognition of woman suffrage by the national political parties during the 1876 presidential nominating conventions.

Gaining the vote for women remained the National’s primary goal, but its leadership stressed that women’s political inequality was nonetheless inseparable from other sources of social and economic degradation. Given these priorities and strategies, the National Association provided a forum for feminism that served as a catalyst for women’s political activism in the 1870s.⁸ The very boldness of the National’s Centennial effort suggests the ongoing optimism of its leaders, which energized the movement despite the recent Supreme Court finding on Minor v. Happersett. The court had ruled that the vote was not granted with citizenship; equally ominous, it established legal precedent for applying other ^[165] qualifications as factors in voting privileges that, among other things, eventually resulted in the “defacto disfranchisement of the freemen.”⁹ In addition, it could be argued that the Minor ruling set sufficient precedence for other means to limit voting privileges or for using that privilege as a tool to achieve either social or political control, as the case of polygamists eventually shows.

Of the National’s inner circle, none became more conspicuous when the “Mormon question” moved center stage than Sara Andrews Spencer. To date, Spencer has received little recognition for her energetic contribution to woman suffragism or for the central role she played as a leader of the National Association in the 1870s.¹⁰ Spencer’s activism illuminates a number of questions about the National Association during these years, including how and why it became identified with Mormon women. It was Spencer who played a pivotal role in facilitating that relationship.

By 1876 the world of Utah’s politically active women had changed once again. After the statehood campaign the growing anti-polygamy crusade began to divert the energy of both ex-Mormon and non-Mormon activists. The New Movement reform effort had waned, leaving its woman suffragists with no institutional base to support their ^[166] activism and struggling to maintain their credibility as representatives of Utah’s women. Individual Godbeite women still claimed that they represented Utah’s women, while a growing number of anti-polygamy activists had also declared that they spoke on behalf of their degraded Mormon sisters. By the Centennial year, Mormon women attacked such claims regularly and vigorously, and they had seized the spotlight as the territory’s central woman suffrage players.

Thus, the Centennial year marked a shift in the way that the two branches of the movement dealt with the problems that Utah presented. Once it became clear that suffrage in Utah did not mean the end of polygamy and New Movement reformers were no longer a viable factor in the territory, the American Association tried to distance itself from Utah’s problems. The implicit stance of the Woman’s Journal was silence: the topic of Utah appeared only in correspondence to the Journal. Confronted with the same evidence, the National Association on the other hand astutely changed its defense of the vote in Utah from claims that enfranchisement would solve the “Mormon question” to claims based on legal grounds—a position that proved difficult to abandon, although the new strategy made political sense. ^[167]

Nevertheless, the critical year in the relationship between national women and Mormon suffragists proved to be 1877. How that critical year came about and why, becomes clear once Mormondom’s ultimate suffragist, Emmeline B. Wells enters the scene. Although the changing circumstances of women’s activism in Utah were important in setting the stage for a new level of interaction, the growing trust between Wells and Sara Spencer was also a significant factor in that change. The entrance of Mormon women into the national movement complicates the history of Utah’s competing factions.

Several questions are raised by the competing claims of Utah’s women. Who has the right to speak as a representative of another’s interest or welfare, or to seek changes that are perceived from the outside? Given either the legal or moral authority to seek such changes, what factors should either limit or enforce those changes? Ex-Mormon women and anti-polygamy activists based their right to speak for Mormon women on their conviction that Mormon women were unable either to know or represent their own best interest. These activists blamed both the controlling hand of the priesthood and the degrading ideology of Mormonism for Mormon women’s disabilities, and given the lack of legal authority in the 1870s, they called on moral authority to secure ^[168] change. Mormon women, of course, based their own defense on both legal and moral grounds and argued that only they had the right to and could represent their own interests.

Assessing these contending claims is complicated by the fact that all were based in women’s rights language. As early as 1870, Mormon women had appropriated the rhetoric of women’s rights as one weapon in their defense of polygamy: it was a woman’s right to choose her marital arrangement. Anti-polygamy activists did not see polygamy as a choice, however; they believed it was spiritual coercion that by its very nature ensured women’s inequality. Such different perspectives raise questions about the meaning of women’s rights among Utah’s competing factions of women, including how each viewed issues of equality and autonomy. More important, questions about women’s rights lead to even more complex questions about feminism in this context, including whether or not it either defines these players or was a source of their empowerment.

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The slow pace of political change for American women contrasted markedly with the rate of change affecting nearly every other aspect of women’s lives. The economic transformation that had accelerated after the Civil War was not only altering the workplace, reorganizing ^[169] industry, and expanding transportation and communication, it was also altering social relations and public institutions. Women as well as men were affected by these interacting events, and both were faced with new challenges and opportunities.

For women, a “veritable domestic revolution” was underway as a result of technological innovations and a flood of cheap immigrant labor. For some women, this meant more leisure time that resulted in a tide of new voluntary organizations and clubs; but for others, it meant low-paying jobs. For all women, the shifting nature of the economy also contributed to a growing class structure and to a series of depressions and labor strikes during the seventies that ultimately had a repressive effect on the nature of women’s political activism.¹¹ For suffragists, the Centennial year marked a reassessment of the status of women. Although grateful for the many advances they believed women were making, suffragists were more concerned with the persisting political, economic and social inequality of women’s lives.¹²

When Susan Anthony made her “sensational” appearance at the Centennial celebration, she was accompanied by four equally bold woman suffragists: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, Phoebe Couzins, and Sara Andrews ^[170] Spencer.¹³ Of the four, none was more central to the activities surrounding the Woman’s Centennial Protest, and less remembered, than Sara Spencer.

Spencer’s story is important because her presence in the National Association illustrates both its strengths and weaknesses during the 1870s, and it illuminates the National’s relationship with women in Utah. She also personified the wide range of social issues, which the National was willing to discuss during this era, including: women’s economic and sexual exploitation, the problems of illegitimate children, and issues surrounding marital relations. Her presence testifies to the attraction that the National had for women who identified with its militant approach, scope of concern and female leadership.

Spencer’s activism intersects with the significant crossroad of the National’s radicalism that had fostered feminism and the more conservative era that followed. Her visibility in the movement was at its height as the campaign to disfranchise the women of Utah began to grow; as a result, it was she who became one of the more visible defenders of Mormon suffragists.

Perhaps it is historical justice that Spencer’s activities in behalf of Utah’s women are what bring her contribution to the history of nineteenth-century ^[171] suffragism to light.¹⁴ Few national suffragists in the 1870s were more willing to befriend Mormon women than she. Spencer’s relationships to Utah’s women, national suffragists, and Congress during the 1870s reveal much about women’s political expectations and changing concept of the role of government in their lives.

Sara Spencer was politicized by her life experience. Her mother was not surprised that Sara was “alive on the woman question,” and she noted, “Every drop of blood in her veins ought to cry out for justice to women.” Spencer was born in 1837, in Savona, New York, to Elizabeth Loomis and Orra Andrews. Her father was “talented and cultured” but, in the language of the day, his “finer instincts” were “perverted” by “intemperance.”¹⁵

As a child, Sara was permanently traumatized when her father took her with him during one of his “fits of intemperance” and bound her to a family for her “minority.” Her father’s actions haunted her. As an adult, Spencer vividly recalled her “blistered feet and tortured body,” and her father’s attempts to hide her by pushing her down “among the coal in a canal boat.” Passing the canal years later, she “went into convulsions at the recollection of the awful terror of those days.”¹⁶ Her mother finally located Sara and her brother and “stole” them back from their “legal bondage.”^{17 [172]}

Young Sara moved with her mother and brother to St. Louis in 1850 where she attended a local seminary. But at sixteen, she stopped her formal education to support her mother by teaching school. At nineteen she became the youngest principal in St. Louis when she was appointed to that position at the “Mound female grammar school.” During the Civil War she left St. Louis for New York with a letter of introduction to Horace Greeley and others. Greeley immediately hired her to work in the office of the Scientific American for half of the day and to write for other publications for the remainder, which meant fourteen hours of “intellectual labor each day.”¹⁸

In 1864, Sara married Henry C. Spencer, who had recently taken over the Spencerian Key, a business enterprise of his father. The elder Spencer was the creator of Spencerian penmanship, which apparently included a type of shorthand. Sara immediately transferred her many skills to the family business. At the end of the Civil War, the young couple moved to Washington, D.C., and opened the Spencerian Business College, which became “one of the largest and most successful” of such institutions in the country.¹⁹

Moving to Washington during Reconstruction changed Sara Spencer’s life. The entrance of young women into government jobs during the war created a propitious ^[173] climate for training women for business careers and also put Spencer in touch with a growing class of professional women. Equally important, the move increased her awareness of and sensitivity to the problems that dogged both wage-earning and impoverished women. During those years the District of Columbia seems to have been remarkably unstable and transient. A large percentage of congressmen resided in hotels during congressional sessions; this contributed, Spencer believed, to the high rate of the “social evil” in the city. This was one of the reasons she was angry at the Congress’s attempts to “regulate” sexual behavior, including polygamy, and labeled such attempts as hypocritical.²⁰

Spencer was propelled into the public arena in 1870 by a series of articles she wrote for the National Republican: “Problems on the Woman Question, Social, Political and Scriptural.” The series was her response to an anti-suffrage petition submitted to Congress by “Mrs. Gen. Sherman, Mrs. Admiral Dahlgren,” and “a thousand” other women.²¹ The petition, coming from “women of fashionable society,” attacked “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other advocates of woman’s enfranchisement” and aroused Spencer’s “indignation.”²² The articles generated ^[174] criticism and praise, and in 1871 the National Association republished the series.

Spencer’s so-called series, in fact, consisted of a hundred and thirty questions for the “gentle women” who opposed woman suffrage claiming, among other things, that women were called to a “higher sphere apart from public life.” Spencer’s attack began with the proposition that irritated her most: that suffrage would “be adverse to the workingwomen of the country.” She launched her response asking, “Dear Ladies, are you the intelligent ‘workingwomen of this country?’ and if you are not how can you understand their trials, their wants, or their wrongs, or judge clearly of the proper remedy?”²³ Although the series was conceived as a defense of woman suffrage, in reality it was also a condemnation of elite upper-class women.

Spencer was furious with all that the anti-suffragists represented: “don’t you sometimes wonder that such a faithful record is kept of what you wear, and that nobody seems to remember anything you say?” Her questions illustrate vividly her disdain for women she perceived as living in a “pampered” world. Underlying her rebuttal was a profound impatience with the social, religious and sexual hypocrisy she believed were embodied in anti-suffrage arguments.^{24 [175]}

In 1871–72 Spencer helped defeat efforts to license prostitution in the district, and in 1873 she secured legislation to “reform outcast girls.” Those efforts were followed by an attempt to secure a reform school for girls funded by Congress.²⁵ Her life work seemed to be to search out and remove “causes of vice, crime, pauperism and wretchedness,” all of which she found abundantly present in the nation’s capital.²⁶ For Spencer, approaching Congress for solutions to the problems of women was only logical.

Since Spencer watched the activities of Congress closely, she followed the appearance of Victoria Woodhull in January 1871 and applauded Woodhull’s argument that women had been enfranchised by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The following April, nineteen months before Anthony and other women attempted to vote, Spencer, Grace Greenwood and seventy other District of Columbia women attempted to register. Denied that privilege, Spencer brought a lawsuit against the Board of Registration, which was heard in the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia.

The ruling of the district court represented a partial victory: it found that “women are citizens, but have not the right to vote without local legislation.”²⁷ Seeing hope in the affirmation of citizenship, Spencer ^[176] proposed that Congress could grant woman suffrage to the residents of the District of Columbia as the territories of Utah and Wyoming had done.²⁸ She made that appeal before the Judiciary Committee in January 1874, but to no avail. In the same year, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the lower court’s ruling and, in 1875, issued a similar finding in the case of Minor v. Happersett, although in 1873, the court had ruled that “the Negro” had been declared a citizen and was “thus made a voter.”²⁹ Notwithstanding Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s belief that the Minor ruling would have the same implications for women that Dred Scott had for slaves, Spencer, Anthony and Stanton were forced to abandon that tactic and instead focused on passing a Sixteenth Amendment for woman suffrage.

Assuming a leadership position in the effort to enfranchise the women in the District of Columbia soon moved Spencer to a prominent position in the National Association. At the annual Washington convention, she read the judicial report on her attempt to vote, “which created much amusement in the audience,” but more important, her appearance confirmed her leadership potential.³⁰ The following year, she was chosen to be a member of the National’s advisory board, and she addressed the annual Washington convention twice: once on ^[177] the subject of her lawsuit and once on the topic of education for women. By then Spencer was viewed as one of the rising stars in the movement.³¹

Between January 1876 and the Centennial protest, Sara Spencer was the consummate suffragist-gadfly for the National Association. She was everywhere. Highly visible at both the Washington convention in January and the May anniversary meeting in New York, she was not only a speaker, but also one of movement’s guiding lights.

In June, Spencer and Elizabeth Boynton Harbert represented the National at the Republican presidential nominating convention in Cincinnati. There she and Harbert, along with representatives from the American Association, appeared before the platform committee urging the Republicans to broaden their 1872 “splinter” into a full plank in support of woman suffrage.³² Although the Republicans were unwilling to adopt the plank submitted by woman suffragists, they did improve the 1872 platform.³³ Spencer saw the action in a positive light; and Henry Blackwell, also pleased by the outcome, claimed that Republican nominee, Rutherford B. Hayes, was a woman suffragist.³⁴ Nevertheless, a less optimistic suffragist claimed that the Republicans had just “thickened the old sop and re-served it.”^{35 [178]}

Spencer’s optimistic evaluation of the Republican convention probably reflected the personal celebrity it brought to her. The Republicans had granted her the privilege of presenting the woman suffrage case to the full convention: it was the first time a woman had ever addressed a national political convention. In addition to winning Spencer national recognition, the convention appearance seems to have secured her a leadership position in the National Association.³⁶

During the Centennial year, the major work for the National’s suffragists was to prepare for their protest and to complete the “Declaration of Rights for Women.” Spencer along with Gage, Anthony, and others worked from their Philadelphia “Parlors” beginning in June. Stanton was on the lecture circuit, and her presence was missed, but Anthony wrote that Spencer was “the real helper—very efficient—& earnest.”³⁷ After Stanton arrived, she incorporated the work Anthony, Gage and Spencer had done; each gave criticisms and helped improve the document. Stanton was delighted: “A splendid work has been accomplished here.”³⁸

On the morning of the Fourth of July Anthony, Spencer, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake and Phoebe Couzins pushed their way through a surprised crowd to the Centennial rostrum at Independence Hall. ^[179] Spectators stood on their chairs to see what was going on as a solemn Susan Anthony presented their declaration of protest to vice-president Thomas W. Ferry. To applause and jeers, the suffragists left the hall. Outside the hall, women held parasols over Anthony’s head while she read the National’s “Declaration of Rights” to the overflow crowd that had filled the street. With that task accomplished, the rebellious and triumphant suffragists hurried to their own Centennial gathering at a nearby Unitarian Church.³⁹

The women’s protest meeting, Stanton claimed, was the “most enthusiastic earnest, yea solemn meeting we ever had, continuing nearly five hours with unabated interest.” Everything about the event surpassed their highest expectations; even the musicians seemed “inspired.” Indeed, she added the “atmosphere was so peculiar” everyone said it seemed like the “very gate of Heaven.” People stood in the aisles, and even after “the benediction no one was satisfied to go.”⁴⁰

Spencer was among the many speakers that day. She related her experience trying to get the approval of the Centennial celebration organizers for three minutes to present the “Declaration.” Their request was denied, she stated, because the organizers knew that the suffragists’ appearance would be “the event of the occasion.” That ^[180] rejection, Spencer noted, served only to inspire their rebellion: she had never been “forbidden by a man” to do something without her resolve to do it being reinforced. Her comment, one reporter added, “called forth laughter and applause.”⁴¹

That Spencer would be selected to serve as the National’s corresponding secretary illustrates several things about that Association. Her concern with women’s economic and sexual exploitation as well as political inequality were consistent with the priorities and political strategies of the National’s leaders, and her feisty attitude and aggressive activism also were compatible with that of its leaders and approved of by the membership.⁴² In addition, Spencer’s advocacy of the federal government as the preeminent mechanism for solving many problems facing women fit the National’s view of politics and government.

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As part of the Centennial protest, the National Woman Suffrage Association launched a plan to increase grassroots involvement. They wanted women across the country to send their endorsement of the National’s declaration and to organize local protests. Stanton wrote to Annie Thompson Godbe in Salt Lake City asking for her participation. Godbe responded immediately. She said the ^[181] protest declaration had her “deep interest and unqualified approval,” and she expressed her gratitude to Stanton for her friendship and for selecting her as the representative of woman suffrage in Utah.⁴³

As a member of Utah’s New Movement, Annie and her sister-wife, Mary Hampton Godbe, had hosted Anthony and Stanton when they visited Utah in 1871. For several years after that time, Mary had served as a vice president from Utah on the National’s board, but in 1876 Annie’s name was listed as Utah’s representative. By that time, only Annie was living with William Godbe, which may explain the shift from Mary to Annie as an N.W.S.A. officer and why Annie was selected to organize Utah’s participation in the Centennial protest.

The intervening years had been difficult for New Movement women on many fronts. Their organization, the Ladies Mutual Improvement Society, had been short-lived; consequently, there was no woman suffrage organization in Utah not affiliated with the Mormon Church. So Annie appreciated the recognition she received from Stanton, even though she humbly professed she had “done nothing to merit such distinction.”⁴⁴ Godbe’s disclaimer was not modest rhetoric. Although she still supported woman suffrage theoretically, she was no longer involved in an ^[182] organizational effort either to defend the ballot in Utah or to promote it nationally.

Although the women of the New Movement had been stymied by many of the problems that hurt the movement as a whole, they had their own gender-related problems as well.⁴⁵ For men solving the dilemma of polygamy had proved one of the more troublesome aspects of their separation from the L.D.S. Church. But for New Movement women, the polygamy question had especially dire implications.⁴⁶ By 1873, William Godbe had made a “great change in his family affairs” and resumed living with Annie, his first and legal wife, “having separated from all the rest.”⁴⁷ Despite this change, Godbe did not divorce his other wives until 1879. That left all of the Godbe women in a peculiar social and emotional situation, one that may have been shared by other polygamist ex-Mormons.⁴⁸

By the Centennial year, the New Movement women were also in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the issue of woman suffrage. The Salt Lake Tribune, the most visible remnant of the New Movement reform, had become dismissive toward woman suffrage. Since 1873 the Tribune had advocated disfranchising Mormon women and had become a vehicle for misogynistic assaults on any woman who supported woman suffrage in the territory. With no organizational support ^[183] for their woman suffrage sympathies, hostility from the non-Mormon community, and their own growing skepticism about the value of woman suffrage in the territory, most New Movement women stepped out of the woman suffrage arena and redirected their reforming interest into other benevolent or charitable efforts in the territory.

In the fall of 1876, the New Movement woman who was most visibly trying to present herself as a representative of Mormon women and a woman suffragist was Charlotte Godbe. Her claim to be speaking on behalf of Mormon women was difficult for them to counter since despite her open support of the New Movement and her Spiritualistic inclinations, she managed to maintain her standing as a Mormon.⁴⁹ Her position in the church was aided, it seems, because her mother was one of Brigham Young’s wives and a steadfast, albeit somewhat eccentric, Saint; but more important was Godbe’s own piety and desire to remain inside the church despite her differences with it.⁵⁰

Charlotte, in fact, grew up in Young’s household, and in 1870, when he was attacked in the pages of the Revolution, she had come to his defense.⁵¹ But in identifying herself with the New Movement, she had alienated her former sisters many of whom treated her as a de facto apostate. Nevertheless, because Godbe retained ^[184] her status as a Mormon, she also remained outside the circle of non-Mormon women. Her name never appears in connection with their social or benevolent organizations. Eventually, she became the object of attacks from Mormon women as well as the non-Mormon press.⁵²

In the national woman suffrage community, Charlotte Godbe’s position was also equivocal. In 1871 she was the first woman from Utah to be included on a working committee of the National Association. But her ties were stronger to the suffragists from Boston affiliated with the American Association; through them, in 1871, she had become the first Mormon woman to speak before eastern suffragists, and in May 1877 she also addressed a convention of the New England Woman Suffrage Association held in Boston.⁵³ Despite her connections with suffragists from Boston, the conservative nature of the American Association, as well as the fact that it recognized delegates only from officially affiliated woman suffrage associations, meant that no woman from Utah was listed among its officers until 1889.

The ambiguous place Charlotte held among Mormon and non-Mormon women and among national suffragists was not helped by the uncertainty that hung over her marital status. After William Godbe decided to live with Annie only, Charlotte was forced to exist in a climate of ^[185] uncertainty exacerbated by the fact that she had no children and, apparently, no financial support. Thus, she moved in and out of Utah and remained on the fringes of both Mormon and non-Mormon communities.

That Charlotte became a more visible player in Utah’s woman suffrage history after the New Movement began to fade seems to defy common logic; the New Movement’s failure left her with neither an institutional base for activism, nor followers or constituency. Still Godbe’s part in this history remains important for several reasons, not the least of which is the amount of attention that has been paid to the role she played.⁵⁴ The nature of Godbe’s persistent activism and her unique, if at times peculiar, role in this history remains important because she remained a member of the L.D.S. Church while outspokenly critical of polygamy and staunchly defending women voting in Utah. Thus, Godbe’s continued presence adds another dimension to the already complicated history of woman suffrage in Utah.

In 1875 Charlotte Godbe made her first significant public address in Utah before an audience that included non-Mormons, Mormon women, and prominent L.D.S. brethren.⁵⁵ In her lecture, “The Question of the Hour,” Godbe addressed “the legal status of plural wives” and appealed for “special legislation” that would make them ^[186] equals before the law.⁵⁶ Godbe was not the first to argue for such legislation, and the Saints had applauded similar proposals. But Godbe’s lecture was badly timed from the Mormons’ point of view.⁵⁷ It was delivered as Brigham Young was being sued by a former wife, Ann Eliza Young, for a large alimony settlement—an action that incurred unwanted exposure of the legal questions surrounding plural marriage.⁵⁸

Charlotte’s lecture was not the major source of the rift between her and many Mormon women, but it illustrates both her persistent attempts to be a leader in the territory and the elusive nature of that endeavor.⁵⁹ At the same time, it also shows the degree of credibility she still had among the Mormons: being raised in Brigham Young’s household may have conferred almost permanent status. Charlotte’s enduring ties to Mormondom may also testify to the powerful web of family relations that polygamy spun, the strength of which may have resulted in greater tolerance in Mormondom than is often assumed.

The major turning point in Charlotte Godbe’s relationship with many Mormon women came in 1876, when she claimed to represent their interests in the pages of the Woman’s Journal.60 Her effort to “enlist the sympathetic action” of the nation on behalf of her Mormon ^[187] sisters may have appeared congenial to the Salt Lake Tribune and generous to women outside of Utah, but it enraged many Mormon women.⁶¹

The anger of Charlotte’s Mormon critics went beyond her condescending tone, or her claim that polygamy was “unproductive of happiness in any degree to women” and resulted in making men “imperious and lordly and, in many cases, tyrannical.”⁶² Mormon women were ready to acknowledge that the path of plural marriage was not “strewn with roses” and at times was “a very thorny one.”⁶³ What seems to have galled many about her claims was her alleged hypocrisy or, as one critic saw it, her “inconsistence”: after condemning plural marriage, she closed by noting that she was “the wife” of William S. Godbe, “leader of the Reform Movement in Utah.”⁶⁴

What bothered another Mormon correspondent about Godbe’s position was that she had had the chance to move to Boston after a visit there in the late 1860s, but instead had chosen to return to Utah and enter into a plural marriage “of her own free will and choice.” Charlotte, according to this correspondent, “rejoiced in having found her affinity, and remarked to her intimate friends of the congeniality that existed between herself and husband.” Charlotte did not come to the conclusion that “polygamy was not true,” the letter continues, until ^[188] she discovered her husband had obligations to his other wives and she was not going to be treated as the “petted lamb of the flock.”⁶⁵ Mormon women knew that Charlotte was only one of Godbe’s four wives, that she was living separately from him, and that he no longer acknowledged his plural wives. The co-editor of the Woman’s Exponent, Emmeline Wells, was the first to respond to Godbe’s correspondence with the Woman’s Journal.66 Wells may have also been the first to challenge Godbe’s claim to represent Mormon women and to make public the fact that William no longer “recognized” his plural wives.⁶⁷ Wells’s confrontation with Godbe marked the beginning of a life-long antipathy between the two woman suffragists.

Godbe refused to concede the ambiguity of her own marital status.⁶⁸ Instead, she wrote to the Woman’s Journal in 1877 that she had willingly returned to Utah to live, a claim that appears designed to shore up the legitimacy of her claim to speak for Mormon women. Then, choosing attack as her best defense, she asserted that the Woman’s Exponent did not represent “the most intellectual class among the Mormon women.”⁶⁹

That characterization angered Mormon Lucinda Lee Dalton, who also resented the implication that Mormons could not represent their own interests. Describing herself as “one of your appreciative readers,” Dalton ^[189] wrote the Woman’s Journal stating, “Mrs. Godbe” could represent herself “but no others.” Moreover, she continued, the “plural wife,” out of necessity, has to learn to think for herself and “even unconsciously, grows out of that weak and dependent spirit” that would permit others to speak for her. When a woman caught the “true spirit” of plural marriage, Dalton continued, she became more “self-sufficient” and “self-centered,” and “more individualized.” These attributes, Dalton insisted, were consistent with “the great effort, which women in general are now making.”⁷⁰

Godbe saw things differently, and she described the Woman’s Exponent as “a little sheet, under the direct supervision of Brigham Young” and Eliza R. Snow, whom Godbe described as “an old lady on the shady side of seventy.”⁷¹ That Mormon women whispered among themselves about the shortcomings of brother Young is not difficult to imagine. But to demean Snow, the most powerful and revered women in the sisterhood, was simply unpardonable.⁷²

Godbe’s attack not only suggests a remarkable lack of political skill, but it also illustrates why she had difficulty working with others. Despite continuing attempts to play a role as a leader in the territory, she seemed doomed to failure.⁷³ Indeed, she suffered from the ^[190] same constraints that limited the success of the Godbeites: she tried to defend the Mormons while hoping to change them. As a former polygamist, she felt obligated to respond when Mormon women were attacked, but her defense succeeded only in making Mormon women angry and irritating many non-Mormons. This left her isolated and, for the most part, powerless—a position that for the rest of her life she struggled unsuccessfully to alter.

Charlotte Godbe has been described as an “independent feminist,” suggesting both her status outside the circle of Mormon women and her liberty from the dictates of the L.D.S. hierarchy as well as her support for women’s equality and aggressive activism.⁷⁴ Feminism has also been ascribed to other women in the Mormon community, who like Godbe espoused political and economic equality for women, worked actively to that end, and valued such characteristics as self-sufficiency and public activism.⁷⁵ In fact, if the issue of plural marriage is extracted from the arguments of either Godbe or Mormon women, their common ground is apparent; both had grown out of the same world view, neither called for realigning the male hierarchical arrangement in the church, and each sought the approval and support of the leading brethren. ^[191]

This is not to understate the differences that their support or criticism of polygamy inferred, but instead to suggest the degree of concurrence between Godbe and orthodox Mormon women. In fact, polygamy was only one aspect of their activism, but it does not entirely explain either the motivations or the objectives of their woman’s rights activism. Despite differing stances on polygamy, Godbe and orthodox Mormon suffragists all argued in defense of women’s political and economic equality on grounds that were basically compatible with the arguments of national woman’s rights advocates. Moreover, Godbe and other Mormon women embodied many of the personal traits that also caused conflict in the national woman rights community: they were outspoken, ambitious, fearless and smart. If differences between such women as Lucy Stone and Susan Anthony generated hostile feelings, it should hardly be surprising that anger, competition and conflict would emerge in the far more emotionally complex situation of Utah.

Charlotte Godbe’s escalating attempts to assert her claim as a woman suffrage leader in the territory may have been connected to the demise of the New Movement and the Ladies Mutual Improvement Society. By the mid-1870s, neither Charlotte nor any of the other Godbeite women had an effective power base for their activism. The lack of ^[192] support for woman suffrage outside of the Mormon community left Godbe and her ex-Mormon sisters in an ambiguous position that may have increased Godbe’s sense of frustration and isolation.

The New Movement women who had given Stanton and Anthony hope for change in the Mormon community in 1871 and who appeared initially to demonstrate the curative power of the vote, were five years later no longer significant public figures in the territory. With the single exception of Charlotte, only New Movement women who worked actively against polygamy or were bitterly anti-Mormon retained their public activism and visibility.⁷⁶

*     *     *

The public confrontation between Charlotte Godbe and her Mormon sisters added to the difficulties that woman suffragists confronted as a result of the conflicting claims of Utah’s women. During the Centennial year, the National and American Woman Suffrage Associations embarked on different paths for dealing with the problems raised by the presence of polygamist suffragists. It was a year distinguished by noticeable silence on the topic of Utah in the Woman’s Journal—a silence that said a lot about the American’s struggle to find a way to deal with the situation. The leaders of the National, on the other ^[193] hand, advanced a new rationale for defending woman suffrage in the territory.

There are two obvious reasons for these shifts. The first was the persistence of the attacks on polygamy, the L.D.S. Church, and woman suffrage as practiced in the territory from ex-Mormons, non-Mormons, and the press. The second was the undeniable evidence that Mormon women were not going to vote away plural marriage and that Utah’s women who opposed polygamy did not have enough political power to end its practice.

After the statehood campaign, Mormon women became increasingly aggressive about defending themselves and quick to refute ex-Mormon or non-Mormon women who claimed to represent their interests. But speaking in their own behalf, Mormon women also made it clear that they were going to defend not only the vote, but the practice of plural marriage and their church as well. Between 1872 and 1876, articles in defense of “the principle” had begun appearing with increasing regularity in Woman’s Exponent.77

One of the most conclusive pieces of evidence that woman suffrage in Utah would not end polygamy had appeared in 1875. It was a petition signed by more than 26,000 Mormon women demanding that Congress repeal the 1862 anti-polygamy law that outlawed plural marriage.^{78 [194]} Indeed, the sponsors of the petition drive called attention to the fact that they acted with “free will and choice,” that the petition was “wholly women’s work.” Mormon women wanted to stress that they had embarked on the campaign entirely of their own volition and without the knowledge of “the sterner sex:” a statement aimed at refuting accusations “from abroad” that “the women of Utah act from compulsion.”⁷⁹

Indeed, woman suffrage seemed to have enabled Mormon women to more effectively advocate their own woman’s rights agenda rather than the one prescribed by outsiders. The vote, in fact, could be seen as lending democratic credibility to a defense of the status quo by Mormon women, rather than providing them with a mechanism for change.

By January 1876 these factors had begun to affect the way the American Association dealt with woman suffrage in Utah. Evidence of that changing position emerged in an article by Henry Blackwell in the Woman’s Journal, which described an appearance by John W. Kingman before the Joint Special Committee on Woman Suffrage of the Massachusetts Legislature. Kingman had served as judge of the Supreme Court of Wyoming and had been asked to testify about the territory’s positive experience with woman suffrage. ^[195]

Blackwell reported that Kingman, when asked about woman suffrage in Utah, claimed it was a “mockery.” Mormon women, Kingman added, had “no adequate political expression” and in reality were the “catspaw of the priesthood.”⁸⁰ Kingman’s characterization of Mormon women was not new: critics inside the territory had made similar observations the first time Mormon women went to the polls. What was new was Blackwell’s reaction. He made no editorial comment about Kingman’s appraisal. In the past when anyone had ridiculed the vote in Utah, the Woman’s Journal had consistently, if cautiously, demurred; its editors had always feared appearing sympathetic to either polygamy or the Mormons. Still, the Journal consistently reaffirmed the importance of woman suffrage regardless of the circumstances of its practice and defended woman suffrage in Utah as a positive development. During the Centennial year, however, the Journal demonstrated its growing anxiety about woman suffrage in Utah: the issues raised in Utah appear only in the context of incoming correspondence; it was a solution that allowed editorial distance from the topic while not avoiding it entirely.⁸¹ Although both the American and the Woman’s Journal steadfastly opposed disfranchisement of Utah’s women, they no longer defended ^[196] the vote by rationalizing that it would benefit territorial women.

At the beginning of the Centennial year, the National too was aware of the mounting evidence that woman suffrage in Utah would not quickly resolve the “Mormon question.” Nevertheless, the same day that the Woman’s Journal published the views of Judge Kingman without editorial comment, the National Republican, a Washington, D.C., Republican newspaper, noted the passage of a new resolution defending Utah’s women at the National Association’s annual convention.⁸²

This resolution marked a change in the rationale for defending the ballot in Utah by the National Association. Its supporters offered a new argument: rather than focusing on the benefits that would supposedly accrue from territorial women voting, which included ridding the territory of polygamy, the defense focused instead on the legal implications of disfranchisement. It emphasized that the vote was legally vested by “constitutional and lawful enfranchisement and by six years of use,” and that to disfranchise Utah’s women violated “a vested right.”⁸³

That the National’s leaders would take this legalistic approach is not surprising. They had clashed with opponents over legal interpretations of the Constitution for five years. Furthermore, two of the ^[197] National’s leaders, Belva Lockwood and Phoebe Couzins, were lawyers.⁸⁴ This new approach, emphasizing the legal implications and the constitutionality of the issue, sidestepped the issue of polygamy and so de-emphasized previous moral rationales. Consciously or unconsciously, the National was trying to separate woman suffrage from the issue of polygamy. The National Association had never supported polygamy, but the fact that many of its members were critical of monogamy and had rationalized that polygamy was not necessarily worse, had supplied critics with a good deal of ammunition. In addition, the National’s advocacy of a woman’s right to make choices about her personal life also ran counter to the idea of condemning the choices that Mormon women made. Thus, a new line of reasoning that based a defense of polygamy on legal grounds was a perceptive move. For better or worse, it eventually led some of the National’s suffragists to defend the Mormons based on the guarantees of the First Amendment.

In addition to passing this resolution of support for suffrage in Utah, the National Association’s convention also appointed a committee of three “to memorialize the congress, and otherwise to watch over the rights of the women of Utah” for the following year.⁸⁵ The committee included Sara Spencer, Ellen Clark Sargent (the wife of ^[198] Senator Aaron A. Sargent of California), and Belva Lockwood, who had drafted the resolution.⁸⁶ Mormon women responded to these actions by thanking “those brave and valiant ladies who so faithfully plead the cause of woman Suffrage for Utah, in the halls of the National Capital.”⁸⁷

Given this new support by the National’s suffragists and growing anti-Mormon sentiment, it is not surprising that the Centennial year also saw an increase in the hostility of Utah’s anti-polygamy campaign. Although Cornelia Paddock had sustained the territorial anti-polygamy crusade for several years without being criticized by the non-Mormon press, in 1876 the Salt Lake Tribune blasted her appeals for “sympathy” for the “down-trodden” Mormon wives. That perspective, the paper claimed, offered only “a woman’s view of the matter.” Instead of giving Mormon women sympathy, the Tribune argued, it would be better to put “a few score in the penitentiary,” which might “cool off their religious ardor.” Since Mormon women were used and regarded as “brood-Mares,” the paper sneered, they should be “felt for in a way that would carry conviction to their vacant breasts.” Indeed, it concluded, if Mormon women did not support polygamy, it would be a “very sickly institution.”^{88 [199]}

The new owners of the Tribune had never hesitated to belittle the Mormon sisterhood, but up to this point they had implicitly trusted “Mrs. Paddock” with the responsibility for attacking the distaff side of polygamy. Now increasingly the Tribune itself assailed Mormon women.⁸⁹

The Tribune in 1876 was outraged by the fact that demands for “sympathy” and “aid” for Mormon women were making their way into national publications.⁹⁰ The Woman’s Journal published two such appeals from California. These letters, one from Caroline Severance and the other from Charlotte Godbe, the Tribune fumed, were from women who were “a good safe distance from the infected spot.”⁹¹ But these women’s lack of proximity was not what had really bothered the paper; rather, it was Severance’s position of respect in the woman’s rights movement and Godbe’s reform credentials.⁹² According to the Tribune, what was needed instead of these “pathetic” appeals for aid was to disfranchise every “man or women polluted with the sin,” and make polygamists “ineligible” for public office.⁹³

The Tribune’s anger escalated in proportion to the growing credibility of the Woman’s Exponent in the outside world. From the Tribune’s perspective and to its dismay, the Exponent was becoming “a powerful organ.”^{94 [200]} As a result the Exponent’s contributors became objects of the Tribune’s ridicule and condemnation that for sheer vitriol topped Paddock: they were called, for example, “procuresses for the harems of the Mountain Meadows Church,” and their leader Eliza R. Snow described as a “dirty old Procuress.”⁹⁵

Despite the Tribune’s criticism of Paddock, her name did not disappear from its pages. Instead, her writings became increasingly unrestrained. In January 1877, she fired her most damning accusation to date: she called the death of a friend and neighbor “murder most cruel and diabolical” when the woman died following childbirth.⁹⁶

Paddock blamed the death on the woman’s husband; a local bishop who, according to the Tribune’s obituary, had taken a new wife while his first was in “delicate” health.⁹⁷ Paddock’s article also detailed what she claimed were the deceased woman’s objections to plural marriage as well as the bishop’s own statement that “polygamy was hell upon earth for man or woman.”⁹⁸ When Paddock’s allegations were called a “malicious falsehood” by the Salt Lake Herald, she doggedly stood her ground.⁹⁹

The mounting impact of such anti-polygamy and anti-Mormon assaults on public perceptions of the Mormons owed much of their influence to the exposes of ex-Mormon women.¹⁰⁰ The writings of Fanny Stenhouse, for example, ^[201] portrayed polygamy’s horrors with new credibility. Stenhouse’s early revelations were soon overshadowed by the appearance of an even more sensational “apostate,” Ann Eliza Webb Young, an ex-wife of Brigham Young, who credited Stenhouse with inspiring her “perilous escape” from her marriage.¹⁰¹

Ann Eliza Young gave her first public lecture condemning Brigham Young and polygamy in 1873, after which she fled Utah, apparently fearful that she would be detained. Her dramatic tale soon made her a popular lecture-circuit figure and won headlines across the country.¹⁰²

Young was not without her critics, including some woman suffragists.¹⁰³ Later she confessed that a critical article in the Woman’s Journal had “wounded” her when it accused her of opportunism.¹⁰⁴ But in 1876 when she published an indictment of polygamy, Wife No. 19, it contained a warm endorsement from one of the American Association’s leaders and former editor of the Journal, Mary A. Livermore.¹⁰⁵ Winning the seal of approval from such a prominent woman suffragist, and one whose Civil War work had made her something of a heroine, was a coup for Young.

Livermore’s endorsement coincided with the recognition by woman suffragists that Mormon women were ^[202] not going to vote to end polygamy. It also marked a new stance among suffragists associated with the American. Increasingly these suffragists came to voice their skepticism about the significance of woman suffrage in Utah, which reflects the success that critics of the vote in Utah were beginning to have. Of equal importance, suffragists associated with the American had begun to engage in a new level of anti-polygamy and anti-Mormon sentiment. In 1877 Livermore repeated critics’ claims that Mormon women voted as directed by their husbands at a convention of the New England Woman Suffrage Association. Charlotte Godbe was in the audience and refuted this attack, adding that younger Mormon women would become a “power against” polygamy. Instead of appreciating Godbe’s defense of the vote, Emmeline Wells apparently criticized her claims, which no doubt furthered the hostility between the two and added to the confusion of woman suffragists.¹⁰⁶

For orthodox Mormon suffragists then, the existence of two national woman suffrage organizations may have been critical to their participation in the broader woman suffrage movement. It is unlikely that they could have established a relationship with suffragists outside the territory if an organization like the National had not existed, especially after 1876. With the National’s broad ^[203] platform and leaders who claimed their doors were open to all, it was more accessible to a diverse body of suffragists. In addition, by embracing “side issues,” including those sometimes considered controversial, it attracted a membership that seemed less skittish about who appeared among them. Just how significant the National’s diversity and tolerance were for Mormon suffragists became apparent in 1877.

*     *     *

The year 1877 marked a milestone in Utah’s history. In August Brigham Young died, ushering in a new era for the Mormons. Following his death, the leadership of the L.D.S. Church went to John Taylor, the ranking apostle in the Council of the Twelve. For the next three years, the church was run by the joint authority of the “twelve apostles”: to them fell the responsibility of sorting out a complex battle between Young’s heirs, reorganizing the church, and dealing with mounting anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy sentiment. In 1880 Taylor’s presidency was sustained; George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith were appointed his counselors.

For Mormon women 1877 was a significant year for other reasons as well: it signaled a turning point in their relationship with the National Association. During that year Emmeline Wells, formerly a co-editor of the ^[204] Woman’s Exponent, assumed full editorial and publishing responsibility for the monthly—a role that made her a dominant figure in the world of women’s rights activism in Mormondom. Within a year, Wells’ initiatives had given new credibility to Mormon suffragists and ultimately helped secure a relationship between Mormon women and the National’s suffragists.¹⁰⁷

If Anthony and Stanton met Emmeline Wells when they visited Utah in 1871, it was of little note to them. But by becoming affiliated with the Woman’s Exponent in 1872, Wells took the first steps that brought her prominence in the Mormon community and eventually captured the attention of national suffragists.¹⁰⁸ In the inaugural issue of the Exponent, Wells published an essay, “Women’s Rights and Wrongs,” which may be the first article on the subject written for Mormon women by one of their own.¹⁰⁹ Between that time and her assumption of the editorial duties of the Exponent, Wells developed a line of thinking that incorporated Mormon ideology, including such ideas as the “potential godhood” in eternal life, and the notion of a person’s “special calling,” as well as the Mormon doctrine of free exercise of individual agency, and woman’s rights concepts being advanced elsewhere in the nation.¹¹⁰ Wells’ amalgam of Mormonism and women’s rights was one that at least some politically ^[205] active Mormon women found comfortable, even though to others Wells’ intellectual and political pursuits seemed “peculiar.”¹¹¹

By the time she became a noticeable figure in the community, Wells had spent many years among the Saints. She was born Emmeline Blanchard Woodward in Petersham, Massachusetts, in 1828. Before she turned twenty-one, Emmeline had converted to Mormonism, left her home in Massachusetts to join the Saints in Nauvoo, been married and deserted, given birth and buried her only son, married into polygamy a man thirty-three years her senior, bore him her first daughter, suffered the hardships of the expulsion from Illinois, and settled in the Salt Lake Valley.¹¹² Her life was as long as it was dramatic—she lived actively until shortly before her death in 1921.

In the 1870s with five grown daughters and the absence of so-called wifely duties that Mormon polygamous women sometimes hailed as a source of their liberation from home or blamed for their loneliness, Wells began her work on behalf of women which occupied her for the rest of her life. Her third husband, Daniel Wells, second counselor to Brigham Young and for six years mayor of Salt Lake City, provided her status in the community. But unlike her first plural marriage, which appears to have ^[206] been almost ideal, her situation in the Wells family provided neither the comfort of a supportive husband nor a warm relationship with her sister-wives. Although Wells’ intellectual and political interests were far more compelling to her than, for example, housekeeping, her special talents and interests were not appreciated by her sister-wives; in fact, her poetry was the object of their ridicule.¹¹³ It is not difficult to understand why Wells would be the object of jealous feelings: she was a striking younger woman with a sense of individual style that coupled with a brilliant mind, excellent memory, personal ambition, and desire for acclaim would have challenged even a very self-confident sister-wife. Accordingly, with little about her marriage offering comfort, the wellsprings of her life were her children, political and intellectual pursuits, and an abiding faith in the promises of Mormonism. Indeed, the sorrows of her life and bouts of depression pierce the pages of her diary, making her public support of plural marriage incomprehensible except when viewed as a measure of her faith and her bleak view of the status of women in general.

Still, Wells did not lie the difficulties of her life solely at the door of polygamy; rather, her troubles and isolation were, she believed, consistent with the ^[207] protests of women outside of Mormondom. Her critique of the status of women included monogamy, and she saw the faults of polygamy as a reflection of common shortcomings in human relations. In some respects, Wells personified the tension between the private trials of “the principle” and public defense of its practice which marks the personal diaries and correspondence of many Mormon women.¹¹⁴ For Wells, argues historian Carol Madsen, it was the full complement of her personal life, religious beliefs and intellectual pursuits, which informed her “feminism.”¹¹⁵

In the spring of 1877, Wells greatly advanced the credibility of Mormon suffragists when she secured their involvement in the renewed campaign by the National Association to persuade Congress to pass a Sixteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage.¹¹⁶ In a letter to the National, Wells proposed using “our woman organizations throughout the length and breadth” of the territory for this “stupendous undertaking.” She noted the congruence between the goals of the national campaign and her own ideas for helping secure women’s rights and added: “we could scarcely help exclaiming ‘God speaks through women, here and elsewhere in the same unmistakable language.’”¹¹⁷

By the fall of 1877, Wells’ visibility and interactions with the National Association had secured ^[208] her a place among its officers as a representative from Utah: she was the first Mormon woman so recognized.¹¹⁸ In December Wells informed the readers of the Woman’s Exponent of the new territorial petition drive for the Sixteenth Amendment, and she noted that the signatures would be presented to Congress by a committee that included “Sara J. Andrews Spencer, who spoke warmly against the ballot being taken from the women of Utah in the House of Congress on a former occasion.”¹¹⁹

Wells prodded the sisterhood, reminding them to remember Spencer’s “kindness and courage; it requires nobility of character and heroism to face opposition and speak boldly in defense of a principle that is not popular.”¹²⁰ Wells consistently sought to put the best possible interpretation on any action or statement of woman suffragists that appeared to support Mormon women: the subtleties of the fine line that suffragists tried to draw between support for the vote and support for the Mormons made little difference to her. What was important to Wells was that Mormon women were recognized both as their own representatives and as the women’s voice of the territory. Wells knew their active participation in the petition campaign would help achieve that goal. At an organizational meeting Wells was elected chair of the ^[209] petition drive, which had the blessings of the leading sisters and no doubt the leading brethren as well.¹²¹

The campaign was a stunning success. In one month, over seven thousand signatures were collected, more than double the amount of any other state or territory.¹²² Wells wrote Spencer telling her about the drive, then sent off the petitions to George Q. Cannon, Utah’s territorial delegate to Congress.¹²³ Spencer’s praise for the campaign thrilled Wells: “I consider this one of the events of my life. Surely my day-star is rising.”¹²⁴

As early as 1874, Cannon had recognized the value of having national suffragists defend the vote in Utah. At that time he informed Brigham Young of a non-Mormon suffragist who appeared before a congressional committee in opposition to legislation that included disfranchising Utah’s women.¹²⁵ Thereafter, the support of woman suffragists was viewed as important because so few non-Mormons would argue for anything that the Mormons were defending. Any statement coming from outside the territory, which offered even a slender thread of support, was seized as if it were a lifeline.

In the spring of 1878, following Utah’s successful Sixteenth Amendment petition drive, Cannon contributed sixty dollars to the National Association, a move that no doubt reinforced the standing of Mormon suffragists in ^[210] the movement.¹²⁶ This is not to suggest that Cannon purchased the recognition of Mormon women. The political activity of Mormon women, the strong woman’s rights voice of the Woman’s Exponent, and the successful completion of the petition drive were sufficient to earn them notice. Still, Cannon’s financial support certainly did not hurt.

The rapid and successful implementation of the Sixteenth Amendment petition drive in the territory, George Q. Cannon’s contribution, and the support of the church—and thus the Mormon community—for the undertakings of Mormon women illustrate the solid resource base that was theoretically available to Mormon women. Although these resources were sometimes critical to the success of various activities, they also drew criticism from those who saw church support as evidence of control by the L.D.S. hierarchy.¹²⁷ What seems more often the case in the 1870s is that Mormon women were left to their own devices, which does not mean they operated autonomously. They fully understood the nature of the constraints on the whole community, and constantly reminded one another of their duties and the authority of the priesthood. Still, the degree of initiative that they took, combined with their inside family connections and political skills inside the church, gave them a degree of latitude, if not independence. ^[211]

Following the death of Brigham Young, the L.D.S. leadership had to face a series of issues related not only to his death, but to growing anti-Mormon and anti-polygamy sentiment as well. The leadership was also fighting for control of the territory on two fronts: with Congress and the territory’s non-Mormons. The numerous problems facing the Mormon leadership between 1877 and 1880 left little time or, it seems, concern for the undertakings of the sisters—except when their actions seemed to have important ramifications. The relationship between the sisters and national suffragists appears to have been of interest to the brethren but was not a major concern. This era of benign neglect, in fact, may account for the degree of relative independence that marked the political activities of Mormon suffragists between 1877 and 1880.

The increased credibility of Mormon suffragists and the growing trust between Emmeline Wells and Sara Spencer was aided in 1877 by the appearance of Woman’s Words, a new monthly magazine for women published in Philadelphia.¹²⁸ In its initial issue, its editor stated that its “columns” would “be open to all.”¹²⁹

Wells pounced on that opportunity. The new publication, she thought, was a “harbinger of good.” Mormon women, Wells explained, found it “hard to get a ^[212] hearing,” since many think “we are little less than barbarians.” She believed, however, that “woman’s charity” meant they would “sustain each other” and “extend the hand of fellowship to all who are striving for the elevation of the sex, even though they may not see alike.”¹³⁰ Shortly thereafter, articles by Wells began appearing in the monthly.¹³¹

During 1878, Woman’s Words continued printing various items relating to the activities of Mormon women. In May, however, the death of Wells’ daughter was announced, an event that appears to have curtailed Wells’ writings for that publication. Nevertheless, items relating to the activities of Mormon women continued to appear.¹³² In the fall, it noted that Wells had been nominated to the office of Salt Lake County treasurer, although territorial law made women ineligible for public office.¹³³ This political activity of Mormon women seemed “odd,” the paper editorialized, yet noted that in the future “these things will become more familiar.”¹³⁴

The effort to establish the credibility of Mormondom’s woman suffragists clearly was meeting with some success.¹³⁵ When bills that included disfranchising Utah’s women were submitted to Congress in 1877–78, they were condemned not only by Mormon women, but also by Spencer and other national suffragists.¹³⁶ In January ^[213] 1878 Sara Spencer made an appearance before a congressional committee in opposition to legislation designed to end polygamy by disfranchising Utah’s women.¹³⁷ Spencer argued that polygamy protected the territory from the “social evil,” but she also called the new proposals to disfranchise Mormon women anti-female. And she suggested facetiously that the sponsors of the bills should change them to ones that intended to “disfranchise the men of Utah and such women as acknowledge more than one husband.”¹³⁸

Mormon women had gained an outspoken ally in the person of Spencer. With the appearance of Woman’s Words, Spencer had new opportunities to increase her status in the woman suffrage community. Soon her speeches, letters and news of her lobbying efforts began to frequent its pages. In April 1878 she became the editor of its “Washington Department.” In July the paper announced that she had purchased “one-half interest” of the monthly, and that it would now be “issued simultaneously in Philadelphia and Washington.”¹³⁹ Spencer’s new responsibilities coincided with the renewed efforts to disfranchise Mormon women; her opposition to that campaign and the opposition of other National Association members were articulated in the monthly.^{140 [214]}

At the same time, however, a new twist appeared in the argument to defend the vote in Utah. In this view, the growing sentiment to disfranchise Utah’s women was seen as evidence of male repression. Lillie Devereux Blake, president of the New York Woman Suffrage Association, argued that the disfranchisement campaign reflected men’s willingness to blame and punish women for society’s ills: it was not the men of Utah who were being threatened with disfranchisement; it was the women. This, Blake argued, was the same as Rhode Island’s attempt to curb intemperance by refusing to sell women liquor, or the attempt in other places to deny women access to “places of amusement” in the fear that “some horrid fallen women” will seduce “some poor innocent man,” adding, “if there is such a thing.” Blake did not defend woman suffrage in Utah on ideological grounds. And in her opinion, because both men and women were under “Mormon rule,” voting was “almost useless.” But if any bill was to be drawn, she concluded, it should “disfranchise all polygamists.”¹⁴¹

Wells wrote that she had some problems with “one paragraph” of the article, but despite those “differences of opinion,” she republished it in the Woman’s Exponent.142 Disfranchising all polygamists had already been proposed, but that an outspoken suffragist such as ^[215] Blake would suggest that tactic foreshadowed what was ahead for the Mormons.¹⁴³

The relationship between Wells and Spencer became a significant factor in the National Association’s support of Mormon women. Wells herself underscored Spencer’s importance when she reminded her sisters that Spencer “must not be forgotten in our little paper, nor in Mormon history when it is written.”¹⁴⁴ But Wells’ passion for politics, faith in the political process, and attention to the political actions of women outside the territory also established her credibility with national suffragists. The combination of Wells’ persistence and political commitment and Spencer’s temerity strengthened the relationship between Mormon suffragists and the National Association despite the National’s continuing attempts to sidestep the issue of polygamy.

Whatever Emmeline Wells had accomplished for her community, one thing is clear: she effectively made a case that Mormon women were credible representatives of their own interests, even though most woman suffragists could not fully endorse all the rights Mormon women advocated. By legitimizing the representation claims of Mormon women, the National took action, which shows that in some corners of the woman suffrage movement, the rights of women were broadly interpreted and, ^[216] consequently, even conflicting ideas deserved recognition.

*     *     *

Between 1876 and 1878 the configuration of the relationship between Utah’s activist women and national suffragists had changed. The early affiliation between the women of the New Movement and the National Association was ebbing, as that with Mormon suffragists was building. The reform movement’s advocacy of woman suffrage narrowed to independent undertakings by 1876; Charlotte Godbe remained the New Movement’s most visible figure, although she never served as an official representative to the National or American Associations’ boards. In 1877 Emmeline Wells joined Annie Godbe on the National’s board as Utah’s co-representatives; the following year a non-Mormon suffragist, Ellen Gifford Haydon, replaced Annie Godbe.¹⁴⁵

After the Supreme Court ruling on Minor v. Happersett, the National abandoned the New Departure political strategy and began working on a new nationwide campaign for the Sixteenth Amendment, returning, the American Association thought, to a more realistic approach to federal action.¹⁴⁶ And in 1877 each association had worked for the passage of a woman suffrage referendum in the new state of Colorado, whose ^[217] constitution had not enfranchised women. Anthony, Stone and Blackwell all made extended tours of the state. Despite this appearance of unity, woman suffrage was defeated two to one. According to one historian, these years do not show “a slackening of effort but a marked imbalance in ratio of effort to gain.”¹⁴⁷

At the National’s January 1878 annual Washington convention, the new woman suffrage amendment was introduced. Several days later, Senator Aaron A. Sargent offered for the first time a federal amendment to grant woman suffrage that would take more than four decades to pass though its language never changed. Although a “galaxy of the women’s best speakers” was heard at the congressional hearing, the disinterest in Congress was obvious. Elizabeth Cady Stanton commented that she had “never felt more exasperated than on [that] occasion” and indeed, she added, that it took all her strength not to “hurl” her manuscript at the head of the chairman for his rude treatment of the suffragists.¹⁴⁸

The lost statehood campaign and the disinterest expressed by most congressmen did not catalyze woman suffragists; in fact, their differences continued to be evident. Because the nation was facing a mid-term election in the summer of 1878, Lucy Stone asked Anthony to clarify her statement that “suffragists will go for ^[218] any party” endorsing woman suffrage. Anthony replied that the statement was correct, except that she should have said “I” instead of “the suffragists.” Anthony said she was even less willing “to-day” to sacrifice woman suffrage for any more minor question, meaning any issue, than she had been a decade earlier.¹⁴⁹ Other ideological and strategic differences continued to divide the two wings.¹⁵⁰

By 1878 the Woman’s Journal became outspoken against polygamy and the Mormons. In fact, by that time, the Salt Lake Tribune called attention to the Journal’s stance, noting that as “of late,” it had become “very chary of handling the Mormon abomination.”¹⁵¹ In early 1878 the Journal had denounced a clause in a newly introduced bill that would disfranchise all of Utah’s women; nevertheless, the Tribune was right in detecting its new editorial wariness.¹⁵² The same year the American Association showed even more caution. Meeting in Washington, D.C., it praised Wyoming’s experience with woman suffrage and discussed the importance of suffrage in “Washington Territory,” Idaho, Montana, Dakota, Arizona and New Mexico, without mentioning the fact that it was being threatened in Utah.^{153 [219]}

At the National’s annual meeting only two months later, discussions of the vote in Utah show a very different stance:

Whereas: the General Government has refused to exercise Federal power to protect women in their citizens’ right to vote in the various States and Territories, it should forbear to exercise Federal power to disfranchise the women of Utah, who have had a more just and liberal spirit shown them by Mormon men then Gentile women in the States have yet received from their rulers.¹⁵⁴

That resolution along with others stated with equal boldness, were submitted by Sara Spencer, chair of the National’s committee on resolutions.¹⁵⁵ Still, the National Association also tried to maintain a balanced position, selecting both a Mormon woman and a non-Mormon woman for its board in an attempt to resolve the debate over Utah representation.¹⁵⁶ But at its regular meetings the National continued to pass resolutions condemning disfranchisement efforts, and the voice of the National Association, Matilda J. Gage’s National Citizen and Ballot Box, did not shy from the topic.¹⁵⁷ Even more important was the continued willingness of the National’s suffragists to defend the rights of Mormon women before the Congress. Just how far the National Association was willing to go in 1878 soon became evident. ^[220]