1 Divided Territory: 1871

Over the sound of the braking wheels and the wheezing engine of the westbound train, the conductor made his final call. Ahead, he shouted, was “the Devil’s sliding place” where “he came down to earth when kicked out of heaven.”¹ Soon two parallel outcroppings of rock appeared, running from the rim of the canyon wall to the river below. For nineteenth-century adventurers to territorial Utah, this canyon was a scenic wonder not to be missed; its end marked the beginning of the Salt Lake Valley.

It was June 28, 1871. Standing on the back platform of the train, suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony watched in “awe and wonder.” At mid-life both women were seasoned travelers, but this was their first journey to the Far West. In Wyoming they had shaken hands with the first women in the nation to win the ballot. Now, against the backdrop of the “far-famed” Great Salt Lake, they prepared to disembark. Closing the latches on their bags, Stanton and Anthony readied themselves to meet the second group of women in the United States to receive the ballot: the women of Utah.^{2 [1]}

Anthony and Stanton arrived in the territory curious and excited. The presence of polygamy in Mormondom was a constant source of curiosity to outsiders; the two suffragists were no exception.³ Anthony and Stanton’s excitement sprang not only from the recent enfranchisement of Utah’s women but also from the appearance of a newly organized reform movement within the Mormon community. That movement sparked hopes for social and political change in the territory. One of its leaders, William Godbe, met their train and hosted their visit.⁴

The division in the Mormon community that prompted the formation of the reform movement grew from differing visions of Mormon Zion, including Brigham Young’s economic strategies, but members of the “New Movement” also called for other religious and secular reforms.⁵ Although contention between the Mormon factions was serious enough to sever long-term relationships and create deep hostilities, two issues did not play a role in stoking disagreement: plural marriage and woman suffrage. Each faction contained both polygamists and monogamists, and each had supported woman suffrage in Utah for pragmatic as well as ideological reasons.^{6 [2]}

Beginning in 1870, women from both factions attempted to establish their primacy as the standard-bearer of woman’s rights in the territory, but each looked in different directions for support. The Mormon women took initiatives within the territory, the dissenting women looked to the national arena.

Anthony and Stanton’s weeklong visit to Utah in 1871 established the foundation for a relationship between national suffragists and Utah’s women—a relationship that was always complicated and generally tentative, but one that endured nonetheless.⁷ The daily meetings between the national woman suffrage leaders and Utah’s two competing factions serve as a convenient analytical mechanism for exploring how and why Utah’s women were enfranchised and how the New Movement’s women fit into that story. These encounters also establish the background, issues, and players that comprised the initial phase of this relationship.

This study argues that the activities of Mormon women helped to secure woman suffrage for Utah in 1870. By the late 1860s the politicization of Mormon women that had begun during the 1840s shifted to a new level of highly visible political activism, and such activism contributed ^[3] to women’s enfranchisement. Initially it was the presence of the New Movement reformers, which helped establish a relationship between Utah’s women and eastern suffragists. The women of the New Movement gave national suffragists reason to be sanguine about the possibility of change in the territory, which lent credibility to the suffragists’ claims of the curative power of the vote. Although it was the New Movement women who opened the door to the East for Utah’s suffragists and advanced the women’s rights dialogue in the territory, ultimately their efforts prepared the way for a relationship between Mormon women and national suffragists.

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Anthony and Stanton’s stopover in Utah was part of a western lecture tour planned to take their cause to the Pacific Coast. It was the first time leaders in the organized woman suffrage movement had undertaken such an ambitious venture, one made all the more impressive by the ages of the two leaders: Stanton was fifty-six and Anthony five years her junior. As co-founders of the National Woman Suffrage Association (N.W.S.A.), they were also seeking local affiliates for their branch of the movement; Lucy Stone’s American Woman Suffrage ^[4] Association (A.W.S.A.) represented the competing wing of the movement. Like Utah’s Mormon community, in 1871, the national woman suffrage movement was deeply divided.⁸

Upon their arrival, Anthony and Stanton discovered that Utah’s factions were making plans for separate Fourth of July celebrations. On one side, as Anthony put it, were the “Brighamites,” the majority of Mormondom; on the other, the “come-outers,” the disaffected Mormons. Non-Mormons divided according to their inclinations.⁹ Despite the serious polarization of the community, both sides eagerly awaited the arrival of Anthony and Stanton.¹⁰ Each offered the suffragists the use of their facilities: the dissenters, the newly constructed Liberal Institute; the majority, the Tabernacle.¹¹

Anthony and Stanton immediately realized the need for prudent scheduling: they lengthened their stay to a week and made separate appearances at competing events. With this strategy they hoped to appease both factions, and secure separate and private meetings with Mormon and non-Mormon women.

A mixed crowd of Utahans had their first look at the “motherly face of the Hon. Elizabeth Cady Stanton” and the “maidenly Susan B.” Thursday evening, June 29.^{12 [5]} Standing at the pulpit of the Mormon Tabernacle, her cumulus cloud of white hair floating above her deceptively gentle face, Stanton launched into a discussion of political equality for women. It was the beginning of a week, Anthony noted, in which she and Stanton “fired some political and social guns” at “the very heart” of the city.¹³

Yet on that first evening the predominantly Mormon audience did not hear an unrelenting attack; they also heard plenty of praise and prescription. For some, no doubt, the praise was surprising. Stanton asserted that she would rather be a woman among the Mormons “with the ballot in my hands than among Gentiles [non-Mormons] without the ballot.” In Utah and Wyoming, she argued, for the first time in the “history of the world” there was “true Republicanism”: men and women “enjoying equal political rights.”¹⁴ The prescription, however, was not new, nor was the fact that it was directed at Mormon women. Stanton told them that armed with the ballot, the continued existence of any “social institution degrading to women” would be “the fault of the women themselves.”¹⁵

One month before Utah’s women had been enfranchised in 1870, Susan Anthony had proposed that Congress pass a ^[6] law that would “enfranchise the women of Utah, as the one safe, sure and swift means to abolish polygamy of that Territory.”¹⁶ Anthony’s strategy was not new. Other non-Mormons had assumed that enfranchised Mormon women would vote to end polygamy, and as early as 1856 the women’s rights movement had been described as “an antidote to polygamy.”¹⁷ In 1867 after the New York Times suggested enfranchising Utah’s women as a means of ending polygamy, woman suffrage and plural marriage were permanently linked.¹⁸

Concern with polygamy had been spurred in 1856 when the Republican Party platform asserted Congress’s power over the territories and claimed responsibility for ending “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.” The first serious attempt to end polygamy was introduced by Senator Justin Morrill that year, and by 1862 the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act was finally passed into law. For a variety of reasons, including the difficulty of enforcement, the Morrill Act proved ineffective. That realization sparked new legislative efforts. In 1868 Senator Aaron H. Cragin introduced “drastic” new legislation, as did Representative Shelby M. Cullom a year later.^{19 [7]}

In 1869 Representative George W. Julian submitted a bill that would enfranchise Utah’s women as a means for ending polygamy.²⁰ Given mounting efforts by Congress to pass anti-polygamy legislation, most Mormons received Julian’s proposition favorably.²¹ That was not what the Congress had expected; sensing a flaw in their tactics they abandoned that approach. Shortly afterward Utah’s territorial legislature took the initiative and passed woman suffrage: the measure was signed into law February 12, 1870.

The passage of woman suffrage bills in Utah, and Wyoming two months earlier had provoked a variety of responses and speculation. In Wyoming, Stanton was informed that the “whole thing was begun in a joke.” To which she replied, “it was the best joke ever perpetrated.”²² The Utah act excited three general responses in the non-Mormon press: outrage, wait-and-see, and surprise. An avowedly anti-Mormon newspaper in Corinne, Utah, declared it a “farce.” The New York Times wondered if Mormon women would “throw off their present degradation with the aid of the ballot.”²³ The Woman’s Journal and the Revolution hoped enfranchising Utah women would prove the curative power of the vote.²⁴ The ^[8] Phrenological Journal thought it “a matter for astonishment: that the women of Utah, supposedly enslaved, should suddenly be found on the same platform with John Stuart Mill and his sisterhood.”²⁵ The Mormon press was supportive. The Ogden Junction encouraged women to use their vote because it was their legal right and because the males in the territory “need stirring up.” The Deseret News asserted that woman suffrage would “strengthen the cause of Zion, including polygamy.”²⁶

At the time the Mormon and non-Mormons argued over the motives of the Mormon-dominated legislature. Historians have continued those arguments. Some dismiss the 1870s enfranchisement as a fluke; others believe Mormon women were passive recipients of the vote or pawns of the male leadership. Still others are convinced the legislature acted progressively on the basis of a generally egalitarian ideology.²⁷

Amidst this array of opinions, historians have ignored the possibility that Mormon women themselves had a role in securing woman suffrage. Because Mormon women neither publicly drafted petitions nor held public demonstrations to seek the vote, many historians have concluded that they were not politically active until ^[9] after they were enfranchised and then only in response to attempts to disfranchise them.²⁸ The reaction of Mormon women to their enfranchisement and their readiness to assume an active political role in their community suggest a different conclusion: that they were politicized prior to enfranchisement and their activities contributed to their own enfranchisement.²⁹

The roots of the politicization of L.D.S. women can be found in the early years of the Mormon community, and are intertwined not only with the persecution of the Saints, but also with the introduction of plural marriage in the 1830s and the establishment of the Female Relief Society in 1842.

Plural marriage was not one of the original doctrines Joseph Smith had included in the “restored” gospel of Jesus Christ when he founded the L.D.S. Church in 1830.³⁰ However, shortly thereafter he informed his most trusted followers of a revelation that would also restore the “patriarchal marriage” of the Old Testament as an aspect of the new gospel. Through it family and marital relations would be perfected. Nevertheless, such claims were not easily accepted even among the most faithful; both the doctrine and the practice were kept secret for ^[10] several years. Not until 1843 did the revelation of the “new and everlasting covenant of marriage” become an official church doctrine.³¹ Although the Saints began practicing “the principle” openly after their exodus from Illinois in the mid-1840s, only after they were safely established in Utah in 1852 did they announce their practice to an already suspicious world.

By the time the Mormons acknowledged plural marriage as a fundamental tenet of their faith, it had created internal divisions, fueled rumors, and helped inflame anti-Mormon sentiment, which provoked persecution of the Saints and the martyrdom of Joseph Smith. Belief in plural marriage implied a rejection of the Christian concept of marriage and family, and thus was seen by many non-Mormons as a threat to the very foundation of civilized behavior, social stability, and Christian morality.³²

Mormon women had been taught that plural marriage, and indeed all the doctrines of the restored gospel, signaled the commencement of a new era for women, and they were promised equality and privileges greater than womankind had ever known.³³ Over time the grounds for Mormon women’s own defense of plural marriage changed, ^[11] but they fell into three general categories. The first was its practical short-term benefits, such as all women having the opportunity to marry and be provided for—some Mormon women claimed it was better to have a part of a good man than all of an inferior one. Plural marriage, they claimed, also had long-term benefits: it removed the curse of Eve which Mormon women cited as the source of woman’s inferior status. Of course, plural marriage had other worldly benefits; through it, for example, women could become partners in progressively advancing toward a state of godhood.

Some scholars have stated that the “crowning doctrine concerning women, pronounced by the Prophet” was the Mormon belief in a Mother in heaven. This concept apparently was taught by Joseph Smith to some women and was a “logical extension” of Smith’s teaching that “the godhood is eternal parenthood.” Eliza R. Snow, one of the first women to become a plural wife to Smith and eventually the most powerful woman in Mormondom, has been credited as the first to put the concept into writing. Snow acknowledged that her sentiments also had been an articulation of her “longing for and connection to the Mother who is in heaven.”^{34 [12]}

Whatever combination of rationales enabled Mormon women to believe in or practice plural marriage the most necessary ingredient was faith. The bottom line for all Mormons was that God had willed “patriarchal marriage;” nonetheless the Saints were instructed to pray for a personal testimony of the truth of the doctrine and to seek spiritual guidance before entering the practice.³⁵

Clear evidence of a new era for Mormon women was expressly manifest by the founding of the “Female Relief Society of Nauvoo” in 1842. Sarah M. Kimball has been credited with the original idea for a woman’s organization, which seems consistent with the time and place of her birth. Like so many woman suffrage leaders, including Anthony and Stanton, Kimball was nurtured in upstate New York. Born in the small town of Phelps, her 1818 birth also made her a contemporary of the national women suffrage leaders.³⁶ In 1833 Sarah Melissa Granger traveled with her parents to join the Mormon community in Kirtland, Ohio, then moved with the Saints to Nauvoo, Illinois, where she married Hirum S. Kimball, a prosperous non-Mormon merchant.³⁷

Sarah Kimball called a meeting in her Nauvoo home to organize a society for women in 1842. When the meeting ^[13] was over she asked Eliza Snow to write a “constitution and by-laws” and to give them to Joseph Smith. Snow reported back to Kimball that Smith stated the Lord had something better in store, and Smith wanted to meet with the sisters so he could organize them “under the priesthood after the pattern of the priesthood.” Until that happened, Smith declared, the church would never be “perfectly organized.”³⁸ Thus, the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo was founded on March 17, 1842, and some Mormon women saw it as a source of authority akin to the priesthood.

The new organization had secular functions as well. Kimball later asserted that when the Relief Society was established, “the sure foundations of the suffrage cause were deeply and permanently laid.”³⁹ During its brief existence in Nauvoo, the Relief Society helped the sisters develop many of the same skills other American women were learning in similar benevolent associations, but in addition, Mormon women took part in their first united political action when they drafted a petition seeking protection for the community of Nauvoo and delivered it to the governor.^{40 [14]}

In the upheavals following the death of Joseph Smith, and the public insurrection of Smith’s wife Emma, Brigham Young disbanded the Relief Society. Mormon women resented giving up their organization and were firm in their conviction that it endowed them with specific spiritual powers. To that claim an angry Young replied he would summon the Relief Society when he wanted their aid, and if anyone saw “Females huddling together veto the concern and if they say Joseph started it tell them it is a damned lie for I know he never encouraged it.”⁴¹

Mormon women, however, steadfastly held to their belief that the Relief Society was rightfully theirs. They frequently asserted their convictions by quoting Joseph Smith’s promise: “I now turn the key to you in the name of God and this Society shall rejoice and knowledge and intelligence shall flow down from this time.”⁴² For the sisters who were taught the blessing of plural marriage directly from Smith, those teachings were a significant source of empowerment. Those teachings not only served to bolster Mormon women’s resolve when attacked from outside, but they also subsequently cited Smith’s words to defend their position inside the church. ^[15]

If Mormon women were empowered during the Nauvoo period, the next twenty years tested the durability of that empowerment. The Relief Society remained in a state of limbo, although the bonds between Mormons deepened in the hardships of the exodus and pioneer experience. The frequent absence of men from their homes, attributable to missionary service as well as polygamy, added to the difficulties of raising young families and reinforced the need for women’s self-sufficiency. Still, their continuous practice of “gifts of the spirit,” and faith that their religion had unique covenants with women helped sustain the Mormon women through those difficult years.⁴³

Circumstances in the pioneer community prevented the re-establishment the Relief Society between 1844 and 1866. There seems to have been a lack of consensus among the brethren that reestablishing the Society would be beneficial.⁴⁴ Nevertheless, by 1866 Brigham Young was rethinking the programs and policies of the past and beginning to seek new ways to solve some of Zion’s ongoing problems. In that changing climate the sisters were quick to take advantage of the opportunity to be ^[16] useful, which in turn provided them with a new and successful chance to reestablish the Relief Society.

Although Eliza R. Snow was the most powerful woman in Mormondom and a wife of Brigham Young, it was Sarah Kimball who “sparked” the reestablishment of the Relief Society, just as she had done in Nauvoo. Nevertheless, it was Snow who was “set apart as President over the entire sisterhood of the church” and authorized to reorganize the Relief Society.⁴⁵ “The time had come,” Snow stated, “for the sisters to act in a wider sphere.”⁴⁶

By the late 1860s Mormon women could be classified into three categories. At the top of the female hierarchy was a small cadre of the “leading sisters.”⁴⁷ These women were the elite, most powerful and least diverse women in Mormon society. They all had joined the church in its early years, several had been married to Joseph Smith, and all shared the hardships that followed Nauvoo. The leading sisters became what they were not only through their family connections, but also because they were faithful, literate, and often ambitious. The second group was the supporting sisters, several hundred women who were officers of the local wards, some of whom lived outside Salt Lake or belonged to the younger generation, ^[17] but who could call for mass action and support from thousands of member sisters. The third group of women was the member sisters, the most disparate group. They were the female rank and file, several thousand women spread throughout the territory. These women more closely resemble the spectrum of other nineteenth-century American immigrants.

As Snow began reestablishing the Relief Society ward by ward throughout the territory, she reminded the sisters of her role in the Nauvoo Relief Society. The Relief Society, she insisted, was established “according to the order of God,” but the sisters were to obey the bishop: “the first principle is union.”⁴⁸ Snow consistently counseled the sisters on their duties as wives and mothers, but she also promoted self-improvement programs and instructed the sisters to prepare themselves for a broader field of activity.⁴⁹ All of this led one historian to call Snow, “the female voice of the male hierarchy.”⁵⁰ The Relief Society had entered a period of “wise” stewardship.⁵¹

The programs and priorities of every Relief Society reflected the counsel of Snow and other leading sisters as well as the vision of local officers.⁵² As president ^[18] of the Fifteenth Ward Relief Society, Sarah Kimball, for example, promoted women’s economic contribution to the community. She developed programs for home manufacturing and secured construction of a storehouse, financed, owned and operated by women; the sisters were, Kimball taught, “pioneers for their sex.”⁵³ She also encouraged women’s independence and self-reliance, but she was careful not to appear too autonomous and was quick to seek the bishop’s approval of her various projects.⁵⁴ During the hiatus in the Relief Society’s existence, the sisters obviously had learned the need to act prudently; still, the Relief Society came to provide a sanctioned setting for a growing discussion of women’s rights and responsibilities.⁵⁵

By 1868 the successes of the Relief Society were being publicly recognized, and the concerns of the brethren were waning.⁵⁶ Utah’s press increasingly noted that “women’s sphere of usefulness” was expanding both inside and outside the territory.⁵⁷ As early as December 1868 the Deseret News addressed and endorsed the merits of universal suffrage, and over the ensuing months articles relating to women increased in the territory.⁵⁸ Sarah Kimball noted this flurry of attention in May 1869 ^[19] telling her Relief Society sisters that “there never was a time when women abilities and duties” had been discussed more both in “public and private as the present.”⁵⁹

This increased interest in women’s issues and the involvement of the sisters in Relief Society projects reinforced their self-esteem and contributed to their growing assertiveness. In the past when Mormon women had been condemned for polygamy, they had chosen not to respond. After the Cragin bill was introduced in 1868, that changed, Mormon women quickly drafted a letter condemning the “despicable Bill.”⁶⁰

The introduction of a new anti-polygamy measure in 1869 served as the final catalyst that propelled Mormon women into an era of highly visible political activism. Among the measures in the legislation, submitted by Representative Shelby M. Cullom, was the disfranchisement of polygamists or anyone who believed in plural marriage. To achieve this end, women could be compelled to testify against their husbands and convicted of “concubinage” and fined $1,000 and sentenced to five years in jail.⁶¹ The Saints considered the substance and language of the bill outrageous, as did a number of non-Mormons who found the ^[20] bill offensive and spoke against its passage.⁶² “Our sisters,” Brigham Young reported, were “in high dudgeon” over the new legislation.⁶³

A turning point in the activism of Mormon women came in January 1870 when the leading sisters resolved to hold a massive public demonstration against the Cullom bill and called a meeting to organize the protest. At the planning meeting, Eliza Snow declared it was “high time” for Mormon women to “rise up in the dignity of our calling and speak for ourselves.” Sarah Kimball added that Mormon women would be “unworthy of the names we bear and of the blood in our veins, should we longer remain silent.” The Cullom bill, she stated, would make “menial serfs” of Mormon men, and if it did that to men, she asked, what would it do to women? A vote to hold a protest was unanimous.⁶⁴

Then, the planning meeting suddenly took a radical turn. Bathsheba Smith, wife of a church leader, stated that she was pleased with the preceding actions and moved “that we demand of the Gov. the right of franchise.” A vote was taken, and the “vote carried.” After which, Lucy W. Kimball moved that “we be represented in ^[21] Washington.” Eliza Snow and Sarah Kimball were “elected as representatives.”⁶⁵

In response to such bold action, one might have expected newspaper headlines in Utah the next day to proclaim: “Women to Seek Franchise from Utah Governor,” or “Snow and Kimball Elected to Represent Mormon Women in Washington.” Instead, five days later the Deseret News headline read, “Minutes of a Ladies Mass Meeting.” The article, which included the comments of Sarah Kimball and Eliza Snow as well as a full copy of the protest resolutions, blandly concluded: “Miss E.R. Snow, Mrs. L.W. Kimball and Mrs. B. Smith made a few very appropriate remarks expressing their hearty concurrence in the movement and in the measures adopted by the meeting.” The article was signed by Sarah Kimball.⁶⁶ Neither the motion to seek the franchise nor the election of Snow and Kimball as representatives to Washington was mentioned.

Although minutes from the meeting show solid evidence of the increasing political activism of Mormon women, the exclusion of both motions from the public record obscured the women’s efforts from public (and historical) scrutiny. Several possible reasons exist for the omission. The sisters may have been fearful of appearing ^[22] too aggressive, or they may have wanted to discuss their resolutions with the brethren before making them public. Both possibilities also suggest why the activities of Mormon women are so difficult to trace: they may have been more interested in being effective than in attracting attention, and thought a low profile was critical to their success. What the minutes do show is that Mormon women were talking privately about woman suffrage, and prior to their enfranchisement they proposed a means to secure it.⁶⁷

Another possible reason for not highlighting their woman suffrage action was that preparations for the “Great Indignation Meeting” required immediate priority. At that protest meeting, held January 13, three thousand Mormon women joined to condemn the Cullom anti-polygamy bill and to hear the “leading sisters” of Mormondom speak for the first time from the pulpit of the “great” Tabernacle.⁶⁸ What the proceedings of this meeting also show is that by this time some Mormon women had come to see polygamy as a women’s rights issue: for some that meant women should have the right to choose to live in plural marriage. Nine of the fourteen recorded speakers defended polygamy without raising the issue of women’s ^[23] rights or suffrage, but the other five made connections between their personal and religious freedom and their rights as citizens and as women. Linking women’s rights and the defense of polygamy is evidence of the growing attention Mormon women were paying to such issues, as well as their desire to portray polygamy as a means for improving women’s lives.

Though undertaken to protest anti-polygamy legislation, the “Indignation” meeting ultimately served many purposes. It allowed Mormon women to demonstrate to the outside world that they were articulate and willing to defend their beliefs. It also gave them an opportunity to show the brethren that they could organize a successful public demonstration and that their effectiveness in a “wider sphere” made them valuable assets “to the cause of Zion.” In addition, the patriarchal leaders could only applaud the women’s public defense of polygamy; therefore, the sisters could not be censured for acting outside their appropriate sphere. Defending polygamy thus became a sanctioned mechanism by which women increased their public activism.⁶⁹

The newspaper coverage of the meeting offered the most positive account ever given of Mormon women and that ^[24] helped to deflect criticism of the whole community. The New York Times headlined the meeting as “remarkable.” The New York Herald stated, “In logic and in rhetoric the so called degraded ladies of Mormondom are quite equal to the woman’s rights women of the East.”⁷⁰ And the Journal of Commerce said that rhetorically the Mormon women were “fully up to the mark of the best efforts of Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Anthony [sic] or any other of the female suffrage women who are trying to stir up public sentiment.”⁷¹ The Deseret News gloated over the attention the women received from national newspapers, and the Ogden Junction observed that the protest has “drawn out the ladies of Utah from silence and obscurity, exhibited them before the world as women of thought, force and ability.”⁷²

Almost immediately following the protest meeting the male leaders of the church threw their weight behind the legislation to enfranchise the women of the territory.⁷³ By February 12, 1870, the acting governor, S.A. Mann, a federally appointed non-Mormon, signed the bill despite his own reservations.⁷⁴

The following week a meeting of Mormon women turned into “a feast of women’s anticipations.”⁷⁵ Thankful that ^[25] Mann had signed the woman suffrage bill, Eliza Snow asked that a committee be selected to draft an “expression of gratitude.”⁷⁶ That task completed, a number of women expressed their feelings about their new political rights and responsibilities. If a single perception united them, it was that they had entered a new phase in the “era of women.” Several speakers expressed their pleasure in gaining the vote, calling it the “reform.” One stated she was “glad to see our daughters elevated with man;” another that she “believed that woman was coming up in the world;” and a third claimed she had “looked for this day for years.” As she saw it, the “yoke on woman is partly removed.” Bathsheba Smith was appointed to journey to southern Utah to preach a series of reforms for women the sisters called “retrenchment,” and “woman’s rights, if she wished.”⁷⁷

There were also words of caution. Margaret Smoot said that she “never had any desire for more rights,” that she had considered “politics aside from the sphere of woman,” but Wilmarth East said she could not “agree with Sister Smoot in regard to woman’s rights”; she had always wanted “a voice in the politics of the nation, as well as to rear a family.”^{78 [26]}

For Sarah Kimball gaining suffrage was a turning point. She told the women that she had “waited patiently for a long time, and now that we were granted the right of suffrage, she would openly declare herself a woman’s rights woman.” The record then notes that she “called upon those who would do so to back her up, whereupon many manifested their approval.”⁷⁹ Hers are not the words of a woman who had been recently politicized. Moreover, she was not referring to religious rights: “woman’s rights” included the secular rights of women, political, economic, and social. It is hardly surprising that not everyone at the meeting was ready to back up “Sister Kimball.” Declaring oneself to be a “woman’s rights woman” was a bold thing for any woman, in the East or the West, to do. In fact, it was so daring that Kimball had waited until after suffrage was granted to make a public declaration.

Mormon women helped gain suffrage by being activists on their own behalf. Suffrage was not granted in 1870 because of an overwhelming egalitarian impulse on the part of the brethren; rather, the usual pragmatic decision-making process was at work. Four months before women were enfranchised, the male leadership was still ^[27] undecided about the wisdom of woman suffrage.⁸⁰ The women of Utah appear to have been enfranchised after they had demonstrated their potential for political usefulness. Being “useful” was critical to building Zion.

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Susan Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were eager to meet privately with these newly enfranchised Mormon women. After their first public meeting they called a second: for “Ladies Only.” The announced topic of the lecture was “Marriage and Maternity,” to which the Salt Lake Tribune added that Stanton was desirous “of acquainting herself with the views of the ladies of Salt Lake.”⁸¹ But Anthony and Stanton were equally anxious to acquaint the ladies of Salt Lake with their own views on the “woman question.” Their wing of the woman suffrage movement not only advocated women’s political equality but also engaged a broad spectrum of issues that required a multi-layered restructuring of American society: woman suffrage was a single, if primary, aspect of those changes. Some three hundred women listened as Stanton threw a “bombshell of woman’s individual sovereignty” into the “polygamic camp;” at least that was the way Susan Anthony described it.^{82 [28]}

The “ladies” who reported on the meeting to the Salt Lake Tribune described the lecture as “a very able, argumentative discourse.”⁸³ Stanton, according to those reports, “did not skim the surface” but touched on issues such as early marriage, which she opposed, and family planning, which she endorsed. Although she did not approve of polygamy, she thought it “less censurable than the practice of keeping mistresses by married men, which prevails in many places outside of Utah.”⁸⁴

Stanton was impressed by the sight of the “great Tabernacle half full of earnest women, honestly considering these grave social problems.” She was pleased that there was a “full and free discussion” of “the comparative merits of monogamic and polygamic relations of the sexes.”⁸⁵ And she joyfully insisted there was a “general response throughout the house” when she said that however the different systems of marriage varied, “they all agreed on one point, and that was the uniform subjection of women.”⁸⁶ Increasingly critical of religion in general, Stanton argued that all the patriarchs from Moses to Brigham Young had taught the “subjection of women, whether in monogamic or polygamic relations.”⁸⁷ After the meeting, she admitted, neither she nor Anthony ^[29] were surprised when the “doors of the Tabernacle were closed to our ministrations.” Still, she optimistically concluded, “we had crowded an immense amount of science, philosophy, history and general reflection into the five hours of free talk [which] those women had never heard before.”⁸⁸

Anthony and Stanton were also eager to meet with members of the New Movement. The first opportunity to do so was at the dedication ceremony of the Liberal Institute, a magnificent new building with the capacity to seat a thousand people. “If I were a believer in special providences,” Anthony told the capacity crowd, “I should say that my being in Salt Lake City at the dedication of the new Liberal Institute was one.”⁸⁹ At the dedication ceremony William S. Godbe, Elias L.T. Harrison, Amasa Lyman, and Henry Lawrence, whom Anthony called “the high priests of the new order,” led the congregation in “songs of freedom, and poured out their rejoicings over their emancipation” from the theocracy of Brigham Young, and they dedicated the Liberal Institute to “mental and religious liberty, progress and humanity.”^{90 [30]}

The New Movement, its members often called Godbeites, was a two-pronged rebellion: the secular prong aimed at the heart of the economic policies of Zion; the other probed Mormonism, with a notion of restoring it to an earlier purer state. The leaders of this rebellion, Ronald Walker has shown, were a remarkably homogeneous group. “Virtually every” Godbeite possessed “artistic, literary, or journalistic talents,” a large percentage were merchants, and most were in their thirties. These “converts to dissent” also had strong ties to “British Mormonism”: many came from English working-class backgrounds, which “predisposed them not only towards religious and political radicalism but also toward dissent and even agitation.”⁹¹ In addition, most of these leaders had not known the prophet Joseph Smith or shared the hegira to Utah.

Dissent had smoldered for several years before erupting in the fall of 1869. At the center of this frustration was a growing opposition to the social and economic aspects of Mormon Zion, as well as dissatisfaction with Brigham Young’s leadership.⁹² The developments that would radically alter the West, including the transcontinental railroad, looked promising ^[31] to this creative group of entrepreneurs. But to Young, the changes appeared to threaten Zion, and his policies focused increasingly on isolating the Mormon economy from the outside, hence his need for securing the help of Mormondom’s women to increase home manufacturing.⁹³

Godbe and other dissenters also shared a deepening skepticism about the spiritual component of the L.D.S. Church. Searching for a new spiritual experience, in 1868 Godbe and Elias L.T. Harrison participated in a series of séances with Spiritualist medium Charles Foster in New York. There they claimed to have communed with religious leaders from Joseph Smith to Jesus Christ. Convinced they had a spiritual and secular mandate to revolutionize Mormonism and force Zion out of its economic and cultural isolation, in 1869 they gradually unveiled their social and religious philosophy in the pages of their organ, the Utah Magazine.94

The New Movement’s call for economic and spiritual reforms led to a confrontation with the L.D.S. leadership. Godbe and Harrison were the first of a mounting number of excommunications. Soon a number of women joined “the apostates,” either through excommunication or by their own volition. The dissidents ^[32] founded the Church of Zion, an amalgam of Mormonism and Spiritualism, established a newspaper that eventually became the Salt Lake Tribune, developed plans for an intellectual and cultural revival with the Liberal Institute at its center, established its political arm named the Liberal party, and reached eastward for both economic and political reinforcement.

These Mormon-cum-Spiritualists had hoped to make polygamy a personal choice, thus allowing those families who were in plural marriages to remain so but not teaching plural marriage as a religious tenet.⁹⁵ As the program of the New Movement was unveiled, the Utah Magazine republished and edited an earlier series, “Woman and Plural Marriage.” These articles illuminate the dissenters’ struggle to establish an intellectual justification for plural marriage by attempting to distinguish between the beliefs of the orthodox Mormon, who practiced polygamy because God commanded it, from the beliefs of the New Movement reformers, who supposedly appreciated the deeper significance of plural marriage. According to this elevated concept of polygamy, men could reach the fullness of intellectual, spiritual and emotional growth only through the experience of loving ^[33] more than one woman; at the same time women could reach such fullness only by focusing on one man while developing the amplitude of her maternal nature. Men and women, this reasoning continued, were “equally illimitable,” the difference being that “man is endowed with polygamic qualities and woman with monogamic ones.”⁹⁶

But the issue of polygamy could never be put aside easily and certainly the New Movement’s approach had its own weaknesses. Taking a vocal stance in defiance of Mormon doctrines made the dissenters vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy by those who called for their complete disavowal of their former Mormon “institutions.” By the summer of 1871, the Godbeites were struggling to reconcile their family obligations, religious convictions, and political and economic aspirations.

Meeting with these New Movement reformers at the Liberal Institute on July 2, Susan Anthony’s thoughts turned to the women in the congregation, many of who were in plural marriages, and “her soul was dipped into the deepest sympathy” for them. Raised a Quaker, and accustomed to speaking in meetings when inspired, at a pause in the services she rose and addressed the pulpit. ^[34] She asked if “a woman and a stranger might be permitted a word.” The male circle on the stand arose and beckoned her forward.⁹⁷

Reaching the stand she asked the men if the women in their households were “today rejoicing in like manner” as they. “Since the hall was being dedicated to liberty,” she added, “she wanted liberty to be extended, not to men alone, but to women also . . . to have truly free men, women must be free.”⁹⁸ Her words, she recalled, brought tears to the eyes of “beautiful women” and those who were “old” and “wrinkled,” and men, she claimed, said they wanted “to shout.”⁹⁹ Anthony it seems had hit a raw nerve in the body of reformers since their dissent had not included a disavowal of polygamy.

Following Anthony’s meeting with the reformers, that evening Stanton had her turn. She confessed that she had been surprised to learn from Anthony’s description of the dedication services that men who had “just escaped from Mormonism, could so highly appreciate the value of truth outside of creeds,” and she congratulated them for having “placed themselves decidedly on the side of science, and against priestly authority.” That belief was compatible with her own encouragement of women “to commune with God ^[35] directly” and to make their own constitutions, codes, customs and creeds. Stanton liked reminding her audiences that the four most oppressive words for women were: “Thus Saith the Lord.”¹⁰⁰

The anti-authoritarian and “scientific” aspects of the New Movement originated in the Spiritualism that had attracted the dissenting Mormon elders.¹⁰¹ Those aspects of Spiritualism also attracted a number of woman suffragists. The religious sympathies of many nineteenth-century feminists, including Anthony and some say Stanton, had turned progressively to Spiritualism. Although Spiritualism is remembered for its sensational metaphysical elements—communing with the dead through mediums, rappings or using planchettes—the social and political stands of the Spiritualists are often forgotten. These attracted a wide array of nineteenth-century reformers.¹⁰²

Women’s rights advocates were drawn to Spiritualism’s “emphatic individualism,” which placed it in “opposition to established religion,” especially since it had “social and political implications as well.” Spiritualists denounced the “authority of churches over believers, of governments over citizens, of doctors over patients, of ^[36] masters over slaves, and most of all of men over women.”¹⁰³ “While not all feminists were Spiritualists,” Ann Braude argues, the argument continues, “all Spiritualists advocated woman’s rights.”¹⁰⁴

Mutual interest in Spiritualism among the New Movement reformers, male and female, and eastern suffragists gave them a common vocabulary and reinforced their sympathy and trust. Indeed, the “woman question,” and the writings of Mormon women, found a new forum after E.L.T. Harrison and William Godbe began publishing the Utah Magazine in 1868.¹⁰⁵ The new weekly, an independent literary journal, had received the approval of Brigham Young and support of the Deseret News in its early months.¹⁰⁶ Public discussions of women’s issues were not unheard of in Utah before 1868, although the practical aspects of women’s contribution to Zion were usually the dominant theme. In fact, the public airing of women’s issues owed much to critics of Mormondom, including those who had suggested that woman suffrage could end polygamy.

In May 1869 the Utah Magazine published, “Our Woman’s Platform.”¹⁰⁷ Although the cautious tone of the “Platform” makes it less interesting than the follow-up correspondence from women, a feminist critique of women’s ^[37] sphere by one of its editors, Edward Tullidge, established the magazine as a champion of women’s rights.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, in publishing “Our Woman’s Platform,” the New Movement inferred that women’s issues would be an element in the dissenters’ program.¹⁰⁹ In the New Movement’s platform published in 1870, the final paragraph asserted the “necessity” of the “highest appreciation” of woman, including her “development and culture as the only basis of a true civilization.”¹¹⁰ The statement, in fact, was one that most Mormons would have readily endorsed.

Although numerous components of the New Movement’s program can be attributed to Spiritualism, its advocacy of women’s rights was reinforced by Spiritualism rather than introduced by it. In fact Edward Tullidge, the most outspoken feminist of the New Movement, disdained Spiritualism and eventually blamed it for the failure of the movement.¹¹¹ The prominence of feminism among the dissenters may have resulted from “British Mormonism,” the influence of which has been shown as a common perspective of the Godbeites.¹¹² The Godbeites’ previous religious and intellectual experience seems to have informed their perspective on women’s rights. ^[38]

What Spiritualism seems to have done for the New Movement leaders was to advance the elements in Mormonism that had fostered women’s equality.¹¹³ From the early years of the L.D.S. Church the full participation of women was advanced, and promoted, as an aspect of the democratic nature of the new religion.¹¹⁴ Plural marriage in Mormon society reinforced the importance of women in the proper functioning of the home, in both the present and the afterlife. In addition, the barrage of criticisms that labeled Mormon women as “degraded” or “downtrodden” brought Mormon men, and women, to the defense and helped to reinforce the belief that portrayed plural marriage as a means for improving the status of woman. When Anthony and Stanton arrived in the territory, both of these factions were attempting to articulate an ideology that accommodated polygamy and woman’s equality.

*     *     *

No one slept soundly the night of July 3, 1871, in Salt Lake City. The streets echoed like a battlefield as firecrackers, “juvenile bombs, pistols, rifles and cannon” exploded throughout the night.¹¹⁵ At dawn, thirteen guns signaled the flag-raising ceremonies; at 7 a.m., three more announced the assembling of divisions ^[39] for the procession; and at 8 a.m., two final gunshots declared the formation for the parade—or rather one of the parades. For this Fourth of July was celebrated by two separate factions in the city.

The first parade followed a procession route that wound from City Hall to the new Tabernacle. In it fifteen-thousand marchers, mostly Mormons, trudged under a hot morning sun to the Temple grounds—more than watched from the sidelines.¹¹⁶ As the first procession ended, the second procession began. This one gathered at the Liberal Institute and was smaller in number; still, by one account the procession was nearly a mile long. To this parade flocked members of the New Movement, and a majority of non-Mormons, including miners who brought thirteen wagons, one was stacked with bullion and labeled “Redeemer of Utah.” The Tribune proudly declared, “No better show of its kind was ever seen in this city”—a claim made by both factions.¹¹⁷

Inside the Mormons’ new Tabernacle marchers filled the benches to overflowing; some, unable to find seats, found places outside near the doors or windows. But as a “stranger from the Atlantic,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton had no difficulty obtaining a seat. To her, the Tabernacle ^[40] with its American flags and banners, children and pioneers, musicians and speakers, presented an “animated appearance.”¹¹⁸ Along with the rest of the audience Stanton joined in the chorus of the “Star-Spangled Banner” performed by the Tabernacle Choir. It was an opportunity, she reported, to see “the Mormons in all their glory . . . all wound to the highest pitch of patriotic enthusiasm.”¹¹⁹ That “thoroughly democratic gathering,” she later claimed, “impressed” her more than any other Fourth of July “celebration” she ever attended.¹²⁰

Stanton also noted the “eloquence” of Mormon and non-Mormon orators, including an impromptu speech by Senator Thomas Fitch from Nevada.¹²¹ Having lost his congressional seat, Fitch had moved to Utah hoping to be appointed its senator by helping with a statehood bid—a strategy that had worked for him in Nevada. His speech, laced with humor intended to amuse the Mormons and irritate the non-Mormons focused on individual rights, which according to the Saints included plural marriage. But Fitch was no friend to polygamy, and he stated that the presence of plural marriage among the New Movement’s leaders proved their hypocrisy. For Stanton the speech smelled of political opportunism.¹²² And she probably agreed with ^[41] “liberals” who responded to Fitch by calling his “would-be-witty” speech “illiberal.”¹²³

While Stanton was meeting with the Mormons, Susan Anthony spent the Fourth of July at the Liberal Institute. The declarations of independence uttered by the leaders of the New Movement, she stated, were inspiring.¹²⁴ And undoubtedly she appreciated the words of a speaker who urged the audience to remember the words of E.L.T. Harrison, who stated, “we talk so much of the men . . . we should not forget the women.”¹²⁵ But as she had done in her first meeting with the New Movement reformers, Anthony began to think about the status of its women, and although in a different vein, her qualms were not unlike Fitch’s criticisms. The New Movement’s talk of liberty and independence and its advocacy of women’s equality were difficult for Anthony to reconcile with the fact such sentiments were coming from men who “had yet to learn to loose the bands of power over the women by their side.”¹²⁶

What loosening the “bands of power” meant for Anthony is difficult to assess. Neither Anthony nor Stanton revealed the tactical changes they would endorse, though they acknowledged the complexity of the matter.¹²⁷ Each ^[42] recognized that reworking power relations in monogamy was difficult and that polygamy magnified the challenge. Even given the will, the way lacked an easy solution—divorce was not an option that Stanton or Anthony could easily suggest. No solution would be easy, because the issues surrounding polygamy were so complicated and ultimately irresolvable.

Thus the “point of attack” the suffragists stressed in Utah was the subjection of women, and both Anthony and Stanton emphasized the fact that woman’s work “in monogamy and polygamy is essentially one and the same,” namely, gaining “power of her own subsistence.”¹²⁸ In this way they hoped to defuse the issue of polygamy by suggesting that monogamy was responsible for similar problems. Thus the suffragists were clearing the way to stand by the “liberal” reformers and overlook their lack of resolve on polygamy. But inadvertently they were also smoothing the path for a relationship with Mormon women.

*     *     *

The women of the New Movement invited Anthony and Stanton to attend the second meeting of the Ladies Mutual Improvement Society (L.M.I. Society) on July 5.¹²⁹ Shortly before the national suffragists had arrived in Utah, the ^[43] reform movement women had organized an independent woman’s association; apparently the “Ladies’ Aid Committee” called for in the New Movement’s Church of Zion did not have broad enough appeal to satisfy both the dissenting women and their non-Mormon allies.¹³⁰ With the prodding of visiting Spiritualists, the Reverend J.M. Spear and wife, the New Movement women organized an association with both a political and cultural bent.¹³¹

Three hundred women gathered at the Liberal Institute for the meeting with Stanton and Anthony, and over one hundred paid dues to join the new organization.¹³² The visiting suffragists, Susan Anthony wrote in her diary, had a “splendid time.”¹³³ Speaking at various intervals Anthony and Stanton covered a wide range of subjects. Stanton told the women that they had “accepted revelations through the male mind long enough,” and now it was time for them to establish their own beliefs without “man’s inspirations or interferences.”¹³⁴

But in fact Stanton and Anthony’s messages to the New Movement’s women did not differ much from that which had been delivered to the Mormon women: women must assert their individual sovereignty both at home and at church. Anthony’s comments that women had accepted revelations ^[44] through men “long enough” were applicable to both groups. Afterward, Anthony also used the same words to describe the dissident women she had used to portray Mormon women, “earnest” and “eager.”¹³⁵ But after the meeting with the reform women, Anthony had no second thoughts as she had had after meeting with Mormon women—no descriptions of “careworn, long-suffering faces” tempered her enthusiasm.¹³⁶

Like their orthodox sisters, many New Movement women had known the hardship of frontier life and the trials of polygamy, yet for the most part they were younger than prominent Mormon women. The noticeable exception was the L.M.I. Society’s president Fanny Stenhouse, the most notorious of the reform women because she subsequently authored two well-known exposés of polygamy.

Born in England in 1828, both Fanny and her husband, T.B.H., were slightly older than most of the New Movement leadership. The Stenhouses married in England in 1850, but they did not “gather” to Zion until nineteen years later. Arriving in Utah, the couple brought with them “charm and sophistication” and an impeccable record of faith. Their unique credentials included missionary work in England, Switzerland, and Italy, and the publication ^[45] of Le Reflecteur, a Mormon paper for French-speaking Swiss.¹³⁷

After moving to the United States, T.B.H. had written for the New York Herald, where he developed contacts in the non-Mormon world that served him for his lifetime.¹³⁸ The Stenhouses were showcase Mormons; according to one historian, they “were introduced to virtually every important visitor to the territory during the 1860s.”¹³⁹ But “Mr. S.” disrupted the household when he began courting a young woman he hoped to make his third wife. Fanny apparently had tolerated her husband’s second marriage reasonably well, but the new object of her husband’s attention was a more serious threat: she was Brigham Young’s beautiful and talented daughter Zina. Although the courtship did not result in marriage, the Stenhouses became estranged in the process. Both, however, became active in the New Movement.¹⁴⁰

Fanny Stenhouse had been, Anthony noted, through the “fires of persecution for leaving the Mormon Church.”¹⁴¹ By this Anthony was probably referring an incident Fanny cited as the source of her alienation from the Mormons. Returning to their home one evening in August 1870, the Stenhouses were accosted by “ruffians” who emptied ^[46] “squirts” of excrement on them. Although the Mormon and non-Mormon press condemned the act, that night, Fanny later declared, her relationship with the Mormon Church “was severed.”¹⁴² Fanny believed that the attack was the result of their activities in the reform movement.¹⁴³ Regardless of the reason for the assault, it testifies to the temper of the times. The “apostates” were berated from pulpit and press, and passions flared as a consequence. Former friends and neighbors economically and socially ostracized the dissenters. “The Mormon Zion,” historian Ronald Walker reminds us, was “no haven of civil rights.”¹⁴⁴

Although Fanny’s name was subsequently listed as a representative to the board from Utah among the officers of the National Woman Suffrage Association, the woman suffrage banner from inside the New Movement was carried instead by three of William Godbe’s wives: Annie Thompson, Mary Hampton, and the woman he married in 1869, Charlotte Ives Cobb.¹⁴⁵ Anthony and Stanton visited two of the Godbe women in their homes—Stanton “took tea” with Mary, Anthony with Annie.¹⁴⁶ Annie and Mary Godbe were both active suffragists, and for several years following Anthony and Stanton’s trip to Utah, they alternatively ^[47] served as Utah’s representatives to the board of the N.W.S.A.

Despite Annie and Mary Godbe’s involvement with the National Association, Godbe’s fourth wife, Charlotte, has received the most recognition for woman suffrage activism among the reform faction.¹⁴⁷ By December of 1870, she was already becoming known among national suffragists, and in May 1871, she was named as the Utah delegate to the National Woman’s Suffrage Educational Committee of the United States.¹⁴⁸

Charlotte Ives Cobb was born in Boston in the late 1830s, the youngest child of Augusta Adams Cobb, a member of the prominent Adams family. Her mother converted to Mormonism after hearing Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum preach in Boston (c.1833–34). In the 1840s, after years of practicing her religion in “secret and silence,” Augusta left her husband and several children to join the Saints in Nauvoo, Illinois.¹⁴⁹ She took two children with her, seven-year-old Charlotte, and a young boy, Brigham, who subsequently died. Augusta became Brigham Young’s fifth wife, and Charlotte grew up as a member of Young’s family, “receiving every advantage of education, culture and refinement which Utah afforded in those days.”¹⁵⁰ “As ^[48] a father,” Charlotte wrote to the Revolution, Young was “fond, affectionate, and indulgent” and “unsparing of means” for his children’s education.¹⁵¹ When Charlotte married William Godbe in April 1869, seven months before he was excommunicated, Brigham Young performed the sealing ceremony.¹⁵²

Augusta and Charlotte maintained ties to their family and friends in the East, including suffragists Lucy Stone and Pauline Wright Davis, and phrenologist and publisher Charlotte Fowler Wells.¹⁵³ In the late 1860s mother and daughter visited Boston where Charlotte remained for a period of time. Shortly after returning to Utah she and Godbe were married, and together they returned to the East. In 1870 Charlotte made her first public appearance at an organized suffrage meeting in Providence, Rhode Island.¹⁵⁴ Suffering an attack of “stage fright,” instead of speaking on woman suffrage in Utah as she had planned, Charlotte uttered what she later described as a prophecy: “As America looks to the rising generation for her hope, so in the rising women of Utah, do I see leaders in public thought.”¹⁵⁵ It was a prophecy that Charlotte herself was anxious to fulfill.¹⁵⁶

*   *   * ^[49]

At noon, on July 6, Anthony and Stanton boarded the Southern Pacific Railroad bound for San Francisco “with the assurance of many new friends that our visit there had been a great blessing.”¹⁵⁷ They had played their political cards well. Moving gingerly between factions they had made no enemies, yet they had not compromised their message. Nevertheless, Anthony and Stanton left Utah with unresolved feelings about the coexistence of polygamy and the advocacy of women’s rights and with conflicting impressions of both territorial factions.¹⁵⁸

Stanton vacillated in her assessment of the Mormons’ community. From Utah she wrote that Brigham Young had done a “great work” in the desert, “building a beautiful city and dotting the territory with honest, hardworking people,” yet from the Pacific Coast, she observed that although Young received credit for doing wonders, “when you think he has had a quarter of a century to build up one very poor city, composed chiefly of small, cheap houses without free schools . . . one must feel that that mastermind has blocked rather than pushed forward civilization.”¹⁵⁹

Stanton saw polygamy as another example of the much greater problem of women’s subjection in organized ^[50] religion; she was far more concerned about the “slavery” of the Mormons’ “minds” to “dogmas, tradition and revelations.”¹⁶⁰ What may have added to the complexity of Stanton’s position on plural marriage was her profound concern with women’s right to “self-ownership” and to privacy, both of which ran counter to the idea of interfering with the choices Mormon women claimed were their right.¹⁶¹

Reflecting on their visit, Anthony concluded that the territory was fertile ground for missionary work; that did not mean moral condemnation or “puritanic horror,” but “a simple loving, sisterly clasp of hands with these struggling women.” What Mormon women needed, she thought, was to be equipped with the tools for their emancipation and supported in their efforts.¹⁶² If she had learned one thing while in the territory, it was that polygamy provoked an array of difficult issues, and the transition “into a new life” for the New Movement reformers “was complicated.”¹⁶³

Although Anthony asked for sympathy for polygamists, she had none for polygamy. But her opposition to polygamy sometimes fell short of total condemnation because she was also critical of monogamy. She called, for example, ^[51] for women to “ABOLISH the whole system of woman’s subjection to man in both polygamy and monogamy.”¹⁶⁴ In one letter she claimed that the “sad spectacle” of Mormon women was attributable to the “life of dependence” which in polygamy was even “more dreadful” than in monogamy; then further on she claimed that the suffering in monogamy equals that in polygamy—the difference being that in polygamy the hurt comes from “a religious duty,” whereas in monogamy the hurt is done “against law and public sentiment.”¹⁶⁵ Anthony was also far more critical of polygamy in private than in public.¹⁶⁶

Associating with the Mormons put Anthony and Stanton in a precarious political position and an ambiguous personal one. Politically, the existence of woman suffrage in Utah compelled the support of woman suffragists, despite the presence of polygamist suffragists in the territory. Personally, Anthony and Stanton took pride in the fact that the National Association was open to all women and engaged a wide range of issues.¹⁶⁷ Moreover, each acknowledged being received “very kindly” by the Mormon women who filled their meeting halls and invited them to “drive and dine.” ^[52] Anthony and Stanton also visited Mormon homes, where they met “refined, lovely women.”¹⁶⁸

The presence of the New Movement’s reformers in the territory was fortuitous indeed, even though Anthony admitted that the movement had not started as a disavowal of the “Mormon religion or of polygamy.”¹⁶⁹ Undoubtedly, Anthony and Stanton would have stopped to deliver their lecture in Utah on their trip west and supported woman suffrage under any condition, but the New Movement gave suffragists solid grounds for developing a relationship with Utah’s women. Suffragists claimed that the “rebellion” opposed Brigham Young’s “tyranny,” and more important that as “band after band” had burst, the “last, strongest, and tightest,” that of polygamy, had begun “to snap asunder.”¹⁷⁰ Thus suffragists could connect woman suffrage in Utah with social and political reform.¹⁷¹ Identifying themselves with the “liberals” ultimately made supporting woman suffrage in the territory politically less risky.

Nevertheless, the failure of the New Movement reformers to renounce polygamy came under increasing attack.¹⁷² Mormons and non-Mormons ridiculed the reformers as well. When an anonymous letter from a “Gentile from ^[53] Nevada” was published by the Salt Lake Tribune, asking the New Movement leader, William Godbe, if he considered polygamy evil, Godbe refused to answer. But the pressure was mounting.¹⁷³

With a territorial election rapidly approaching, Godbe grew fearful of internal “cliques” among members of the Liberal party over the issue of polygamy. The reformers had rejected the divinity of plural marriage and urged its practice based solely on “its own merits,” but Godbe confessed the difficulty of unwinding “all the intricate cords” of plural marriage. Many in the movement, he claimed, were “not ready to set adrift their wives and children at the demand of a few unmarried men who are as heartless as they are childless.”¹⁷⁴ At the Liberal Institute on July 30, shortly after Anthony and Stanton left the territory, Godbe claimed that the “new revelation” of “woman’s perfect equality with man” was “fatal” to polygamy, but that at present “each should be allowed to settle the question for himself and herself.”¹⁷⁵

By September, Godbe’s address on polygamy had found its way to the Woman’s Journal, the voice of the American Woman Suffrage Association. The New Movement and Godbe’s ^[54] “new revelation” of women’s equality were applauded. The article concluded that since woman suffrage was the “legal and political expression of the doctrine of woman’s equality” its presence in the territory had “doomed polygamy.” For suffragists in the American Association, the New Movement also appears to have provided evidence of the importance of woman suffrage in the territory and solid reason to extend support to Utah’s women.¹⁷⁶

Nonetheless, the New Movement’s women ran into immediate problems maintaining an institutional base for political activism. Although many ex-Mormon women were firm believers in woman suffrage, many non-Mormon women who had joined their organization did not apparently share that commitment. One month after Stanton and Anthony attended the meeting of the L.M.I. Society, one woman blamed the meager attendance at the Society’s next meeting on the fact that many women were “frightened away” because of the organization’s link with woman suffrage.¹⁷⁷ The Society survived for less than a year and “realized few of its original objectives.”¹⁷⁸

In the meantime Sarah Kimball was preparing her Relief Society sisters to vote in the August 1871 ^[55] election. At a meeting on July 20, both she and Bathsheba Smith stressed the importance of voting in order to sustain “good men in office.” Although Kimball said she believed in “political and religious liberty,” she also urged the women to educate themselves so they would vote “understandingly.” By that Kimball meant what was good for Mormondom.¹⁷⁹

For orthodox Mormon women enfranchisement was not viewed as a mechanism for securing change in their religious practices, but rather as a means for participating in the civil life of the community. Having been enfranchised they considered it their duty to maintain political solidarity with the brethren, thus ensuring social and religious stability; church membership was the same as partisan politics or loyalty to any special-interest group. For the sisters, as for the brethren, unity and obedience were a central theme exhorted by their leaders. As one sister concluded, the women must “honor the confidence placed in us that our united strength joined with the Brethren would result in good to the people.”¹⁸⁰

Mormon suffragists did not see their personal interests as separate from the best interests of their ^[56] church or community. Their loyalty to the church did not outweigh their individual interests or take precedence over their women’s rights concerns; rather, they saw no dichotomy between their interests and those of the church—they saw them as synchronous. The church teachings held the key to their own advancement, and if the church and community were strengthened by their political activism, that meant women were promoting their own best interests as well. Mormon women were not asserting individualism through the vote, they were reinforcing community.

The difficulty for Mormon women was that although some held strong perceptions about the power and authority they believed had been bestowed on them, those perceptions were not shared by all the brethren. Although Mormon women honored the authority that the priesthood represented, their own views of their status in the church gave them a degree of resilience that empowered them to seek a variety of creative means to accomplish their goals. Both the personal diaries and other writings of Mormon women and the minutes of their Relief Society meetings show evidence of the power of many women’s convictions.^{181 [57]}

Looking back on these early years of political activism, Sarah Kimball said that when she first read the Revolution she would not have “dared to say the bold, grand things that Miss Anthony said.” Those things, she claimed, would have made her “so unpopular,” she would have hardly “dared to shoulder it.” When she declared herself a “woman’s rights woman,” she had “entertained ideas that appeared wild, which she thought would yet be considered woman’s rights.”¹⁸² But, she recalled, “as time rolled on we were very careful.”¹⁸³

If a single word could describe the operative mode for Mormon women during these years, it would be “careful.” They consistently attempted to ensure that their words or actions were never viewed as threatening to the hierarchy or interpreted as inconsistent with the goals of the church.

A week before Anthony and Stanton arrived in the territory, the “leading” sisters wrote a circular stating that woman suffrage was the will of God and it was granted for a “wise purpose;” even though it was not through women’s “solicitation,” its existence showed that the Utah women “possess advantages greatly superior to women elsewhere.”¹⁸⁴ The circular demonstrates that the ^[58] female leadership intended to guide the sisterhood’s political activities in order to affirm the value of woman suffrage to Zion and their unity with their brothers. More important, it demonstrates the careful way Mormon women operated. They bypassed credit, showed their gratitude, and sought to ensure support for their activities, in this instance, by claiming their enfranchisement had a divine purpose that they were ready to fulfill.

By deflecting credit for their achievements, Mormon women themselves contributed to the conclusion that they were not agents in their own behalf. It was not uncommon for other nineteenth-century women to hide their agency, just as it is not uncommon today. But it is one of the reasons that both their process of politicization and their political activism have been overlooked.

At the same time Mormon women tenaciously defended their own secular and religious activism. They persistently reminded one another of the status the prophet Joseph Smith had bestowed on the Female Relief Society. For them, the Relief Society provided the institutional means for ensuring their contribution to church and community, and demonstrating the Society’s ^[59] usefulness would ensure its permanence. Through their “careful” actions the Mormon sisters built their society into a durable institution capable of rapidly mobilizing thousands of women. Ultimately, the Relief Society provided the organizational network that gave credibility to the claims of Mormon women as the territorial leaders of Utah’s woman suffrage movement.

For the national suffragists, however, it was the presence of the New Movement reformers in 1871 that allowed them to more wholeheartedly support woman suffrage in Utah. Whether or not national suffragists knew of the strong support for woman suffrage from women like Sarah Kimball is unclear, but in 1872 Mormon suffragists would make that point clear. Although the New Movement women and their Mormon sisters had been engaged in a process of politicization that had its roots in the early persecutions of their church, the Godbeites had provided a new forum for the discussion of women’s equality. Historians have credited the New Movement with legitimatising public debate and dissent in Utah, and mark its presence with the beginning of modern Utah.¹⁸⁵ But the New Movement should also be credited with advancing the debate on woman’s equality in the territory ^[60] and, equally important, with providing the foundation for the relationship between national suffragists and women in Utah. ^[61]