6 Matters of Expediency: 1883–1890

“The sail up the harbor this morning was most delightful,” wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the morning of November 27, 1883. After months in England “with its leadened sky and heavy, damp atmosphere,” she continued, “the change to our clear bright heavens was striking.” The journey home, however, had not started well. Through a “blunder,” Stanton claimed, the ballast was improperly arranged, and the ship rolled “beyond endurance;” that and the rough seas kept the dinner table of the “magnificent” steamer “very thin.” Thus, to Stanton and to Susan B. Anthony, New York’s pier was a welcome sight.¹

As the Servia docked, the familiar figures of the two now famous, and aging, woman suffragists appeared on its deck exchanging greetings with their friends on the pier. After the gangplank was lowered, Anthony and Stanton returned to their cabins to greet friends and speak to the press.² On their voyage home, they had discussed their differences over the direction of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Stanton feared its new narrow focus, whereas Anthony insisted that their reorganizational plan required limiting their concerns ^[395] strictly to woman suffrage.³ The debate would continue for the rest of the decade.

Throughout the 1880s, other National suffragists shared Stanton’s fear of losing the “old association.”⁴ Between 1883 and 1887 their concerns centered around attempts to limit “side issues” as well as efforts to secure an alliance with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, two strategies that reflected Anthony’s new thinking and the more conservative philosophy of the National’s younger leaders. To Anthony and her allies this plan, coupled with the new emphasis on efficiency and administrative control, represented the hope of the future. But to Stanton, Matilda Gage, Belva Lockwood and others, the new direction of the National was a source of concern. They believed these changes were regressive and would eventually dilute the differences between their association and the American. In 1887, after Anthony and Lucy Stone took the first steps to unite the woman suffrage movement, objections hardened into so-called anti-union sentiment. Nonetheless, most opponents begrudgingly accepted the union of the National and American Associations in 1890 as the most expedient option.

In 1883 one of the “side issues” the National leadership wanted to avoid was that represented by Mormon ^[396] suffragists. The Edmunds Act of 1882 had helped in that regard; woman suffragists no longer had to defend the political rights of polygamist suffragists. After its passage, the American Association took a stance that supported the act’s basic premise: disfranchisement was an appropriate punitive measure for the crime of polygamy. But the “large-latitude” that Susan Anthony noted in the 1870s still defined the values of many of the National Association’s members and prevented the N.W.S.A. from distancing itself as easily from Mormon women. As a result the National was slower to adopt the American’s position; not until 1884 did it join the American in publicly supporting disfranchisement of men and women as a punitive measure for plural marriage. In 1886 both the National and American opposed a clause in the newly proposed Edmunds-Tucker bill, which would disfranchise all of Utah’s remaining women voters. By then both associations were willing only to defend the vote in Utah for non-polygamous and non-Mormon women.⁵ Any lingering differences between the way the two branches dealt with Utah’s women did not impede eventual unification in 1890.

This chapter tracks the final years of the division in the woman suffrage movement, seeing in some of the changes that made union possible clues to ^[397] understanding the dynamics of the relationship between women in Utah and national suffragists.⁶ At first, changes inside the National worked against the interests of Mormon women. The National’s new suffrage-first focus, and its increased emphasis on woman suffrage as a means to achieve order and security and to protect the home, worked to the advantage of Utah’s anti-polygamy advocates. Soon, they were the sole representatives from Utah of the National’s board.

Although the representatives from Utah now appeared to have a united front, soon a serious conflict arose among these anti-polygamy activists over the question of supporting or opposing the campaign to disfranchise Utah’s remaining female voters. After the passage of the Edmunds Act in 1882 some anti-polygamy women opposed any further effort to disfranchise the rest of Utah’s women, even though anti-polygamy activists continued to criticize Mormon women’s use of the vote. Other anti-polygamy advocates demanded legislation disfranchising all territorial women, non-Mormon and non-polygamists alike. They were willing to sacrifice their own voting privileges in the interests of reducing the political power of the L.D.S. church. This strategy was supported by the growing number of evangelical, temperance and ^[398] benevolent female activists from outside the territory who were becoming active in the anti-polygamy movement.

The increased public visibility of such women illustrates the changing nature of women’s activism in the 1880s, change that was related to an expanding middle class increasingly concerned with issues surrounding home and family life, as well as the continuing power of the “politics of domesticity.”⁷ One result of the politics of domesticity was a profusion of new women’s clubs and organizations and a growing number of women actively participating in a variety of social, religious and benevolent associations.⁸ Ultimately, the outcome of the anti-polygamy crusade owed much of its success to such women.

The passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887 and the National Association’s new reorganizing strategy ultimately had unintended and ironic consequences: they served as means for Mormon suffragists to regain a voice in the women suffrage movement. Although the Edmunds-Tucker Act hastened the end of polygamy and changed Mormondom, it also helped motivate Mormon suffragists to organize official suffrage societies and advance monogamist Mormon women as leaders. That new strategy provided Mormon women with the necessary credentials, under the National’s newly adopted bylaws, to reclaim ^[399] territorial representation. When the American and National Woman Suffrage Associations united in early 1890, monogamist Mormon suffragists were selected as Utah’s representatives. Thus, contrary to what is commonly thought, Mormon women were reintegrated into the national woman suffrage movement before the Saints officially abandoned polygamy in the fall of 1890.

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When they arrived in New York in the fall of 1883, Anthony and Stanton were returning together from extended trips to England and Europe that they had begun separately. After finishing the second volume of the History of Woman Suffrage in May 1882, Stanton left for Europe with her daughter, Harriot. Anthony sailed for England the following February after the National’s annual Washington convention.

Susan Anthony left the 1883 convention feeling vexed with Belva Lockwood. Like Anthony, Stanton and Gage, Lockwood was an independent woman of strong convictions nurtured in the reform culture of antebellum New York State. Belva Ann Bennett was born on a farm in Royalton, New York, in 1830. Paternal opposition and a lack of funds ended her early education when she was fifteen. She taught school for three years before marrying Uriah McNall, a local farmer and sawmill operator. In 1853, ^[400] Belva McNall, mother of a four-year-old daughter, became a widow. She resumed both her education and teaching, graduating with honors from Genesee College in Lima, New York, in 1857. During that period, she met Anthony at a teachers’ institute where they discussed the reform philosophies that would later bring them together in the woman suffrage movement.⁹

Following the Civil War, Lockwood moved to Washington, D.C.; like Sara Spencer, she started a new school in the district, one of the first to offer coeducational training. In 1868 she married Ezekiel Lockwood, twenty-seven years her senior, a dentist and former minister. While her husband supervised the school, Belva turned her energies to the study of law. After several universities rejected her application, she was admitted to the National University Law School; she graduated in 1873. Lockwood then undertook a series of battles for recognition as a lawyer: the first was to receive the diploma she had earned; another was to practice before the court of claims in the capital; and finally, she fought to argue a case before the Supreme Court of the United States. After four efforts to pass legislation that would grant women that privilege, in March 1879 Lockwood became the first woman permitted to argue a case before the Supreme Court. Woman suffragists ^[401] hailed the achievement not simply because Lockwood was a woman, but also because by then she had become a committed worker in their cause.

Never one to be intimidated by unpopular causes, Lockwood cut her teeth on controversy in 1872, backing Victoria Woodhull for president. In 1880, a year after being allowed to argue before the Supreme Court, she championed “the First Southern Negro (Samuel R. Lowrey)” to appear before the Court.¹⁰ Lockwood’s feminism was a broad-based belief in equality for women and justice for all: ultimately, that meant not only black and Native Americans but Mormons as well.

At the National’s 1883 Washington convention Lockwood ensured that the issues raised in Utah were not going to be as easily sidestepped by the National as they were by the American Association. Anthony had asked Lockwood to discuss the new legislative proposals that would disfranchise Utah’s non-polygamous and non-Mormon women. Instead, Lockwood submitted a resolution condemning the disfranchisement efforts by Edmunds and Representative Cassidy, calling their attempts a “cruel display of power . . . that the Congress had no more right to disfranchise the women of Utah than the men of Wyoming.”¹¹ And she did not stop there. ^[402]

Lockwood was, in fact, one member of the legal profession that had reservations about the constitutionality of the Edmunds Act of 1882. Consequently, she delivered a long lecture that not only opposed the proposed legislation, but also condemned the existing law that had disfranchised all polygamists. This she called “unjust and inquisitorial” for both men and women.¹²

The Edmunds Act, Lockwood argued, was an attack upon the principle of woman suffrage: the “enemies of reform,” such as Senator Edmunds and Representative Cassidy, relied on “trickery” to attack woman suffrage and “seizing hold of the most trivial pretext to carry a point, make the religious belief of the Mormons . . . a pretext for disfranchising polygamists, male and female.” Cassidy knew, she continued, that polygamists had been disfranchised by the Edmunds Act; therefore, his bill could only be “a blow at woman suffrage and only a fool or knave would deny it.” The “real question at issue,” she said, was political: “whether Utah as a state will be Democratic or Republican.” Because Edmunds was a Republican, she insisted, he wanted either to prevent Utah joining the union as a Democratic state or to cut off possible Democratic votes to ensure his party two Republican senators.^{13 [403]}

The Mormons hailed Lockwood’s defense, calling it a “fearless address,” but the National’s suffragists did not appreciate such praise.¹⁴ Although the convention passed Lockwood’s resolution objecting to any further legislation, Anthony, Stanton and Gage excluded the record of that action from the History of Woman Suffrage.15

Lockwood also presented her argument to the congressional bodies considering the new legislation, after which George Q. Cannon noted that she had “displayed considerable courage” at the hearing, unlike many suffragists who were “afraid to say anything favorable” for fear of hurting their cause. “But not so for Mrs. Lockwood,” he added.¹⁶ Then, in late 1883, she met with Utah’s congressional delegate and women from Utah. Most likely, the women were Emily Richards and Margaret N. Caine, who were both in Washington with their lawyer husbands. Richards and Caine both later became leaders in the Mormon woman suffrage movement.¹⁷ Lockwood gave her opinion of the pending legislation—“dreadful”—and noted that in her view disfranchising Utah’s women threatened woman suffrage everywhere. She also told the Mormons that if they wanted to send a women’s delegation to Washington, she would help them. With the Mormons in tow, Lockwood then went to “see Susan Anthony about it.” ^[404] According to Lockwood, Anthony said “don’t send women, but send us money.” Because the Mormons felt that their “women [would] not be heard,” they asked for Lockwood’s help. So began Lockwood’s relationship with the Mormons.¹⁸

Once money enters the scene the story gets cloudy. Lockwood denied being in the employ of the Mormon Church, yet two separate accounts existed in which the Mormons raised funds that were ostensibly sent to her. Lockwood’s statement suggests that the money went to Anthony, but the accounts on the Mormon side mention only Lockwood.¹⁹ Whatever the truth, Lockwood worked with the Mormons for several years; she was clearly committed not only to working against the passage of new disfranchising measures, but also to questioning the constitutionality of the Edmunds Act.²⁰

Following Lockwood’s appeal on behalf of the Mormons at the January 1883 National Association convention, Anthony left for Europe. Neither she nor Stanton attended another meeting of the National until the Washington convention in March 1884. With Anthony and Stanton out of the country, a new generation of leaders assumed responsibility at the National. The growing professionalism of the organization shows the imprint of May Wright Sewall, Ellen H. Sheldon and Jane Spofford. ^[405] Their reorganizational attempts are evident in the National’s 1884 Washington convention: its proceedings comprised the “most complete” report ever issued.²¹

While Anthony and Stanton were in Europe, the younger leaders tried to solve another problem for the National: when the 1884 list of officers appeared, Emmeline Wells’ name was no longer listed. How this occurred, if Wells was informed, or exactly when it happened remain unclear, but the change was significant. Utah’s representation now came only from the anti-polygamy faction, namely, Sarah Ann Cooke, Jennie Froiseth and Cornelia Paddock.²²

Lockwood, however, was not going to let the National desert the Mormons that easily. At the annual convention held in March 1884, once again she raised the issue of the congressional action on Utah. Lockwood’s speech was “largely legal argument” showing that the Edmunds bill and the new efforts to disfranchise Utah’s women were “not only unjust and unfair, but in direct violation of the constitution of the United States.” The bills, she claimed, were “all the results of a morbid public sentiment intended to oppress a gentle, harmless people, and furthered by public men for purposes of their own.” At one point during the lecture, Susan Anthony interrupted Lockwood when she stated that the government had never intervened in the Oneida Community.²³ Anthony ^[406] “assured” Lockwood that the “community had been broken up.” Lockwood concluded by stating that she “profoundly hoped” the Congress would “let Utah alone.”²⁴

That was too much for Anthony. At the end of Lockwood’s speech, she firmly stated that the association was not concerned “with the general laws” proposed by the Congress for “Utah and the Mormons:” they were “none of our business.” And she added, “only when it is proposed to disfranchise women, without touching the men, did the association enter its protest.” Anthony’s statement was received “with loud applause.”²⁵ Lockwood was not intimidated. She snapped back that she was sorry, but she did not “see the difference between injustice to men and injustice to women.”²⁶

Nevertheless, Anthony had made her stand and won: the association would continue to oppose any measure that would disfranchise Utah’s “innocent” women, because disfranchisement struck at the principle of woman suffrage. The National refused to allow Lockwood to pull them into any other aspect of the issue. After that convention she never again spoke from its platform on the Mormon question. The “large latitude” that marked the National in the seventies had narrowed.²⁷

Lockwood was equally resolute. She would not only oppose any further legislation that would disfranchise ^[407] Utah’s remaining women, she would also continue protesting against the Edmunds Act. Her position did not, however, help her relationship with the National Association, and for a combination of reasons, her connection to the woman suffrage movement began to weaken after 1884. Lucy Stone was so furious at Lockwood’s defense of the Mormons that she cited it as a reason for not uniting with the National.²⁸ In the fall of 1884, when Lockwood became the candidate of the Equal Rights party for the presidency of the United States, she did not receive the support of woman suffrage leaders.²⁹ Anthony and Stanton issued a call to the National’s suffragists to “stand-by” the Republican Party, which the American Association readily endorsed.³⁰

After 1884 neither Lockwood’s efforts, nor those of the women she was trying to help altered the support her cause received from woman suffragists. In the summer of 1885 Lockwood visited Utah on a lecture tour, and the Mormon community treated her as close to royalty as it was able.³¹ In 1886 Lockwood said that she thought Mormon women were “fully up to the standard of intelligence and progressiveness” and were “far more independent of men than the Gentile women.”³² Even after the Mormon cause was lost in 1887, she continued to support Utah’s bid for statehood. Although Lockwood’s willingness to defend the ^[408] Mormons’ constitutional rights secured her a place in Mormon history, her actions won her criticism as well as praise.³³

After the National Association’s 1884 convention, its defense of the ballot—at the expense of polygamy—remained unchanged until the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 disfranchised Utah’s remaining women. From 1884 on, the National and the American’s official stances were identical: both had come to accept disfranchising women as punishment for polygamy. They also vigorously opposed the removal of woman suffrage from the territory for the remaining Mormon women and non-Mormons, and passed resolutions to that effect.³⁴ Yet, their support for the vote in Utah was often coupled to statements so critical of the Mormons that it was a measure of how desperate the state of affairs was for Mormon women that they would nevertheless thank woman suffragists.³⁵ With a few exceptions, national suffragists did not publicly condemn disfranchising polygamous women, nor did they denounce the hardships that the Edmunds Act inflicted.³⁶ Instead, they distanced the movement as much as possible from the issue. Indeed, in 1886 the National went on record approving disfranchisement as a punishment for “the crime of polygamy.”^{37 [409]}

The National’s Report of the 1884 convention shows why taking a definitive position on Utah’s situation had been so difficult. For woman suffragists everywhere the thorny problems raised by polygamist suffragists had no simple answers. The Report contains two contradictory replies to Anthony’s inquiries into the status of woman suffrage in Utah from Emmeline Wells and Annie Godbe.³⁸

Wells’ letter was predictably defensive, but the rather self-righteous tone also masks the real depth of her anxiety and anger. Reciting the accomplishments of Mormon women, both personal and public, Wells defends woman suffrage in the territory, denying “most emphatically and positively” that Mormon women voted as instructed; none of her comments are uncharacteristic of her standard line of defense. In condemning the Edmunds Act, however, Wells incredulously states, “I contend that no woman is a polygamist, as she does not live with more than one man.”³⁹ Wells knew that, strictly speaking, the Mormons were practicing polygeny, a man with more than one wife (although she may not have realized that the definition of polygamy encompasses both polygeny and polyandry). Still, her comment is peculiar, to say the least, considering her strong public defense of the practice, even if she thought she was making a fine legal point. That Wells would make such a statement suggests, ^[410] among other things, that no matter what rationale Mormon women gave, plural marriage was a personal trial that was becoming a burden of almost intolerable proportions. According to Helen Hunt Jackson, Wells stated that she advised her own daughters and other young women not to enter polygamy unless they were certain that “religion is more to you than all else in this world. Nothing else can enable a woman to endure the torture of it, or to live up to the precepts of the church.”⁴⁰

Annie Godbe’s letter was angry but effective. She drew specific attention to the National’s recognition of Wells and Zina Williams, noting that the “sad spectacle of sincere, good-meaning Mormon women standing on your progressive platform as representatives of a huge polygamic theocracy with Woman Suffrage the hope of its perpetuation” was evidence that “Woman Suffrage in Utah to-day is a cruel perversion of the beneficent aims of its advocates.” She called for “radical legislation, or none,” and she dismissed the Edmunds Act as “first-class tinkering.” She hedged on disfranchising Mormon women because Mormon men were equally culpable—removing Mormon women from the ballot box would only reduce the “crushing” power of the church by “one-half.”⁴¹

Obviously, simple answers for any of these women were not easily found. Interestingly, Emmeline Wells called ^[411] attention to both letters in the Woman’s Exponent, but she did not note the absence of her name from the officers’ ranks in the National.⁴² Only months before, Wells stated that Mormon women did not want pity, “they simply want justice, nothing more.”⁴³ What constituted justice for Utah’s women—who represented the best interests of the Mormon women, and how to judge such conflicting perceptions and perspectives—was almost impossible for national woman suffragists to determine.

By 1884 the situation for Mormon women was rapidly deteriorating as the full impact of the Edmunds Act filtered down to the community. The first case under the law was prosecuted in October, foreshadowing what was ahead for polygamist men and women. To prove that the defendant was living in a polygamous relation, his polygamous wife was called to testify, but she went into hiding and the trial ended in a hung jury. The following day, she was discovered, and a second trial was called.⁴⁴ This time she refused to be sworn in as a witness and was committed to prison. Responding to the request of her husband, she was sworn in, and on her evidence, he was convicted. The sentence sent a shock wave through the community: he was to serve three years in prison on the charge of polygamy and fined $500.00, and on the second ^[412] count of unlawful cohabitation, he was sentenced to an additional six months and a fine of $300.00.⁴⁵

The case illustrated what was ahead for Mormon polygamous women: hiding to avoid testifying, imprisonment for a few who refused to testify, searches of their homes at any hour, trials before non-Mormon juries, and long prison sentences combined with high fines; all of which were as difficult for the women and children at home as they were for the men. When polygamists realized this was what they could expect, they moved to a stance of passive resistance by “going on the ‘Underground.’”⁴⁶ Sometimes, the underground meant creating hiding places at home; other times it meant running to hide with family or friends, or even leaving the country on missions. Many Mormon women moved constantly and lived months at a time in a state of fear and deprivation, often with their young children.⁴⁷

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With all of Utah’s officers on the board of the National coming exclusively from the anti-polygamy ranks after 1884, Utah’s representatives appeared to have a united front, but that proved not to be the case. As Edmunds and others began proposing to disfranchise the rest of Utah’s women, anti-polygamy activists divided over the issue. In May their conflict became public when ^[413] Cornelia Paddock sent a petition to the Woman’s Journal demanding the disfranchisement of the rest of Utah’s women. This stance was based on the belief of Paddock and others that Mormon women voting reinforced the power of the L.D.S. church, even though their numbers had been seriously reduced by the loss of those who practiced plural marriage. Instead of supporting Paddock’s efforts, the Journal noted its opposition to her strategy. Sarah Cooke denounced Paddock’s position, and Jennie Froiseth stated that the Anti-Polygamy Society had voted on the issue in 1882 and that its position had not changed.⁴⁸

Undaunted by the censure of her allies, Paddock continued to collect signatures on her petition. Her efforts were supported by the growing number of women who were becoming active in the anti-polygamy crusade, including religious evangelical women, many of whom lived outside Utah. The annual meeting of the National Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church had drafted the petition in the fall of 1883. At that meeting, Angie Newman, whose evangelical sentiments had moved her initially to edit the Heathen Woman’s Friend and then to destroy the “harems” of Utah by organizing a “Mormon Bureau,” was the sponsor of the anti-polygamy petition.^{49 [414]}

Newman embraced the anti-polygamy cause after visiting Utah in 1879 and in 1883 turned her full energy to missionary work in Utah. Newman had none of the Anti-Polygamy Society’s qualms about sacrificing woman suffrage on the altar of reform for Utah. Paddock and some other Salt Lake City women who had been associated with the Anti-Polygamy Society joined Newman’s petition drive. Eventually, with the help of the W.C.T.U., they obtained 250,000 signatures demanding disfranchisement and submitted these to the Congress in June 1884.⁵⁰ That effort may have been the reason that Paddock’s name was removed as an officer from the National Association in 1885. Only Jennie Froiseth remained on the National’s board; Sarah Ann Cooke having died that year.⁵¹

By 1886 the anti-polygamy campaign had found a new focus that increased its effectiveness. That year anti-polygamy activists joined Angie Newman in organizing the interdenominational Industrial Christian Home Association. The aim of the association was to establish a “home” that would “extend a warm welcome” to polygamous women they hoped to “rescue” from the bonds of polygamy.⁵² Because the Congress controlled the territory, Newman lobbied in Washington for financial support. She was joined in that effort by Mormondom’s latest nemesis, Kate Field, a reform-minded journalist ^[415] who had made a name for herself on the lecture circuit during the Civil War.⁵³ Their combined efforts added to the ever-growing body of horror stories about Mormon practices. Congress printed “thousands” of copies of Newman’s arguments opposing woman suffrage in Utah, and Senator Edmunds used them to push through new anti-Mormon legislation that included annulling Utah’s woman suffrage law.⁵⁴

Woman suffragists praised Newman’s “Home” campaign, which was compatible with its growing emphasis on the vote as a means of protecting the home, but her disfranchising effort and the support it was receiving angered them. Clara Colby, editor of the Woman’s Tribune, a new women’s newspaper, noted the opposition of Jennie Froiseth to Newman’s disfranchising crusade and, albeit mistakenly, of Cornelia Paddock.⁵⁵ Colby reminded the growing number of new anti-polygamy advocates that Froiseth and Paddock had worked longer than most on the issue of polygamy and that they did not support disfranchisement. She asked where all the anti-polygamy advocates were when the Anti-Polygamy Standard needed support.⁵⁶

Colby’s inquiry is helpful because it shows several things about the status of the organized anti-polygamy movement by 1886. Following the passage of the Edmunds ^[416] bill, the Anti-Polygamy Society in Salt Lake City had begun to lose its vigor, as the end of the Anti-Polygamy Standard in 1883 suggests. Colby’s comment shows that the Standard’s battle to survive was generally known. What the failure of the Standard also seems to suggest is that the Anti-Polygamy Society’s 1882 decision to officially defend woman suffrage in Utah seems to have divided Utah’s opponents of polygamy: Paddock and other members shifted their efforts to Angie Newman’s campaign, which advocated far more extreme measures. This change would also explain why Jennie Froiseth began focusing much of her energy outside Utah.⁵⁷

By 1886 Newman’s crusade had supplanted the Anti-Polygamy Society as the focus of Utah’s anti-polygamy activities. The high point of Newman’s success was her victory in Washington, D.C., when Congress backed her efforts, providing her with $40,000 to construct an impressive edifice in Salt Lake City.⁵⁸ For several reasons, the “Home” failed totally to reach its stated goals.⁵⁹ But Newman and the evangelical women who supported her had the satisfaction of helping ensure the passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887.

At the same time that the anti-polygamy movement was dividing over the issue of non-polygamous and non-Mormon women voting, the Mormons were trying to forestall any ^[417] more punitive legislation and defend the vote for non-polygamous women and all other women in the territory. In February 1886 John Taylor approved a request from Romania Pratt, M. I. Horne and Sarah Kimball to protest, as Taylor put it, “the unhallowed persecutions” of Mormon women.⁶⁰ At a mass meeting held on March 6, Mormon women protested their treatment under the Edmunds Act and opposed the pending legislation, including the clause on disfranchisement. They also thanked Belva Lockwood for defending their “constitutional rights” and the American Woman Suffrage Association for passing a resolution opposing the clause of the Edmunds-Tucker bill, which would remove woman suffrage.⁶¹

After the mass meeting, Mormon women compiled the proceedings into a ninety-one-page pamphlet. John Taylor was pleased with the results and suggested that Emmeline Wells and either Ellen Ferguson or Romania Pratt take it to Washington. In the capital, Wells and Ferguson distributed their document and spoke to the press.⁶² They were aided by two younger non-polygamous women, Emily Richards and Josephine West, who already lived in the capital with their Mormon-lawyer husbands.⁶³

This Washington venture met with little success. Because the anti-polygamy crusade was marked by such harsh condemnations and exaggeration, Mormon women had ^[418] become skilled at dismissing the offensive rhetoric of the campaign; they failed to comprehend the depth of the fear and hatred their beliefs aroused in masses of Americans. As a result, they underestimated the power of their adversaries and overestimated the helpfulness of the support that woman suffragists were prone to give.

The plight of Mormon women did engender sympathy from some suffragists. Dr. Clemence Lozier, president of the N.W.S.A. during the mid-seventies, was particularly compassionate, though she claimed that Mormon women were being punished for the acts of their husbands.⁶⁴ Nevertheless, these efforts of Mormon suffragists did not alter the nature of the official response of the woman suffrage movement. When the first effort to pass the Edmunds-Tucker bill failed in late 1886, the American Society rejoiced, but on the grounds that if the bill had passed “the ballot [would be left] in the hands of Mormon men.”⁶⁵

That the organized woman suffrage movement struggled with the question is hardly surprising for the issues raised in Utah were complicated. It was much simpler to avoid the topic and refer to the successful experiment of woman suffrage in Wyoming instead.⁶⁶ Moreover, the national movement was consumed with issues that were of far greater concern—most fundamentally, by the fact that ^[419] their cause continued to lack broad public support. The state campaigns in Michigan, Colorado, Nebraska and Oregon had provided “meager results in return for exhausting labors.”⁶⁷ Partial suffrage (school or municipal, for example) was, at best, a mixed blessing. As an “ideologically conservative offshoot” of the movement, partial suffrage’s successes were more about continuity than change.⁶⁸ By establishing the Select Committees on Woman Suffrage in 1882, hailed by suffragists as a step forward, Congress also prevented suffragists from receiving the benefits of arguing before more elite committees.

The 1886–1887 Congress had several opportunities to deal with the issue of woman suffrage.⁶⁹ On January 25, 1887, while woman suffragists attended the first day of their annual Washington meeting, the Congress voted on the woman suffrage amendment for the first time: the Senate defeated the bill sixteen to thirty-four with twenty-six absent. Susan Anthony responded by stating that rather than considering the vote a defeat, she considered the fact that it had occurred a “triumph.” She based her reasoning on her opinion of how the absent senators might have voted—an assessment that appears more optimistic than realistic.^{70 [420]}

Notwithstanding her public stance, shortly afterward Anthony secretly took the first steps to secure a union with the American Association.⁷¹ Learning that Lucy Stone would be vacationing alone in Georgia, Anthony decided to approach her privately about the possibilities of uniting the movement. Anthony discussed her plan only with her trusted aide, Rachel Foster, who also accompanied her to the meeting with Stone.⁷² Following the meeting, Stone and her “inside circle” debated the union question, deciding in its favor before the American’s annual meeting in the fall of 1887. Stone was appointed to meet with Anthony “to consider a satisfactory basis of union.”⁷³

As far as anyone in the National Association knew, the initiative had come from the American; only Foster knew that Anthony had taken the first step. Anthony apparently acted independently, without the knowledge of her fellow officers, because she feared the opposition of those who were already objecting to the direction the association was moving.⁷⁴

Anthony’s concerns proved to be justified. The factions within the National who had voiced their opposition to its conservative direction became increasingly vocal after 1887. Their opposition shifted from concern to anger after the National’s concessions to ^[421] its new religious faction and orientation, symbolized by growing ties to the W.C.T.U., became conspicuous. For Stanton, Gage and others, Frances Willard’s prominence came to represent the growing conservative emphasis that accommodating evangelical temperance women required.⁷⁵ In reality, other longtime members of the National, such as Harriette R. Shattuck, Helen M. Gougar and Harriet Robinson, were increasingly interested in seeing the support of both the church and evangelical women for the woman suffrage campaign.⁷⁶

Questions and resolutions surrounding the issue of religion had been discussed at the National’s conventions in the 1870s, but in 1885 essentially the same resolutions that were passed earlier, one historian notes, now produced a debate of “such magnitude that it carried into the following day.” Drawing attention to this event she concludes only “somehow the times had changed.”⁷⁷ What had changed was that the National was not only seeking broader representation through the offices of the W.C.T.U., but it was also trying to get the support from mainline Protestant churches. The prospect of that infuriated Stanton, Gage, Clara Colby and others.

As the issue of uniting with the American became a reality the internal opposition to changes in the ^[422] National became expressed as objections to uniting with the American. The significance of these conflicts was that the debate over religion and development of anti-union sentiment ultimately had important implications for the relationship between the National Association and Mormon women. Despite this growing opposition inside the National, Anthony appointed a negotiating committee to work out the details with a similar committee from the American. The long process that would unite the movement in 1890 had begun.⁷⁸

*     *     *

While woman suffragists were attempting to get the Sixteenth Amendment to the floor of the Congress for a vote, the Mormons tried unsuccessfully to stop the advance of new anti-Mormon legislative initiatives, including a clause disfranchising all women in Utah. Resolutions passed at the National Association’s 1887 annual convention stated that because Utah’s remaining women voters were not charged with “any crime,” their rights should be considered “sacred.” A committee from the National, chaired by Lillie D. Blake, called on President Grover Cleveland and asked him to veto the legislation. Mormon women responded to the action with a telegram of thanks to Anthony.^{79 [423]}

Despite woman suffragists’ support for maintaining the ballot, both associations continued to note their disapproval of the Mormons. The Woman’s Journal explained even that position, noting that if “taking away the votes of the women would give the Gentiles a majority, there would be some inducement to do it,” but no one had claimed that was a possibility.⁸⁰ The Woman’s Tribune pointed out that the substance of the National had been misquoted by “every paper in Washington.” Members of the National’s committee “did not touch, and never have wished to touch on the question of disfranchising polygamous persons.”⁸¹

On March 3, 1887, the Edmunds-Tucker Act became law without President Grover Cleveland’s signature. As a result, all of Utah’s women were disfranchised. Other aspects of the act had more devastating implications for the Saints because it openly aimed to curb the temporal power of the L.D.S. Church as well as to destroy polygamy by strengthening the 1882 law. To achieve the necessary results, the act disincorporated the legal church and empowered the territorial attorney general to escheat church property valued over fifty thousand dollars and use it for the benefit of common schools. To end polygamy, it provided the legal means for charges of adultery to be filed by other than a husband or wife, and ^[424] it permitted legal wives to testify against their husbands. It also required a pledge from anyone registering to vote that they would not aid or encourage anyone to defy anti-polygamy laws.⁸²

Given the severity of the act, the Mormons’ only immediate hopes were to try again for statehood, as their friends suggested, and to test the law before the Supreme Court.⁸³ As legal representatives of the church began the slow process of moving their case through the courts, Mormon politicians made another bid for statehood. This time the proposed constitution included provisions to separate church and state, and to make bigamy and polygamy misdemeanors (these practices “being considered incompatible with a republican form of government”), but the new constitution did not include a provision to restore the vote to women. The Congress, not surprisingly, was skeptical of any compromise to which the Mormons would agree, and it once again refused to act on the measure.

Emmeline Wells privately expressed her disappointment that women were not “called upon” for this effort. When it failed she commented, “if the Lord intended Utah to be admitted then the women would have had the suffrage for that would have secured it.”⁸⁴ Of course, what had changed was that Utah’s women no longer had the vote; ^[425] that they were not “called upon” for the new effort seems likely to have been related to that fact. That women in Utah would be hurt by disfranchisement was something Mormon women had expressed to national suffragists whenever talk of disfranchising them had arisen. What Wells’ comment suggests is that those fears were not unfounded.

Wells’ personal position among the Mormons may have also been injured by her connection to a highly visible and controversial event that she had made worse by her response. Wells’ daughter “Louie” married George Q. Cannon’s son, John, in September 1886, the day after he divorced Annie Wells, Louie’s sister. Louie, it seems, was already pregnant. In December, she moved to San Francisco; in April, she gave birth to a stillborn child; and in May, she too died. The experience was awful for Emmeline Wells on all fronts, including the fact that Louie was her second grown daughter to die. The Woman’s Exponent published articles praising Louie for her many talents and contributions, but many in the community thought the articles showed poor judgment on Emmeline Wells’ part. Wells was extremely defensive about those who had “assailed” her daughter at this time, although it is hard to imagine any event that could make the Mormons ^[426] look worse. The controversy surrounding Louie’s death lasted for several years.⁸⁵

In 1887 other Mormon milestones were passed. In August, L.D.S. President John Taylor died while on the Underground; he was the last Mormon president to die defending plural marriage. Then in December, Eliza R. Snow, the woman the Mormon sisterhood called their “presidentess,” “prophetess” and “poetess,” died—it was a symbolic end to a year that ultimately altered the nature of Mormondom.

Things looked dreary indeed for Mormon suffragists in 1887. For the past three years, they had had no voice among the National’s suffragists; even the presence of two monogamist Mormon women at the National’s annual convention in 1885 was noted only in Utah. Mormon women had to watch anti-polygamy women be reelected as Utah’s territorial representatives.⁸⁶ The Edmunds-Tucker Act meant that despite having voted for seventeen years, women were now barred from political representation; moreover, the power to confer the franchise was removed permanently from the territorial government. Nevertheless, as one prominent woman suffragist later noted, “non-polygamous” Mormon women did “not submit tamely to this infamous wrong,” but instead, began organizing to regain their rights.⁸⁷ For the next three ^[427] years, Mormon activists would focus their woman suffrage movement on regaining the vote.⁸⁸ Reorganizing their movement ultimately provided them with the necessary credentials to reclaim their place in the national woman suffrage movement.

*     *     *

Three factors resulted in Mormon women’s successful effort to gain reentry into the national woman suffrage movement. First, the same reorganizational strategies that were designed to institutionalize and professionalize the National Association unintentionally worked to the advantage of Mormon suffragists. Second, a policy change among Mormon suffragists shifted their leadership from polygamist to “innocent” monogamist women. Third, the internal conflict in the National Association over the issue of union served to strengthen the position of Mormon women. All of these factors secured the reinstallation of Mormon suffragists in the National Association before the Saints disavowed polygamy in 1890, which is usually seen as the reason why Mormon women were welcomed back.

In the summer of 1887, the National Association announced the reorganizational efforts that were designed to result in a stronger, more effective organization. In July, the Woman’s Tribune stated that a committee had ^[428] been assigned to work out a new “basis of representation,” called for by the “Plan of Work” that had been adopted at its annual convention. The announcement reminded all of the National’s members that the plan would be in place by the following January, and it urged members “to see that your state is represented in the next annual convention according to [the forthcoming] provisions.”⁸⁹

In 1885 the National’s leaders had identified the need to change both the way state and territorial representatives were selected and how voting privileges were allocated as critical elements of their reorganizational plans.⁹⁰ The National Association’s original constitution gave anyone who paid a dollar annually the right to membership and to participate in its deliberations: all members could vote on the officers and policies of the organization.⁹¹ The nomination of officers had remained at the discretion of the leaders: a nominating committee composed of current leaders submitted names for officers that the membership then voted on. Utah’s changing representation illustrates how the method operated, while Sara Spencer’s defense of her position as corresponding secretary and eventual resignation show that the system did not always work smoothly. ^[429]

In 1886, new voting procedures were proposed. This action followed a heated confrontation over a resolution that Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote criticizing the role of organized religion in the continuing degradation of women.⁹² Anthony and the younger leaders were upset by the resolution because they were trying to improve the way state suffrage societies functioned by using local branches. State woman suffrage societies, in turn, were becoming more religious in character precisely because of the W.C.T.U’s influence on their membership—which was part the motivation behind Stanton’s resolution.⁹³ Anthony believed that the conflict over the resolution was compounded by the fact that suffragists who were not affiliated with state societies could vote on the same basis as those who were. Prior to this time, membership in a state or local society was not required for voting privileges; to Anthony, the 1886 convention proved the weakness of this method of operation. So in 1887, the National’s new “Plan of Work” changed voting procedures, allowing only those credentialed by a dues-paying state or local society to vote.⁹⁴

In October 1887 the Woman’s Tribune published the “Report of the Committee on the Basis of Representation,” which was to serve as a guide for representation. Each representative vice president on the board was instructed ^[430] to call their woman suffrage members together to elect one representative to the annual meeting and one more for every twenty-five dues-paying members of the National Association. In addition, any state or territorial organization that gave twenty-five percent of its annual dues to the National would be “styled a paying auxiliary” and would be allotted three delegates plus one additional delegate for every twenty-five members over fifty. The delegates who were present could cast the entire number of votes allowed their organization, and the vice president from a state or territory had to sign the credentials of each representative.⁹⁵

This new “guide for action” for the 1888 convention had important implications for Utah’s suffragists. Utah’s lone representative on the National’s board, Jennie Froiseth, did not represent any state suffrage association; in fact, by 1887 the anti-polygamy forces were decidedly in Angie Newman’s camp. For their part, Mormon suffragists were organized only through the auspices of the L.D.S. Relief Society, which Froiseth could argue did not qualify as an official woman suffrage society. Nevertheless, the appearance of these new guidelines reopened the door to Mormon suffragists, and they moved to take advantage of that change. ^[431]

During the summer of 1887, another avenue of opportunity opened for Mormon suffragists to reestablish links with their eastern sisters. In July the National Woman Suffrage Association issued a call for participation in the fortieth anniversary celebration of Seneca Falls, which would be marked by an “International Council of Women” in March 1888. Anthony and Stanton took the first steps to hold a meeting of international women while visiting England in 1883. The call interested Mormon women because it stated that the Council would be open to women from a wide range of institutions, all of whom would be offered the opportunity to report “the various phases of women’s work and progress in all parts of the world.”⁹⁶ The invitation sounded sufficiently open to encourage Mormon women to try to participate.

As the event rapidly approached, the National Association needed help from any corner—and any did not exclude the Mormons. The Council was a massive undertaking, and was already straining both the human and financial resources of the National. An urgent appeal was issued: “Will you not assist to the extent of your ability?—Money or pledges of large or small amounts will be most acceptable.”97 Mormon women, of course, saw the possibility of assisting as an opportunity to participate. Since financial support had previously come ^[432] from the L.D.S. leadership, expecting financial help once again was not unrealistic. In early February, Wells wrote to Jane Spofford and to Matilda Gage and sent five dollars to the National Association. Shortly thereafter, she reported with pleasure that she had received permission from the new L.D.S. president, Wilford Woodruff, for her to accept an invitation to join the “Press Committee of the International Council.”⁹⁸

If Mormon women needed to convince the L.D.S. leadership of the importance of their presence and involvement in the International Council to secure financial backing, in February, Emmeline Wells provided a compelling rationale. Dr. Ruth Woods, the superintendent of Angie Newman’s Industrial Home in Salt Lake City, called on Wells seeking information for the presentation she was scheduled to make at the International Council. Wells could hardly have been more offended: “her manner and discourse are equally repulsive to me.”⁹⁹ Wells subsequently dashed off an “important” letter to Susan Anthony.¹⁰⁰ Wells’ personal outrage was strengthened by her awareness of the difficulties that the L.D.S. representatives in Washington were encountering in their efforts to get their stalled bid for statehood through the Congress. Wells knew that Woods might make statements that could further damage their already bleak prospects. ^[433]

Although the Mormon brethren may not have known that Ruth Woods was going to speak at the Council, they undoubtedly did after her visit to Wells. Most likely, the L.D.S. leadership had been aware of the importance of the International Council. The Council had generated substantial publicity, and during their time in the capital, many Mormon representatives stayed at Jane Spofford’s Riggs House, which also happened to be the headquarters for the International Council and Susan Anthony’s home away from home.¹⁰¹ In March, the brethren’s intense interest in the upcoming women’s meetings in the capital reflected the degree of their concern.¹⁰² A few days before the International Council and the National’s conventions were to convene, the brethren in Washington called a meeting to “consider” the upcoming meetings, and see “if arrangements cannot be made to keep them from speaking against Utah and its people.” The next day, Representative John T. Caine met with Susan Anthony; reports indicate that he had “made all right as was desired.”¹⁰³

The strategy that evolved to secure the participation of L.D.S. women in the International Council and to reassert their right to represent themselves before the National’s suffragists was two-pronged. The sisters pressed for the opportunity to represent their women’s ^[434] organizations and, in strict accordance with the Council’s call, prepared detailed credentials for their would-be representatives, Emily Richards, Margaret N. Caine, Luella Young and Nettie Snell. Meanwhile, the brethren including Richards, Caine and Young pressed the National’s leaders to accept the Mormon delegates and apparently provided the sisters with the necessary funds. Jane S. Richards, Emily’s mother-in-law, and Margaret Caine each gave one hundred dollars toward the Council’s expenses.¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, Emmeline Wells feared that the chance of Mormon women being given the “opportunity to speak” was “quite improbable,” although she acknowledged privately that “it may be accomplished with money and wire pulling.”¹⁰⁵

Wells and other Mormon women in Salt Lake City worked furiously for days to make their sisters’ credentials for the International Council “in harmony with all the parties,” and they sought help from Apostle Franklin D. Richards, “the active party in getting the sisters to prepare Credentials.” Still, it was just days before the Council was to commence that they attached the last ribbons and seals to the credentials and took the documents to the train depot.¹⁰⁶

No sooner had the credentials for the Council left Salt Lake than Wells began preparing additional documents ^[435] for the National Association’s annual convention, scheduled to follow on the heels of the Council’s meeting. After three more days of labor and with the signatures of the leading sisters of Mormondom affixed, the N.W.S.A. credentials were sent to the capital. Wells felt better “satisfied” with these since she had more her “own way” with them, although it was “not possible” for her to “be able to do all myself as I please.”¹⁰⁷ She also believed that the Mormon women would have better luck among the woman suffragists than at the Council.¹⁰⁸

The National’s new guidelines for representation opened the door to the Mormon women. Attempting to impose a more systematic organizational structure that would provide more uniformity and control, the National’s leaders had institutionalized the participatory process. If Mormon women could prove anything to the outside world, it was that they were organized, although Wells admitted their organizations were not specifically “suffrage societies.”¹⁰⁹

The dual strategies of the Saints worked. The Mormon women attended the International Council, and Emily Richards, monogamist wife of “Lawyer Richards” and daughter-in-law of Franklin D., was granted the opportunity to address the Council session on “Philanthropy.” Nevertheless, that event was not without ^[436] its stressful moments. Because the arrangements for the Mormon women to attend were completed only days before the Council convened, Richards’s name did not appear on the printed program. When the session chair failed to announce her, Richards wrote a note to ask for an explanation. Susan Anthony promptly responded by meeting Richards in the wing and “escorted her to the platform with every demonstration of respect.” Richards’s speech was characterized by one enthusiastic Mormon as a “veritable triumph,” although printed copies of the address show it to be a carefully restrained, undramatic description of Latter-day Saint women’s auxiliary organizations.¹¹⁰ Richards herself regarded the International Council experience as one of the “most interesting,” if not most critical, of her life.¹¹¹

The day after the Council commenced, Emmeline Wells expressed her regrets that she did not “make an exertion to go down and be present,” but that seems to be a rationalization since it is likely she was still tainted with controversy.¹¹² Richards was a far more politic choice than Wells to represent the Mormon women’s cause: a monogamist, she symbolized the “innocent” women of Utah who had been disfranchised. Even though she belonged to a younger generation of Mormon suffragists, she was not new to Washington—her husband had been central to the ^[437] Saints’ legal battles for years. Perhaps because of her exposure in Washington to the best legal minds the L.D.S. leadership could find or afford, Richards seems to have been comfortable defending the rights of Mormon women, especially since plural marriage was not one of the rights she needed to defend. In the spring of 1888, in fact, Wilford Woodruff told one of the brethren that if anyone in a public meeting “attempted to speak about polygamy, to throw his hat at him.”¹¹³ Thus, it was Richards, not Wells, who led her sisters back into the national woman suffrage movement, a fact that later contributed to a developing “schism in the sisterhood.”¹¹⁴

Emily Richards took the single most important step for Mormon women to reclaim their standing in the organized woman suffrage movement when she brought the case of Utah’s representation before the National Association’s executive session on April 3, 1888.¹¹⁵ Not surprisingly, Richards’s presence provoked a debate; following her speech, at least one of the National’s officers objected to the presence of Mormon women because she thought it implied approval of polygamy.¹¹⁶ A resolution from Harriet Robinson, stating that the National “welcomes to its membership women of all classes, all races and religions,” apparently settled the ^[438] question, according to Mormon sources, “without further discussion.”¹¹⁷

After that resolution Richards and non-Mormon Isabel Cameron Brown, a member of the Industrial Christian Home Association of Salt Lake, were elected to the National’s executive committee.¹¹⁸ To resolve the dispute over the National’s representation from Utah, Jennie Froiseth and Richards were “authorized” to organize an official woman suffrage association in the territory; without one, neither could claim a basis of representation.¹¹⁹ Nevertheless, the controversy left the position of acting vice president from Utah, the office previously held by Froiseth, unfilled.

Exactly why Froiseth’s name did not appear in the official proceedings is unclear, although the National’s treatment of her at this meeting obviously angered anti-Mormons. Kate Field, who a year earlier had received a special tribute from anti-polygamy activists following passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, wrote to Stanton stating that she “resented” the “treatment” of “Mrs. Froiseth.”¹²⁰ To add to the confusion, in September, when the National Association published the officers supposedly elected during the April convention, Froiseth’s name was listed as the vice president from Utah.¹²¹ If the National had reinstated Froiseth to ^[439] placate its critics, their effort did not end the hard feelings created by the controversy; in January, Froiseth refused to act on the National’s “authorization” for her to work with Emily Richards to organize an official woman suffrage society in the territory.¹²²

*     *     *

By January 1889, in fact, the relationship between Utah’s activist women and national women’s rights activists had changed. For anti-polygamy activists, that change was facilitated when Julia Ward Howe visited Utah in the summer of 1888. If Howe had not heard of the controversy between Froiseth and the National Association before arriving in the territory, it would have been surprising. Froiseth was a vice-president from Utah in Howe’s Association for the Advancement of Women (A.A.W.), and they had known each other for years. Upon Howe’s arrival in the territory to lecture, the Salt Lake Tribune called her attention to the National’s actions.¹²³ During Howe’s Utah visit, her time was monopolized by the non-Mormon community, and she lectured in small Protestant churches, which troubled Mormon women.¹²⁴ Later, Froiseth asserted that the “Gentiles” had done “a good thing” by entertaining Howe because after her visit she was “able and only too willing to battle for the American home in polygamydom.”^{125 [440]}

Howe’s arrival was also a source of excitement for Mormon women. Emmeline Wells confessed that it was “quite an event” to see her, but that did not happen easily.¹²⁶ Wells sent flowers to Howe along with a request for an interview. Howe did not respond immediately, keeping Wells anxiously waiting. Following a short meeting with Howe, Wells wrote a generous article praising her, but Howe’s visit was nevertheless a disappointment to Mormon women. Wells concluded her tribute by remarking that it was surprising a woman of Howe’s “breadth of thought” and “liberal views” would come to Utah and not meet the Mormons.¹²⁷

Howe’s sympathy with the anti-polygamy cause translated into action after she left the territory. In the fall of 1889, at the Woman’s Congress, she introduced Jennie Froiseth “with very complimentary remarks,” and Howe’s name topped a list of A.A.W. women who formally thanked Froiseth for her “interesting and useful statements.”¹²⁸ Following the Woman’s Congress, Howe also attended the annual convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association, taking with her “abundant material” from Froiseth to present. Froiseth’s information was apparently compelling: when the American’s annual meeting ended, two new names appeared on its roster of officers, Froiseth and Cornelia Paddock. They were the first women ^[441] from Utah elected as representatives to the American’s board.¹²⁹

Ironically, Howe’s treatment of Mormon women also helped facilitate new and sympathetic support from two well-known women associated with the National: Clara Bewick Colby, editor of the Woman’s Tribune, and Elizabeth L. Saxon, long-time officer and woman suffrage lecturer.¹³⁰ Colby cited Howe’s avoidance of Mormon women as one reason she wished to spend time with them. She wanted to see for herself how they were “adjusting themselves to their new conditions.”¹³¹ Returning to the East in the fall of 1888 after lecturing on the West Coast, the two suffragists stopped to visit the territory. Mormon women welcomed

the visit of Colby and Saxon all the more because their opponents had monopolized Howe’s visit. While in Utah, they were hosted by Emily Richards, Romania Pratt and Emmeline Wells among others, and they attended L.D.S. church services, spoke to large predominantly Mormon audiences, and were given an elegant reception and luncheon at the Gordo House, the most prestigious building in the Salt Lake valley.¹³²

For Mormon suffragists, the visit of Colby and Saxon eased Howe’s painful snub. Colby, in fact, was at the height of her influence among woman suffragists; during the International Council and subsequently at the ^[442] National’s convention, she published daily editions of the Woman’s Tribune that ran to 12,500 copies.¹³³ Moreover, after leaving the territory, her descriptions of Salt Lake were positive and her portrayal of the Mormons, sympathetic. Colby also contradicted the general image of Mormon women that “pictures them as degraded, ignorant and down trodden,” stating instead that they had “a quiet air of good-breeding while their clothing was as rich and elegant as at any afternoon reception in eastern cities;” in addition, she noted the number of Mormon women who were doctors. Colby was also the first outsider to expose the problems at Angie Newman’s Industrial Home; she reported that despite its generous funding, its sole “beneficiaries” were one woman and eight children.¹³⁴

Mormon women were not only anxious to acquaint the national suffragists with their community, but they also were eager to inform them of the connection between their religion and their women’s rights activism. Colby, whose religious skepticism naturally aligned her with both Stanton and Gage, was intrigued by what she heard. Describing her visit, she told her readers that the Mormon woman who before her death had been “revered as a prophetess,” Eliza R. Snow, was credited by the sisterhood as “the first” Mormon woman to promulgate “the idea of the mother element in the God-head.” Snow’s poem ^[443] “voicing this thought,” Colby remarked, was one of the Saints “favorite devotional hymns.”¹³⁵ Mormon women apparently thought that their belief in a “mother-in-heaven” lent credibility to their women’s rights activism and their concept of women’s equality.¹³⁶

The Mormon sisters seemed to have accomplished their goal. Colby’s favorable depiction of Mormondom resulted in anti-Mormons describing both of the national suffragists as “special female attorneys of the Mormon church.” Following the Saxon-Colby visit to Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune claimed that Jennie Froiseth had gone to the Woman’s Congress to set the record straight with woman suffragists. The paper commended Froiseth for having “checkmated” all that Colby and Saxon had “hoped to do,” and it applauded her invitation to the A.A.W. to hold their annual meeting the following year in Salt Lake City. The Tribune also added that the assistance of more outside women would be helpful to the anti-Mormon cause.¹³⁷

Colby and Saxon’s trip to Utah also proved to have been of practical help. They encouraged Mormon suffragists to move ahead with the organization of an official Woman Suffrage Association.¹³⁸ In November 1888, Emily Richards, her mother-in-law Jane Richards and Zina D.H. Young apparently took steps to begin that process.^{139 [444]} By January, the Richards women, Zina Young, Emmeline Wells, Sarah Kimball and Bathsheba Smith met with L.D.S. President Wilford Woodruff and other leading brethren to formally organize the “ladies of Utah” into a “Woman Suffrage Association.” The association was to “appoint one or more delegates” to attend the January convention of the National Association scheduled for Washington, D.C. Woodruff added that Emily Richards would be a “suitable” delegate.¹⁴⁰ Before the formal call was issued, the names of Pratt, Ellen Ferguson and Josephine West were added.¹⁴¹

Sometime in early January, as a matter of protocol and perhaps courtesy, Emily Richards and Emmeline Wells called on Jennie Froiseth to ask her if she intended to call a meeting to organize a suffrage association. Froiseth refused to have any part of their plan. She no longer believed in woman suffrage for Utah, she added, because of the “anomalous condition of affairs here,” which may have been the reason she was no longer an officer in the National. Moreover, she would not work with women who believed in polygamy.¹⁴² Richards then told Froiseth that she would call the meeting, adding that she hoped “all classes of women in the Territory would co-operate.”¹⁴³ Froiseth explained her position to the Salt Lake Tribune so that the “Association in the East” would ^[445] understand why she could not take part “in establishing a branch here.”¹⁴⁴

Although the organizing meeting was decidedly Mormon, one of its most striking characteristics was that polygamist suffragists were barred from serving as officers of the new woman suffrage association. Two days before the women met to organize their association, Wells noted that no one who had “ever been in plural marriage” could have a position in the new association.¹⁴⁵ How the monogamist-only policy was set is not clear; in fact, even if the minutes of the meeting between the sisters and the brethren were available, they might not reveal the way the decision was made or by whom. In the dynamics between the brethren and the leading sisters, the women often made suggestions, and if the men had no objections, they would advance the idea or give the policy the seal of their authority. The decision to appoint monogamist women as officers could have come from the women’s reading of the situation as easily as it could have come from the brethren. Wherever the idea originated, it was a perceptive stroke that had the desired results. The political expediency of a monogamists-only policy did not make adherence to it any less painful for Wells. She noted privately after the organizing meeting that she felt “very unpleasant about the work,” especially since ^[446] she believed that much of it would be up to her and “Dr. Pratt.”¹⁴⁶

With one conspicuous exception, the monogamist policy of the newly founded Utah Woman Suffrage Association (U.W.S.A.) was upheld: Margaret N. Caine was elected as president; Lydia D. Adler, Nellie Webber and Priscilla Jennings Riter as vice presidents; Cornelia H. Clayton as secretary; and Margaret Dwyer as treasurer.¹⁴⁷ Caine and Emily Richards were confirmed as the official delegates to the National’s upcoming convention. The position of corresponding secretary proved the exception. That office went to a former polygamist, albeit one of its critics, Charlotte Godbe Kirby, who had continued her idiosyncratic course by marrying a non-Mormon mining man many years her junior.¹⁴⁸ Kirby’s selection suggests that the organizing process was fairly democratic, despite the clear understanding that the association was to be headed by monogamist women.

Wells’ fears notwithstanding, several women shared the “tedious” task of preparing material for the convention.¹⁴⁹ When Emily Richards left for Washington, D.C., she carried with her the carefully prepared credentials of the U.W.S.A. and “60 yards of names—8393 signatures” that Mormon suffragists collected for the National Association’s woman suffrage enrollment ^[447] campaign.¹⁵⁰ Richards also could boast of two hundred new members in Utah’s auxiliary. Half of the new members had signed up at the organizing meeting—the membership fee of twenty-five cents was kept small so more women would be “induced to join.”¹⁵¹ In all likelihood, she also took with her the annual dues for the National Association. (Utah’s membership fee conveniently covered the dues of twenty-five cents per member that the National Association’s by-laws stipulated.)

The outcome of the National’s annual convention confirmed the wisdom of attending carefully to every detail of the U.W.S.A.’s credentials and of its monogamists-only policy. Richards was reelected to the executive committee. The National’s suffragists also complied with their newly adopted constitution and bylaws, and replaced Jennie Froiseth with Margaret N. Caine as vice president from Utah.¹⁵²

Richards did not arrive at the National’s 1890 convention convinced that these means alone would produce the desired results. She also carried with her a carefully prepared speech, perhaps one of the more effective addresses ever given by a Mormon woman to a non-Mormon audience.¹⁵³ The speech essentially attempted to change the nature of the discourse between Mormon and national suffragists by focusing on common ground: “Today ^[448] I am disfranchised and on the same political plane as you, my sisters, and the rest of our sex in this ‘land of liberty.’” The disfranchisement of Mormon women, she observed, was “not more cruel to us than to you.” And again: “the experience which I gained with the women of Utah should not be concealed from this Convention; it belongs to you; it is essentially a part of women’s history in this great Republic.” Her defense of Mormon women, including the way they exercised their political rights, was neither belabored nor full of sentimental references to the hardships suffered by the Mormons in the past or present. Although the speech was conciliatory in nature, it was also a decisive attack on “our vice-president,” Froiseth, for her lack of “aid or sanction” to the fledgling Utah association. Richards’s speech, the press noted, “made a decidedly favorable impression.”¹⁵⁴

The Mormons’ woman suffrage front in Utah was proceeding less smoothly. At the second meeting of the Utah Association, an open letter to the “women of America” written by Charlotte Godbe Kirby was read, and the Association voted to release it to eastern papers. The letter included statements such as: “we would offer a suggestion that our Little Organization away in the Rocky Mts. may be the golden link to join together those two ^[449] grand armies[:] The American and the National Suffrage Association.” The letter also included: “Having conformed to the rules of the N.W.S.A. we see no reason why we should not be accepted as a strong ally to the Woman Suffrage Party,” but that statement replaced one which remains legible: “As there are no officers on our board in any way connected with polygamy, we having made this matter a test for office,” etc.¹⁵⁵ In essence, the letter was asking for recognition of the Utah Association and suggesting that the Utah Association which, “numbers many thousand women” would bring a “voice of some importance to women throughout the civilized world.”

Given the tone of the letter, it is not surprising that the vote to release the letter was not unanimous. After the meeting, Romania Pratt, always ready to speak her mind, told Kirby that she thought it was “presumptuous” to send out the letter, noting she did not want their organization to “appear ridiculous.”¹⁵⁶ Pratt’s concerns were well founded: in style and content, the open letter was both inappropriate and badly conceived.

Furious, Kirby did not let the matter rest there. After her election as an officer in the U.W.S.A., she had written to President Woodruff hoping to secure his recognition as a leader in the movement.¹⁵⁷ Fiercely defending the institutional niche in Utah she had found ^[450] at last, after her encounter with Pratt, she wrote Woodruff again informing him of this “little circumstance,” claiming that it showed the “wisdom” of her being placed where she was because her personal connections and social standing allowed her to “write such a letter and have it warmly received.”¹⁵⁸ Kirby also moved to defend her new position in the local newspapers; a letter of “self-praise” signed by “A Friend” was most likely her own doing.¹⁵⁹ Not surprisingly, despite her efforts, Kirby’s first official position in Utah’s woman suffrage movement proved to be her last.

When Kirby wrote to Woodruff seeking his support, he responded by stating blandly that he trusted “amicable and friendly feelings” would be “cultivated” and the women would work harmoniously together.¹⁶⁰ By the end of March, such maneuvering and internal conflicts apparently provoked Woodruff to remind the sisters in the woman suffrage movement “to work for Union in all their moves.”¹⁶¹ Woodruff’s counsel became increasingly difficult for the sisters to heed.

Despite internal conflicts, local woman suffrage associations affiliated with the Utah Association multiplied rapidly throughout the territory during 1890. Both city and county associations were organized, and meetings were held in a variety of locations, including ^[451] L.D.S. meetinghouses and tabernacles as well as county court houses and social halls. Many of these local organizations read and adopted constitutions and bylaws based on those of the National Woman Suffrage Association. At this stage, Utah’s woman suffrage associations were primarily educational in nature because the Edmunds-Tucker Act prohibited the territory from enfranchising women. Not until the prospect of statehood became a reality did Utah’s suffragists work actively for their re-enfranchisement.¹⁶²

At the Utah Association’s annual meeting in January 1890, new officers were elected and the monogamist policy sustained. Sarah M. Kimball, who almost twenty years to the day had declared herself publicly “a women’s rights woman,” was chosen president. Kimball had worked tirelessly within the Relief Society promoting woman suffrage as well as the other multiple projects of that organization.¹⁶³ She immediately began preparations to represent Utah at the upcoming woman suffrage convention in Washington, where the National and American Associations would merge.¹⁶⁴ During the meeting, concerns were expressed over the importance of a “large enrollment” and “sufficient means” so that Mormon women and not others would “represent us” among the national woman suffragists. In response, Kimball promptly ^[452] requested that all “organized suffragists” send “immediately” their number of members and reports of their activities during the year, “that our delegates may be able to report the same” at the Washington convention. Despite the sisters’ careful documentation and preparation of their credentials, Wells remained fearful that the convention would “not be all roses,” and that Kimball and Maria Dougall would find “many thorns” ahead.¹⁶⁵

Instead, the historic first meeting of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (N.A.W.S.A.) encouraged Mormon suffragists and left them seeing the “golden side of the affair.”¹⁶⁶ Susan Anthony’s seventieth birthday celebration set the tone for their venture, and her generous welcome at the final executive session of the National reassured them tangibly. Noting the presence of the Mormon women on their platform, Anthony urged the National’s suffragists not to “go back on their record. Every woman, whether she be Mormon or Gentile, has the right to vote.” The Congress, she added, had committed a “dastardly” act by disfranchising Utah’s women. Then, doubtless to the delight of the Mormon contingent, Anthony called attention to their “magnificent delegation.”¹⁶⁷ Only Ohio surpassed Utah in the number of delegate votes officially allotted. Anthony doubtless ^[453] appreciated the numerical strength that Utah’s delegation would provide on the National side in the upcoming joint session with the American.¹⁶⁸

Although the warm reception for Utah’s delegation owed much to their organizational efforts and their adherence to the monogamist-only policy, the advantage to the National of Utah’s numerical strength and other pragmatic considerations also accounted for Anthony’s effusive welcome. At the last executive session of the National’s board, Anthony had had to fend off attacks by anti-unionists which turned the meeting into the “most stormy in the history of the association.” Anthony’s welcoming words were offered as part of her response to critics who claimed that union would prove the death knell of the broad platform of the “old association.”¹⁶⁹

Shortly before the union convention of the National American began, its most vocal opponent, Matilda J. Gage, issued a call for the founding of the Woman’s National Liberal Union at a convention to follow the first N.A.W.S.A. meeting.¹⁷⁰ Earlier Gage expressed her concern that the embattled women’s rights program of the National Association would be abandoned, leaving a “religiously-oriented, narrowly-focused” woman suffrage association dominated by the W.C.T.U.¹⁷¹ Her alternative “Union,” she promised, would advocate the political, religious and ^[454] social emancipation of women, while fighting the W.C.T.U.’s efforts to secure legislation that Gage and others, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believed violated the separation of church and state.¹⁷² In fact, Gage had given the press a letter from Stanton reiterating Gage’s call for a new association, which suggested Stanton’s complicity in the matter. Stanton tried to dismiss the appearance of her letter and its contents, claiming her writing fashion to be “heedless,” but she was angry that Gage had published it. When a reporter asked Susan Anthony about Gage’s plan, she claimed never to have given the new movement “any thought,” although two months before she had called Gage’s plan “absurd” and “ridiculous,” comments, which, one historian argues, “masked her concern.”¹⁷³

Anti-union sentiment was rooted in earlier concerns over the National’s direction, concerns expressed most often and vocally by Gage and Stanton. Their objections stemmed in part from the growing presence of the W.C.T.U. during the 1880s in the National. At the National’s 1887 convention, the deference shown the W.C.T.U. gave a “decidedly religious cast” to the convention “for the first time in [N.W.S.A.’s] history,” according to one historian.¹⁷⁴ That Stanton was troubled by this turn of events was illustrated in a letter to Clara Colby, in ^[455] which she called the Prohibition movement “the rock ahead for woman suffrage.”¹⁷⁵ After the International Council in 1888, the fears of Stanton and Gage intensified because of the heavy representation of Union women and the dominance of Frances Willard.¹⁷⁶ The question of the National’s uniting with the American compounded the concerns of Gage, Stanton and others, but no one offered a wholly satisfactory solution.

For Anthony, a working alliance with the W.C.T.U. and uniting with the American Association made pragmatic and political sense. But as the negotiations to unite the National and American intensified, other National leaders grew increasingly wary. Some opponents felt that the fundamental differences between the two associations would ultimately “lead to internal dissention” and that “Woman Suffrage would be impaired instead of strengthened by a union.” Even Isabella Beecher Hooker, who had labored to prevent the original split, feared the compromises that a union implied. For her, only the National would continue to provide “a greater scope for individual expression.”¹⁷⁷

The National’s members were “widely divided” over the issue of union, and Mormon women became the beneficiaries of the debate.¹⁷⁸ When Anthony had taken the stand at the N.W.S.A.’s previous executive session before the joint ^[456] convention, she tried both to calm the concerns of many and secure the loyalty of all so as to present a united front at the union meeting. To those critics who feared the loss of the National’s “broad platform,” Anthony insisted that they would continue to stand “like a rock in regard to creeds and politics, demanding that every woman should be allowed to come upon our platform to plead for her freedom.” She reassured anti-unionists that she wanted the National’s liberal principles to be maintained, “that our platform may be kept as broad as the universe, that upon it may stand the representatives of all creeds and no creeds—Jew or Christian, Protestant or Catholic, Gentile or Mormon, pagan or atheist.”¹⁷⁹

For her part, Stanton told the convention that she hoped the new association would “keep our platform as broad as Mrs. Gage and myself desire,” and in both the executive session and the joint meeting, she reaffirmed that position, also citing the presence of Mormon women to illustrate her point.¹⁸⁰ Stanton was not willing to back an insurrection; in fact, for ten years she had focused more attention on her own interests and concerns than on the political and organizational problems that had come to consume Anthony. While Stanton’s imprint is clearly on the nature of the National in the 1870s, it was Anthony’s that dominated the 1880s. ^[457]

Anthony’s claims that the new association would have a broad platform may have helped soothe the concerns of Stanton and others who continued to fear the move toward union; whether they were uttered sincerely is questionable, but they do not reflect the practical considerations of accepting the Mormon suffragists. The Mormon suffragists brought a considerable number of members into the national movement, and under the new organizational plan, numbers meant dues, neither of which were factors that Anthony would have neglected to consider.

*     *     *

Events in Utah in the months that followed the union convention ultimately made it easier than in the past for national suffragists to stand by a commitment to Mormon women. The Mormons’ “year of shocks” began in February when, because of the restrictions imposed on Mormons’ voting rights, the Liberals won control in Salt Lake City’s municipal election; this victory had its inception in the passage of the Edmunds Act of 1882.¹⁸¹ The Mormons’ weakened political control seemed all the more dire after several unfavorable decisions by the United States Supreme Court. Not only was the church escheated of its property, other coercive measures included in the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 took a toll on Mormon ^[458] solidarity.¹⁸² Moreover, it also appeared that the Mormons might be facing total disfranchisement.

Although the L.D.S. Church had made earlier efforts to control the number of plural marriages performed, in July George Q. Cannon, by then a counselor to Wilford Woodruff, declared: “I have been assured hundreds of time by men of wisdom and discernment that our overthrow was inevitable unless we conform to the demands of public opinion and renounce all peculiarities of faith; . . . and that it was folly to suppose we could withstand these continued assaults upon us.”¹⁸³

In September, President Wilford Woodruff announced to the Saints that he was “under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the Church.”¹⁸⁴ The Woodruff Manifesto, as it came to be known, asked church members to “refrain from conducting” plural marriages. On October 6, 1890, the church membership voted to sustain the declaration. With that began the long and painful process of abandoning polygamy.

Thus, 1890 proved a landmark year. For woman suffragists, it marked the end of the division of their movement and the beginning of the “modern mass movement” for woman suffrage. The unity of the woman suffrage associations did not mean that the movement was united: the radical sentiment within the National did not ^[459] disappear, but went in new directions, including Gage’s organization and the short-lived Federal Suffrage Association. The supposed benefits of uniting the branches of the movement proved illusory. In fact, woman suffrage was not achieved nationally until after the movement divided once again. This time, the militants gathered in the Congressional Union and the Woman’s Party, under the leadership of Alice Paul.

It has been argued that there was a link between the defeat of the Sixteenth Amendment effort in 1887 and passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act: the opposition of woman suffragists to the disfranchising section of that legislation had a “serious impact” on the N.W.S.A.’s prospects for passage of the amendment.¹⁸⁵ Certainly, Susan Anthony’s comment to Mormon women in 1882, that national suffragists had to “guard the cause by shunning even the appearance of evil,” is evidence of the National’s new concern with being identified with the Mormons, as is her subsequent contact with the Mormons.¹⁸⁶ But the arguments used by opponents of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1887 make it clear that objections to woman suffrage were so fundamental they would not have been ameliorated, even if woman suffrage had never been identified with either the Mormons or polygamy.^{187 [460]}

In retrospect, 1890 was also a watershed year for Utah’s suffragists, although at the time the clear implications of the Woodruff Manifesto and the permanence of the Mormons’ position in the National American Woman Suffrage Association were unknown. For anti-polygamy activists, the year marked the end of their official presence in the national woman suffrage movement, but it did not diminish their skepticism about the Saints’ willingness to abandon polygamy; as history has shown, their fears were not without foundation.¹⁸⁸

The summer of 1890 did provide woman suffragists with a chance to unite in celebrating Wyoming’s victorious statehood bid—its new constitution included woman suffrage, and that gave the woman suffrage flag its first star. Utah’s suffragists took heart in their sister-state’s success. In 1870 they had followed Wyoming’s lead; now, they hoped to do the same. Eventually they did, but this time it would take five years to duplicate Wyoming’s achievement. ^[461]