An Experiment In Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage In Utah In 1870
BY T H O M A S
G.
ALEXANDER
X N 1869 AND 1870, as the nation agonized over the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment and universal manhood suffrage, the people of Utah considered a suffrage question which was so far ahead of its time that the nation did not adopt it until 1920. At that time these mountain westerners debated universal adult suffrage, female suffrage as it was then called, or woman suffrage as it is generally called today. 1 Dr. Alexander, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, was the 1969 recipient of the U t a h State Historical Society Morris S. Rosenblatt Award for his article "John Wesley Powell, T h e Irrigation Survey, and the I n a u g u r a t i o n of the Second Phase of Irrigation Development in U t a h , " which was selected as the best article of the year appearing in the Utah Historical Quarterly. Dr. Alexander expresses appreciation to Professor Leonard J. Arrington for his help in securing sources used in this present article. 1 General treatments of w o m a n suffrage will be found in Carrie C h a p m a n Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Woman Suffrage and Politics: The Inner Sfory of the Suffrage Movement (New York, 1926) ; T h e National American W o m a n Suffrage Association, Victory: How Women Won It; A Centennial Symposium, 1840-1940 (New York, 1940) ; and K a t e B. Carter, comp., Woman Suffrage in the West ([Salt Lake City], 1943).
