4 N O . I V O L .
8 8
270 First to Vote: Commemorating Utah’s Suffragists
U H Q
I
CONTENTS By Katherine Kitterman
278 The Echo of Equal Suffrage:
265
A Brief History of Utah’s Rural Suffrage Movement, 1889–1896 By Tiffany H. Greene
287 The Fire of Civic Endeavor: Utah Suffrage after Statehood, 1896–1920 By Rebekah Ryan Clark
306 Women and the Transcontinental Railroad through Utah, 1868–1869 By Wendy Simmons Johnson
320 Finding the Joy in Labor in the Salt Lake City School District By Elizabeth Egleston Giraud
336 Classic Reprint: Women in the Utah Work Force from Statehood to World War II By Miriam B. Murphy
HISTORIOGRAPHY 350 Women’s History in Utah Historical Quarterly: A Selected Bibliography
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 265
8/26/20 6:42 PM
DEPARTMENTS
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
267 353 359 360
In This Issue Reviews Contributors Utah In Focus
REVIEWS 353 Governors and the Progressive Movement By David R. Berman Reviewed by Jeff Nichols
354 Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory By Cynthia Culver Prescott Reviewed by Amanda Tewes
356 Iron Mining and Manufacturing in Utah By Evan Y. Jones and York F. Jones Reviewed by Paula Mitchell
266
357 Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture By Chip Colwell Reviewed by Dean McGuire
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 266
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Accordingly, this issue opens with three pieces written by historians from the nonprofit organization Better Days 2020 that refresh what we know about female suffrage in Utah. Katherine Kitterman argues that far from being on the sidelines, “Utah women punched above their weight in the national suffrage movement, and their experience and contributions shaped the trajectory and ultimate success of that movement in securing a federal amendment for women’s suffrage.” Further, Kitterman adds women of color into the Utah suffrage story, including Elizabeth Taylor and Hannah Kaaepa.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 267
Our next three articles move the camera to focus on a controlling factor in anyone’s life: economic circumstances. Wendy Simmons Johnson, an archaeologist, shines a light on a subject that has received only scant attention, the role of women in the creation of the first transcontinental railroad. She looks at three classes of women involved in that effort: entertainers, prostitutes, hotel owners, and others in “hell-on-wheels” track towns; Latter-day Saint women who cooked and washed for railroad crews; and the wives of railroad employees who traveled along with the construction. The economic and social realities these groups of women encountered made a tremendous difference in how they experienced the building of the railroad. Moreover, as Simmons Johnson puts it, “Although their work was often different from men’s, women still profited economically from the transcontinental endeavor and were critical to its success.”
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
This isn’t entirely new territory for UHQ: the journal has published a number of special issues about women. In 1970, one hundred years after women first voted in Utah, Leonard Arrington acted as guest editor of an issue that focused on women and politics. This was a forward-thinking piece of scholarship: according to one tabulation, from 1960 to 1975, historians wrote only twenty-one books about American women. The field of women’s history had gathered more steam by the late 1970s, a time when UHQ again produced an issue entitled “Views of Utah Women.”1 The current number of the quarterly closes with a selected bibliography of UHQ articles about women published from 1946 to the present. That the quarterly has done so much to document women’s lives is a point of pride. Even so, there is always room for more research.
Tiffany Greene extends this reconsideration of suffrage history with a detailed look at the work of women who belonged to some fifty chapters of the Woman Suffrage Association (WSA), a national organization. Hundreds of rural women joined the WSA and advocated for a renewal of the rights they had lost with the disenfranchisement of Utah women in 1887. Finally, Rebekah Ryan Clark takes the story beyond 1896 to show how the “fire of civic endeavor” impelled Utah suffragists to continue their efforts after they had regained the vote, fighting for the rights of women throughout the United States.
U H Q
On August 18, 1920, the United States Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged on the basis of sex. In honor of that centennial, as well as the sesquicentennial of female suffrage in Utah, this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly considers the laws, cultural ideals, and economic realities that have expanded and circumscribed the lives of Utah women. Put differently, we ask how women have navigated their public and private worlds: what restrictions have they faced; what opportunities have they enjoyed?
4
In This Issue
267
Next, Elizabeth Giraud delivers a carefully researched article about the arts and crafts movement in Salt Lake City: its relationship with progressivism and, particularly, how educators used “manual training” in public schools in the first years of the twentieth century. Part of that history belongs to Emma Daft, a single mother with a gift for artistic expression and teaching. Daft used those talents, developed through years of makeshift opportunities, to support
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Finally, a classic reprint from Miriam Murphy uses legislative records, census data, and oral interviews to analyze the working lives of Utah women from statehood to World War II. Surveying the types of jobs women could find, as well as their experiences in those workplaces, Murphy argues that Utah women generally fit national patterns. During those forty-five
years, she writes, “Many of their occupations were of signal importance to education, health care, manufacturing, communications, retailing, business—the lifeblood of most communities, in fact.” Their working conditions often included long hours, sexual harassment, and nary a benefit, yet Utah’s women increasingly joined the paid workforce, changing along with the social and economic environment around them. Note 1. Gerda Lerner, “Priorities and Challenges in Women’s History Research,” Perspectives on History, accessed May 13, 2020, historians.org.
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
her family and enrich the community. Her story, as well as the larger story of developing educational ideals in the Salt Lake School District, prompts us to look at how the structure of society affects the life choices that any of us make—and how those choices go on to affect the lives of others.
268
Opposite: A few Utah heroines in the struggle for women’s suffrage. Top: Protesters for women’s voting rights, November 10, 1917. Lovern Robertson of Salt Lake City is fourth from the left. Bottom left: Minnie Quay. Robertson and Quay, among others, were arrested in November 1917 when they picketed outside the White House. The women ended up in the Occoquan Workhouse, where workhouse guards brutalized them. Bottom center: Elizabeth “Lizzie” Taylor, a newspaper woman and advocate for African American rights. Bottom right: Hannah Kaaepa, a Native Hawaiian who traveled to the Triennial Congress of the National Council of Women in 1899. Images courtesy of Library of Congress and Amy Tanner Thiriot.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 268
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
269
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 269
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
270
The Utah delegation to the triennial National Council of Women, held in Washington, D.C., in February 1899. Note, particularly, in the bottom right corner, Hannah Kaaepa, a Native Hawaiian woman. Young Woman’s Journal, May 1899.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 270
8/26/20 6:42 PM
The year 2020 marks the 150th anniversary of Utah women’s first votes: the first cast in the United States under a law that made women’s suffrage rights equal to men’s.1 It also marks the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, offering a unique opportunity for Utahns to reflect on the long, messy, and unfinished work for equal suffrage. Leading up to the Nineteenth Amendment centennial, a resurgence of voting rights history is pulling the suffrage movement back from the sidelines of U.S. history. We’re remembering how—far from being a long but triumphant march forward (for white women)—the movement came to focus narrowly on voting rights, how it split on issues of race, and how various factions negotiated, compromised, or protested to achieve their goals.2 Americans are rediscovering the implications of that movement— with all its fractures, successes, compromises, and setbacks—for our democracy today. We are still wrestling with many of the same questions the suffrage movement raised over one hundred years ago: whose voices matter in the public square, where women fit in politics, business, and community leadership, and how social change should happen.
4 N O . V O L .
K I T T E R MA N
I
KAT H E R I N E
U H Q
BY
8 8
I
First to Vote: Commemorating Utah’s Suffragists
271
In 2020, Utahns commemorated the sesquicentennial of women’s suffrage with legislative ceremonies, exhibits, public events, and new monuments. Martha Hughes Cannon will soon represent Utah in the United States Capitol, and a memorial at Council Hall in Salt Lake City now honors the first Utah women voters and all those who followed as federal and state legislation slowly expanded the franchise. From billboards to classrooms, Utahns are rediscovering the local leaders who advanced women’s rights. In 1970, Leonard J. Arrington remarked it was “fitting” for the Utah Historical Quarterly to highlight women’s contributions in a special issue for the centennial of women’s suffrage in Utah.3 He noted that women in Utah were “the first in the nation to exercise the right of suffrage” and that they were among the first to serve as elected officials. They played
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 271
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Seraph Young, who became, on February 14, 1870, the first woman in the United States to cast a vote under a women’s equal suffrage law. Reproduced in Deseret Evening News, March 8, 1902.
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
Second, Utah suffragists generally enjoyed support in their work for women’s voting rights from the majority in their communities, especially from Latter-day Saint leaders. There was real opposition to women’s suffrage in some quarters within Utah, but suffragists did not face the same kind of protracted, uphill battle in Utah as they did in most other parts of the United States. This has led many people to conclude that Utah women did not do much to gain the vote.
272
crucial roles in many local industries and ran the first women’s periodical west of the Mississippi. Fifty years later, there’s much more to say about Utah’s complex suffrage story and Utahns’ role in the movement for women’s voting rights. Utah women citizens became the first in the United States to cast ballots with equal suffrage when they voted in 1870 elections. Their votes attracted national attention and scrutiny, prompting visits from leading suffragists and congressional legislation. The struggle for women’s voting rights in Utah shaped the trajectory of the national movement, and it produced generations of committed suffragists who worked for nearly fifty years to advance a federal amendment enfranchising women. Despite its historically significant beginning, the story of suffrage in Utah is often relegated to a side note in the national narrative about voting rights history, due to several factors. First, this story played out early. Utah women gained voting rights twice, but in the nineteenth century, before the national movement gained winning momentum or developed a recognizable visual culture. The first suffrage victories in Utah and other western states were crucial, but they became a less-visible prologue to the wins that began accruing more rapidly in the twentieth century.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 272
Third, and most importantly, Utah’s suffrage story has been entangled in the conflict over the Latter-day Saint practice of polygamy from the very beginning. Polygamy was the precipitating factor for Utah’s 1870 suffrage law, and it was the reason Congress revoked Utah women’s voting rights in 1887. It also complicated Utah suffragists’ relationships with various factions of the national movement for women’s rights, well past the official end of polygamy in 1890.4 Unfortunately, many people today write off Utah women’s early political engagement, just like their nineteenth-century contemporaries did, because they consider “the Utah experiment seriously compromised by theocracy and polygamy.”5 The problem with dismissing women’s suffrage in Utah as an experiment or a Mormon public relations ploy is that this obscures the very real political experience Utah women gained as voters and political actors in the 1870s and 1880s. Utah women’s engagement in politics mattered, both to themselves and to other women across the country.6 Utah’s female citizens were the first substantial population of voting women in the United States.7 Their ballots immediately attracted national attention and scrutiny, and as their voting rights became a political football in the conflict over the “Mormon Question,” women both inside and outside the LDS church entered the fray to have their say.8 Latter-day Saint women had collectively entered politics to defend their religious practice and the rights of polygamous men against congressional attack. But within a few years of having gained the franchise, antipolygamists began to target their voting rights as a factor upholding polygamy—or the “liberty of self-degradation,”
8/26/20 6:42 PM
As Mormon women attempted to defend both polygamy and their voting rights, they adopted and adapted established patterns of women’s political engagement from the antislavery movement and the nascent suffrage movement. Across the territory, they held indignation meetings, petitioned, lobbied, and wrote newspaper articles to counter antipolygamy and antisuffrage arguments. In response to a congressional bill that would have repealed women’s suffrage in Utah, several thousand women petitioned in 1878: “We have exercised the ballot with our own free will and
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Through the course of this political engagement and their defense of their voting rights in the 1870s and 1880s, Mormon women in Utah came to describe and see themselves as citizens.14 This was a meaningful rhetorical choice at a time when the meaning of citizenship was still very much debated in American society. In the early 1870s, the National American Suffrage Association was unsuccessfully trying to demonstrate that (native-born, white) women already held voting rights flowing from their U.S. citizenship.15 At a time when women in other parts of the United States were facing arrest and fines for voting illegally, Utah women were arguing to federal officials that the government was obligated to protect their voting rights as loyal U.S. citizens. Through this engagement, they became articulate political actors in their own behalf.
I
Many Latter-day Saint women found the need to defend their own voting rights as an equally pressing reason to remain in the political fray; congressional proposals to disenfranchise them came as early as 1873 in an antipolygamy bill introduced by a New Jersey senator.11 They countered antisuffrage arguments nationally and locally decades before those same arguments would be turned on other women as the suffrage movement began to attract organized opposition. Some of the strongest arguments against Mormon women’s right to vote, for instance, developed out the speeches and writings of Utah’s Jennie Froiseth, vice president of the Utah Ladies’ Antipolygamy Society and editor of the Antipolygamy Standard.12
choice, having fully demonstrated that honorable women command as much respect at the polls, as in the drawing-room, the parlor, and the Church.”13 They sought to demonstrate that they were not voting only as their husbands or church leaders directed, but rather that they were capable of rational, intelligent decisions on political matters and that their influence in politics was uplifting, not disruptive, to American society.
U H Q
as the popular nineteenth-century lecturer Kate Field put it.9 The Liberal Party in Utah also attempted to overturn Utah’s women’s suffrage law several times throughout the 1870s and 1880s.10
273
So what did Utah women do to gain voting rights? First, evidence indicates that Utah women were not the entirely passive observers of the suffrage question in 1870 that some previous historians assumed them to be.16 Minutes
Three leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in Utah, Emily Richards, Sarah M. Kimball, and Phoebe Beatie, photographed in 1875. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 28709.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 273
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
274
from the Salt Lake City Fifteenth Ward LDS Relief Society show that leading Latter-day Saint women passed a motion to “demand of the Gov the right of franchise” at a mass meeting on January 6, 1870.17 That meeting led to the “great indignation meeting” one week later that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explores in A House Full of Females, and also precipitated similar gatherings in more than fifty towns across Utah Territory. These meetings mobilized over twenty thousand women.18 Utah women did not publicly campaign for the vote in 1870, but their territory-wide mobilization to defend polygamy demonstrated to Mormon lawmakers that women could be valuable political partners. It certainly advanced a goal that some women had felt and expressed privately.19 Later, after Congress disenfranchised all Utah women through the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, Utah women officially organized under the National Woman Suffrage Association to regain the franchise. This effort involved thousands of women across the territory, from San Juan County to St. George, and from Beaver to Brigham City.20 At least twenty-one counties had branches of the Woman Suffrage Association (WSA) of Utah by 1895. As part of this network, suffragists gathered regularly to sing from the Utah Woman Suffrage Song Book, educate each other about civics and current political issues, perform music and recitations, and plan events to sustain local support for women’s voting rights.21 The Woman’s Exponent shared news of local WSA meetings and projects, as well as reporting news of women’s rights and reprinting articles from national suffrage periodicals like the Woman’s Journal and the National Citizen and Ballot Box.22 Utah suffragists’ careful organization, lobbying, and petitioning secured the inclusion of an equal suffrage clause in Utah’s constitution that also allowed women citizens to hold public office.23 The commitment of Utah women to the cause of equal suffrage did not end with statehood. While the new constitution guaranteed the equal voting rights of male and female citizens, discriminatory U.S. citizenship laws still excluded many women of color from the polls. Women who had emigrated from many Asian countries could not apply for U.S. citizenship until 1952. Many Native Americans were not
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 274
Elizabeth A. Taylor, who actively encouraged women’s political participation. This newspaper image was preserved by Taylor’s granddaughter, Josephine Taylor Dickey. Courtesy of Amy Tanner Thiriot.
considered U.S. citizens until 1924, and even then, many states—including Utah—had laws on the books that prevented people living on reservations from voting. The state legislature only repealed Utah’s law in 1957, as a legal challenge was making its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Many women of color in Utah pushed against boundaries of social inclusion to advocate for a fuller realization of equal suffrage. Elizabeth A. Taylor and Alice Nesbitt were particularly active in political campaigns, encouraging their fellow black women to register and vote despite the discrimination they might face in doing so.24 Hannah Kaaepa, a Hawaiian Latter-day Saint, emigrated to Iosepa, Utah, in 1898, the same year the United States annexed Hawaii. At the invitation of May Wright Sewall, Kaaepa addressed the National Council of Women in Washington, D.C. in 1899. Speaking in both English and Hawaiian, she urged council members to support the dethroned Queen Lili‘uokalani’s efforts to secure voting rights for Hawaiian women as well as men.25 Between Utah statehood in 1896 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Utahns elected sixteen women to the state legislature and over 130 women to county offices across the state.26 Those numbers would
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Many Utah suffragists continued their engagement in the national movement for an amendment to the federal constitution. As Martha Hughes Cannon testified in 1898, while serving as the nation’s first female state senator, “none of the unpleasant results which were predicted have occurred.”27 Women from Utah and elsewhere in the West demonstrated that the sky did not fall when women voted. Through the Utah Council of Women, they worked with both the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), as well as the more radical National Woman’s Party. Utahns continued to raise funds, welcome national suffrage leaders, attend conventions, lobby lawmakers, and gather petition signatures in support of suffrage. For example, Utah contributed nearly 40,000 signatures to a massive NAWSA petition for a suffrage amendment presented to Congress in 1910—three times the state’s assignment and one-tenth of the total number of signatures.28 And Utah’s federal delegation were some of the strongest advocates for the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment.” Utah women punched above their weight in the national suffrage movement, and their
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 275
V O L . I
experience and contributions shaped the trajectory and ultimate success of that movement in securing a federal amendment for women’s suffrage. The year 1920 was no more the end of suffrage work than 1870 was the beginning, but Utah women’s crucial role in the long struggle toward women’s political equality is worth remembering. Their efforts for the cause of equal voting rights should not be dismissed, overlooked, or forgotten. They supply needed examples of public engagement, careful strategy, and community leadership for Utahns today.
U H Q
decline in coming decades, but the experience Utah women gained in campaigning, mobilizing voters, and public administration should not be overlooked. The real and practical effects of women’s suffrage in Utah came not only through policies, but also in the way it shaped women’s view of their place in the public square and in the way Utahns marshalled their forces to support national women’s suffrage.
8 8
I
N O .
4
A snapshot simply labeled “Payson 1920” that appears to show women and men queueing at a voting location. Arthur Nichols, photographer. Courtesy of Suzanne Nichols and Jana Warner.
275
Notes 1. Although Wyoming Territory was first to pass a law extending voting rights to women citizens, in December 1869, Utah Territory passed a similar law two months later, in February 1870. Due to the timing of elections, Utah women were first to go to the polls. They voted in Salt Lake City’s municipal election on February 14, 1870, and in the territory-wide general election on August 1, 1870. Wyoming women first cast ballots in a general election on September 6, 1870. A note on terminology: although nineteenth-century Americans used the term woman suffrage, this issue of Utah Historical Quarterly will use the more accessible women’s suffrage, except in the case of proper nouns. 2. Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 3. Leonard J. Arrington, “Women as a Force in Utah History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 5. 4. See Joan Iversen, “The Mormon-Suffrage Relationship: Personal and Political Quandaries,” Frontiers 11, no. 2/3 (1990): 8–16; and Joan Smyth Iversen, The AntiPolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880–1925: A Debate on the American Home (New York: Routledge, 1997). 5. T. A. Larson, “Woman Suffrage in Western America,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 17.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
276
6. Historical work that does take Utah women’s political engagement seriously owes its foundations to research and publications such as Carol Cornwall Madsen’s edited volume Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870–1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), and her two biographies of Emmeline Wells, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870–1920 (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2006) and Emmeline B. Wells: An Intimate History (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2017). Also incredibly important is work such as that included in the Utah Women’s History Association’s collection edited by Patricia Lyn Scott and Linda Thatcher, Women in Utah History: Paradigm or Paradox? (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005) that began to contextualize Utah women’s political participation collectively and as individuals. 7. In 1870, approximately 1,500 women citizens in Wyoming would have been eligible to vote, but that number was nearly 18,000 in Utah by conservative estimates— twelve times larger. See United States Census Bureau, 1870 Census: A Compendium of the Ninth Census, Sex, and School, Military, and Citizenship Ages, accessed April 13, 2020, www2.census.gov/library/publications /decennial/1870/compendium/1870e-27.pdf. 8. Beverly Beeton, “Woman Suffrage in Territorial Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 46, no. 2 (Spring 1978): 6–26. 9. Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The Liberty of Self-Degradation: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (December 1996): 815–97. 10. See for example “Proposed Memorial to Congress for a Registration Act for Utah,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 16, 1872, 1; “Utah Gentiles Interview the President on the Polygamy Question,” Eureka (UT) Daily Sentinel, January 30, 1876, 2; “Female Franchise,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, October 2, 1880, 3. 11. “The Frelinghuysen Bill,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 18, 1873, 2. 12. For example, in 1880, Froiseth wrote in the Antipolygamy Standard, “The only effect that the franchise has had in this Territory, has been to increase the spread of polygamy and the consequent degradation of woman.” See “Polygamy and Woman Suffrage,” Antipolygamy Standard 1, no. 3 (June 1880): 20. Froiseth was a suffragist herself who served as NWSA vice-president for Utah from at least 1884 to 1888. See National Woman Suffrage Association: Report of the Sixteenth Annual Washington Convention (Rochester, NY: C. Mann Press, 1884), 141. 13. Memorial of Utah Women Against the Christiancy-Luttrell Bills Which Would Disenfranchise Them, March 4, 1878, HR45A-H23.6, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233; National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 14. Memorial of Utah Women; “Petition for Woman Suffrage,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 19, 1877, 3; Emmeline B. Wells, “Letter to the Sisters at Home,” Woman’s Exponent, April 1, 1886, 164. 15. This “New Departure” strategy hit an insurmountable roadblock in 1875 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 276
in Minor v. Happersett that citizenship alone did not guarantee women the right to vote. 16. T. A. Larson, “Woman Suffrage in Western America,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 19; see also, Thomas G. Alexander, “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah in 1870,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 26. 17. “Minutes of a Ladies Mass Meeting,” January 6, 1870, Fifteenth Ward, Salt Lake Stake, Relief Society Minutes and Records, 1868–1968, vol. 1, 1868–1873, p. 139–42, LR 2848 14, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah, available online at catalog.churchofjesuschrist. org, accessed April 17, 2020. 18. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870 (New York: Vintage, 2017); “The Ladies’ Mass Meetings—Their True Significance,” Deseret News, March 9, 1870. 19. The minutes of the January 6 mass meeting were published in the Deseret News along with the call for a large indignation meeting in Salt Lake City’s Old Tabernacle, but the women’s resolution to demand the right of franchise was omitted in that publication. See “Minutes of a Ladies’ Mass Meeting,” Deseret News, January 12, 1870, 8. 20. For a closer look at two local suffrage associations, see Lisa Bryner Bohman, “A Fresh Perspective: The Woman Suffrage Associations of Beaver and Farmington, Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 59, No. 1 (Winter 1991): 4–21. 21. Utah Woman Suffrage Song Book (Salt Lake City: Woman’s Exponent Office, [1890]), LDS Church History Library. 22. For example, see “W.S.A. Reports,” “W.S. Party at Payson, Utah,” Woman’s Exponent, March 15, 1892, 134, and “Women Druggists in Buffalo,” “Notes and News,” Woman’s Exponent, September 15, 1889, 58. 23. Jean Bickmore White, “Woman’s Place is in the Constitution: The Fight for Equal Suffrage in 1895,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Fall 1974): 344–69. 24. “Rally of Colored Women,” August 23, 1895, Salt Lake Tribune, 3; “Echoes of the Election,” Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, UT), November 12, 1898, 1. 25. “Hana Kaapea’s Presentation,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 26, 1899, 4; “The Recent Triennial in Washington,” Young Woman’s Journal 10, no. 5 (May 1899): 195, 203–204. 26. Katherine Kitterman and Rebekah Ryan Clark, Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), end matter. For information about each of these of these women—compiled by the Utah women’s history nonprofit, Better Days 2020— see “Explore the History,” Better Days 2020, accessed May 20, 2020, utahwomenshistory.org/explore-the -history/. 27. Quoted in Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, 1883–1900 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 319. 28. “Council of Women Has Busy Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 2, 1909, 12.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
THE PRESS, WOMEN, AND THE LONG ROAD TO THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT
N O . U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
EditEd By LINDA STEINER, CAROLYN KITCH, AND BROOKE KROEGER
I
Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage
4
Front Pages, Front Lines
277
266 pp. 6 x 9 in. 13 black & white photographs Paper; E-book UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 277
www.press.uillinois.edu
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
278
A map of towns and hamlets where a chapter of the Woman Suffrage Association had been formed, 1889–1895. Map created by Whitney Seal and Deb Miller, Utah Division of State History.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 278
8/26/20 6:42 PM
T IF FA N Y
H .
G R E E N E
On the evening of November 20, 1894, Emily Crane Watson gathered with fellow suffragists in Parowan, Utah, to enjoy an evening of “musical and literary entertainment.”1 Their local suffrage newspaper, the Echo of Equal Suffrage, was read as part of the evening’s program. The publication was edited, published, and distributed by the women of the Iron County Woman Suffrage Association in order to “allay any prejudice against [the] organization.”2 They did not intend the name of their paper as a figure of speech. Since 1887, when the federal government passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act, Utah women’s elective franchise had been revoked. These women relied heavily on the echo of their previous equal suffrage to inspire a movement to regain that right. The story of these Iron County women, their suffrage newspaper, and their rural political activism is not unique in Utah history, only underexplored.
4 N O . I U H Q
I
BY
V O L .
8 8
The Echo of Equal Suffrage: A Brief History of Utah’s Rural Suffrage Movement, 1889–1896
279
Between 1889 and 1895, hundreds of female citizens joined local suffrage associations across Utah Territory in order to advocate for the restoration of the female franchise.3 The history of Utah’s rural suffrage movement has traveled to the present day in precisely the way that the name of Emily Watson’s paper unknowingly predicted: as an echo rather than a clear call. Historians have acknowledged the existence of rural activism in the Utah suffrage story but have done little to examine the specifics of who was involved or what types of activities they engaged in outside of the three rural towns for which Woman Suffrage Association minute books survived: Beaver, Farmington, and Glenwood.4 The research presented here, sourced from local newspapers of the time period, yields new information concerning Utah’s rural suffragists and provides a more complete understanding of what nineteenth-century activism looked like for these women. In January 1889, Emily Richards and Margaret Caine established the Woman Suffrage Association (WSA) of Utah, as an affiliate organization
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 279
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
280
of the National Woman Suffrage Association led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth C. Stanton.5 The constitution of the WSA of Utah provided a protocol for establishing affiliate associations in the counties of Utah.6 By 1890, there were organized suffrage associations in sixteen of the twenty-five counties then established in Utah Territory. By 1895, the year the territorial legislature voted to include an equal suffrage clause in the proposed state constitution, twenty-one of the then twenty-seven counties had associations.7 Each county WSA elected women to the offices of president, vice president(s), secretary, treasurer, and corresponding secretary. Typically, the group elected seven to eight women to the offices, with an additional five to nine women elected to serve on an executive committee. These officers were responsible for organizing and supporting the WSA in the towns of their counties, holding county suffrage conventions, and participating in annual territory-wide suffrage conferences. The organizational framework of the county WSAs was replicated at the town level, with women elected to fill executive offices and work on committees. In counties where few municipalities had been established, WSAs led by women like Sarah Fulmer (Emery) and Sarah J. Elliot (Grand) functioned as both county and town WSAs. In counties where municipalities were more numerous, WSA leaders such as Julia Farnsworth (Beaver) and M.A.Y. Greenhalgh (Millard) established local WSAs in many small towns. At least fifty town WSAs had been organized throughout the territory by the time Utah applied for statehood in 1895. Despite the success of these rural leaders in creating associations across the territory, not all of their organizing efforts came to fruition. Iron County WSA president Emily Crane Watson visited Paragonah in the spring of 1895 in hopes of organizing an association there. Despite her fervent efforts in presenting and explaining the cause of equal suffrage, “no organization was affected.”8 The membership and leadership of rural WSAs was not limited to older women whose elective franchise had been revoked. The Summit County WSA listed “Miss Ball . . . Miss Nora Evans, Miss May Cluff, Miss Lena Allison and Miss Maggie Salmon” as members of their
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 280
One woman involved on the ground in a local WSA chapter, Vilate Kimball Snow Hawley. Courtesy of the author.
executive committee.9 This indicates that the target audience included young women as well, who hoped to one day vote under an equal suffrage law like women of the previous generation had done. Annual dues were a quarter per person, and official membership was only available for women, although men were often invited to attend and participate in meetings. Most county WSAs met on a monthly basis. However, some, like the WSA of Iron County, met several times a month, and others, like the WSA of Glenwood in Sevier County, met most often between the months of March and July, with fewer meetings occurring during the latter half of the year.10 Once they had established their organizations, these rural suffragists began educating themselves and their communities on issues relating to women’s rights. Typical meetings opened with song and prayer, and were followed by
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Greenhalgh’s encouraging words in “Where is Suffrage Gone” provided Utah suffragists with a hopeful rallying cry: Oh, be not disheartened, but keep to the fore. The cause that you strive for, tho’ nations ignore, Is just, and will triumph, though tyrants oppose, And law-makers strengthen the ranks of your foes; Right surely will conquer and take to flight, And freedom’s bright dawn chase oppression’s dark night.12 Following the opening business, women (and occasionally men) delivered speeches they had written. Naturally, advocating for women’s right to vote was a frequent topic of these lectures, but other topics—such as pay equity, voter education, constitutional government, the history of the national suffrage movement, and “coequal education”—were regularly discussed as well.13 Additionally, articles from national publications like the Yellow Ribbon Speaker and territorial publications like the Woman’s Exponent were often read aloud during rural WSA meetings. In between speeches and lectures, the women also included musical entertainment
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 281
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Rural Utah suffragists worked to improve the perception of and participation in the suffrage movement in their communities. The minutes from WSA meetings in Beaver and Glenwood frequently mentioned the need for recruitment in order to increase the amount of women (and men) involved in the cause. Newspaper evidence shows that WSAs in Box Elder, Sevier, Beaver, and Cache counties advertised regularly. Anyone subscribing to the Brigham City Bugler, Richfield Advocate, Southern Utonian, or Logan Journal would have, at the very least, been aware that suffrage organizations existed and were an active force in the community. Women such as Genia Pierce of Brigham City and Celia Bean of Richfield would have been easily identifiable as suffragists in their own communities, since their names were most often included in advertisements for suffrage meetings.15 Occasionally, local papers reprinted the speeches given at WSA meetings.16 If nothing else, people in rural Utah towns knew about the arguments in favor of equal suffrage.
I
In Equal rights we take delight, Our own we view with favor bright, We’ll have them too, without a fight, Oh Come, Come Away.
as part of the meeting: in the spring of 1890, Vilate Hawley sang a “charming” rendition of “Lords of Creation” at a suffrage meeting in Deseret, Millard County, and “suitable songs, recitations, duets and instrumental music interspersed” the lessons of a suffrage meeting in Iron County in 1895.14
U H Q
business matters of the WSA, such as reading minutes of previous meetings, recognizing new members, amending by-laws, or electing new officers. The Utah Suffrage Song Book, the source for many of the songs at suffrage meetings, was published in 1891 by the WSA of Utah. The book sold for ten cents a copy and could be purchased at or mailed from the offices of the Woman’s Exponent in Salt Lake City.11 It included lyrics penned primarily by Utah women. Nearly half of the songs were written by women who also served in the leadership of rural WSAs throughout Utah: M.A.Y. Greenhalgh (Millard), sisters Lucinda Dalton and Ellen Jakeman (Sanpete), and Lucy Clark (Davis) all contributed. One of Dalton’s songs, “Oh, Come, Come Away,” included the following refrain:
281
In addition to advertisements and articles included in local papers, some of these suffrage organizations published their own newspapers or newsletters. The Beaver County WSA published the Equal Suffrage Banner, a monthly publication aimed at furthering the education and support of local Beaver residents for the suffrage cause. As mentioned earlier, Emily Crane Watson and the women in Iron County published monthly editions of the Echo of Equal Suffrage. Similarly, Ray (Rachel) Evans was the president of the Brigham City WSA when it self-published the Woman’s Advocate, a manuscript paper that was read regularly at the association’s meetings.17 The women of these associations also held community events to bring attention to and raise funds for women’s voting rights. During the summer months, WSAs in towns like Manti marched in Fourth of July parades.18 The Kaysville WSA held a ball in January 1895 that
8/26/20 6:42 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
Parowan Relief Society Hall, Iron County, Utah. Most WSA chapters in Utah held their meetings in halls owned by the Relief Society, the organization for women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints—a fact that reflected the overlapping membership between the organizations. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 06775.
282
raised forty-five dollars for the suffrage cause.19 The following month, the Rich County “female suffrage society held forth on St. Valentines night . . . a lovely ball to the satisfaction of all.”20 These fundraising events helped to finance the activities of rural WSAs, but they also provided a public platform to talk about female suffrage. By participating in WSAs, rural Utah women joined a social network that encouraged their civic engagement and provided opportunities for leadership beyond their communities. Attending annual conventions held at the county, territory, and national levels linked them to fellow suffragists across the territory and, indeed, the nation. In many rural towns where the majority of the population belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the overlap of female ecclesiastical leadership and suffrage leadership was high. The structure of the WSAs resembled the organization of the LDS church, and much of the success of the rural suffrage movement can be attributed to the already-existing religious networks in Utah towns. In many cases, a rural suffragist could easily be involved in all three of the church’s organizations for women—the Relief Society, Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA), and the Primary Association—in addition to her WSA work. For example, Lucy Heppler (Sevier) served as president of the Glenwood WSA for over five years while also serving as
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 282
a secretary of her ward Relief Society, as first counselor of her ward YLMIA, and as president of her larger stake Primary Association.21 Additionally, the Woman’s Exponent, the official publication of the LDS Relief Society, was a pro-suffrage newspaper with distribution in small towns across Utah Territory. Rural suffragists not only read and discussed articles advocating for suffrage from the Exponent, they could also contribute articles themselves that would then be printed and distributed to a larger audience. For example, women in Sanpete County gathered in May 1890 for their first annual county WSA convention. Local leaders like Ellen Jakeman and Alvira Lucy Cox, as well as prominent men, gave speeches, and Euphrasia Day and Mrs. M. A. Hyde from Fairview and Spring City reported on the work of the WSA in their communities. A letter from territorial WSA president Sarah M. Kimball was also read at the convention.22 Proceedings such as this occurred regularly for other county WSAs as well, providing women with a venue to share their local activities with a broader audience. As women attended or participated via letter in territory and national suffrage conventions, their opportunities for inclusion within the larger suffrage movement expanded. In 1889, at the conclusion of the first territory wide WSA convention held in Salt Lake City, it was noted that “letters were received by other counties
8/26/20 6:42 PM
In May 1895, a suffrage convention was held in Salt Lake City and Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw were in attendance. The relative ease in traveling to Salt Lake City compared to Washington, D.C., allowed many women from across the territory, such as Lucy Heppler from Sevier County, the opportunity to meet wellknown national leaders. As Utah prepared for statehood in the fall of 1894, rural activists marshalled their efforts to ensure the inclusion of an equal suffrage clause in the state constitution. Having received encouragement and direction from national and territory leaders, they used “every effort in the cause of suffrage for women prior to the election of delegates to the state constitutional convention,” in the words of Sarah H. Boyer from Utah County.25 The Richfield Advocate reported that “the ladies of Sevier County . . . are, in every social gathering, expressing their delight over what has been done by the two political parties in favoring their enfranchisement and political rights.”26 Women around the territory had been working for five years to agitate for equity. They laid the groundwork for the inclusion of an equal suffrage clause in the state constitution, and, by the early spring of 1895, it appeared to be a foregone conclusion.27 On March 11, when the topic of the female franchise was first discussed by the Committee on
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 283
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Records of the constitutional convention also identify nine women by name as signers of separate petitions, each including hundreds of other signers: Sarah M. Dell (Beaver), Laura Taylor (Fremont), Elizabeth Yeates (Scipio), Ann Webster (Cedar City), Mary Ann Hubbard (Box Elder County), and Bertha Thiede, Mary Anderson, Ellen Reese and Caroline Affleck (Cache County). Although Dell was the only one among these women with documented membership in a rural WSA, it is highly likely that the other women listed were also active in the suffrage work of their communities. People from twenty-six of the territory’s twenty-seven counties sent petitions in favor of equal suffrage to the convention.28 While documentation of official WSAs in Carbon, Garfield, Kane, Piute, Tooele and Wayne counties has not been found, petitions in favor of equal suffrage were sent from each of these counties, hinting that there was indeed suffrage activity going on in those areas, regardless of official WSA affiliation.
I
Although their physical attendance at national suffrage conventions was limited, Utah’s rural suffragists still contributed to the success of the Utah delegations. In February 1891, ten Utah women attended the NAWSA convention in the nation’s capital. M.A.Y. Greenhalgh was not only present, but she also spoke to a national audience specifically about the suffrage efforts in Millard County.24 Without the efforts and financial contributions of women from towns like Holden, Oak City, Deseret, and Fillmore, Greenhalgh’s participation in the national convention would not have been possible.
Elections and Suffrage, Representative B. H. Roberts raised concerns that including an equal suffrage clause could potentially derail federal approval of Utah’s proposed constitution. As the debate over equal suffrage continued to escalate in the days and weeks to come, antisuffragists lobbied constitutional convention delegates to delay the female franchise until after statehood. But rural suffragists also rallied to their own cause, sending petitions with thousands of signatures in support of equal suffrage as part of the proposed constitution. The WSA of Utah sent a petition to the convention with signers from several rural counties: Mary A. Grover (Juab), Alvira L. Cox (Sanpete), and Celia Bean (Sevier).
U H Q
besides those represented on the platform.”23 Despite the lack of specific details about what the letters contained, who wrote them, or what counties the letters were sent from, the fact remains that women from small Utah towns were participating in these territory conventions in whatever way they were able.
283
On April 18, the debates over equal suffrage came to an end, when delegates of the convention voted to include an equal suffrage clause in the proposed constitution.29 Later that year, Utah’s male citizens voted overwhelmingly in favor of the proposed constitution, and Utah was admitted to the Union as the forty-fifth state on January 4, 1896.30 In addition to the restoration of the female franchise, the new Utah state constitution legalized the election of women citizens to city, county, and statewide offices. For Utah’s rural suffragists, leadership in WSAs was a springboard for
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
284
The cover of a handwritten newsletter published by Beaver County Woman Suffrage Association. The banner and subtitle read “Equal Rights Banner,” and “The Ballot, the Key to All Reform.” The newsletter is dated July 16, 1893. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, BYU.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 284
8/26/20 6:42 PM
The public service of rural suffragists was not confined solely to running for an elected office. Before and after statehood, they also participated in political and social groups and clubs. Many women, such as Electa Bullock (Utah), Lucy Heppler (Sevier), and Lucy Clark (Davis), held leadership positions in county Democratic and Republican committees. Lucy Clark was also elected as a delegate to the National Republican Convention.31 Many more suffragists—like Sarah J. Elliot (Grand), founder of the Busy Women Club of Moab—established women’s civic groups under the umbrella of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs.32 Again, without a comprehensive collection of rural suffragists’ names, it is difficult to assess the crossover between rural women’s participation in political and social clubs and involvement in the suffrage movement during the 1890s, but it is reasonable to assert that it was high. As the last decade of the nineteenth century progressed, rural suffragists in Utah successfully used their influence to advocate for equal voting rights for themselves and future generations of Utah citizens. The need for fair treatment under the law was just as pressing and important to women living in small towns and rural counties as it was for those in the more populated cities. The relatively unknown details of who these rural women were and how
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 285
I 8 8 V O L .
1. “W.S.A. in Iron Co.,” Woman’s Exponent, December 1, 1894, p. 215. 2. “W.S.A. at Summit, Iron Co.,” Woman’s Exponent, July 1, 1895, p. 24. 3. The history of the Utah suffrage movement has been wonderfully researched and written in Carol Cornwall Madsen, ed., Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870–1896 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1997), 176. 4. Lisa Bryner Bohman, “A Fresh Perspective: The Woman Suffrage Associations of Beaver and Farmington, Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 59, no.1 (1991): 6–21; Glenwood Ward, Sevier Stake, “Woman Suffrage Association Minutes,” LR 3227 25, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. 5. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, 1883–1900 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 940. 6. “Woman Suffrage Meeting,” Woman’s Exponent, January 15, 1889, p. 1. 7. Carol Madsen and Lisa Bryner Bohman have reported the existence of nineteen county suffrage associations in Utah. Further research now documents suffrage organizations in Rich and San Juan counties, bringing the total number to twenty-one. “Lake Town Locals,” Logan (UT) Journal, November 23, 1893. Minutes from a suffrage meeting in Bluff, Utah, are on display in the Relief Society Building at Bluff Fort, courtesy of the Hole in the Rock Foundation. See “Relief Society Building,” Hole in the Rock Foundation, accessed April 28, 2020, blufffort.org/reliefsociety.html. 8. “Iron Co. W.S.A.,” Woman’s Exponent, July 1, 1895, p. 24. 9. “Summit Co. W.S.A.,” Woman’s Exponent, July 15, 1889, p. 30. 10. “Glenwood Woman Suffrage Association Minutes.” 11. “Editorial Notes,” Woman’s Exponent, April 15, 1891, p. 156. 12. Utah Woman Suffrage Song Book (Salt Lake City: Woman’s Exponent Office, [1890]), accessed May 6, 2020, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org; see also Kenzi Christensen, “Utah’s Woman Suffrage Songbook,” Better Days 2020, accessed April 28, 2020, utahwomenshistory .org/2019/08/utahs-woman-suffrage-song-book/. 13. “Woman Suffrage,” Brigham City (UT) Bugler, August 4, 1894, p. 4. 14. “Suffrage Meetings,” Woman’s Exponent, May 15, 1890, p. 6 (first qtn.); “Iron Co. W.S.A.” Woman’s Exponent, July 1, 1895, p. 24 (second qtn.).
I
Notes
N O .
4
they worked to champion the cause of equal suffrage add a much-needed dimension to the history of Utah. In all they undertook as part of the daily labor of living and providing for their families and communities, these women also dedicated time to organize, educate, and advocate under the banner of equal rights. The echo of their participation in the political process can be heard again more than one hundred years later, encouraging and inspiring Utahns to continue to engage in the process today.
U H Q
further participation in the political sphere. Of the eleven women elected to county office in 1896, nine came from counties that had suffrage organizations, and four of them were directly involved in the leadership of their county WSA: Ellen Jakeman (Sanpete/Utah), Deliah Olsen (Millard), Margaret A. Caine (Salt Lake), and Mary F. Shelby (Rich). Within the first decade of statehood, three more women joined the list of county suffrage leaders who were later elected as county officials: Emily Crane Watson (Iron), Addie Longhurst (Uintah), and Sarah A. Howard (Davis). These numbers are not definitive. In the absence of complete WSA membership records, it is difficult to identify how many of Utah’s elected female leadership also participated in the suffrage movement. However, there is a high probability that most of the female town and county officials elected within the first decade of statehood were also involved in the suffrage movement in some way.
285
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
25. “The Woman Suffragists,” Provo (UT) Dispatch, September 8, 1894, p. 1 (qtn.); see also “Appeal for Woman Suffrage,” Deseret Evening News, July 26, 1894, p. 5. 26. “News from Nearby Cities and Towns,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, November 2, 1894, p. 7. 27. “With the Delegates,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, March 10, 1895, p. 8. 28. Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention to Adopt a Constitution for the State of Utah, available online at le.utah.gov/documents/conconv /01.htm, accessed April 28, 2020. 29. Katherine Kitterman and Rebekah Ryan Clark, Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 2019), 79. 30. Jean Bickmore White, “Women’s Place is in the Constitution: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Utah in 1895,” Utah Historical Quarterly 42, no. 4 (1974): 344–69. 31. “First Woman to Be Seated in Convention,” Ogden Daily Standard, June 16, 1908, p. 1. 32. “Birthday of Ladies Literary Club Observed at Saturday Meeting,” (Moab, UT) Times Independent, March 14, 1957, p. 1.
U H Q
I
15. “Special Notices,” Brigham City (UT) Bugler, November 7, 1891, p. 4; Richfield (UT) Advocate, May 3, 1890. 16. “Right to Vote,” County Register (Ephraim City, UT), March 3, 1891, p. 4. 17. “Woman’s Suffrage,” Brigham City (UT) Bugler, September 15, 1894, p. 1. 18. “Programme,” Manti (UT) Messenger, June 29, 1894, p. 4. 19. “Kayevilles Kinks,” Davis County (UT) Clipper, January 24, 1895, p. 1. 20. “Lake Town Locals,” Logan (UT) Journal, February 27, 1895, p. 7. 21. Tiffany Greene, “Lucy Heppler, a Rural Advocate,” Better Days 2020, accessed April 28, 2020, utahwomenshistory.org; Irvin L. Warnock and Lexia Dastrup Warnock, Memories of Sevier Stake, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Diamond Jubilee Memorial Volume, 1874–1949 (Springville, UT: Sevier Stake Presidency, 1949). 22. “First Annual Convention,” Woman’s Exponent, June 1, 1890, p. 6. 23. “Utah W.S.A.,” Woman’s Exponent, November 1, 1889, p. 5. 24. “The Speech of Mrs. Greenhalgh’s at the National Woman’s Convention,” Provo (UT) Daily Enquirer, March 12, 1891, p. 1.
286
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 286
8/26/20 6:42 PM
C LA R K
On a late summer day in 1915, Utah women paraded through Salt Lake City’s Main Street with cars decorated in purple, white, and gold flags.1 The automobile procession greeted national women’s suffrage leaders just arriving in Utah for a large convention on behalf of the radical Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU).2 That day’s elaborate display of progressivism, however, was neither controversial nor was it led by militants. Instead, it included many of the most respected, and respectable, women of Utah society.
4 N O . V O L .
RYA N
I
RE BE KA H
U H Q
BY
8 8
I
The Fire of Civic Endeavor: Utah Suffrage after Statehood, 1896–1920
287
A photograph taken on the steps of the Utah State Capitol Building on the occasion of a national suffrage envoy visiting the state, October 1915. Courtesy National Woman’s Party (NWP) Collection, Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, Washington, D.C.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 287
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
288
At the head of the parade stood the aged and stately Emmeline B. Wells, Utah’s preeminent suffrage leader and the current general president of the Relief Society, the women’s organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The demonstration culminated at the Hotel Utah, where the eastern leaders and dozens of suffragists met with Senator Reed Smoot, thanked him for his support of women’s suffrage, and secured his wholehearted commitment to champion a constitutional amendment in the next congressional session.3 At the convention the next day, Wells’s daughter, Annie Wells Cannon, served as one of the key speakers and as the convention chairperson. Despite their continued loyalty to the more moderate National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), the convention delegates unanimously adopted a motion by Utah suffragist and religious leader Susa Young Gates to support the CU’s work toward adoption of a federal suffrage amendment. This ardent support for women’s suffrage from prominent women and men in Utah is striking on the surface yet unsurprising in light of Utah’s pioneering role in the early women’s rights movement. Utah women made history in 1870 as the first female citizens in the nation
to vote in an election with full equal suffrage rights.4 Utah Territory’s official entrance into the women’s suffrage movement raised unique complications, sparked nationwide controversy, and added complexity and nuance to contemporary national debates about women’s rights, religious freedom, and citizenship. As the first place in America with a large population of enfranchised women, the remote western territory quickly emerged as a focal point of women’s suffrage in action. As the only place in the country that legalized polygamous marriages, it also became the target of sweeping federal legislation that leveraged women’s suffrage to eradicate the religious practice. After Utah women had actively voted for seventeen years, the U.S. Congress revoked their voting rights as part of the most stringent antipolygamy legislation it enacted.5 Indignant Utah suffragists mobilized into suffrage associations throughout Utah Territory, and in 1896 they successfully regained their right to vote in Utah’s first state constitution. Utah women celebrated this victory, yet it was not the end of Utah’s suffrage story. The state’s suffragists remained actively committed to the larger cause long after securing their own rights with statehood. In 1896, Governor Heber
Suffragists lobby Senator Reed Smoot outside the Hotel Utah, 1915. Courtesy NWP.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 288
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Notwithstanding this long history of activism, Utah’s place in suffrage history still remains unclear. The pivotal role of western women, and of Utah women in particular, as trailblazers in the women’s suffrage movement has largely been omitted, obscured, or overshadowed within traditional historical narratives.9 While historians have begun to reconstruct the intricate reality of Utah’s unique suffrage experience, these important analyses generally focus on the most active period of Utah suffrage activism, between 1870 and 1896.10 The activism that occurred after statehood remains largely unexamined.11 Utah suffragists’ national activism during the twentieth century took form primarily through contributing to other state suffrage campaigns, offering an example of the positive effects of suffrage, and lobbying for a federal amendment. The continued grassroots activism reflects the commitment of many Utah suffragists to the
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 289
larger cause of women’s rights while illuminating some of the complex tensions within the national movement. Examining the post-statehood era of Utah activism continues the important process of reinserting Utah women back into the larger national suffrage narrative. Such a study is critical to a deeper understanding of Utah’s suffrage experience and its place within the national movement.
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
With their voting rights almost secure, members of the Woman Suffrage Association (WSA) of Utah met in 1895 to discuss the fate of the suffrage organizations. Emmeline B. Wells, then serving as president of the territorial organization, described the decision of the WSA leaders to continue their activism even after the re-enfranchisement of Utah women, explaining: “All favored the existences of suffrage clubs in the future. They thought it the duty of all to work for the enfranchisement of women until universal suffrage should be obtained.”12 By that time, Utah had a thriving territorial association as well as a well-organized structure of associations in at least twenty-one counties and numerous local branches. The suffragists unanimously agreed to continue these WSA groups and to create a state association following Utah’s imminent statehood. They later explained that they continued as an official chapter of NAWSA in order to “evidence our progressiveness in uniting our voices with the rest of the States and Territories in the hope that ere long every State in the Union will concede to woman this right.”13 Following statehood, the suffrage leader Emily S. Richards similarly predicted “that all women will yet have the right to vote,” and emphasized the role and responsibility of Utah in the growing women’s rights movement. She urged Utah’s suffrage association members to remain “thoroughly organized and united in our work” so they could “be a benefit to our sister States that have not received the franchise yet.”14 One way that Utah suffragists continued to utilize their highly organized suffrage network and unity after their own victory was to bolster NAWSA’s state-by-state approach.
4
“A Benefit to Our Sister States”
U H Q
M. Wells predicted, “Their cause is too great to permit of their resting satisfied with merely local advantages—it is the enfranchisement of half the Nation, the better half—they are contending for, and no doubt, the influence of the women of Utah will be felt in behalf of ‘Woman Suffrage’ until the last woman in this broad land shall have been enfranchised.”6 As demonstrated by the parading cars and widespread support for a constitutional amendment in 1915, many twentieth-century Utah suffragists in fact continued their longstanding engagement in the national movement. Local and state organizations sent delegates to national conventions, raised funds for multiple national associations, obtained tens of thousands of signatures for congressional petitions, and participated in public demonstrations. Despite lingering tensions over the fading practice of polygamy, the rare political experience gained by Utah women as some of the first female voters, lobbyists, and elected officials ensured their complex yet crucial role within the suffrage movement.7 Utah suffragists continued to cultivate relationships with national leaders, lobby legislatures on behalf of women’s suffrage, and exemplify the good that enfranchised women could do in their communities. Overall, Utah women demonstrated widespread support for the suffrage cause throughout five decades.8
289
An opportunity for such unity came in the spring of 1895, as activists from throughout the western states arrived in Salt Lake City for
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
Utah suffrage leaders with Susan B. Anthony, May 1895. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 20395.
290
NAWSA’s regional Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention. A large procession greeted national leaders Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw, who spoke in the Tabernacle to a crowd of more than six thousand people and then led the two-day convention. The interdenominational participants of the gathering demonstrated unprecedented unity as the women of Utah celebrated regaining their voting rights. Anthony spoke of the ongoing “battles” in the other states, rejoicing that “the states of these old rock-ribbed mountains are the first to embody justice in their constitutions and are going to set the example.”15 Utah suffragist Mary Isabella Horne voiced the religious conviction behind her commitment to extend equality, exclaiming, “I would be glad if we could induce all the men and women to believe in equal suffrage for both sexes. God created us equal.”16 Alice Reynolds, a Utah leader, later described the importance of Anthony and Shaw’s presence, when she noted that “their visit marked the high peak in the suffrage history of Utah.”17 The 1895 conference celebrated a victorious culmination of suffrage advocacy in Utah, but it also marked the beginning of a new phase of national activism. Utahns had engaged in the national movement since the 1870s, but the focus now shifted outward. The path forward, however, was not always smooth. Despite some local concerns that sending Utah delegates to the NAWSA national convention in 1896 “might seem a useless expenditure of time and money considering that Utah is now a State with
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 290
universal political equality,” the suffrage association ultimately decided that participating in annual national conventions was “expedient . . . not now as formerly to solicit their influence in our behalf, but that they were in need of our influence . . . to further the cause.”18 The Woman’s Exponent indicates that Utah was represented by a delegation at every annual NAWSA convention from 1887 until 1920. To further facilitate support of the national campaign, NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt enlisted the women of Utah in a more official capacity. Emmeline B. Wells was selected as one of the original five members of the NAWSA Standing Committee on Organization, chaired by Catt and established in 1895 to “map out the national work and put organizers in the field” to travel, speak, and raise money for NAWSA’s national treasury.19 Catt met with twenty-five women in the Woman’s Exponent Salt Lake City office in October 1899 and established the Utah Council of Women (UCW).20 The UCW bridged former divisions among Utah suffragists by including women from multiple faiths and political parties and served as a state NAWSA branch dedicated to supporting the suffrage efforts of other states. Richards, one of the most prominent Latter-day Saint women who had worked for the inclusion of suffrage rights in the new state constitution, replaced Wells as president of the new state suffrage organization, and Wells was appointed to the NAWSA national executive committee.21 The UCW supported the national organization’s goals by mobilizing
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Utah’s contributions to neighboring state campaigns went beyond finances. Mary Isabella Horne promoted the cause at meetings in southern Idaho in 1895, where “the question of Woman’s Suffrage . . . was listened to with the greatest attention and interest, and has awakened thought and reflection that cannot fail to produce good results.”29 One Idaho woman acknowledged that it was “a subject almost new to many of our Sisters,” and that Horne’s words helped convince the Idaho women “to fall in line with Wyoming, Colorado and Utah in the Woman’s Suffrage movement, and secure every
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 291
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
These efforts to encourage the passage of suffrage in other states were not limited to Idaho. Colorado suffragists acknowledged, “It seems that we from Colorado ought to thank you for the help Utah has given us.”33 Richards assured suffrage leaders in California: “Realizing as we do that women of Utah are highly privileged, we are not indifferent to the interests of our sisters abroad, and would be most happy in assisting them in their wise and laudable efforts.”34 Wells and her daughter Melvina Woods, a delegate for the newly enfranchised women of Idaho, both addressed the 1897 NAWSA convention in Des Moines and then testified before the Iowa Senate in favor of women’s suffrage.35 Native Hawaiian and Utah resident Hannah Kaaepa attended the 1899 National Council of Women conference in Washington, D.C. with Gates and other Utah suffragists, where she strongly advocated for women’s suffrage in the new territory of Hawaii.36 In 1911, Gates represented Utah in the newly organized National Council of Women Voters, a short-lived nonpartisan coalition of the five suffrage states through which the western enfranchised women worked “to gain votes for women in other states.”37
I
Whenever the national organization called for financial aid to fund its state campaigns, the UCW “responded liberally.”24 Utah County suffrage leader Electa Bullock spoke of the need for unity with the rest of the nation when she urged, “In sustaining your local society you are sustaining financially your State and National Association as well. . . . We want to be one grand solid army from one end of the nation to the other.”25 In addition to dues contributions, the Utah organization participated actively in national fundraisers, such as a 1900 NAWSA bazaar. Catt implored suffragists to “contribute of their time and talent in this common effort,” explaining: “National work means work for all the States.”26 The UCW responded to Catt’s call to raise funds for the state-by-state campaign and donated items such as a quilt made from Utah silk and a doll “none the less elegantly attired because the women who dressed her were voters.”27 At the bazaar, Utah shared a prominent booth with the other three enfranchised states next to the main platform, decorated with the national colors and representing the end goal for all the states.28
advantage that can be obtained by equality at the ballot box.”30 An Idaho delegate echoed this sentiment at the 1897 NAWSA convention, just after Idaho granted women’s suffrage: “We are proud that our four equal suffrage States are joined together and united . . . and we will stand as a great bulwark of strength to the States around us.”31 Idaho leaders later recognized that some of Utah’s contributions in southern Idaho were a “strong factor in the campaign,” noting the literature presented by the Utah suffrage association to the Idaho press, the “effective work” of Utah suffragists advocating the cause, and the presence of a large group in southern Idaho “who were residents of Utah when women voted there and who believed in their enfranchisement.”32
U H Q
the efforts of the majority of Utah suffragists. They held monthly meetings, sent delegates to each of the annual NAWSA conventions, gathered signatures for congressional petitions, provided funding for the national movement, served in NAWSA leadership positions, hosted national leaders, and attended and spoke at national and international women’s rights conventions.22 Their support led Catt to observe in 1909: “Utah has always stood so nobly by us that we feel grateful for its many kindnesses, to say nothing of its continued record on woman suffrage.”23
291
The commitment of Utah suffragists to helping other women achieve equal suffrage was genuine but limited in scope, especially in regards to race. In 1896, they celebrated that “Utah is now a State with universal political equality guaranteed to all her citizens without regard to race, color or sex,” but like the rest of the mainstream
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
292
national suffrage movement, Utah fell short of true universal suffrage.38 This racial myopia resulted in the exclusion and marginalization of many women of color from the general movement in Utah and throughout the nation.39 Women’s suffrage laws in 1870, 1896, and even 1920 did not include most Native Americans or immigrants of Asian descent because these groups were largely barred from citizenship by federal law. Segregation and local discriminatory restrictions also impacted the ability of African Americans to fully and equally participate as citizens, although records indicate that Utah’s small population of black women and men voted and actively participated in Utah politics by the turn of the twentieth century. The struggle for equal access to suffrage continued for women in these communities for many years—even after important extensions of voting rights such as the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.40 While they often worked on the margins of the mainstream movement, Utah women of color made critical contributions to these efforts. For example, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Taylor and Alice B. Nesbitt, leaders of the Colored Woman’s Republican Club of Utah and the Western Federation of Colored Women, vigorously campaigned for the Republican Party during elections, encouraged black women to register and vote even if they met resistance, and advocated for social and political equality in early-twentieth-century Utah.41 Zitkála-Šá, who lived on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah, was a leading national advocate for Native people’s citizenship and cultural identity beginning in 1916. She co-founded the National Council for American Indians in 1926 to continue lobbying for Native suffrage rights.42 Activism by women of color in Utah and in the national cause often took place through separate organizations because of the cultural limitations of prejudice within the mainstream movement. The intensity of suffrage activism during this phase of Utah’s involvement was also limited by the difficulty of maintaining momentum once Utah women had won back their own voting rights. Gates recorded that “it was hard to keep up the interest” in monthly local suffrage association meetings beyond 1910, although the
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 292
associations still mobilized throughout the next decade whenever the national association needed help from Utah.43 Looking back on Utah’s twentieth-century activism, suffragist Alice Reynolds also noted the challenge of maintaining enthusiasm and overcoming apathy among some Utah suffragists after their own victory. She described the steadfast efforts of leaders such as Richards, who maintained Utah’s active engagement in the movement and kept “the home fires burning.”44 The Deseret Evening News acknowledged the continuing influence of “Utah ladies . . . in the front ranks” of the suffrage cause, noting: “The women of Utah who enjoy the boon of suffrage, do not forget that it is their duty to do all they can, that the sisters in other states may receive the power and opportunity of doing good through the ballot.”45
“In the Front Ranks”: Leading by Example Utah’s role as an example of the real-world effects of women’s suffrage was ultimately one of the most influential ways that it contributed to other state campaigns. Initial reactions to enfranchisement in the state reinforced the impression that the eyes of the nation were on Utah and that suffragists indeed looked to Utah to demonstrate the success of women’s suffrage. As noted in 1896, the women of Utah were keenly aware that they were “watched by three classes of men and women. By the cynic who expects that we will make but a poor use of [the franchise], by the timid women who fear for the ‘consequences,’ and by the earnest women of many states who look to us to vindicate their hopes and aspirations.”46 Other states benefited from the experience, influence, and even just the existence of Utah as a model of women’s suffrage in action.47 A leader from the Detroit Equal Suffrage Association explained in 1896: “The example of Utah must help to hasten the day of the general enfranchisement of women. . . . To the women of Utah we look for such dignity and discretion in the discharge of their new duties that we may be able to point to them as exemplars.”48 Utah suffragists repeatedly tried to demonstrate the success of women’s voting and to vindicate the hopes of advocates throughout the nation. In a congratulatory letter to the “newly enfranchised women of Utah,” Colorado suffragists wrote in 1895:
8/26/20 6:42 PM
There are no polling records extant for this period, but other surviving records indicate high voter participation among Utah women throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century. Wells claimed that Utah women exercised the vote “as extensively as men,” based on the election statistics of 1900, with a considerably larger proportion of registered women voting than registered men.51 Records indicate that this high level of participation continued at least throughout the early twentieth century. In 1911, the NAWSA reported that 85 to 90 percent of eligible Utah women voted, according to the Commissioner of the State Bureau of Statistics.52 In 1913, NAWSA historian Ida Husted Harper recorded that “official records show that during all the past eighteen years [Utah women] have voted in quite as large a proportion as men.”53 Gates wrote in 1922, “As a rule about 90 per cent of the women vote and about 85 per cent of the men.”54 If these statistics are accurate, Utah women defied the national trends following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment of both overall declining voter turnout as well as women’s low electoral participation.55
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 293
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
Utah women served as an example to the nation of the societal benefits of women’s suffrage as they put their newly won political rights into action. They often framed their political activity in domestic terms, a common method used by Progressive Era–suffragists to illustrate the respectability and femininity of women participating in politics. In 1897, one year after the state constitution restored the franchise to Utah women, the Woman’s Exponent replaced its masthead about women’s rights with a more specific appeal: “The Ballot in the Hands of the Women of Utah should be a Power to better the home, the State and the Nation.”50 Utah women largely fulfilled this mandate through high voter participation, legislative lobbying, and elected office, providing an opportunity for suffragists throughout the nation to refute the predictions of their detractors and demonstrate that women’s votes would improve society. The legislative gains accomplished through women’s efforts provided a model for future suffrage states and demonstrated the civic interest of women.
4
“In the march of progress, may your banner ever float in the front ranks.”49
The author, activist, and religious leader, Susa Young Gates. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 12329.
Utah’s example was further strengthened by the ability of its women to immediately enter into the political process because of their long history of political participation. After enjoying seventeen years of voting privileges, they gained even more experience with leadership, organization, and legislative procedure during their eight-year fight to regain the vote. The UCW followed NAWSA urgings to use the franchise to influence legislation and became an effective lobbying power. The UCW formed a women’s Legislative Council that met during every legislative session between 1911 and 1920 to carefully review and respond to each bill, or to frame new bills, relevant to the cause of women’s rights and reform.56 This council served as an effective lobbying power. While Utah women typically voted along party lines rather than as a cohesive group, they nevertheless posed a threat to any legislation that might mobilize the women, as occurred during political fights involving gambling and prohibition.57 During legislative debates over raising the age of consent, Wells threatened the House Legislative Committee with the risk of losing all the women’s votes and later claimed that the bill’s
293
8/26/20 6:42 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
ultimate success “was all because we have the franchise, and the men know it.”58
294
Utah women also organized with women in the other suffrage states to more effectively promote the extension of the franchise and share their suffrage and legislative experiences. Through its prominent role in the formation of the National Council of Women Voters, Utah had the opportunity to share its example of the legislative and social gains that suffrage could accomplish.59 In a 1910 letter to Gates, who was the appointed Utah delegate to the organizing convention in Tacoma, the Washington state leader Emma Smith DeVoe indicated the importance of Utah as an example of suffrage in action and asked: “Please come loaded with what you did in Utah at first for women, also what you wish you had done, for I know we will be able to secure more and better laws right now than ever again. Please tell me . . . what your laws are concerning women and jury duty.”60 Her request for information concerning women’s influence on legislation demonstrated her willingness to accept the Utah experience as a valid example. Utah women influenced key state and municipal laws even more directly by entering political positions on nearly every level, proving themselves well qualified to lead as elected officials. Most notably, Martha Hughes Cannon was elected as the first female state senator in the United States in 1896. As a medical doctor, Democrat, and polygamous wife who had run against and defeated her own Republican husband in the state senate election, Cannon provided a complicated counter-example to the claims of antipolygamists that Latter-day Saint women were dupes controlled by their husbands. Once in office, Senator Cannon worked closely with the other women in the state legislature, particularly Representative Alice Merrill Horne. Cannon and Horne joined forces to secure the passage of legislation to improve public health, provide for higher education, and support the arts. They leveraged the power of women’s suffrage to obtain needed votes on this legislation by scattering yellow flowers, a well-known symbol of suffrage, on the desks of male legislators as a reminder of the strength of women’s collective voice.61 Over the next two decades, more Utah women gained office and used their power to bring
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 294
about progressive municipal reforms, particularly on issues of interest to women. Suffragists such as Annie Wells Cannon, Jane Skolfield, Elizabeth A. Hayward, and Lily C. Wolstenholme used their elections to the state House of Representatives to pass legislation relating to marriage, education, minimum wage, widows’ pensions, equal pay, child labor, prohibition, and prostitution. Several women rose to leadership within their elected roles, including Mary G. Coulter of Ogden, who became the first woman in the nation to chair a state House Judiciary Committee, and Grace Stratton Airey, who chaired the House Public Health Committee for two terms.62 The town of Kanab was the first in Utah to elect an all-female town council, with Mary Chamberlain as mayor and Tamar Hamblin, Luella McAllister, Blanche Hamblin, and Ada Pratt Seegmiller serving as council members.63 Although initially put on the ballot as a joke, and faced with opposition once in office by those who resisted a “petticoat government,” these Kanab women enacted ordinances to rid the town of problems such as alcohol, gambling, Sabbath-breaking, and stray livestock.64 Gates asserted, “Since statehood every county, every town, every precinct has been served faithfully and well by women in various positions.”65 Indeed, by 1920, Utah had elected two women as state senators, fourteen women to the state House of Representatives, and over 120 women to county office.66 Utah women also earned distinction at a national level as delegates to national party conventions and as presidential electors. For example, as an alternate delegate to the 1896 Democratic National Convention, Ellen Ferguson urged the inclusion of women’s suffrage in the party platform.67 Lucy A. Clark of Brigham City was the first woman in the nation to vote as a delegate at the Republican National Convention and the first to give a speech at such a convention. Clark also spoke to a gathering of women in Chicago just prior to the convention, explaining: “We are asking for a serious consideration of suffrage as a subject that intimately concerns the welfare of the nation.”68 Elizabeth Cohen seconded the presidential nomination of William Jennings Bryan at the 1900 Democratic National Convention.69 Margaret Zane Witcher was the first woman in the nation to serve in the Electoral College in 1912, where
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Suffrage leaders could counteract these arguments by pointing to the experience in suffrage states as evidence of the real-world benefits of women’s suffrage. Cannon, while serving as a state senator for Utah, testified in 1898 to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee about Utah’s experience with women’s suffrage, assuring the congressmen that “none of the unpleasant results which were predicted have occurred.” Instead, she described the “actual conditions” and “practical reality” in Utah as proof that women’s participation would “elevate” politics and lead to “the well-being of the State,” asserting that “woman’s suffrage in Utah is the story of all efforts for the advancement and betterment of humanity.”73 Romania B. Penrose, another active Utah suffragist, similarly used Utah’s example to refute specific antisuffrage claims when she spoke to the Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam, Holland, in June 1908. She professed that women in Utah often chose different political parties or candidates than their husbands but reassured her listeners that there had been no “disruptions in families which were predicted,” and “it has not robbed her one whit of her womanliness or hindered the performance of home duties.” Penrose described what she saw as the resulting purification of politics, where “polling places are conducted in proper order without unseemly
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 295
Advocacy for the Amendment
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Suffrage itself was never the end goal but rather the doorway to public participation. As Richards declared in her speech to the annual NAWSA convention in 1896, “Of course, the work is but begun; the cause is in its merest infancy. . . . In a far away promised land we behold a perfected state wherein the heart and hand and intelligence of woman contribute their full share to the welfare of the race.”75 Women’s engagement in the public sphere enhanced their opportunities to improve society. Utah’s example of political participation and leadership served as an extension of the suffrage movement and an opportunity to promote the cause throughout the nation. Its example was critical to securing suffrage victories in individual states, and particularly in advocating for a national suffrage amendment to secure women’s right to “contribute their full share” to society.
I
Twentieth-century suffragists in Utah, and throughout the nation, often used Progressive Era–rhetoric about the perceived feminine ability to clean up politics as a way to counteract antisuffrage portrayals of suffragists as masculine and militant. Antisuffragists were vocal from the beginning of the suffrage movement and formally organized on a national level in 1911 as the movement began to gain nationwide momentum.71 Common opposition arguments included the claims that most women did not want the vote, were not mentally capable of participating adequately in politics, would just vote the same as their husbands, or would lose their femininity if they entered the public sphere.72
wrangles, vulgar language, and profanity, and free from the uncleanness of tobacco-using,” and included examples of beneficial legislation among the other “good effects of woman suffrage in Utah.”74
U H Q
she had the honor of meeting personally with President William Howard Taft.70 These and other Utah women had an impact on local, state, and national politics.
295
Utah women had already experienced the vulnerability of legislative suffrage when Congress revoked their right to vote after seventeen years. Their firsthand knowledge of the weakness of legislatively granted suffrage rights fueled their dedication to obtaining constitutional protection of women’s rights, both to extend the rights of suffrage to women in other states and to provide more security to their own privileges. Following statehood, Utah’s well-organized advocacy focused on the fight for a federal amendment while also endorsing the state-by-state suffrage campaigns and providing a positive example of women’s suffrage in action. In general, Utah suffragists continued to support NAWSA efforts, but their longstanding support for an amendment led them to also form alliances with more radical organizations that emerged with an exclusive focus on constitutional change. As Utah women continued to engage in the battle for nationwide women’s suffrage rights into the twentieth century, they participated in many of the national efforts for a constitutional amendment, including suffrage parades, massive petitions, and even White House picketing.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
296
Utah suffragists demonstrated early and consistent support for a federal suffrage amendment. During the fledgling years of the movement, nineteenth-century suffragists, including national leaders Victoria Woodhull and Susan B. Anthony, had argued that women already had suffrage rights under the Fourteenth Amendment based on their citizenship.76 Following Minor v. Happersett, the 1875 U.S. Supreme Court decision that held that citizenship alone did not guarantee voting rights, the only recourse left for advocates was to either secure a constitutional amendment or lobby each state to individually grant women suffrage.77 From that point on, national suffrage organizations pursued both courses of action. The conservative American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) focused its efforts primarily on a state-by-state approach, while the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) emphasized the necessity and efficiency of a constitutional solution.78 Because NWSA strongly defended Utah women’s suffrage against multiple legislative attacks, while AWSA leaders often refused to endorse Utah women’s suffrage, Utah suffragists developed close ties to NWSA and its nationwide approach.79 Many Utah women publicly supported a constitutional amendment as one of the main goals of the cause as early as 1877, when Wells mobilized Utah women to gather signatures for a NWSA petition. Utahns responded enthusiastically to official appeals from NWSA leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Anthony for all states to contribute to a “mammoth petition.”80 Wells publicly declared the “ardent” desire of Utah women “to be one with the women of America in this grand movement.”81 Utah women gathered nearly seven thousand signatures, more than any other state or territory, for this appeal to the Forty-fifth Congress in favor of a constitutional amendment.82 Utah’s portion of the petition stated: “The undersigned citizens of the United States, residents of the Territory of Utah, earnestly pray your honorable body to adopt measures for so amending the constitution as to prohibit the several states and territories from disfranchising United States citizens on account of sex.”83 Utah suffragists were keenly aware that an amendment would protect them
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 296
from disfranchisement as well as extend rights to other female citizens throughout the nation. A contemporary newspaper noted this motivation for circulating the suffrage amendment petition, reporting that “the measures introduced into congress recently, among which is one to deprive them of that right and virtually disfranchise them, has aroused them and induced this protective action.”84 Indeed, at the large meeting where Utah activists organized their NWSA petition efforts, they not only expressed the “great practical benefit” of the amendment “for the elevation of mankind” but also protested pending federal antipolygamy legislation that threatened to revoke their right to vote.85 Utah’s well-organized efforts to support the petition led to the appointment of Wells to the NWSA Advisory Committee and an invitation for Utah women to attend the 1879 NWSA annual convention, thus securing Utah suffragists’ alliance with NWSA.86 After the two national organizations merged in 1890 to form the NAWSA, the focus on an amendment was often overshadowed as the more conservative members’ emphasis on a state-by-state campaign took precedent. Utah suffragists indeed contributed to these efforts, but they also continued to echo Anthony’s focus on an amendment as the most effective method of extending suffrage rights. Arguing for continued activism after 1896, Utah suffragist Sarah Boyer urged other Utah women to have a continuing role in the movement. After serving as a delegate to a national suffrage convention, Boyer observed that NAWSA was “in need of [Utah’s] influence . . . to further the cause, and to petition Congress to grant them a[n] . . . amendment to the Constitution.”87 Although the efforts of NAWSA toward an amendment slowed after the merger and throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, Utah suffragists combined their local efforts with national activism on several occasions. In 1898, when Cannon spoke at the congressional hearing on the proposed suffrage amendment, she advocated for it by citing “the actual conditions now existing in Utah as a complete vindication of the efforts of equal suffragists.”88 In 1908, Utah suffragist Rose Sullivan also testified in favor of an amendment before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, alongside NAWSA leader Carrie Chapman Catt.89 Utah’s status as one
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
The 1913 parade was a turning point in the suffrage movement, not only because publicity from the event shifted public opinion and reinvigorated the cause but also because it led to yet another split within the national suffrage organization. Fundamental disagreements arose between NAWSA leadership and the organizers of the procession, the emerging leaders Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who believed that the American movement needed to employ more radical tactics. When these tensions became irreconcilable, Paul and Burns broke away from NAWSA and formed a more progressive, competing organization called the Congressional Union for Woman’s Suffrage (CU). The CU rejected the slower process of working state-by-state preferred by NAWSA and instead sought to leverage the “latent political power in our Equal Suffrage States to force Congress to give us a Federal Amendment.”95 CU organizers employed a controversial policy of mobilizing enfranchised women to vote as a protest against a political party’s failure to pass a suffrage amendment. NAWSA president Anna Howard Shaw warned that this policy would be “highly injurious to the suffrage movement in America,” and “utterly suicidal in the campaign states,” and thus urged NAWSA members to “take a decided stand” against
I
Particularly in the second decade of the twentieth century, as the suffrage movement began to gain momentum and the focus shifted toward advocating for a national amendment, Utah women participated in NAWSA’s new approach to hold large public demonstrations. In April 1910, NAWSA leaders presented Congress with a mile-long “monster petition” of 400,000 signatures on behalf of a constitutional amendment: the Utah chapter had obtained over 40,000 of those signatures.90 Utah women were “among the most active” suffragists to participate in the 1912 NAWSA convention and parade in Philadelphia.91 Having first heard Anthony and Shaw speak when she attended an 1895 NAWSA convention in Salt Lake City as a child, Florence Allen rode in one of the leading limousines heading to the 1912 convention.92 In the 1913 Senate Committee hearing on the amendment, Senator Reed Smoot presented Congress with Utah’s portion of another large NAWSA petition and related the success of Utah suffrage, claiming that “no evil effects have followed, but, on the contrary, a better condition in public affairs has been the result.”93 In 1913, Utah suffragists participated in the largest suffrage demonstration in United States history, the NAWSA Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C. Over eight thousand suffragists marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the demonstration, including a
contingent of women from Utah who were led by Edna Groshell, a UCW leader who had also served as president of the Woman’s Democratic Club of Salt Lake.94
U H Q
of only four states with enfranchised women at this time gave Utahns credibility.
297
A massive parade in support of women’s voting rights, March 3, 1913, Washington, D.C. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-DIGnpcc-20233.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 297
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
298
such a policy.96 Thousands of copies of Shaw’s warning were reportedly sent throughout the suffrage states by NAWSA to undermine CU efforts, with Paul noting that “practically every woman I have met in Colorado, Utah, and Idaho has received a copy.”97 NAWSA leaders even considered a resolution that would bar any suffragists who worked with the CU from being members of the National Executive Council.98 Utahns found themselves in the crosshairs of this organizational rivalry as they tried to negotiate their loyalty to both NAWSA and CU agendas.99 The CU’s exclusive focus on securing a constitutional amendment, as well as its emphasis on the influence of already-enfranchised western women, made Utah a natural partner for CU efforts. When national CU leaders arrived in Utah in 1915 and led the parade down Salt Lake City’s Main Street, this public demonstration was centered on advocacy for an amendment. The cover of a 1915 issue of the CU’s newspaper the Suffragist featured a large photograph of Smoot and several Utah and CU suffrage leaders under a large banner reading, “We Demand an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Enfranchising Women.”100 Among the participating Utah suffragists were Wells and Richards, who had both served as presidents of Utah’s NAWSA chapter, as well as other women who remained active in NAWSA efforts.101 At the large suffrage convention held the next day, Annie Wells Cannon spoke on the “Desire of Utah Women to Help Their Sisters in the East,” and the CU leader Mabel Vernon rallied the Utah women, declaring, “If these women of the western states who already have the vote take a stand for the suffrage amendment to the constitution it will go through this next Congress.”102 Despite NAWSA warnings, the large meeting of about one hundred delegates unanimously adopted a motion by Gates to support the CU’s work toward adoption of a federal amendment extending women’s suffrage throughout all the states.103 Utah supported the CU’s bold amendment agenda by holding rallies, attending conventions, providing funds, and signing petitions. Because of a train delay, Paul missed the August 1915 parade and convention in Salt Lake City, but she arrived in time to organize a Utah branch of the CU.104 Paul observed the
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 298
“enthusiasm and interest” she encountered in Utah and noted that the state officers for the new branch included “Gentiles and Mormons; and Republicans, a Democrat, a Progressive, and a non partisan—so we are hopeful that the committee will suit all factions.”105 As Utahns entered this final era of suffrage activism, the religious tensions of the past clearly lingered but did not obstruct their participation. Paul reported that Utah’s new CU committee of officers, which included former Utah state legislators such as Annie Wells Cannon, Wolstenholme, and Horne, had elected sixty delegates to represent Utah at the upcoming “Woman Voters Convention” in San Francisco the next month.106 This convention of over three thousand delegates, hosted by the CU in conjunction with the Panama Pacific International Exposition, passed a resolution declaring their commitment to work exclusively for the passage of an amendment to prohibit gender as a restriction for voting rights, known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment.107 Interestingly, the only opposing voice to this resolution came from Salt Lake City suffrage leader Elizabeth Cohen, who raised concerns because the CU resolution explicitly opposed supporting any other suffrage amendments.108 This objection reflected Cohen’s loyalty to NAWSA and the growing tensions between the two organizations. NAWSA had always supported the Anthony amendment, but a few NAWSA leaders had also recently introduced an alternative amendment that would have required each state to hold its own referendum on suffrage once eight percent of voters in the state signed a petition. Known as the Shafroth-Palmer Amendment, this short-lived NAWSA proposal was a strategic compromise to facilitate the state-by-state suffrage platform. It was particularly designed to appeal to southern conservative legislators who wanted to maintain states’ rights and protect discriminatory voting practices by having each state determine its own voting requirements.109 The Salt Lake City convention the month before had unanimously voted that the Utah delegation would specifically support the Anthony amendment, rather than the Shafroth amendment, so Cohen’s objection likely came as a surprise.110 Ultimately, most suffragists supported the Anthony amendment, even most members of NAWSA.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Utah’s support for the CU and NAWSA became increasingly divided as the CU became more
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
militant and as NAWSA began to emphasize its own advocacy for a national suffrage amendment. The CU launched the National Woman’s Party (NWP) in suffrage states in 1916 and then merged the CU into the NWP in 1917. The longtime activists Annie Wells Cannon, Wolstenholme, and Cherdron attended the first NWP convention as delegates from Utah, and then Utah’s NWP branch held weekly meetings in Salt Lake City beginning in September 1916.117 The NWP was designed as “a movement of western women” to promote the Anthony amendment by leveraging enfranchised women’s votes against the political party in power.118 The NWP’s partisanship and confrontational tactics sparked pragmatic concerns from rival NAWSA leaders that echoed earlier AWSA fears about maintaining respectability. During this period, while Utahns maintained their commitment to the Anthony amendment, widespread support for the NWP declined in the wake of World War I. Most Utah suffragists sided with NAWSA’s more moderate approach, disapproving of the NWP’s radical criticism of the U.S. president during wartime. Richards, as president of the UCW, was among the hundred women who joined Catt in Washington, D.C. to offer Woodrow Wilson the wartime support of over two million NAWSA members.119
U H Q
The CU resolutions in favor of the federal amendment passed with overwhelming support, and the San Francisco convention gathered 500,000 signatures on behalf of the amendment from enfranchised western women. This 18,333-foot-long petition was then sent with a CU automobile envoy across the country to be delivered to Congress. When the CU leader Sara Bard Field and the rest of the CU cavalcade arrived in Salt Lake City in October 1915, they were greeted by another elaborate procession of decorated cars, a marching band, and many of “Salt Lake’s most prominent women.”111 Field, Governor William Spry, the Salt Lake City mayor, Wells, and other public figures spoke in favor of the suffrage amendment at an official ceremony held on the steps of the new Utah State Capitol building.112 When Field and her companions arrived in Washington, D.C. in December, Senator George Sutherland from Utah greeted them on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and then introduced the suffrage amendment to the Senate.113 Wolstenholme was among the suffragists who delivered the petition to President Woodrow Wilson.114 Margaret Zane Witcher Cherdron, state chairwoman of the Utah CU branch, presided over a large meeting at the first national CU convention in Washington, D.C. that week.115 Utah suffragist Alice Reynolds joined another CU envoy to the nation’s capital to present another large petition for a suffrage amendment in the capitol rotunda on May 16, 1916.116
299
A small but significant NWP branch stayed active in Utah, however, and as the movement progressed, a few Utah women embraced more aggressive forms of advocacy. Annie Wells Cannon served on the NWP Advisory Council from
The 1915 Salt Lake City suffrage parade. Courtesy NWP.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 299
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
300
1915 until at least 1920.120 Two Salt Lake City women, Lovern Robertson and Minnie Quay, joined the NWP’s unprecedented and controversial picketing campaign in 1917. Known as “Silent Sentinels,” a systematic rotation of almost two thousand NWP protestors held large banners outside the White House six days a week for over two years. Robertson and Quay were among the thirty-three protestors arrested and subjected to the violent “Night of Terror” while in prison on November 15, 1917.121 Highly publicized newspaper reports of the prisoners’ mistreatment generated public sympathy for suffragists throughout the nation. While the NWP in Utah heralded the bravery of Robertson and Quay, many Utah suffragists distanced themselves from the NWP’s militancy. UCW president Richards and Democratic Woman’s Club president Hortense Haight Nebeker, both from NAWSA affiliate organizations, publicly denounced the NWP tactics and endorsed NAWSA policies. In a published letter, they condemned Quay’s participation and terminated her Woman’s Democratic Club membership.122 Most Utah suffragists increasingly aligned themselves with the more moderate NAWSA in the final years leading up to ratification of the amendment. Utah’s UCW continued to provide support for NAWSA efforts, particularly those focused on a national amendment. While the NWP was protesting in front of the White House and burning presidential speeches, NAWSA emphasized its contributions to the war effort and employed a new strategic approach. Following the failure
of both major political parties to adopt a strong federal suffrage platform, Catt called an emergency convention in 1916. At an executive council meeting, she unveiled the “Winning Plan,” which called for increased action on both the state and national fronts. Catt gave the suffrage states in particular an assignment to secure from their legislatures resolutions requesting that Congress submit the women’s suffrage amendment. In response, Elizabeth Hayward, member of the Utah House of Representatives and first vice-president of the UCW, introduced a 1917 resolution to Utah’s legislature recommending consideration of the federal suffrage amendment. The resolution easily passed both houses of the Utah legislature. After Congress finally approved the amendment in June 1919, Hayward secured a special session of the Utah Legislature that met solely to consider ratifying the amendment.123 Hayward, then as a state senator, introduced the amendment to the Utah Senate on September 29, 1919. It passed in thirty minutes.124 The next day, Representative Anna T. Piercey chaired the Utah House of Representatives during the passage of the amendment, and representatives Delora W. Blakely and Grace Stratton Airey gave speeches.125 Utah was the only full suffrage state in the West to ratify the amendment by October 1919.126 This support was in large part due to the continued activism of Utah suffragists. The UCW immediately sent a telegram to Catt, who came to Utah in mid-November for a convention and special meeting in which she replaced the UCW with the Utah League of Women Voters.127
National Woman’s Party headquarters in Salt Lake City. Courtesy NWP.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 300
8/26/20 6:42 PM
Beyond the “Final Triumph” Looking back over the twenty years that Emily S. Richards led the UCW, Susa Young Gates commended Richards for spending “herself and her vital forces to keep alive upon the altar of struggle and sacrifice the fire of civic endeavor for the women of this State.”133 Their continued commitment to the suffrage cause, even after Utah women’s own voting rights were
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 301
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Neither pawns nor militants, Utah’s women actively advocated for and participated in the women’s suffrage movement for fifty years. With statehood and the restoration of their voting privileges on the horizon, Utah suffragists at the end of the nineteenth century had already developed a clear self-image of their own activism, their commitment to the cause of suffrage, and their integral role within the national movement. The experience Utah women gained in organization and leadership during their own suffrage campaign, as well as the close relationships they developed with national suffrage leaders, gave them the necessary skills to continue advocating for nationwide women’s suffrage following statehood. Utah women in the early twentieth century continued to participate actively, strategically, and progressively in the national movement to enfranchise women by helping other state suffrage campaigns, by providing an example of the benefits of women’s suffrage in action, and by advocating for the federal suffrage amendment. For many suffragists throughout Utah and the nation, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 marked the culmination of decades of advocacy.
I
After decades of participating in the national movement, Utah suffragists joined women throughout the nation to celebrate the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, a victory that they had helped win. Utah women were actively involved in the NAWSA Jubilee Convention in Chicago in 1920, where fourteen Utah delegates participated in the victory celebrations and helped plan for future work through the National League of Women Voters.130 Gates later wrote, “Throughout the convention the Utah delegates were proud of Utah’s position, presented and recorded in this greatest of all suffrage conventions.”131 In addition to the numerous local jubilee meetings held in Utah in celebration of the amendment, a large celebration was held on the steps of the Utah State Capitol. Amid much fanfare, the prominent state suffrage leaders Wells, Richards, Hannah Lapish, and Lydia Alder, along with Governor Simon Bamberger and former Governor Heber M. Wells, spoke “in honor of the final triumph of the cause of woman suffrage in the United States.”132
restored, indicates how personally invested Utah suffragists had become in the expansion of voting rights for women. They still felt the “fire of civic endeavor” and contributed their efforts to sharing that flame across the nation.
U H Q
The efforts of the moderate NAWSA and the militant NWP both contributed to the ultimate victory of the Nineteenth Amendment. The NWP’s public demonstrations garnered media attention, pressured lawmakers, and made NAWSA proposals appear more mainstream in contrast, while the years of alliances, respectability, and groundwork established by NAWSA proved invaluable in securing the votes needed for passage and ratification. Utah suffragists remained involved in each stage of this process as they worked for an amendment that would extend voting rights to women in every state. The long-awaited constitutional amendment was signed into law on August 26, 1920.128 The Nineteenth Amendment states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”129
301
In reality, this landmark victory was not the “final triumph” or the end of the story. The Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying voting rights based on sex, but other discriminatory restrictions remained well beyond 1920. Despite limitations and exclusions, many Utah women indeed remained engaged and influential in the national suffrage movement up through the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and beyond. As marginalized women of color persisted with the struggle for citizenship and equal access to voting rights throughout the twentieth century, they built upon the protections established by the Nineteenth Amendment. Many Utah women continued, and still continue, to work toward the goal of true equal suffrage for every American woman. Their dedication to using their political voice to advocate for equality is an inspiring legacy for Utah women today.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
Notes
302
1. Sections of this article are adapted from the author’s 2003 honors thesis for the History and Literature Department at Harvard University, entitled “An Uncovered History: Mormons in the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1896–1920.” 2. “Suffragettes Are Ready for Convention,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 19, 1915, p. 12; “Women of Utah Pledge Support,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 21, 1915, p. 12; “Parade Streets to Advance Suffrage Cause,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1915, p. 2. 3. “U.S. Senator Reed Smoot Pledges Support to Bill Enfranchising Women of the Nation,” Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, August 20, 1915, p. 12. 4. Wyoming was the first place in the United States to grant unrestricted equal suffrage, but Utah women were the first to legally cast votes under such a law. Utah held several municipal elections as well as a general election before Wyoming held its first election including women in September 1870. “The Election,” Deseret Evening News, February 15, 1870, p. 3; “The Election,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 2, 1870, p. 3; “Wyoming: The Territorial Election,” Deseret Evening News, September 7, 1870, p. 1. Some unmarried, property-owning women could vote in colonial New Jersey between 1776 and 1807, and a few rural women could vote in local school elections in Kentucky beginning in 1837 and Kansas in 1861. These women legally voted prior to Utah’s historic election but only under certain gender-based restrictions. 5. Edmunds-Tucker Act, 49th Cong., Sess. 2, Ch. 397, March 3, 1887, (24 Stat. 635). 6. “Woman’s Day at Saltair,” Woman’s Exponent, September 1, 1896, p. 37. 7. Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Joan Smyth Iversen, The Antipolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880–1925 (New York: Routledge, 1997). 8. Katherine Kitterman and Rebekah Ryan Clark, Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019). 9. Rebecca J. Mead, How the West Was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University, 2004), 4–5. For examples of classic suffrage histories that offer little or no analysis of Utah involvement, see Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 3; Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Belknap Press, 1975), 165–66. 10. Carol Cornwall Madsen, ed., Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870–1896 (Logan, Utah, 1997); Lola Van Wagenen, “Sister-Wives and Suffragists: Polygamy and the Politics of Woman Suffrage, 1870–1896” (PhD diss., New York University, 1994); Iversen, “The Mormon–Suffrage Relationship”; Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The Liberty of Self-Degradation: Polygamy, Woman Suffrage, and Consent in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 3 (1996): 815–47. 11. Iversen, The Antipolygamy Controversy, 261 n.43; Kitterman and Clark, Thinking Women; Carol Cornwall
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 302
Madsen, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870–1920 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 2005); Better Days 2020, accessed May 26, 2020, utahwomenshistory.org. 12. “Utah W.S.A.,” Woman’s Exponent, October 15, 1895, p. 66. Although many suffragists at the time used the term “universal suffrage,” it is critical to note that discriminatory federal laws and local practices kept many women of color excluded or marginalized from true universal suffrage for many more decades. 13. Sarah A. Boyer, “Visit to Washington,” Woman’s Exponent, May 15, 1896, p. 153. 14. “S. L. Co. W. S. A.,” Woman’s Exponent, March 1, 1896, p. 122. 15. “Conference N.A.W.S.A.: Remarks by Miss Anthony,” Woman’s Exponent, November 1, 15, 1895, p. 79. 16. “Conference N.A.W.S.A.: Remarks by M. Isabella Horne,” Woman’s Exponent, November 1, 15, 1895, p. 77; see also Alvira Lucy Cox, “Equal Suffrage,” Woman’s Exponent, October 15, 1893, p. 50. 17. Alice L. Reynolds, “Emily Sophia Tanner Richards,” Relief Society Magazine, October 1929, p. 523. 18. Sarah A. Boyer, “Visit to Washington,” Woman’s Exponent, May 15, 1896. 19. Mary Gray Peck, Carrie Chapman Catt: A Biography (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1944), 84, 86. 20. “Noted Woman Suffragist,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 30, 1899, p. 8. 21. Richards served in that position until the council merged into the League of Women Voters in November 1919. 22. Ida Husted Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 6, 1900–1920 (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1922), 645. Note that Susa Young Gates wrote the “Utah” chapter in Harper’s edited volume. 23. “Utah Dolls [Featured] at Suffrage Bazar,” Deseret Evening News, December 23, 1909, p. 16. 24. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:645. 25. Electa Bullock, “Conference of the N.A.W.S.A.,” Woman’s Exponent, June 1896; see also Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 4:950. 26. Carrie Chapman Catt, National Suffrage Bulletin 5, no. 8 (New York: National American Woman Suffrage Association, April 1900), available in Susa Young Gates Papers, MS 7692, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (CHL). 27. “Suffrage Bazar Notes,” Woman’s Exponent, January 1, 1901, p. 66; see also “Conference N.A.W.S.A.: Remarks by M. Isabella Horne,” Woman’s Exponent, November 1, 15, 1895, p. 77. 28. “Bazar Notes” and “The National Bazar,” Woman’s Exponent, December 15, 1900, p. 58–59. 29. “Mrs. Horne’s Visit to Idaho,” Woman’s Exponent, July 15, 1895, p. 32; see also T. A. Larson, “Woman’s Rights in Idaho,” Idaho Yesterdays 16 (Spring 1972): 2–19; Beeton, Women Vote in the West, 132–33. 30. “Mrs. Horne’s Visit to Idaho,” Woman’s Exponent, July 15, 1895, p. 32. 31. “Mrs. M. C. Woods’ Speech,” Woman’s Exponent, March 15, p. 1897. 32. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 4:592–93. The legislative representative from Oneida County, an area dominated by people from Utah, introduced the first bill designed to grant women’s suffrage in Idaho. 33. “Conference NAWSA,” Woman’s Exponent, October 15, 1895.
8/26/20 6:42 PM
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 303
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
56. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:646. 57. Susa Young Gates, “Woman Suffrage in Utah,” locations 31–32, 47, History of Women Files, Revised Chapters, Gates papers, accessed May 28, 2020, catalog. churchofjesuschrist.org. 58. Emmeline B. Wells, quoted in Susa Young Gates, “Where Women Vote in Utah,” Political Equality Series 4, no. 6 (New York: NAWSA, 1899), CHL. 59. This prototype of the National League of Women Voters was organized in Tacoma, Washington, in January 1911, with Emma Smith DeVoe as president. Eleanor Flexner briefly referred to this organization as “an abortive attempt to gather together the voting strength of the enfranchised women of the West,” indicating that the council was ultimately unsuccessful. Flexner, Century of Struggle, 312–13. Abigail Scott Duniway’s account, however, indicated that this council was still active in 1914 and that Utah representatives remained involved. Duniway, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (Portland: James, Kerns, and Abbott, 1914), 246– 49. 60. Emma Smith DeVoe to Susa Young Gates, letter, December 13, 1910, reel 32, fd. 10, Gates papers, emphasis in original. 61. Harriett Horne Arrington, “Alice Merrill Horne, Art Promoter and Early Utah Legislator,” Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (Summer 1990): 270–71. 62. “Only Woman in the Legislature Made Chairman of Important Committee,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 14, 1903, p. 8; “Committees Organized by Members of House,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 11, 1917, p. 2; “Committees Appointed in Senate, House,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, January 16, 1919, p. 6. 63. Vinnie Jepson was initially elected but resigned at the first council meeting in January 1912, so Ada Pratt Seegmiller was appointed to fill her place. Kanab (Utah) City Council Minutes, March 1884 to January 1920, November 13, 1911, p. 245, 254, reel 1, Series 84960, Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah. 64. Kylie Nielson Turley, “Kanab’s All Woman Town Council, 1912–1914: Politics, Power Struggles, and Polygamy,” Utah Historical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 308– 328. 65. Susa Young Gates, “State Suffrage Council,” Gates papers. 66. Kitterman and Clark, Thinking Women, “Utah Women Elected to the State Legislature” and “Utah Women Elected to County Office,” appendix. 67. “The Utah Delegation,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 9, 1896, p. 1. 68. “First Woman to Be Seated in Convention,” Ogden Daily Standard, June 16, 1908, p. 1. 69. “Utah’s Lady Representatives of the Two Big Party Conventions,” Deseret Evening News, July 7, 1900, p. 14. 70. “Mrs. Witcher Tells of Trip,” Salt Lake Tribune, February 4, 1913, p. 14. Margaret Zane Witcher was remarried to Otto Phillip Cherdron in December 1913. 71. “National Anti-Vote Society,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 29, 1911, p. 11. 72. “Some Reasons Why We Oppose Votes for Women,” pamphlet, National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, n.d., Library of Congress; “Prize Winners in the Woman Suffrage Contest,” Sun (New York City), October 13, 1912, p. 54.
U H Q
34. Emily S. Richards to the California Suffrage Association, undated letter, reel 61, box 87, fd. 18, Gates papers. 35. Woman’s Exponent, January 15, February 1, 1897; Woman’s Journal, February 6, 1897. 36. “Utah Women at Washington,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, February 26, 1899, p. 4. 37. Western Woman Voter, January 1911, p. 4. 38. Sarah A. Boyer, “Visit to Washington,” Woman’s Exponent, May 15, 1896. 39. “National Capital Affairs,” Wasatch Wave (Heber City, UT), March 11, 1910, p. 6; see also Susan Ware, Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Sally Roesch Wagner, ed., The Women’s Suffrage Movement (New York: Penguin Books, 2019). 40. Even after Native Americans received citizenship under the federal Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Utah was one of the last states to end voting restrictions for Native Americans living on reservations on February 14, 1957. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 finally opened citizenship for immigrants of Asian descent, although quotas for specific nations remained in place. 41. “Rally of Colored Women,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 23, 1895, p. 3; “Echoes of the Election,” Broad Ax (Salt Lake City, UT), November 12, 1898, p. 1; “Western Colored Women,” Deseret Evening News, June 15, 1904, p. 2; “Colored Women Form Organization,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 3, 1904, p. 8; “Colored Women in Federation, All of the West Well Represented,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 6, 1904; “Colored Women Hold Convention,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, July 6, 1904, p. 5; “Western Federation of Colored Women’s Benefit,” Ogden Daily Standard, March 24, 1905, p. 7. 42. Gina Capaldi, Red Bird Sings: The Story of Zitkála-Šá, Native American Author, Musician, and Activist (Minneapolis, MN: Millbrook Press, 2011). 43. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:645. 44. Alice L. Reynolds, “Emily Sophia Tanner Richards,” Relief Society Magazine, October 1929, 524. 45. “Utah Suffrage Council,” Deseret Evening News, April 6, 1904, p. 4. 46. “Woman’s Day at Saltair,” Woman’s Exponent, September 1, 1896, p. 37. 47. California Equal Suffrage Association, “California Next” (San Francisco: California Equal Suffrage Association, 1911), LAW-0245, Special Collections, Cecil H. Green Library, Stanford University, Stanford, California; “From a California Leaflet,” Western Woman Voter, February 1911; “Band Wagon,” Western Woman Voter, January 1911, p. 1; Gary L. Bunker and Carol B. Bunker, “Woman Suffrage, Popular Art, and Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 59 (Winter 1991): 195–96. 48. Harriet J. Boutell, “Letters to the Governor and Mrs. E. B. Wells,” Woman’s Exponent, January 1, 15, 1896, p. 101. 49. “Colorado Woman’s Greeting,” Woman’s Exponent, November 1, 15, 1895, p. 77. 50. Woman’s Exponent, January 15, February 1, 1897. 51. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 4:951–52. 52. Frances Maule Bjorkman, Woman Suffrage: Arguments and Results, 1910–1911 (New York: NAWSA, 1911; New York: Kraus Reprint, 1971), 31. 53. Ida Husted Harper, How Six States Won Woman Suffrage (New York: NAWSA, 1913), 9. 54. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:648. 55. Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 101–104.
303
8/26/20 6:42 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
304
73. Martha Hughes Cannon, “Woman Suffrage in Utah,” Hearing on House Joint Resolution 68 (February 15, 1898), 12, 324.623 C226w 1898, CHL. 74. “Delegate from Utah at the Woman’s Congress,” Woman’s Exponent, August 1, 1908, p. 14–15. 75. “Woman Suffrage in Utah,” Deseret Weekly, February 15, 1896, p. 2. 76. “Editorial Notes,” Woman’s Exponent, January 15, 1873, p. 121; “Washington, D.C.,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 4, 1871; Susan B. Anthony, Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony (Rochester, NY: Daily Democrat and Chronicle Book Print, 1874). 77. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875); “Right to Vote,” Deseret News, April 7, 1875, p. 8. 78. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 3:104. 79. “Woman Suffrage in Utah,” Woman’s Exponent, February 15, 1876, p. 139; “The Suffrage Movement,” National Republican, January 29, 1876, p. 1; “Constitution of the National Woman Suffrage Association,” Ballot Box, September 1876, p. 1; History of Woman Suffrage, 3:5. 80. “Appeal for a Sixteenth Amendment,” November 10, 1876, ID 306647, and “Ten Thousand Petitioners Appeal for a Sixteenth Amendment,” December 14, 1877, ID 117874758, both in Petitions and Memorials, 1813– 1968, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. (hereafter NAB). 81. Emmeline B. Wells, “Convention Letters,” National Citizen and Ballot Box, July 1877, p. 1. 82. “Sixteenth Amendment Workers,” Ballot Box, April 1878, p. 1; “R.S. Reports,” Woman’s Exponent, January 1, 1878, p. 114; “Notes and News,” Woman’s Exponent, January 15, 1878, p. 121; “R.S. Reports,” Woman’s Exponent, March 15, 1878, p. 154. 83. “Women Suffrage,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 19, 1877, p. 3. 84. “Female Suffrage,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 15, 1877, p. 3. 85. “R.S. Reports,” Woman’s Exponent, January 1, 1878, p. 114; Memorial of Utah Women Against the Christiancy-Luttrell Bills Which Would Disenfranchise Them, March 4, 1878, HR45A-H23.6, RG 233, NAB. 86. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 4:937; “Our Relief Societies,” Woman’s Exponent, October 15, 1878, p. 76. 87. Sarah A. Boyer, “Visit to Washington,” Woman’s Exponent, May 15, 1896, p. 153. 88. Cannon, “Woman Suffrage in Utah”; “Editorial Notes,” Woman’s Exponent, March 1, 1898, p. 253. 89. “Utah Woman Pleads for Women Suffragists,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 4, 1908, p. 1. 90. Harper, ed., History of Woman Suffrage, 6:645; “Council of Women Has Busy Meeting,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 2, 1909, p. 12; “Suffragists at Capitol,” New York Daily Tribune, April 19, 1910, p. 7; “Suffragists Invade Capitol,” Deseret Evening News, April 19, 1910, p. 8; “Advanced on Congress,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, April 19, 1910, p. 1. 91. “Women Declare Independence Near Liberty Bell,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, November 22, 1912, p. 1. 92. “Women Declare Independence Near Liberty Bell”; “Florence E. Allen Named Federal Judge,” New York Times, March 7, 1934, p. 9. 93. “Woman Suffrage Amendment, Proceedings in the United States Senate,” July 31, 1913, U.S. Senate, 63d
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 304
Cong., Sess. 1, Doc. 155, p. 17–18; “Suffragists at Capitol,” Ogden Daily Standard, July 31, 1913, p. 1. 94. “Mrs. Groshell Leads Big Parade,” Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, March 10, 1913; “Utahns Will Witness Ceremonies,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, March 4, 1913, p. 1. 95. Emily H. Bright, “Report of the N.A.W.S.A. Midyear Conference Held in Chicago June 7th–8th 1915,” Congressional Union, General Correspondence, Series II, Alice Paul Papers, MC 399, Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 96. Letter from Anna Howard Shaw, July 24, 1915, Congressional Union, General Correspondence, Series II, Paul papers. 97. Alice Paul to Emily H. Bright, letter, August 23, 1915, Congressional Union, General Correspondence, Series II, Paul papers. 98. Bright, “Report of the N.A.W.S.A. Midyear Conference,” Paul papers. 99. “Suffrage Mass Meeting Called,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 12, 1915, p. 12. 100. Suffragist, September 4, 1915, p. 1; “U.S. Senator Reed Smoot Pledges Support to Bill Enfranchising Women of the Nation,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, August 20, 1915, p. 12; “Suffragettes Are Ready for Convention,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 19, 1915, p. 12. 101. “Parade Streets to Advance Suffrage Cause,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 20, 1915, p. 2. 102. “Women of Utah Pledge Support,” Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, August 21, 1915, p. 12; “Suffragists Change Program for Meeting,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 8, 1918, p. 11. 103. “Women of Utah Pledge Support.” 104. “Women of Utah Pledge Support.” 105. Alice Paul to Miss Lancaster, August 23, 1915, letter, Congressional Union, General Correspondence, Series II, Paul papers. 106. Paul to Lancaster. Fifteen delegates to this convention were reportedly elected at the large meeting in Salt Lake City, including UCW president Emily S. Richards. “Amendment Cannot Pass Next Session, Sutherland Says,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 21, 1915, p. 7. 107. “Suffragists Convene in San Francisco,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 14, 1915, p. 2; “Convention at San Francisco Goes on Record,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 17, 1915, p. 3. 108. “Convention at San Francisco Goes on Record”; “Take Stand for Anthony Amendment,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, September 17, 1915, p. 1. 109. “National Capital Affairs,” Wasatch Wave (Heber City, UT), March 11, 1910, p. 6; “New Amendment Proposed,” Suffragist, March 21, 1914, p. 4–5; “Many Opposed to Plan of Shafroth,” Salt Lake Tribune, March 31, 1914, p. 2; Mabel Vernon, “Working in the Interest of Suffrage Amendment,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 15, 1915, p. 44. 110. “No Immediate Hope Held for Suffrage, Salt Lake Tribune, August 21, 1915, p. 12. 111. “Salt Lake Women Welcome Suffrage Envoy,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 5, 1915, p. 1. 112. “Women Voter’s Delegates Will Meet Monday at the Capitol,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 3, 1915, p. 21; “Militant Suffragist Speaks from Steps of Capitol,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 5, 1915, p. 8. 113. “Monster Suffrage Petition Presented,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 6, 1915, p. 1; “Senator Sutherland Presents Suffrage Amendment,” Salt Lake
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
“Salt Lake Picketer Chosen to Address Court During Trial,” Salt Lake Telegram, November 21, 1917, p. 2. 122. “Say Mrs. Quay Is Not a Democrat,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 31, 1917, p. 8. 123. “Special Legislature for Suffrage Asked,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 10, 1919, p. 22. 124. “Suffrage Ratified by Senate of Utah,” Salt Lake HeraldRepublican, September 29, 1919, p. 16. 125. “Suffrage Ratified by House, Now Goes to Chief Executive,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1919, p. 18. 126. “Suffrage Measure Signed by Governor,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 4, 1919, p. 22. 127. “Distinguished Suffragists Will Visit Salt Lake City,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 16, 1919, p. 62. 128. “Suffrage Ratified by House,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1919, p. 18; “Governor Signs Suffrage Bill,” Salt Lake Telegram, October 4, 1919, p. 2. 129. Unites States Constitution, Amendment XIX. 130. Donette Smith Kesler, “Three Important Conventions,” Young Woman’s Journal, May 1920, p. 271–76. 131. Susa Young Gates, chapter 50, “Suffrage,” location 71, History of Women Files, Gates papers, accessed June 8, 2020, catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org. 132. “Fiftieth Suffrage Anniversary in Utah,” Ogden Daily Standard, February 9, 1920, p. 2; “Utah Women Observe Suffrage Victory,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, September 1, 1920, p. 3. 133. Susa Young Gates, Chapter 50: “Suffrage,” location 63.
U H Q
Herald-Republican, December 7, 1915, p. 1; “Woman Suffrage, speech of Hon. George Sutherland of Utah in the Senate of the United States, February 18, 1914” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), available online at catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org, accessed May 28, 2020. 114. “Democrats are Urged to Pass Equal Suffrage,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 8, 1915, p. 3; “President Promises Support for Women,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 22, 1915, p. 4. 115. “News of the Women’s Clubs, Salt Lake Tribune, December 5, 1915, p. 45; “Democrats Are Urged to Pass Equal Suffrage”; “President Promises Support for Women.” 116. “Suffrage Envoys Close Salt Lake Conference,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 12, 1916, p. 2. 117. “Women’s Party Names Delegates,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 28, 1916, p. 16; “Woman’s Party Active,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 23, 1916, p. 8. 118. “Women Launch Party to Promote Suffrage,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, June 6, 1916, p. 7. 119. “Emily Sophia Tanner Richards,” Relief Society Magazine, October 1929, p. 525. 120. “National Advisory Council,” Suffragist, November 18, 1916, February 1920, p. 2; “Salt Lake Women Welcome Suffrage Envoy,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 4, 1915, p. 1. 121. “Salt Lake Woman to Picket White House,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 1, 1917, p. 9; “Suffragist Leaves for Washington,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 30, 1917, p. 16;
305
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 305
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
Women and the Transcontinental Railroad through Utah, 1868–1869
306
BY
WE N DY
SI MMO N S
J O H N SO N
The first transcontinental railroad in the United States was built by the Central Pacific (CP) and Union Pacific (UP) railroads between 1863 and 1869. Based on the current written histories, women appear to have participated in the creation of the railroad to a very limited degree, at least through Utah.1 Writers might occasionally note nameless “camp followers” and laundresses or list the individual wives accompanying specific businessmen or engineers, such as the Central Pacific’s Mrs. (Hannah) James Strobridge. And almost always, these descriptions include markers of class and respectability, such as the styling of Hannah Strobridge as “Mrs. James.” The newspapers of the time reported that four “ladies” were present at the golden spike ceremony on May 10, 1869, the wives and family members of prominent railroad men; only women of a higher social class or those women associated with the railroad notables were mentioned by name in print. Yet many other women, besides this handful of “ladies,” played supporting roles in the construction of the transcontinental railroad in 1868 and 1869; they included entertainers, hotel and newspaper operators, and Latter-day Saint women, as well as the wives of railroad employees. Because contemporaries considered these kinds of women to be “those of little note,” their stories are harder to find.2 Although their work was often different from men’s, women still profited economically from the transcontinental endeavor and were critical to its success. In the 1860s, few machines could move the work forward on the railroad, and the construction required intensive physical labor. This included lifting railroad ties and rails as well as hammering the spikes with large, heavy hammers. Because of the physical nature of the work, women generally did not labor on the actual construction. Additionally, most women living in the West were originally from the eastern United States or Europe. These women, although often having to take on male roles in their frontier homes, still ascribed to the domestic work “assigned to women in western civilization.”3 Regardless, women did work alongside the men in this work to complete the first transcontinental railroad joining the eastern and western United States.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 306
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
307
Fig. 1. The staff of the Daily Reporter in front of their office in Corinne, Utah, 1869. William H. Jackson, photographer. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 15273.
Union Pacific End-of-Track Towns As construction of the Union Pacific progressed westward, temporary communities followed along in its wake. These end-of-track towns, known famously as “hell on wheels,” consisted of flimsy tents and storefronts that housed offices and lodgings and sold anything from dentistry to alcohol—and women were part of them.4 Most visibly, perhaps, women in the Union Pacific end-of-track towns fulfilled the desire of railroad crews for entertainment: dancing and singing, talking to the men or having a drink with them, or selling them sex. Women also offered domestic support, such as cooking, laundering, sewing, and general camp maintenance, often using their own stoves and dishes. Other women worked with their husbands or families running boarding houses, printing newspapers, or reporting railroad events to newspapers throughout the country. Women whose husbands ran the railroad also provided an emotional as well as physical support system to their husbands in the frantic race toward the meeting of the rails.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 307
Nineteenth-century observers generally relegated women who entertained men in track towns—as performers, drinking companions, and prostitutes—to the “fallen” category and spoke of them in that tone. It is difficult to discern the actual experiences of these women because few primary records of their own making exist. Plenty of popular accounts exist of prostitution in the West, but they should be approached warily. Meanwhile, the body of historical and archaeological literature about prostitutes and entertainers in the frontier West is growing, allowing us to get a general sense of what they might have encountered in the hell-on-wheels camps. Contemporaries and popular writers have dismissed camp followers in terms both glib and salacious, suggesting that they had no real part in track towns or that they didn’t meet societal expectations of proper womanhood. One author, writing in 1979, noted that women were basically absent in the early West, but that “whores, of course, were there almost from
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
the beginning.”5 Such notions are false. Those women dismissed as morally inferior had important functions in the economic makeup of track towns, and many of them filled the role of prostitute because they had no other choice. As Cheryl Livingston puts it, “Poverty fed prostitution. One of the chief reasons why women became prostitutes was that they had no other option for employment.”6
308
Contemporaries usually mentioned, but did not discuss in detail, the presence of dance hall girls and other working women in the Union Pacific end-of-track towns. Several eyewitnesses recounted the wild nature of these towns. Henry Stanley wrote, “Mostly everyone seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation. The women were the most reckless. . . . They come in for a large share of the money wasted.”7 Samuel B. Reed, an engineer for the Union Pacific, penned a letter to his wife on July 30, 1867, describing the vice and crime that went on at the hell-on-wheels camps: “The first place we visited was a dance house, where a fresh importation of strumpets had been received. The hall was crowded with bad men and lewd women. Such profanity, vulgarity and indecency as was heard and seen there would disgust a more hardened person than I.”8 The strumpets, due to their profession, must have not exhibited the characteristics expected of women during this time period. The Frontier Index—a newspaper that followed the Union Pacific Railroad, setting up in the end-of-track towns and publishing, only to pick up and move again when the railroad moved on—is a vital source about the transcontinental experience. A column from the Frontier Index, reproduced elsewhere, described railroad town social life in language that fit its times: hot-shot eastern visitors, who had already lost money gambling, continued on to “visit some of the dance houses and squander as much more in treating the ‘fair and frail’ girls to wine, whisky, and other such beastly fodder; and when they return to their senses and find out how nicely they were inveigled, while intoxicated, their indignation knows no bounds.”9 Another piece of reporting, from June 1868, told of a “fast female” in Laramie City who “whipped her paramour in the street yesterday.”10 These accounts of end-of-track entertainers as “fast” women who charmed men and then took their
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 308
money were entirely consistent with descriptions of women in other free-and-easy frontier settings and likewise biased against seeing them as true women. The flipside of these stories, which portrayed camp followers as temptresses, was a business move of proprietors throughout the West: the use of female companionship to attract customers to hell-on-wheels establishments.11 A number of advertisements in the Frontier Index made this plain. Beginning in May 1868, the newspaper noted that J. C. Crisman was building one of the “largest and most splendid sporting houses in the West.”12 Just what was meant by “sporting” became clear with advertisements throughout the summer inviting the people of Laramie to “get an introduction” to Crisman’s “Diana”: Diana, Diana!—Diana the living Goddess.—She can be seen in all her glory at J. C. Crisman’s splendid galleries on Front street. Amusements of every name and variety surround you. . . . Games and plays, music and tempting luxuries, eatables and drinkables greet you in every nook and corner. Go and enjoy the fun.13 When the camp had moved along to Green River, Wyoming, in the fall of 1868, a similar announcement for the Alhambra resort described how the popularity of “the charming ways of those coy maidens, keep the rooms crowded and us awake until two o’clock every morning.”14 In these sorts of winking accounts, dance hall women were part of the advertisement for alcohol, gambling, and more. Similarly, Robert V. Grewell, who started working on the railroad in the spring of 1869, described his experience in a place called Wyoming City: “It consisted of a saloon and some tents. I went to the saloon and asked the man if he had any work. . . . Then they put a floor in the saloon. The next thing the man did was to go to Laramie and get four girls and start a dance hall. After every other quadrille the girls would go to the bar and get a drink. By midnight they would be pretty mellow, I tell you.”15 Closer to the Promontories, the Deseret News reported how Echo City sprang up almost
8/26/20 6:43 PM
These were just some of the descriptions given of the hell-on-wheels towns. No women are mentioned by name, but obviously they were present. Bowles, for instance, noted that “one to two thousand men, and a dozen or two women” had encamped in Benton.18 The settlements along the Union Pacific route featured tents whose very structure facilitated the sale of sex. The so-called “Big Tent,” which measured one hundred feet long by forty feet wide, was lined on one side was lined with a bar full of liquors and cigars. Music was furnished by a band, and gambling surrounded the dance floor. As the filmmaker Gregory Nickerson puts it about the “Big Tent” in Cheyenne, Wyoming, “inside, customers who spent enough money could get a drink, play a game of cards, dance with a girl, hire a prostitute and get treated for venereal disease all in one visit.”19 The working girls of these camps remained nameless and disregarded by observers, yet their work and their bodies were clearly a part of the economy and the social world along the grade.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 309
Other women, in addition to entertainers and prostitutes, contributed to the world of the railroad camps, as is evident from newspaper accounts and historic pictures. One Mrs. T. Clapp apparently joined her husband, a reporter for the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican, on the railroad grade.22 Likewise, William Henry Jackson photographed the staff of the Daily Reporter in Corinne, Utah, which included a
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
The contemporary author Samuel Bowles, depicted the track town of Benton as “a village of few variety stores and shops, and many restaurants and grog-shops; by day disgusting, by night dangerous; almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice; averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce, the chief business and pastime of the hours. . . . Where these people came from originally; where they went to when the road was finished . . . were both puzzles to intricate for me.”17
The Union Pacific attempted to control the activities in the end-of-track towns, with little effect. Grenville M. Dodge wrote, “Two or three times at the end of our tracks a rough crowd would gather and dispute our authority, but they were soon disposed of.20 The Central Pacific, which largely employed Chinese immigrant labor, had different dynamics. Hellon-wheels camps were not present at the end of the CP line. Chinese camps had their vices but were generally quiet. No prostitutes were brought into these towns. Chinese performed many of the domestic services, such as laundering and cooking, that women provided for the Union Pacific workers. Therefore, it would be less likely to find the presence of prostitutes and dance hall women at these camps. As an archaeological report for the Golden Spike National Historic Site has noted, “the characteristics of these [UP] towns contrasted sharply with that of the Chinese and Mormon Camps.”21
U H Q
overnight, with a list of products and services that devolved into female availability: “Today I have counted exclusive of the UPRR buildings, some fifty structures, most of them true enough, mere duck tenements. Under this vigorous spread of cotton luxuriate wholesale and retail groceries, dry goods, general merchandise, clothing, hardware, bakeries, blacksmith and wagon shops, cheap Johns, carpenter shops, saloons, doggeries, whiskey-holes, dram-barrels, gambling hells, restaurants, eating places, lunch covers, pie and gin resorts, corrals, hotels under shingles and dimity, ‘private dwellings,’ whence femininity stalks out with brazen publicity expressly denominated here as nymphs du grade.”16
309
A Chinese tea carrier, captured in this image by the official photographer of the Central Pacific, Alfred A. Hart, circa 1863–1869. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 00530.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
woman wearing a work apron and standing just inside of the Daily Reporter tent. Perhaps she worked with her husband setting type or writing columns or perhaps she was a member of the newspaper’s staff in her own right (see figure one).23 Publishing in the 1890s, Cy Warman wrote about life in the UP camps and described the role of one woman running a hotel tent.24 Warman portrayed the boss of the hotel tent as a jovial, somewhat lazy character whose wife was the real powerhouse of the camp:
310
From four in the morning until midnight this slave of the camp is on her feet. To be sure, there are men cooks and flunkies and dishwashers, but the boarding boss has but one wife, and she must oversee everything. She must see that nothing goes to the pigs until all the boarders have refused it. . . . She is at once a mother to the beardless and a sister of charity to the bearded men. Her private tent is the one spot respected at all times by the rough men of the camp, whether they be drunk or sober.25 Warman’s description of the hotel matron is surely idealized, but it is also a tribute to the hardworking women on the transcontinental railroad. One has to wonder how many women contributed to this endeavor but are lost to history or are out there waiting to be found.
Central Pacific End-of-Track Towns The Central Pacific, building from the Pacific Coast toward Utah, had different circumstances: for the most part, CP towns were populated by Chinese male workers, and there were no hell-on-wheels camps at the end of the line. Between ten to twelve thousand Chinese labored on the CP at any one time, many of them intending to return to China. Chinese women generally stayed behind in China while their men worked in America and sent remittances home. In 1870, just one year after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, there were 429 Chinese men and sixteen Chinese women in Utah.26 In the words of Vanessa Hua, “These immigrants played a crucial role in finishing the railroad, performing hard, dangerous work
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 310
for long hours at low wages that were one-half to two-thirds of what their white counterparts were earning. Afterward, some returned to China, but many found work in other trades or continued to work on railroad lines throughout the United States.”27 The Chinese workers lived in canvas tents of about thirty to forty men along the grade. Each group was overseen by a white foreman with a bilingual Chinese overseer or headman.28 The headman directed the Chinese workers, purchased provisions, and handed out wages to the crews. The Chinese did not associate with the Irish, Cornish, and Native Americans employed by the CP. Because of this, their railroad camps were male-dominated communities where men took on the jobs considered to be women’s work: cooking their own food, washing their own laundry, and performing other domestic tasks.29 The Chinese workers did enjoy gambling and the use of opium, but since the men kept to themselves, no women, outside professional gamblers, or saloon keepers were involved in these camps.30
Latter-day Saint Women and the Transcontinental Railroad The role of Latter-day Saint women in the history of the transcontinental railroad has received little attention. Newspapers from the East and far West missed the part that these women played in supporting the railroad through Utah because they focused on the more sensational subject of polygamy. A reporter from the Evening Bulletin, a San Francisco–based newspaper, wrote: “The only female Mormon face, married, that I have seen that looked at all bright, was a young wife, say third or fourth, and she looked as if she had a part to play before her husband, and her anxiety to gratify him exhibited itself painfully. To please him was the task she kept constantly before her.”31 Another reporter, this time with the Daily Alta California, described “a party of stalwart fellows returning from their labors. They march with the wagon, carrying their tools and provisions; seated in the wagon is a laughing Mormon girl, whose white teeth form a beautiful contrast with her sunburnt healthy face. She was the only female I saw. The Mormons who have been employed on the railroad, as a
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Mary Larsen Ahlstrom, who lived near Heber City, described in 1919 how the cash her husband made working on the railroad affected her and her family: “That summer lots of men were called to go out in Echo Canyon to work on the railroad, and papa went. He came home a few days and had money, so we got some flour and shoes and clothe to make us some clothes. He went back again to work till winter came on so they couldn’t work. In 1869 the train came to Ogden, Weber, Utah. Now we had better times. That fall I got my first stove (Well I have never had only two and I got the last one yet.)”36 As the railroad passed through Morgan County, women and families there also supported the construction gangs: taking in their laundry and selling milk, butter, and eggs to the camp cooks. Local families benefited from the railroad in other ways, receiving old clothing from railroad officers or taking in boarders for extra income.37
I
Latter-day Saint women at the railroad camps performed typical domestic labor for the railroad workers. A Deseret News reporter described the Mormon-run Harvey’s camp, located near Echo, as “one of the most picturesque scenes I have looked upon for some time. . . . Nesting among the willows are tents, wagons doing duty for sleeping chambers, neat boweries and inviting looking wick-e-ups. Here a lady busy with the needle, there another superintending some culinary operation; with children enjoying themselves among the feathery foliage, and the movements of busy life on every hand.”34 Although many Mormon men did leave “their wives behind,” articles like this one clearly show that there were women present in the Mormon camps. Numerous family histories and biographies also tell about the women who went with the Latter-day Saint men to work on the railroad. Unlike the working women of the UP camps, many Mormon women left a history of their lives. As already mentioned, most of the women remained at home to run the households, stores, industries, and farms that
the men left. Mormon men went to work for the railroad generally for two purposes: first, the leader of their church, Brigham Young, requested that they do so; and second, cash, to be paid by the railroad was a rare commodity in the newly formed territory of Utah and there was great need of it among the population.35
U H Q
general thing, left their wives behind them.” But the boss of the party, who reportedly had nine wives, “brought along with him only one, and that the ninth and youngest. . . . Her position was rather one of triumph.32 In both of these accounts, Mormon women appear as simple, easily recognized characters: the young wives of older, polygamous men. The actual experiences of LDS women on the railroad were more complicated.33
311
In nearby Wasatch County, men and women alike traveled from the valley to work on the UP line. William Lindsay, a twenty-year-old Scottish immigrant, left for Echo Canyon in 1867. He returned to Heber City that fall with
The cabins of graders employed in the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad, Echo Canyon, Utah. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 00847.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 311
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
312
an ox team and wagon because he and the other Wasatch County men needed cooks—and even such necessities as a stove and dishes.38 Lindsay arrived back in Echo Canyon in early October with his mother, Christina Howie Lindsay Muir, and his future wife, Mary Mair. The two women worked in the canyon until December 1, cooking for twenty men. As William Lindsay later wrote, “Each received about $90.00 for their services. Men with teams were getting $10.00 a day, but flour was 10.00 a hundred and other things in proportion at that time. By this time it was very cold and most of the men were quitting and coming home so they quit and came back to Heber, it took three days and it was very cold camping out.”39 Muir’s life history adds a few more details to the story. She was from Scotland and came to Heber City, where she met her second husband, George Muir. There she worked in the fields by her new husband and acted as a midwife and doctor in the area. When Lindsay returned to Heber to ask his mother’s help, she had two young children to care for, yet “she took her stove and what things were needed and with the help of Mary Mair they fed the men and made $90.00 each. With some of this she bought a sewing machine, about the first in Heber and did sewing for other people.”40 The Lindsays and Muirs were recent immigrants to America and recent settlers in Utah. Working for the railroad entailed sacrifice, but they must have seen it as worthwhile and they later reinvested their earnings in equipment such as a sewing machine. Mary Petersen Ipsen, together with her mother, also worked for the UP railroad construction crews. She was born in Aalborg, Denmark, in 1857 and came to America in 1858 with her family. In 1868, when Ipsen was still a young girl, her father died; her mother, Christine Nessen Petersen, moved the family to Bear River City, Utah, where she married Peter Alberson. Like Christina Muir, Petersen had young children and was a recent immigrant, newly widowed and remarried. Her life, to say the least, was in flux. In the spring of 1869, as construction of the Union Pacific moved west through Box Elder County, Petersen began cooking for the railroad crew. Ipsen, only twelve years old, went to work as a cook’s helper. A family
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 312
member recounted that, “Mary indicated that the work was hot and dusty, and paid very little. She recalled the big soup kettle which played an important role and the old cook stove, hauled forward with the line in its own special wagon. Both the cook and the helper ate anything that was left after the men were finished, if anything was left.”41 Because of her work with the crews across the Promontories, Mary Ipsen was present at the driving of the golden spike on May 10, 1869, a fact that was widely recognized at the end of her life.42 Two other Danish immigrant families show the difficult circumstances of Latter-day Saint women who worked on the railroad. Catherine Scow Davidson was born in Denmark, where she joined the LDS church. She later immigrated to Utah in 1866. Davidson’s father was a carpenter, and they moved often looking for work. Her father and brother worked on the railroad, and “Catherine and her mother (Ellen Marie Jensen Scow) cooked, sewed, and laundered for these crews.”43 Catherine was also present for the driving of the golden spike, “which was the finish of this massive project.”44 Johanne Bengtson Valentine also emigrated with her family from Denmark in 1866. For the Valentine family, work was very hard to find. Johanne’s sons went freighting to Missouri, and her husband joined the Union Pacific Railroad, taking an eleven-year-old son with him.45 The family moved to Bryant near Green River, Wyoming, to work for the railroad. Here they made adobe for buildings and lived in a dugout with no furniture. The Valentines eventually built a log house. Johanne’s husband found work as a carpenter while she and her daughter took in washing. The family was doing quite well when trouble broke out between the two railroads. Mr. Valentine, feeling their lives were in danger, moved in the middle of the night. He took their ox team and cart and headed for Salt Lake City. That spring, they all worked for the railroad again until its completion.46 Both the Scows and the Valentines were immigrants in difficult economic circumstances—patching together livelihoods as entire families—and work on the transcontinental railroad provided them with some opportunity. Another family history, of Miriam Ann Richins Jones, describes the work that she and her
8/26/20 6:43 PM
husband did for the railroad. In 1868, Miriam and Robert Jones lived in a family member’s home about two miles east of Echo in Weber Canyon. Grasshoppers had ruined the crops the year before, and so Robert went to work for the railroad company near Echo.47 First he worked by hand for seventy-five cents per day. Later he worked with ox team and scraper.48 Miriam did her share to help out the struggling family. While her husband was away, there were many men, some with families, working for the railroad and stationed at Echo. Miriam saw the opportunity to help support her family, and she took in their laundry, which was shuttled to and from Echo by young boys. Laundry work was difficult, but Miriam was paid well for it.49 Around this time Robert and Miriam were making plans to build a home in Henneferville or Henefer, in Summit County. They used the money that they had made from working for the railroad to start their own home. The diary of John Gerber provides further information about daily life on the grade, including an interesting story about women visiting a Mormon UP railroad construction camp but
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 313
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
Miriam Richins Jones, who took in laundry for construction workers in Echo Canyon, even as her husband graded the railroad. Courtesy of Alden Richins.
Gerber related another incident that made clear the difficulty of domestic duties amidst railroad work: “Su 19. Today our company of men has been increased from at an average of 20 men to 40, which keeps us busy at baking bread and cooking for them. One day last week we twisted beans in a kettle where there was previously soap made in of concentrated lye. . . . which caused the men who ate of the beans to have exceeding great pain in their bowels with diareah but by the next morning were well again.”51 (Forgetting to thoroughly wash a pot that was used to make lye soap is not something that many women of the time would have done.)
4
not necessarily providing domestic services. He wrote these entries in his diary while working on the railroad through Echo Canyon in July 1868: “We 29—thru- Th 30. This evening brother [William] Young arrived with his wife. Wrote letters to my father and family and sent my letters by bros. Wm S. Young’s express. Sister M. Smpy [?] also came to stay a while with Sis. Young at our camp which gives us considerable more to do as we have an extra table to set.”50
313
The accounts from Latter-day Saint diaries and family histories, which depict the railroad experience as one of difficult work and much-needed earnings, differ greatly from newspaper reports of pretty polygamous wives and older husbands. This is not to say that polygamous families were not part of the construction, but rather that they were not stock characters. Ezra Taft Benson, one of the three LDS contractors for the Central Pacific, had multiple wives, one of whom is known to have played a role in Benson’s work on the transcontinental railroad. Mary Louise Larsen was born in Denmark where, as a young woman, she managed the households of several wealthy families. In 1863 Mary Larsen immigrated with her family to the Salt Lake Valley. The next year, Benson hired Mary Larsen to work for his family. In 1866, Larsen and Benson were married and had two sons; she was his eighth wife.52 The story of this couple ties in with the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. In 1868, Ezra T. Benson’s firm, Benson, Farr, and West, obtained a contract from Leland Stanford to build the railroad west of Ogden.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
314
Mary Larsen Benson, equipped by her years of managing households in Denmark and Utah, organized the food for the men working for her husband’s firm. In order to do so, she would have necessarily been present, at least part of the time, at the work headquarters set up by the firm near Promontory. A history of Ezra T. Benson states that their headquarters were “located about two miles southwest of Junction City,” which is now known as Lampo.53 The archaeological evidence shows the presence of many worker camps in this area, but which one was the Benson, Farr, and West site is not currently known. A family history notes that through her work with the railroad, Mary Larsen Benson met Stanford. The quality of her work reportedly impressed him so much that he offered her the management of his household in California.54 There are likely more histories of Mormon women who worked on the railroad, yet even from this handful of stories, we can see a number of common themes. The Latter-day Saint women who contributed to the railroad effort apparently did the domestic duties of cooking and laundering for male construction workers, who sorely needed the help. These women were recent immigrants in difficult conditions, and their work was often part of a larger project to keep a family afloat that involved grownups and children alike. More positively, the cash from the railroad could be reinvested into equipment and homes. Finally, having assisted in something as monumental as the transcontinental railroad was evidently a point of pride for these families, for a record of it is preserved family recollections, personal histories, and local newspapers.
Wives of Railroad Employees According to an early history of the golden spike by Bernice Gibbs Anderson, “Mrs. Strobridge, Miss Earl and a Miss Annie Reed were the only ‘real ladies’ recorded in history as being present.”55 Some of these women appear in the historic photographs of the 1869 joining of the rails at Promontory Summit: Hannah Strobridge and her family; Jane Ann Reed and her daughter, Anna Reed; and Minerva Earl, sister of Jane Ann Reed.56 As noted above, additional research adds several other women who were there with their husbands who worked for the
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 314
railroad. The class and status of the wives of prominent railroad men provided them with options that most of the other women in this study did not have: the opportunity for education, the privilege of not working, and the ability to be mobile. Still, some of these women probably did have to provide domestic work and play supporting roles for their husbands. In several instances, we know about these women because of their class status; in other words, contemporaries saw them as worth mentioning. Hannah Maria Strobridge is, perhaps, one of the best known railroad wives who traveled with her husband during the CPRR construction of the transcontinental railroad. Although other wives came and left, Strobridge brought her two adopted children with her and set up house in a train car. Strobridge’s car had three apartments; the Strobridges had one, the wife of the Joseph Graham, an engineer, lived in another, and the third served as an office. Hannah Strobridge seems to have been well respected among the railroad workers and was known as the “Heroine of the CP.”57 An eyewitness at the driving of the golden spike, Amos L. Bowsher, stated that after the telegraph wires were disconnected from the spike, “several people took a swing at the spike, including Mrs. J. H. Strobridge.”58 Her two adopted children were also present at the wedding of the rails.59 Bowsher also mentioned that Mary L. Swearingen Ryan, the wife of Emmons Black Ryan, first secretary to Leland Stanford, was also there on May 10, 1869.60 Like other railroad women, Mary had a life filled, somewhat, with movement and family concerns: she was born in Missouri but spent her youth in California. After marrying as a teenager, she bore a handful of children, including a daughter with the middle name Stanford. It is commonly accepted that Mary L. Ryan was one of the main women featured in the photographs of the “joining of the rails.”61 Other women associated with the CP who were present that day were the wives of O. C. Smith, a paymaster for the CP, and Mike Stanton, a track boss for the CP and a relative of Hannah Strobridge.62 The most prominent woman associated with the Union Pacific Railroad present at the golden spike ceremony was Jane Earl Reed. Her
8/26/20 6:43 PM
More information is available for, Caira Simpson, who joined her husband, Jabez B. Simpson, while he was working as an engineer on the railroad in Byron, Wyoming. According to her obituary, Caira at first took her “meals in a tent boarding house . . . later taking charge of the eating house built by the UP.”69 Caira continued to on with the railroad and was present at the driving of the last spike in May 1869. Caira left her work with the UP that summer of 1869, when she returned to New Hampshire to visit her mother and her first son was born, a fact that means she was most likely pregnant during the final weeks of construction. The family later settled in Laramie, Wyoming, where Jabez became a rancher.70
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
From newspapers and other accounts come snippets of information about other women who were present with their husbands, employees of the UP; these include the wives of Isaac Sisson and E. P. North. In March 1869, the Deseret News wrote about the progress of the Union Pacific and mentioned that Sisson, “a regularly graduated grader” and foreman had his wife “with him, and they are veritably at home in camp.”67 Little is known of Mrs. E. P. North other than she was present at the golden spike ceremony and that her husband worked as a civil engineer on the UP.68
I
In 1895, Louis Howard Hyde, a grandson of the Reeds compiled Samuel’s letters and made notes concerning his life.65 Samuel filled his letters, written mainly to his wife, with details of the difficulties of the race to the Promontories. He seems to have relied on his wife for support in his tough decisions and for comfort at a very busy time. She was able to join him near the completion of the railroad. In April 1869, Jane, her three daughters, and her sister arrived at Echo, in Weber Canyon, Utah. They stayed here with Samuel until the joining of the rails. Unfortunately, the three girls contracted scarlet fever on the way to Utah Territory and only
Anna, the eldest daughter, was able to “attend the ceremony of the laying of the last rail” with her mother and aunt.66
U H Q
daughter Anna Reed and her sister Minerva Earl were with her at the time.63 Jane was the wife of Samuel B. Reed, who started working for the Union Pacific as a locating engineer. She was born in Pennsylvania in about 1827 and would have been about forty-two years old in 1869. Samuel worked for about six months surveying the railroad route between Green River, Wyoming, and the Wasatch Range in Utah. By 1866, he had changed positions in the company from surveying to engineer of construction and superintendent of operations. Samuel supervised all phases of construction on the final railroad construction to Promontory Summit. Since he led the work for the Union Pacific, it would make sense that his wife and family— which included three young daughters and a sister-in-law—were with him at least through the final stages of construction.64
315
Piles of rock from construction of the railroad, near Promontory, July 1949. This photograph provides an idea of the landscape women such as Anna Jenkins Ewing experienced during the building of the transcontinental railroad. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 15750.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 315
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
316
Perhaps one of the most intriguing stories comes from the local Promontory lore. For many years the story was told that an entire family “took up housekeeping in one of Promontory’s caves during the railroad construction.”71 Edwin Hancock added details to the story. According to the account given to Hancock by his grandparents, Earl Ewing and Anna Jenkins, the couple met and were married while working for the UP. His grandmother, an English immigrant, was a cook, and his grandfather was a construction engineer. “Just before completion of the railroad, with his wife in the final days of pregnancy, Earl found a large Promontory cave and moved Anna to their new ‘home.’ (Their daughter) Ella was born in the cave on April 13, 1869, and was in her mother’s arms during the Golden Spike Ceremony on May 10th.” Hancock’s account is supported by census data that shows the Ewings, including baby Ella, in Box Elder County in 1870.72 These are a few of the stories of women who worked for the railroad or were married to railroad workers. Each story is different, but each also illustrates the many ways that women played a role in the work of the transcontinental railroad. The commonalities among these women center on the respect and relative comfort that came from their husbands’ employment with the railroad. Yet they still dealt with the difficulties of disease, childbirth, and a frontier environment that less prosperous or famous women experienced. gh The study of women who played roles in the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in Utah and neighboring areas is highly interesting. These women were from different classes, even from different nations, and included entertainers, hotel and newspaper operators, Latter-day Saint women, railroad worker wives, and prominent railroad wives. From Hannah Strobridge, who was called by some the “heroine of the CP,” to the LDS women who took in laundry and cooked for the workers, to the prostitutes and hotel owners, each of these women profited, to an extent, in the construction of the rails. They each played different roles, working alongside the men. All of these different stories work together to draw a more complete picture of the history of the railroad construction.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 316
Notes 1. See, for instance, Stephen E. Ambrose, Nothing Like It In the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863–1869 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001); Robert West Howard, The Great Iron Trail: The Story of the First Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Bonanza, 1962); Wesley S. Griswold, A Work of Giants: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad (London: Frederick Muller, 1963); John Hoyt Williams, A Great and Shining Road: The Epic Story of the Transcontinental Railroad (New York: Times Books, 1988). 2. This idea is especially influenced by the work Elizabeth M. Scott. See Elizabeth M. Scott, ed., Those of Little Note: Gender, Race and Class in Historical Archaeology (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 3. 3. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, “Women’s Work on the Mormon Frontier,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 277. 4. Charles Vollan, “‘Hell on Wheels’ Towns,” Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, accessed February 24, 2020, plainshumanities.unl.edu/encyclopedia/doc/egp .ct.027. See Frontier Index (Bear River City, WY), November 3, 1868, 3, 4, for a representative list of advertisements and announcements in the Union Pacific camp towns. For typical secondary summaries of the towns, see Leonard J. Arrington, “The Transcontinental Railroad and the Development of the West,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (January 1969): 7; John J Stewart, The Iron Trail to the Golden Spike (New York: Meadow Lark, 1994), 10; Brigham D. Madsen, Corinne: The Gentile Capital of Utah (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1980), 3. 5. Richard Erdoes, quoted in Catherine Holder Spude, “Brothels and Saloons: An Archaeology of Gender in the American West,” Historical Archaeology 39, no. 1 (2005): 103. 6. Cheryl Livingston, “Mother Rachel Urban: Park City’s Leading Madam,” Worth Their Salt: Notable but Often Unnoted Women of Utah, ed. by Colleen Whitley. (Logan: Utah State University Press 1996), 123; see also Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849–1900 (Reno: University of Nevada, 1986), 34–35; Spude, “Brothels and Saloons,” 89–106. 7. Dick Kreck, Hell on Wheels: Wicked Towns along the Union Pacific Railroad (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2013). 8. Lynne Rhodes Mayer and Kenneth E. Vose, Makin’ Tracks: The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad in the Pictures and Words of the Men Who Were There (New York: Praeger, 1975), 102. 9. “The Newspaper on Wheels,” Edgefield (SC) Advertiser, July 15, 1868, 2. 10. Frontier Index (Laramie City, WY), June 2, 1868, 3. The 1868 volume of Frontier Index is available online at newspapers.wyo.gov. 11. Brooks McNamara, New York Concert Saloon: The Devil’s Own Nights (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84; Holly George, Show Town: Theater and Culture in the Pacific Northwest, 1890–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 79–88. 12. Frontier Index (Laramie City, WY), May 19, 1868, 3. 13. Frontier Index (Laramie City, WY), May 26, 1868, 3. The Crisman “Diana” advertisement appeared in the Frontier Index throughout the summer of 1868. For further evidence of dance halls and female-centered entertain-
8/26/20 6:43 PM
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 317
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
31. “The Great Railroad,” Evening Bulletin, May 3, 1869, 1E. 32. “Over the Union Pacific Railroad,” Daily Alta California, May 18, 1869, 1. 33. See Beecher, “Women’s Work on the Mormon Frontier,” 288, for an examination of the work of Mormon pioneer women. 34. Deseret News, August 5, 1868, p. 1. 35. For the employment of Latter-day Saints on the railroad, see Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 270–78, and “The Transcontinental Railroad and the Development of the West,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 10–11. 36. Mary Larsen Ahlstrom, Autobiographical Sketch, 1919, microfilm, MS 9923, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City (CHL). 37. Linda H. Smith, A History of Morgan County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Morgan County Commission, 1999), 262. 38. Jessie L. Embry, A History of Wasatch County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Wasatch County Commission, 1996), 46; Pioneer Immigrants to Utah Territory, database online, s.v. “William Lindsay,” accessed March 26, 2020, ancestry.com; William Lindsay, “History of Mary Mair Lindsay,” 3, document on file, International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, Salt Lake City, Utah (ISDUP). 39. Lindsay, “History of Mary Mair Lindsay,” 3. 40. Lindsay, “History of Mary Mair Lindsay,” (qtn.); Utah, Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v., Christena Howie Muir, death certificate, digital image, accessed April 7, 2020, ancestry.com. 41. Daughters of Utah Pioneers, “Life History of Mary Petersen Ipsen,” document on file, ISDUP. 42. “Life History of Mary Petersen Ipsen”; “Pioneer Who Saw Spike Ceremony Succumbs at 91,” Ogden Standard-Examiner, June, 21, 1948, 8; “LDS Pioneer Dies at 91 in Box Elder,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 22, 1948, 21. 43. Mary Lyn Leavitt Loose, “Catherine Scow Davidson: Maternal Grandmother of Mary Lyn Leavitt Loose,” 1, document on file, ISDUP. 44. Loose, “Catherine Scow Davidson,” 1. 45. Sharon Brooks, “Johanne Bengston Valentine,” 3, document on file, ISDUP. 46. Brooks, “Johanne Bengston Valentine,” 4. 47. Margaret Calderwood Richins, “Life Story of Miriam Ann Richins and Her Husband Robert Jones,” 5, 1974, document on file, Sagebrush Consultants, Ogden, Utah. 48. Richins, “Miriam Ann Richins,” 5. 49. Richins, “Miriam Ann Richins,” 5. 50. John T. Gerber, Diary, Wednesday, July 29, 1868, June 1868–June 1869, John T. Gerber Papers, MS 1701, CHL, available online at catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org, accessed April 8, 2020. 51. Gerber, Diary, Sunday, July 19, 1868. 52. Donald Benson Alder and Elsie L. Alder, The Benson Family: The Ancestry and Descendants of Ezra T. Benson (Logan, UT: Ezra T. Benson Genealogical Society, 1979), 313. 53. John Henry Evans and Minnie Egan Anderson, Ezra T. Benson: Pioneer, Statesman, Saint (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1947), 318. 54. Alder and Alder, The Benson Family, 314. 55. Bernice Gibbs Anderson, A Report on the Site of the Driving of the Golden Spike, May 10, 1869, at Promon-
U H Q
ment, see Frontier Index (various locations), May 22, June 19, September 1, November 10, 1868, 3. 14. Frontier Index (Green River City, WY), October 2, 1868, 3. 15. “Saw Golden Spike Driven York Man Recalls,” World Herald (Omaha, NB), April 25, 1939, 10A. 16. Quoted in Mayer and Vose, Makin’ Tracks, 136; David Hampshire, Martha Sonntag Bradley, and Allen Roberts, A History of Summit County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Summit County Commission, 1998), 57. 17. Samuel Bowles, Our New West; Records of Travel between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean . . . (New York: J. D. Dennison, 1869), 56–57, available online at memory.loc.gov, accessed March 2, 2020. 18. Bowles, Our New West, 56. See Frontier Index (various locations), April 21, 28, May 29, June 5, 16, October 6, 1868, for brief mentions of women. 19. Gregory Nickerson, “Industry, Politics and Power: the Union Pacific in Wyoming,” WyoHistory.org, published November 18, 2018, accessed February 24, 2020. 20. Quoted in Mayer and Vose, Makin’ Tracks, 102. The Frontier Index offers some insight into the social makeup and, at times, lawlessness of these camps with accounts of vigilance committees, drunken fights, and the like. See, for instance, Frontier Index (Bear River City, WY), November 3, 10, 13, 1868, 3. 21. Carla Homstad, Janene Caywood, and Peggy Nelson, Cultural Landscape Report: Golden Spike National Historic Site, Box Elder County, Utah, Cultural Resources Selections, no. 16 (Denver: National Park Service, Intermountain Region, 2000), 35. 22. Carter, Our Pioneer Heritage, 342. 23. Foe Bauman, “History Online,” The Record: News from the National Archives and Records Administration 4, no. 3 (January 1998): 20; Mayer and Vose, Makin’ Tracks, 164. 24. Mayer and Vose, Makin’ Tracks, 46–48. 25. Cy Warman, The Story of the Railroad (New York: D. Appleton, 1899), 94; see also, Mayer and Vose, Makin’ Tracks, 76–78. 26. Russell N. Low, “Hung Lai Who Was a Great-Grandfather I Never Met,” in Voices from the Railroad: Stories by Descendants of Chinese Railroad Workers, ed. Sue Lee and Connie Young Yu (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 2019), 16; Bryn Williams, “Men, Women, and the Chinese: Entanglements of Race and Gender in Pacific Grove, California” (paper presented at Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology, Albuquerque, New Mexico, January 2008). 27. Vanessa Hua, “Golden Spike Redux,” National Parks Conservation Association, Summer 2019, accessed April 7, 2020, npca.org/articles. 28. George Kraus, “Chinese Laborers and the Construction of the Central Pacific,” Utah Historical Quarterly 37, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 41–57. 29. Bryn Williams, “Chinese Masculinities and Material Culture,” Historical Archaeology 42, no. 3 (2008): 58. 30. Homstad, Caywood, and Nelson, Cultural Landscape Report, 35. See Adam McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875–1943,” Journal of American Ethnic History 18, no. 2 (1999): 73, for a discussion of Chinese immigrant communities, the role of legislation such as the 1875 Page Law on gender imbalance, and the use of Chinese pastimes and characteristics to fuel racism.
317
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
318
tory Station, Box Elder County, Utah (Brigham City, UT: Box Elder Chamber of Commerce, 1953), 45. Emphasis mine. 56. Barry Combs, Westward to Promontory: Building the Union Pacific across the Plains and Mountains, a Pictorial Documentary (New York: Crown Publishers, 1986). 57. Martin W. Sandler, Iron Rails, Iron Men and the Race to Link the Nation: The Story of the Transcontinental Railroad (Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015), 19. 58. Earle Health, “Eye Witness Tells of ‘Last Spike’ Driving,” Southern Pacific Bulletin, May 1926, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, electronic document, accessed November 27, 2007, cprr.org/Museum /Farrar/pictures/2005-03-09-02-02.html. 59. Barry B. Combs, Westward to Promontory: Building the Union Pacific across the Plains and Mountains (Palo Alto, CA: American West Publishing, 1969), 73. 60. Health, “Eye Witness Tells of ‘Last Spike’ Driving.” 61. Kate B. Carter, First Transcontinental Railroad, in Picture and Story (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1969), 52–53; Sacramento California, “Sacramento Bee” newspaper 1859, Obituaries, Marriages, Births, database online, s.v. “Mary L. Swearingen”; 1880 United States Federal Census, database online, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, roll 75, page 433A, enumeration district 97, E. Black Ryan, both accessed April 10, 2020, ancestry.com. 62. J. M. Graham, interview, March 28, 1929, Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum, electronic document, accessed December 31, 2007, cprr.org /Museum/Farrar/pictures/2005-03-09-02-04.html; see also Robert L. Spude and Todd Delyea, Promontory Summit, May 10, 1869, Cultural Resources Management (n.p.: National Park Service, Intermountain Region, 2005), 211. 63. Carter, First Transcontinental Railroad, 52–53. 64. “Significant Individuals, Samuel B. Reed,” Union Pacific Railroad, accessed December 26, 2007, http://www .uprr.com/aboutup/history/sig-indv.shtml; 1870 United States Federal Census, database online, Joliet Ward 1, Will, Illinois, roll M593_291, page 180B, Jane E. Reed, accessed April 1, 2020, ancestry.com. In addition to Jane Earl Reed and Samuel B. Reed, the 1870 federal
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 318
census listed three daughters (Anna, thirteen; Mary, seven; Jennie, two) in the Reed household, as well as Minerva Earl (age twenty-eight), and three servants, born in Ireland, Bavaria, and Africa. 65. Louise Hyde, A Compilation of the Letters of Samuel B., Reed and Notes Concerning His Life for the Use of His Family (n.p., 1895), available at the Union Pacific Museum, Council Bluffs, Iowa, and in the Reed and Hyde Families papers, box 4, P2675, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota. 66. Hyde, A Compilation of Letters, 117. 67. “Article Describing the Progress of the Union Pacific through the Utah Territory,” Deseret News, March 30, 1869. 68. Hugh F. O’Neil, “The Golden Spike: List of Persons Present, Promontory, Utah: May 10, 1869,” Utah Historical Quarterly 24, no. 2 (1956): 162–63. Abundant evidence exists of an E. P. North who was active as a civil engineer in late-nineteenth-century America; see, for instance, Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers 21 (February 1895): 81. 69. “Obituary for Mrs. Caira Simpson” (n.p., n.d.), on file at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory, Utah. 70. “Obituary for Mrs. Caira Simpson”; “Descendant of Martha Washington Passes On,” Independent-Record (Helena, MT), April 4, 1930, 4. A diary for Caira Simpson (1908–1914) is held at the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. “American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming: Guide to Wyoming and the West Collections,” 311, accessed April 2, 2020, uwyo .edu/ahc/_files/collection_guides/wy-west-guide-2014 -ed2018jan.pdf. 71. Golden Spike National Historic Site, A Guide to the Big Fill Trail (April 1991), available at the Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory, Utah. 72. A Guide to the Big Fill Trail; 1870 United States Federal Census, database online, Corinne, Box Elder, Utah Territory, roll M593_1610, page 44B, Ella Ewing, accessed April 1, 2020, ancestry.com. Genealogical data also verifies that the Ewings were Hancock’s ancestors. See familysearch.org/tree/find/id, s.v. KF5J-WD9, Bertie Ella Ewing.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
CELEBRATING THE WORK THAT WOMEN DID AND DO TO SECURE EQUAL VOTING RIGHTS
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
CompilEd By DAWN DURANTE Introduction By NANCY A. HEWITT
N O .
A University of Illinois Press Anthology
4
100 Years of Women’s Suffrage
319
266 pp. 6 x 9 in. 18 black & white photographs, 3 charts, 12 tables Paper $26.00; E-book UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 319
www.press.uillinois.edu
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
320
Salt Lake High School students posed with their fly traps, 1915. From 1913 to 1915, manual training students in Salt Lake City produced hundreds of traps to eradicate house flies. Dr. Samuel G. Paul, the city’s public health commissioner, referred to the traps as “implements of warfare” against the insects. They were part of a citywide campaign that also included a bounty for dead flies and a pamphlet sent to every home about the risk of disease flies posed. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 16153.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 320
8/26/20 6:43 PM
G I R AU D
In 1912, after having taught grade school children for seventeen years, Emma Frances Daft embarked on her high school teaching career in the art department of the Salt Lake High School. Although trained in fine art, she was known locally for her expertise in applied arts, specifically jewelry making, metal crafting, and leather tooling, and she instructed her students in these mediums.1 Daft worked at the height of the arts and crafts movement, an artistic philosophy of the early twentieth century, also known as “craftsman,” which sought social and economic reform through design to reverse the damaging effects of industrialization. The movement influenced residential architecture, most notably in the construction of the bungalows that compose entire neighborhoods in Salt Lake City and are characterized by their earth-hugging silhouettes of broad, deep porches and low-pitched roofs. Although Daft limited her teaching to the materials listed above, the arts and crafts movement also incorporated furniture, ceramics, decorative tiles, and textiles, ideally to embellish the craftsman home. It is difficult to know how doctrinaire Daft was in terms of integrating the arts and crafts aesthetic into her own bungalow, which still stands at 463 South Douglas in Salt Lake City, but Daft’s professional work as an art teacher, her ongoing education both locally and in California, and her involvement in the local art community indicate her strong desire simply to create.
4 N O . V O L .
E G LE STO N
I
E L IZ A B E T H
U H Q
BY
8 8
I
Finding the Joy in Labor in the Salt Lake City School District
321
For arts and crafts followers, this philosophy fostered a nostalgia about preindustrial society, inspiring them not to seek a return to the past but to reform a consumerist culture forced to rely on poorly made, mass-produced goods. The inferior quality, they believed, resulted from industrialization’s reliance on repetitive work, which had eliminated the satisfaction workers once enjoyed in the production process. As opposed to England, where craftsmen reformers adhered to a socialist agenda, in the United States they worked within the existing economic framework to enable workers to produce goods exhibiting “integrity” and “honesty.” Such programs, they believed, would empower consumers to identify skilled workmanship and allow laborers the pride of participating in the full range of production. Craftsman advocates sought to unite the hand
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 321
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Both photographs of Daft’s students’ work and the lofty discourse of local contemporary observers indicate her arts and crafts sensibilities (see figure one).3 She was an example of the many committed enthusiasts of craftsman undertakings at the turn of the twentieth century. The arts and crafts philosophy, however, was more than a design perspective. As an aesthetic component of the larger Progressive Era, it contained a major educational impulse. This impulse helps us understand the deeper ways it aligned with the progressive movement, which
had the revamping of education as one of its central objectives. Educators and reformers believed implementing manual training programs could be the solution to achieve these objectives. Embraced by both progressives and craftsmen, these programs became the channel by which the arts and crafts philosophy influenced the early twentieth century educational landscape. Salt Lake City’s educational administrators were very much in the vanguard of modern instructional reform, and they also wanted to use manual training in their young school district. Studying the discourse among Salt Lake’s school men and women offers an up-close view of how the craftsman ethic
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
with the mind in the production process in order to achieve “joy in labour.”2
322 Fig. 1. This display of work created by Emma Daft’s students clearly shows the arts and crafts style. Etched metal items, such as trays and wall sconces, show sinuous lines of plants and birds, and the leatherwork is incised with abstract, foliated patterns. Also included is a craftsman household emblem: table lamps with angled, metal bases and cut-out metal or leaded glass lampshades. These designs and materials reflect the craftsman goal of producing items that were handmade and thus “honest,” exhibiting the connection between the spirit of the worker and the end product. Reproduced in Devotees and Their Shrines, 116.
Emma Daft and her students at work. In 1914, Alice Merrill Horne, an influential advocate of Utah art, described Daft as more than an artisan; “she is an artist” who, because of her talent and training possessed “a gift of originality in shaping materials into artistic forms.” Reproduced in Devotees and Their Shrines, 117.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 322
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Roughly bounded by 1890 to 1920, the Progressive Era was a response to the changes that had profoundly altered the United States during the nineteenth century. By 1900, the rise of big corporations, the separation of the workplace from the home, the demographic shift from independent small communities to interconnected urban centers, the rise of the middle class, and the expansion of women’s involvement outside the home had reordered America economically and socially.4 Because these trends formed such a complex matrix of change, reformers associated with a variety of interests emerged, hoping to mitigate the adverse impacts of industrialization. During the same period Utah had also experienced great change, evolving from its pioneer past to adopt the cultural, social, and economic characteristics of mainstream America. Salt Lake City’s population tripled, and it became a city of regional significance.5 The increasing social complexity of the territory and its capital city prompted a substantial amount of reform legislation, addressing occupational safety, professional licensing, and agricultural product safety, to name a few things. To a large extent the rancor between Latter-day Saints and their neighbors abated, allowing
At the same time that reformers implemented their progressive improvements, Salt Lake City developed a local response to the arts and crafts movement. The city did not have the same communities and venues craftsmen had established elsewhere to promote their ideals of joy in labor. Nationally, these institutions took the form of retail stores, such as the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts; communities, such as Gustav Stickley’s Craftsman Farms in New Jersey; and model industries, such as the Newcomb art program at Tulane University. Local publications, however, demonstrate that residents were aware of the arts and crafts philosophy. Newspapers carried advertisements for Stickley furniture, articles explaining “Arts and Crafts Mission Furniture,” and descriptions of a “Mission House and Stable.”7 Women’s clubs, such as the Ladies Literary Club, hosted visiting speakers who lectured the cultured set on artists and craftsmen ethics. (In December 1916, for example, Daft presented a paper on the history of jewelry making, followed by an exhibition of handmade jewelry, at the literary club.) The local tendency to blur the line between fine and applied art was reflected in arts exhibitors’ shows, where paintings shared the stage with decorated household items. In 1908, the Deseret Evening News announced the formation of an Arts and Crafts Club, the purpose
I
gh
middle- and upper-class citizens of both camps to join forces and pursue a long list of municipal improvements, including city beautification, street improvement, pest control, and air pollution.6
U H Q
shaped contemporary educational theory in a rapidly growing western city. The view adds nuance to our understanding of the progressive movement in Salt Lake City and demonstrates the cultural impact of arts and crafts beyond the evidence of material culture.
323
Bungalows are one of the signal representations of the arts and crafts movement. Pictured here is Emma Daft’s Salt Lake City bungalow, as it appears in 2020. Elizabeth Giraud, photographer. Courtesy of the author.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 323
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
of which was to “Promote mutual advancement along literary, musical, architectural and painting lines as well as to create a social harmony between those interested in the arts.”8 Two years later an article in the Salt Lake Herald Republican urged readers to attend an opening reception for the annual state art show, at which officials purchased paintings to add to the state art collection. In this case, crafts were presented with both fine and performing arts.9
324
The expansive array of progressive reforms often diverged from the narrower focus of arts and crafts philosophy. Both camps, however, found common ground in educational reform. By the end of the nineteenth century, educational theorists bemoaned students’ reliance on rote learning, teachers’ emphasis on recitation, the lack of graded classes, and above all the haphazard availability of secondary instruction. Public officials and businesspeople feared that America’s substandard educational system imperiled national economic stability. This was especially true of the lack of high schools. Until the twentieth century, American high schools were rare institutions designed to prepare young men for a college education, despite the low matriculation rate of secondary school graduates in universities.10 High school course offerings, namely classical languages and mathematics, were subjects with little practical application.11 Americans increasingly pushed for a public high school education that engaged the intellect and offered instruction in relevant topics for a variety of populations. In response to these appeals, in 1892 the National Council of Education, the “inner brain trust of the National Education Association (NEA),” appointed the “Committee of Ten” to propose a reorganization of the nation’s high schools. Composed primarily of college presidents and high school principals under the leadership of Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot, the committee recommended replacing classical language with modern, emphasizing modern scientific subjects, and making high school a source of knowledge and skills for non-college bound youth to use throughout life.12 Salt Lake City school administrators faced not only the challenges their colleagues everywhere experienced but also the fact that their young district had displaced the unique theocratic system of “ward schools.” In 1890, the
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 324
Utah Territorial Legislature passed the Free Public School Act to establish a secular school system, supported by a revised funding system and managed by a centralized administration. The legislation established the Salt Lake District as a consolidated school system dependent on tax revenue rather than tuition and provided elected boards with increased influence.13 Jesse F. Millspaugh, the first superintendent of the Salt Lake District, organized the new consolidated district from a fragmented parochial system in the context of these national and local challenges. By the end of his decade-long tenure in Salt Lake, Millspaugh had overseen the construction of sixteen elementary schools, increased attendance from 57 to 79 percent, and instituted graded classrooms.14 Although both Millspaugh and his successor, Frank Cooper, mentioned manual training in their reports to the district’s board members, their support was lukewarm. It was not until David Henry Christensen’s appointment that the district’s implementation of manual training gathered momentum. Serving from 1901 to 1916, Christensen was the third superintendent of the Salt Lake District. He built upon the foundation Millspaugh constructed and came to the position with the perfect credentials to lead Salt Lake City’s district at the onset of the new century. Born in 1869 in Manti, Utah, Christensen attended a Protestant mission church, recounting later that he learned under “the inspiring influence of some very rare men and women of the finest scholarship and training.”15 In 1890, at age twenty-one, Christensen graduated from the University of Deseret (later known as the University of Utah) and rose quickly through the administrative ranks of the Utah County District. He interrupted his career to serve an LDS mission in Germany prior to undertaking European study. While in Germany he studied “all types of schools” including the German secondary school manual arts programs, considered to be the best in the world. Upon his return from Europe, Christensen planned to pursue doctoral work at the University of Chicago but abandoned this scheme after accepting an unsolicited offer as superintendent of the Salt Lake District when he was only thirty-two.16 Thus, Salt Lake City had a young superintendent who was a native Utah Latter-day Saint
8/26/20 6:43 PM
If progressive reformers and arts and crafts enthusiasts found common ground through education, manual training was the fine point on which they pinned their hopes. Manual training was the conduit for introducing craftsman philosophy into schools and inculcating youth with an appreciation of labor. Also referred to as “manual arts,” “vocational training,” or “industrial arts,” manual training appeased the
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
Christensen’s belief in the merits of manual training was a function of its immense national popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century, his recent exposure to its use in the German educational system, and his cognizance of the need for skilled manual labor through his involvement in his family’s corporation: the Christensen Construction Company, which undertook large-scale excavation projects and built new road and rail alignments.19 In 1911, Christensen’s belief in the efficacy of manual training led him to Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, whom he visited with his family. Two years later, he invited Washington to visit Utah and deliver several lectures to school teachers, the public, and members of the “colored congregation of the Baptist Church.” Washington, Christensen believed, was one of the “first six of the great constructive educators of the United States.”20
4
concerns of experts that education had become overly abstract and irrelevant.17 Hoping to provide youth with practical skills, manual training proponents believed teaching children to use their hands as well as their minds would help them study traditional subjects and that instructing adolescents in trade skills would improve their employment possibilities.18
U H Q
yet familiar with other populations, was an experienced educational administrator, and was exposed to Germany’s technical secondary training program. Christensen was well-equipped to steer the young district in a community where religious antagonism still simmered, the population boomed, and non-Mormon European immigrants arrived in large numbers. His reports to the district’s board members and his papers describe the public debate regarding the role of schools in society, how to adjust the curriculum to engage students, and how to prepare youth for the modern world. A true progressive, Christensen viewed his success as dependent on a centralized administration, the systematic assessment of employees’ performance, and the efficient allocation of resources in order to steer the district through a period of expansion. His reports and those of the district’s top administrators reflected the faith of progressive era managers in the use of a systematic approach fortified by data to solve problems.
325
Christensen drove the implementation of manual training in the district. In 1902, he expressed
David H. Christensen in his office at the Salt Lake City and County Building. Christensen’s background and experience made him an ideal fit for the needs of the Salt Lake School District. Christensen papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 325
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
Booker T. Washington, apparently with David Christensen’s children when the family visited the Tuskegee Institute. Christensen papers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah.
326
his commitment to manual training in his first Salt Lake superintendent’s report and indicated his belief in its economic significance: “In this progressive and utilitarian age, the humane aspect cannot consistently be considered to the exclusion of the economic. It is this commercial phrase of the question that has given such prominence, of late years, to industrial training in the schools for both sexes. While the mind must be trained to think, the productive power of the nation can be enhanced only to the extent that the co-ordinate motor activities give tangible expression to thought.” To this end, Christensen requested the board fund a “Mechanical Training Department” to teach a oneyear course for mechanical drawing and wood work for eighth grade boys and a one-year course in “plain sewing” for seventh and eighth grade girls.21 The program grew quickly. By 1904, the district had hired a supervisor of manual training and domestic arts and a director of sewing who, together, instructed hundreds of students in almost every district grammar school. The following school year the district could offer wood working to high school boys. It also hired as the district’s supervisor of art John Leo Fairbanks, who came from a Utah family of talented artists and had recently returned from studying in Paris.22 Judging from the narrative in the superintendent’s reports and from personal correspondence in Christensen’s papers,
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 326
Fairbanks served as the arts and crafts ballast to Christensen’s manual training zeal. Each man exemplified the beliefs of the progressive and craftsman factions that manual training could reshape society by helping youth learn to use their hands as well as their brains. While Christensen believed manual training was a key component in the efficient deployment of educating youth, Fairbanks believed drawing and art should be the basis of almost all study. Their convictions had different origins but they sought to accomplish similar goals. Although Fairbanks eventually incorporated his commitment to art in the context of practical application to manual training, at the beginning of his career with the Salt Lake District he espoused a loftier purpose in teaching art. “Besides aiming to acquire skill in expressing with the creations of the hands,” he wrote in a 1905–1906 report, “we aim to lead the children to appreciate the appropriate and beautiful, to acquaint them with the best art products of the world, to cause them to love nature, and to help them realize that the meanest things and the most ordinary surroundings are not wholly devoid of beauty.”23 Fairbanks’s aesthetic ambitions for Salt Lake’s schoolchildren— when contrasted with Christensen’s pragmatic goals—indicate the philosophical distance between the progressives and the crafters. Their comments, however, display an affinity for each other’s perspective. Christensen described the
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Whether viewed as practical or lofty, however, all champions of manual training believed that instructing young children to use their hands as well as their minds would help them academically. It was the bedrock tenet of the program. In 1911, Mary Dysart, principal of the Emerson School, wrote “I would recommend the proper employment of the hands as a means for developing brain power as the equal of at least any other.”26 In a 1908 article in the Utah Educational Review, E. L. Miner, the teacher of manual training at the State Normal School (University of Utah), wrote that meaningful training should be related to school work and social life. “Exercises evolved from the class study, or community interest, or the social activities are of much great educational value,” he asserted, and continued to explain that students often performed beyond the expectations of a particular grade. First graders made hammock stands and doll house furniture in conjunction with the study of the home, second graders produced “looms and a store” in order to study industrial activities, and third grade students constructed bird houses as an outgrowth of nature study.27
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 327
In the upper grammar school grades, manual training was gendered, with seventh and eighth grade boys learning mechanical drawing and wood working in shop classes, and girls studying sewing and cooking in “domestic science.” Although many young girls learned such skills at home, theorists’ practice of attributing technical expertise to homemaking skills was in keeping with the progressive emphasis on professionalization.30 In 1907, Christensen expressed the national rhetoric on domestic arts to the female students of the district when he reported, “We certainly should look after the health and happiness, both present and future, of boys as well as girls, by giving the girls an opportunity to learn the fundamental of a scientific and economic knowledge of preparing food and clothes.”31 In 1911, the principal of the Emerson School wrote that “there is something wrong in the education of any girl who enters upon life’s duties without high standards as a home maker.”32 Just as mechanical drawing and shop would positively shape boys’ characters, Anna Corbett, the director of sewing, reported that her sewing students “are being taught habits of virtue, economy, judgment, persistence, and neatness.”33 Thus, training in the domestic arts not only exposed girls to scientific knowledge but upheld their standards of civility and provided moral uplift. The Salt Lake District’s employment of domestic science also
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Fairbanks, on the other hand, made the case for the pragmatic necessity of teaching art to youth: “When it can be shown that art is practical, that there is educational need of it, that it is no fad, that children can make objects of use and beauty while developing judgment and good taste one does not need to argue for the arts.”25
I
And it [manual training] goes one step farther in that it serves to dignify manual labor, whether it be in the kitchen or in the shop. The boy learns to look with due respect on the dusky brow at the forge, and he finds it is just as honorable to work at the carpenter’s bench for $4.00 a day as it is to add figures for equal or less remuneration. The girl discovers with joy that a proper education does something more than provide a lady with a few so-called accomplishments . . . the truly cultured woman should know something about each [cooking and sewing].24
The Salt Lake principals and teachers found that manual training not only produced an abundance of homemade goods but elicited good behavior and reinforced academic lessons. Principal Lizbeth Qualtrough wrote of her students’ experience at the Oquirrh School: “Manual training seems to us to be the solution of so many educational problems that have hitherto baffled us. In arithmetic . . . Manual training . . . can take the pure number abstraction and make of it a concrete reality upon which he can get a mental grip. Nothing will so develop powers as this union of hand work and head work.”28 A few years later, E. B. Mitchell, the head of manual training for the district, wrote in a similar vein: “It is my opinion that there should be a closer correlation of the subjects of arithmetic, art, geography, manual training and the study of natural laws. How many teachers know that arithmetic is applied in the shop more often than the tools?”29
U H Q
arts and crafts emphasis on respect for labor when he wrote,
327
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
A group of girls from sewing class with their projects, June 1914. Lincoln School, 440 West 500 South, Salt Lake City. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 15740.
328
corresponded to the national enthusiasm for scientific application to homemaking. Ellen H. Richards, the nationally renowned founder of home economics, imprinted technical knowledge on homemaking by emphasizing the chemistry of cooking, cleaning air within the home, and ensuring a clean water supply. Richards believed that while women belonged in the home their work had a technical and scientific basis.34 There were, however, instances of gender crossover in the realm of manual training. In 1914, the principal of the Jefferson School, W. J. McCoy, wrote that as long as boys made ironing boards and sleeve boards in manual training they could learn how to iron. McCoy identified two benefits of boys learning this skill: they would take more interest in what they were making if they knew they would use the article themselves, and their pride in their appearance would increase if they knew how to properly press their clothes. “It is really noticeable, that many of these boys are ‘picking up’ and are really succeeding in their work because of these things. The slouch is always indifferent to everything and his school work is likely to suffer.”35 The comments of one administrator, however, mirrored the hope of some progressives that manual training would bolster masculinity. In 1910, Principal Oscar Van Cott of the Wasatch School averred that the incorporation of art and crafts into the curriculum caused
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 328
effeminacy and lowered the graduation rate of boys at every level of schooling. In his report to Christensen, Van Cott inquired, Is it because we have the boys use a little brush with water colors now, a little clay modeling next, to be followed by some weaving with colored yarn. . . . Is it because these he does daily, but he runs a saw or pushes a plane but once a week? Should the course for each be the same? Must there be no differentiation? I believe that the school should render unto the boy the things that are his and unto the girl the things that are hers. In this way only can we provide for the true functioning of citizenship in manhood and womanhood.36 According to Van Cott, administrators should allot more time for boys to partake of traditionally male craft activities to uphold socially responsible gender roles. This was very much an objective of those who believed manual training could close the gap between students perceived as rough, working-class youth and overly sensitive weaklings.37 Many progressives feared that the affluence associated with the rise of early twentieth-century consumerism threatened manliness, prompting cultural elites to encourage middle-class men to cultivate “regeneration” to stave off ennui. Van Cott reflected a contemporary fear that painting, weaving, and clay modeling would usurp the robust physicality American boys needed.38
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Christensen and his fellow administrators, primarily George A. Eaton, the high school supervisor during Christensen’s tenure, argued these questions within the broader context of the variety of educational options they could formulate. In 1915, the Board of Education hired the educational theorist Ellwood Cubberly to undertake a survey of Salt Lake City’s school system. Cubberly and his Stanford associates praised the Salt Lake District for its efficient deployment of meager financial resources and noted that Salt Lake City was “essentially a city of the so-called middle class. This should make the maintenance of any public enterprise such as schools, a relatively easy matter.”42 But it was not so simple. How could administrators meet the needs of children who did not finish grammar school, did not pursue high school after eighth grade, attended high school for only two years, or graduated from high school with
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 329
N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
Christensen’s narratives indicated a perspective more inclusive than that of Eaton, who tended to espouse the application of classifications to sort out the questions described above. Eaton frequently mentioned “differentiation,” an educational term for steering students as early as seventh grade on a career path. Although Eaton displayed a commitment to high school students’ welfare, he frequently sounded much like David Snedden, a prominent educational theorist. Applying the social efficiency model to education, Snedden believed that schooling should develop the skills of the child necessary for the needs of society rather than accommodate the individual needs of the child.43 Referred to as the “Czar” in the Red and Black, the Salt Lake City High School yearbook, Eaton embraced social efficiency theory when he addressed the high attrition rate of high school students by dismissing them as lacking a serious purpose. “High Schools everywhere have too many pupils who are there simply because they have to be there in obedience to a parent’s dictation,” he warned. “They might be doing something really serviceable to themselves and to mankind if they were employed at some manual labor.”44 Eaton’s scorn reflects a low opinion of the intellectual acumen of working class youth.45
4
no plans to attend college? What of the “overage” students, some of whom were still in the lower grades well into their teens? What of the “hand-minded” who failed academically but responded to constructing things? Where should seventh-grade students who could handle the demands of high school curriculum attend school?
U H Q
Despite the misgivings of Principal Van Cott, the numerous reports of principals and administrators revealed their acceptance of crafts as a constructive method to teach young children the basic concepts of arithmetic, social studies, and natural history. Manual training and crafts fit in with other enrichment programs, such as cultivating a school garden or raising poultry. As children advanced through school, however, manual training and the related role of art and crafts invited scrutiny whether students were being unduly pushed toward a particular path too early in their school years. To some extent, the discourse focused on administration of manual arts programs within bread and butter issues.39 Should educators incorporate manual training into the existing curriculum or should it be a distinct course alongside the traditional “classical,” “English,” or “scientific” tracks? Should districts separate industrial institutions apart from the main high schools? Other debates revolved around the purpose of manual training. Should manual training prepare students for jobs and support the community’s industrial sector? Should it create the joy in labor so treasured by craftsmen? Was it simply a way to bolster “every power of muscle, mind and heart?”40 Ultimately, the debate articulated Progressive Era rhetoric, contemporary values regarding education, and class assumptions regarding professionals and so-called bread winners.41
329
In 1910, voters passed a $700,000 bond to construct a new high school, two grade school buildings, and a technical high school on the Salt Lake High School property.46 At the time of the passage of the bond, the existing Salt Lake High School was located on the current site of West High School at 200 West and 100 North.47 The high school consisted of several buildings scattered over a large area that lacked amenities such as an auditorium and was inconvenient for east-side students. Since its establishment in 1890 the district’s high school student body had expanded from twenty-six to 1,448 by the end of the 1909–1910 school year.48
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
The need for funding and space for a modern high school campus presented an ongoing challenge for district officials, whose consideration of adequate secondary school facilities entailed equitably providing opportunity to a young population of diverse backgrounds, needs, and aspirations.
330
The new high school, which for a few years was referred to as the “Eastside High School” (and later simply as “East”), would be the classical or academic institution while the Salt Lake High School would be the industrial or technical school. Although most would not attend a university, Eastside High School students could prepare for university course work. The technical high school would provide “the commercial courses, manual training courses, domestic science and other subjects and courses whose aim is to equip the graduate for bread winning.” In 1908, prior to the passage of the bond but after officials had devised the bifurcated curriculum, H. P. Henderson of the Salt Lake Board of Education justified the program as bringing “the school system into even closer touch with the social and industrial needs of our community,” writing that it would “prevent a duplication of subjects and an overlapping of courses in the two schools.”49 In 1912, the Technical High School opened. Situated on a north–south axis adjacent to what is now 400 West, the building was organized
in three parts: the central two-story block was constructed first and later flanked by one-story wings on either end completed in 1920. The new building allowed the Mechanical Arts Department to expand its course offerings substantially. “Previous to its construction, the boys taking this course could work with wood only. Now there are outlines of study in machine work, forging, moulding and applied arts. . . the courses . . . are finding much favor among the students who are inclined to the practical.”50 The local firm of Cannon and Fetzer designed the building in the Prairie Style that architectural historians have attributed to the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo, New York.51 The brick piers and the wide frieze provided space for the installation of sculptures and bas-relief panels designed by the renowned sculptor Mahonri Young, a Salt Lake City native. Cast in concrete, the sculptures depicted laborers working in carpentry, masonry, metallurgy, and pottery. The three-panel bas relief showed people laboring in industrial shops.52 Given the purpose of the building, the incorporation of art into the structure represented one of the city’s best arts and crafts examples depicting art in harmony with labor. With the construction of the Technical High School, Salt Lake City followed the example of a number of other cities building separate manual arts schools. These included Toledo,
A copy of a drawing of the new Technical High School, November 13, 1911. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 12812.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 330
8/26/20 6:43 PM
The construction of the Technical High School, however, prompted concern, at least among educators, that its students would be relegated to the harsh world of manufacturing with little recourse to culture. At the beginning of 1911, in a letter to the president of the Agricultural College of Utah, John Widtsoe, Christensen contested the criticism from fellow educators who disapproved of the “segregation” of students in the two schools as eliminating “the culture element” from the technical students. While the report and Widtsoe’s correspondence is not located in Christensen’s papers, evidently the report expressed a concern of reducing the position of educated men to the working-class level. “We are going to produce
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 331
4 N O . V O L . I
In 1914, the Eastside High School opened. Along with the Salt Lake High School and the Technical High School, the east and west side institutions were administered as one school on two different campuses.57 The year before, Principal Eaton reported that it would be “most feasible plan” that the “mechanic arts, domestic science and the commercial courses be given exclusively” in the westside campus, and that classical, English, and normal preparatory courses “be reserved for the east side and that the scientific course be offered at either place.”58 A local newspaper’s mention of “apprehension, entertained last fall” referred to the concern of parents and students that the district would establish geographic boundaries and thus curb pupils’ options; however, Christensen did not have to resort to this because the high school student body divided itself evenly.59 The administrators also did not strictly divide the academic and technical courses, so that while the west-side campus coursework focused on technical subjects, it would offer the first two years of classical courses after which students could transfer to the east campus and prepare for university.60
8 8
I
that ‘social equality of classes’ not by bringing the ‘socially efficient educated man’ to a lower plane by lessening his possibilities during the process of training . . . but by lifting the laboring man to a higher and more remunerative field of activity through special and expert training during at least the major part of his apprenticeship and preparation.” Christensen used social efficiency rhetoric to defend the Technical High School, in that “segregation is necessary in the interests of the highest degree of efficient instruction.” For Christensen, the risk of “unnecessary multiplicity and intermixture of courses” outweighed a potential loss of opportunity for the manual training students.56
U H Q
Brooklyn, Chicago, and the well-known experimental school Calvin Woodward established at Washington University in St. Louis.53 In 1911 and 1912, Fairbanks and board members toured technical high schools on the East Coast and in the upper Midwest to determine what equipment and coursework might be advantageous to the Technical High School. Fairbanks provided a lengthy evaluation in which he promoted the position he had long advocated: the importance of incorporating drawing as having “universal application, is democratic in its scope, and is essential in the school curriculum.” To Fairbanks, the ability to draw was a necessity not only as an art form but as an essential prerequisite for “mechanical drawing, cabinet work, forge and machine shop . . . all other industrial or vocational courses.”54 In a letter to Christensen, Fairbanks recounted his conversation with a machine specialist at the Vocational School for Boys in New York, who stated that “mechanics must be able to talk with the pencil without mechanical assistance.”55 Fairbanks also noted the comprehensive list of subjects the New York school offered, which included architecture, domestic skills, and applied art in every category except fine art in addition to trades. Fairbanks’s correspondence with Christensen indicates that although he promoted fine arts as a source of beauty he also understood art’s pragmatic application in an industrial context. As the district’s art supervisor, Fairbanks accommodated Christensen’s agenda to use manual training as a counterweight to intellectual study, to motivate the “hand-minded” to remain in school, and to support industry.
331
The concern regarding the split in courses between the two high schools reflected that manual training was simply not as popular as the school men had anticipated. Low enrollment in the manual training course concerned and puzzled the administration as few students graduated from either the manual training or domestic science tracks. Ernest A. Smith, the superintendent who succeeded Christensen after his resignation in 1916, noted that while
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
the commercial course attracted one-half of the west campus’s student body, the mechanical arts course attracted “scarcely a corporal’s guard.” The investment of $150,000 in the Technical High School building on the westside campus and related equipment did not warrant cost of educating fifty students in manual training.61
332
Eaton, Christensen, and various supervisors had long tried to rectify the perception of manual training as the poor relation among school courses. It was not easy. Teachers often referred to manual training as a solution to helping “the backward student or the overage pupil” who were “in no sense dullards,” and board president J. T. Hammond exposed a bias toward the academic youth when he asserted that the district could establish a trade school “without lowering the requirements for training the intellect.”62 Christensen stated that the district had to attach “a little more dignity” to manual training “by placing it with all other high school courses.”63 Many educators, however, did not want to abandon crafts or manual training but instead resisted funneling youth into an industrial or trade course. They viewed art, crafts, and manual training not as a route to employment but as a component to a child’s development. “The primary purpose of manual training is not to make tradesmen, but to keep alive and develop the creative side of the individual,” wrote Anna Corbett, the director of sewing work.64 In 1914, Principal Mary Dysart of the Emerson School extolled the enthusiasm of her young students for manual training but noted “our children are many sided, and capable of education along many lines.” She refuted “the criticisms of those who would make bankers, counting house drudges and bookkeepers of the children whom we are turning out of our elementary schools” as missing the point of education, which she believed should “prepare the individual for life.”65 In 1916, Supervisor of Manual Training Milton Clauser, who had relocated from Denver to work for the Salt Lake District, expressed his dismay regarding the ambivalent approach toward manual training in the district. He quoted his colleagues from previous years’ reports, insinuating that manual training suited the “slow” children or the overage pupils and
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 332
that the vocational needs of youth were barely considered. Clauser threw down the gauntlet: “Either the industrial subjects are worthy of recognition in promotions, or all this talk of enriching the curriculum and adapting it to community needs is more or less a contradiction.”66 Why had a program the administration so robustly supported declined? Broadly, manual training was an educational fad, an impulse within the American educational system that garnered tremendous support for a couple of decades because it supplied scaffolding at a time when the modern American school system was feeling its way, testing educational theories and defining its place in American society. Ultimately, administrators misjudged working class youth by assuming that if they came from wage-earning families, they did not possess aspirations to carry them beyond their background. Manual training, educators hoped, could at least expand their potential for higher pay with more status within laboring vocations.67 In 1919, Jacob H. Tipton, a manual training instructor at the University of Utah, wrote in his master’s thesis that manual training had fallen far short of its supporters’ expectations. He listed the reasons manual training failed to live up to its promoters’ anticipation: administrators did not allocate enough time for manual training, teachers did not have necessary training, and rather than waste time on wood working manual training students should instead learn housebuilding skills. Tipton was candid regarding a major impediment to training students for trades in public school: “The parents often object to having their children trained to be mechanics or anything approaching the trades; they wanted the children educated so that they would not have to work.”68 Manual training did not disappear, but it changed. In 1921, Edward W. Gesswein, the district’s supervisor of industrial arts, wrote that, “It is now logically conceded that it [work in the shop] is only of value as a school subject in that proportion to which it contributes to the boys’ general educational development.” Ironically, in the Salt Lake District boys as young as junior high age were getting instruction in a wider range of trade subjects than at the height of the movement as they received training in cement, carpentry, sheet metal, and electricity, yet “no
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
In 1916, Christensen resigned from his superintendent position in order to manage his family’s excavation construction business and also in response to acrimony among members of the board of education.72 In an undated article in his papers, Christensen said he resigned not because he could not get elected, “but because he is tired of the everlasting nagging by a few people.”73 In addition to managing the Christensen Construction Company, he remained involved in education by serving on the Board of Regents from 1917 to 1951. In 1948, the University of Utah recognized his contribution to education by awarding him an honorary doctorate. In 1956, Christensen died at age eightysix.74 Fairbanks stayed on as art supervisor of the Salt Lake District until the mid-1920s, when he joined the faculty at Oregon State University in Corvallis. He became the chair of the Art and Architecture Department and remained in Corvallis until his death in 1946.75 By 1920, Daft was living with her married daughter in Berkeley to recuperate from ill health.76 She was sixty years old by then and had left the teaching profession. In June 1916, at the end
I
As the second decade of the twentieth century closed, the arts and crafts movement waned. The promise of united art and labor did not come to pass, the consumer economy of the 1920s eliminated the handicraft mania, and the Art Deco style supplanted craftsman rusticity for ornamental treasures. Manual training had held out the promise of relieving school attrition, elevating employment opportunity for youth, reinforcing good citizenship, and building strong characters. While it is questionable that it achieved such a substantial list of objectives, it significantly influenced the discourse among various interests of how to wrest the nation’s education system from an antiquated model of rote learning and narrow curricula. In Salt Lake City, the discussion correlated with a surge in population and the community’s
cultural, social, and economic maturation. Although its role within the school system changed over time, the implementation of manual training contributed to the formation of a modern school system with the flexibility to provide social mobility. The triumph of the comprehensive high school recognized “the rights of the individual” by placing students’ aptitudes at the highest level of the hierarchy of needs.71
U H Q
attempt is made in the course to prepare a boy for a trade.”69 In the ultimate nod to the working-class mien of West High School, constructed in 1922, George Eaton wrote that East High School should become a cosmopolitan institution like its west-side counterpart. “A public high school offering only the so-called academic subjects is today an anachronism,” Eaton opined, proposing that East have commercial and home economics departments similar to West’s and a modified manual training in wood work, electricity, and advanced cabinet making. Such implementation might mitigate “this condition [that] stamps the East High School as an aristocratic institution, one in which the poor boy or girl has no chance to acquire what they term a practical education.”70
333
Students at work in the West High blacksmithing shop, November 23, 1915. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 16599.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 333
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
of Christensen’s tenure as superintendent, she wrote to him that she “realized what a good and true friend I have in you, and that this testimonial [a high school diploma] paid in full for all the long years of hard work and struggle.”77 In California, Daft turned to poetry as a creative outlet, publishing two books of verse and contributing to poetry periodicals in the United States and England. In 1954, she died in Yuba City, California, acclaimed as a “noted poet” who had received notable recognition.78
334
Christensen, Fairbanks, and Daft left their mark on the arts and crafts legacy of Salt Lake City through the implementation of manual training in the schools. At times hidden behind the reformist conversation regarding imprinting the practical on the intellect, craftsman ideals percolated in the dialogue over managing the district. Christensen was driven by efficiency, but Fairbanks consistently pushed back by emphasizing that art could engender the model student Christensen envisioned: respectful of labor, academically proficient, and economically productive. Year after year, Fairbanks imparted to his superiors the gains that students could make in all their studies with the proper art instruction. In 1917, upon Christensen’s appointment to the Board of Regents, Fairbanks’s comment in a congratulatory note perhaps best reveals the extent to which the craftsman ideal was inscribed on his soul: “I am certain you can help fashion the policy in my particular subject so that art will reach the people and give joy in labor as well as in leisure.”79 As for Daft, as a teacher her influence was felt in the classroom rather than in district administration. Her popular classes did not seem to elicit commentary about their societal or educational value but rather that students enjoyed making things in her workshop. Her high school arts and crafts courses thus fulfilled a full circle: rather than uniting joy in labor, crafts became a pleasurable hobby, supporting leisure in a separate sphere from work.80 One friend and former student, Ruth Harwood, the daughter of the esteemed artist James T. Harwood, wrote that other than her father, Daft stood out as her most influential teacher. “The thing which stands out most clearly to me in the hours with her was the joy of workmanship, that vital and beautiful quality of existence.”81 Arts and crafts did not have to be associated with labor to be worthwhile but
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 334
could simply bring forth joy. Through the many years of administering and teaching to the city’s youth by Christensen, Fairbanks, and Daft, the debate over what would best serve students, or the pleasure brought by simply making things, the arts and crafts tradition was embedded in the educational foundation of Salt Lake City’s public schools. Notes 1. Alice Merrill Horne, Devotees and Their Shrines (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1914), 116–18. 2. The entire quote is “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour” and comes from William Morris, the British founder of the arts and crafts movement. William Morris, “Art under Plutocracy,” in William Morris and Arthur L. Morton, ed., Political Writings of William Morris (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984). See also, Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979), 85; and William Casement, “William Morris on Labor and Pleasure,” Social Theory and Practice 12, no. 3 (1986): 351–82. 3. Horne, Devotees, 117, 188. 4. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), 164–95. The work of T. J. Jackson Lears, Edgar Krug, and Harvey Kantor illuminates the challenges and issues surrounding public education at the turn of the twentieth century, providing a framework with which to understand the response of the Salt Lake District’s administrators to these issues. This is particularly so with the question of determining the role of secondary education in the district and the purpose of manual training within the curriculum. Harvey Kantor, “Work, Education, and Vocational Reform: The Ideological Origins of Vocational Education, 1890–1920,” American Journal of Education 94, no. 4 (August 1986): 491; Edgar Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1880–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), 198; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 69. 5. Salt Lake’s population was 44,843 in 1890; 53,531 in 1900; and 92,777 in 1910. “Table C: Population in Utah Urban Areas, 1860–1970,” Richard D. Poll, ed., Utah’s History (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1989), 687. 6. Thomas G. Alexander, “Cooperation, Conflict, and Compromise: Women, Men, and the Environment in Salt Lake City, 1890–1930,” Brigham Young University Studies 35, no. 1 (1995): 6–39. 7. Salt Lake Tribune, November 2, 1913, p. 6; Goodwin’s Weekly (Salt Lake City, UT), April 4, 1903, p. 5; “‘Mission’ House and Stable,” Salt Lake Telegram, July 11, 1904, p. 11. 8. “Lovers of Art Forming Arts and Crafts Club,” Deseret Evening News, November 12, 1908. 9. “Letter to Art Lovers,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 4, 1910. 10. Krug, Shaping, 13. 11. Krug, Shaping, 11–13. 12. Frederick Buchanan, Culture Clash and Accommodation: Public Schooling in Salt Lake City, 1890–1994 (San
8/26/20 6:43 PM
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 335
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
School campus is now located at 300 West and 200 North. 48. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 48; Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 91. 49. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 6. 50. Salt Lake High School, Red and Black (1913), 92–93. 51. “The Technical High School,” National Register of Historic Places Inventory—Nomination (1980), available at State Historic Preservation Office, Utah Division of State History, Salt Lake City, Utah. 52. Norma S. Davis, A Song of Joys: The Biography of Mahonri Mackintosh Young, Sculptor, Painter, Etcher (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 1999), 62. 53. Krug, Shaping, 184–85. 54. Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1916–1917, 168. 55. John Leo Fairbanks to D. H. Christensen, April 11, 1912, box 2, fd. 3, Christensen papers. 56. D. H. Christensen to John Widtsoe, January 16, 1911, box 2, fd. 2, Christensen papers. 57. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 77. 58. Twenty-third Annual Report, 1912–1913, 53. 59. “Even Division of High School Pupils,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 2, 1915. 60. “Vacation Days Nearly Over,” Salt Lake Tribune, August 25, 1913. 61. Twenty-seventh Annual Report, 1916–1917, 137–38. 62. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 166 (first qtn.); Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1914–1915, 126 (second qtn.); Nineteenth Annual Report, 1908–1909, 6 (third qtn.). 63. Sixteenth Annual Report, 1905–1906, 124. 64. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 133. 65. Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1913–1914, 75–76. 66. Twenty-sixth Annual Report, 1915–1916, 102–103. 67. Krug, Shaping, 217. 68. J. H. Tipton, “Methods of Teaching Mechanic Arts” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1919), 23. 69. Thirty-first Annual Report, 1921, 73. 70. Thirty-fourth Annual Report, 1924, 37. 71. Krug, Shaping, 245, 380. 72. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 88–91. 73. Journal of Education, 83, no. 6 (February 10, 1916), in box 4, fd. 8, Christensen papers. 74. “D. H. Christensen, Ex-S.L. School Chief, Dies at 86,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 7, 1956. 75. Tom Alder, “Idealized Realities: The Life and Art of J. Leo Fairbanks,” 15 Bytes: Utah’s Art Magazine, April 5, 2009, accessed March 17, 2020. 76. “Writer of Verse,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 25, 1928, 62. 77. Emma Daft to D. H. Christensen, June 16, 1916, box 2, fd. 5, Christensen papers. 78. “Death Claims Noted Poet,” Independent Herald (Yuba City, CA), April 1, 1954, p. 4. 79. John Leo Fairbanks to D. H. Christensen, May 31, 1917, box 2, fd. 3, Christensen papers. 80. This idea is drawn from Lears, No Place of Grace, 83. 81. “Ruth Harwood,” undated clipping posted on “Emma Frances Moyes,” accessed May 21, 2020, ancestry.com /family-tree/person/tree/112891950/person/260107 749107/gallery.
U H Q
Francisco: Smith Research Associates, 1996), 48. 13. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 22. 14. Buchanan, Culture Clash, 50. Millspaugh served from 1890 to 1898. Frank B. Cooper was the second superintendent and served from 1899 to 1901. 15. “Personal,” typescript, August 20, 1942, box 1, fd. 1, D. H. Christensen papers, Ms 627, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. 16. Biographical sketch, typescript, box 1, fd. 1, Christensen papers. 17. I will use the term “manual training.” 18. Krug, Shaping, 217. 19. Christensen papers. 20. “Negro Educator Is Coming to Salt Lake for Two Lectures,” Salt Lake Telegram, March 22, 1913. 21. Board of Education, Twelfth Annual Report of the Public Schools of Salt Lake City for the Year Ending June 30th, 1902 (Salt Lake City: Ackerman, 1902), 78, 79 (hereafter, Annual Report). Most volumes of the Annual Report are available online via Hathi Trust Digital Library, accessed March 18, 2020, catalog.hathitrust .org/Record/100076206. 22. Vern G. Swanson, Robert S. Olpin, William C. Seifrit, Utah Art (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991), 87–88. 23. Sixteenth Annual Report, 1905–1906, 86. 24. Twelfth Annual Report, 1901–1902, 78. 25. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 138. 26. Twenty-first Annual Report, 1910–1911, 85. 27. E. L. Miner, “Manual Training. Its Development, Principles and Methods,” Utah Educational Review 1 (April 1908): 21–22. 28. Fifteenth Annual Report, 1904–1905, 98. 29. Twenty-second Annual Report, 1911–1912, 58. 30. Clifford Edward Clark, Jr., The American Family Home, 1800–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 159; Krug, Shaping, 229. 31. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 61. 32. Twenty-first Annual Report, 1910–1911, 86. 33. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 148. 34. Krug, Shaping, 229–30. 35. Twenty-fourth Annual Report, 1913–1914, 85–86. 36. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 174. 37. Lears, No Place of Grace, 81. 38. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern American, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 21–22. 39. Krug, Shaping, 217–248. Krug describes how schools were beset with a large population of youth without the structure with which to educate them. 40. Seventeenth Annual Report, 1906–1907, 144. 41. Eighteenth Annual Report, 1907–1908, 5. 42. Twenty-fifth Annual Report, 1914–1915, 42. 43. Krug, Shaping, 253. 44. Salt Lake High School, Red and Black: Commencement (1910), 367, accessed May 14, 2020, issuu.com/westalumni /docs/1910. 45. Kantor, “Work, Education, and Vocational Reform,” 420. 46. Twentieth Annual Report, 1909–1910, 1, 86. 47. Salt Lake City’s street system west of Main Street changed in the twentieth century. The West High
335
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Women in the Utah Work Force from Statehood to World War II
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
CLASSIC REPRINT
336
BY
M I R I A M
B .
MU R P H Y
Miriam B. Murphy—Mims, as she was called—contributed much to the writing of Utah’s history. Born in 1933 to Edward A. Brinton and Julia Maxfield Brinton, Murphy grew up in Salt Lake City and graduated from West High School. She began honing her skill with words as a young woman: she majored in English Literature at University of California Berkeley and the University of Utah, where she served as associate editor and then editor-in-chief of the Daily Utah Chronicle. After working in advertising in California and New York, Murphy returned to Utah; in 1971, the Utah State Historical Society hired her as associate editor of Utah Historical Quarterly. She continued in that position until her retirement in 1997. During her years with the historical society, Murphy did the kind of exhaustive work on which publications and historical understanding are built: wordsmithing, proofreading, illustrating, and indexing the quarterly, as well as editing the popular Beehive History. With the approach of the state’s centennial, Murphy contributed a remarkable twenty essays to the Utah History Encyclopedia, and the Wayne County Commission asked her to write its volume for the state’s centennial history series. Meanwhile, her scholarship in the quarterly focused on women’s history. The following article, first published in 1982, showcases Murphy’s facility with Utah history and the careful research that informed her arguments. 1 gh In the early 1900s Charles O. Harris of the Utah Independent Telephone Company visited the Maxfield homestead in Big Cottonwood Canyon. He asked two daughters of the house if they would be interested in working for the new venture. The girls’ father was outraged: “No daughter of mine will ever be a telephone operator. Most of them are nothing but little hussies.” As the chagrined Harris quickly explained to his host, such a notion was incorrect. The Independent was looking for “good girls.” Lois and Josie Ellen Maxfield were surely that, and, more to the point, they were experienced workers eager to learn new skills. Like so many young women of their time, they had labored not only at home but as
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 336
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
337 The switchboard of an independent telephone company, as photographed in August 1909. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 09587.
poorly paid domestics in the homes of others. With their father’s worst fears allayed, the two sisters—one just in her middle teens—went to work in Salt Lake City for the promising, but short-lived, competition to the Bell System. Utah’s capital was a growing, bustling city of about a hundred thousand in the first decade of the twentieth century. Probably many a parent shared R. D. Maxfield’s anxiety about letting daughters, especially, work there. However sheltered their lives may have been, the two sisters soon became street wise. The UITC offices were on State Street near the old police headquarters and no more than a silver dollar’s throw from the heart of Salt Lake City’s red light district. The young women saw policemen drag prostitutes by the hair of the head into the station for booking. They knew something of the patrons of Regent Street, too—pillars of the community, many of them. These men would telephone from one of the notorious hangouts to ask the young operators to call home for
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 337
them: “Tell my wife I’ve been detained at the Alta Club.” Such experiences neither tempted the Maxfield girls nor made them cynical. Rather, they learned to cope in a complex, changing world where good and evil continually contend. In 1909 the younger girl accepted a job offer from John E. Clark, manager of the Lyric Theatre, to work as a cashier. Clark cautioned twenty-year-old Josie Maxfield not to engage in any conversation with male patrons of the silent movie palace. She never doubted the wisdom of this warning. A year later, in pursuit of better wages and working conditions, she started to clerk at a dental and surgical supply house. After two years and the disappointment of seeing another, less experienced girl promoted ahead of her, she decided to move on. About that time, the Independent folded, and both Lois and Josie Maxfield began new careers as saleswomen for the city’s leading
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4
would undoubtedly have changed their employment pattern as it did for most women of that time.
There is something very typical about the experiences of the Maxfield sisters and something less typical as well. These young women went to work originally out of necessity. Their parents were not wealthy, nor even middle class, and children from such families were expected to shoulder some of the economic burden. Not until 1919 was compulsory school attendance through high school in effect in Utah.3 Working children were hardly exceptional. Compiled employment statistics through at least the 1930 census include persons ten years of age and older.4
There is a popular song—written in 1909—titled “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl.”6 Heaven certainly seems to have favored the Maxfield sisters during their working years. But other forces also attempted to protect working women or advance their cause. During the 1895 constitutional convention in Salt Lake City several rather fascinating events occurred. To begin with, on March 12 the question arose of who would win the coveted position of convention clerk. Miss B. T. MacMasters and Miss Henrietta Clark were among the women nominated along with several men. George M. Cannon, who was to prove the champion spokesman for women at this all-male convention, came out strongly for MacMasters: “. . . She is perfectly capable of doing the work required, and . . . we will by this means give representation to the fair sex.” Forwarding the skills of Clark was delegate David Evans who, with truth but no gentlemanly class, said: “She is thoroughly competent, I understand, and that will recognize the sex, as she is willing to work cheap. She is an honest lady devoted to her work and does not seem to be very much devoted to the gentlemen around her.” The backhanded compliments notwithstanding, according to the Deseret News, MacMasters and Clark won the day and were “employed after a . . . rather unparliamentary set-to lasting fully an hour.” The two women were exuberant about their employment as convention clerks and saw it as a “good omen.”7
It is a temptation for researchers in Utah history to look for the unique, the unusual, indeed, for the “peculiar.” One can resist that temptation in studying working women. Utahns generally fit into the statistical pattern for working women in the United States and varied only slightly from the norm, as did the Intermountain region, to the extent that the area was less heavily industrialized than other sections of the country and therefore provided fewer job opportunities.5
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
department stores. Employment there was not necessarily safer—one store owner had a reputation as a womanizer, and a buyer for another firm was deeply involved in a complex thievery plot. Despite these perils, the two women succeeded at their new line of work and rose in the retailing hierarchy. They married in 1919, and having no children continued their careers. Fortunately for their many relatives, the two women and their husbands remained employed steadily throughout the depression years. They continued busily at work in their own restaurant-resort enterprise as World War II ushered in a period of prosperity and different opportunities for working women.2
338
Paid housework brought the girls their first pay. That seems typical of the times. Domestic help was the most frequently advertised need in the female help wanted columns of the newspapers. But when other, more lucrative opportunities came along, the Maxfield sisters and their peers were quick to seize the bright ring of bigger paychecks and better hours and working conditions. The positions they filled were typical—telephone operator, clerk, saleswoman, and occasionally department head or assistant buyer. Only their eventual leap into the employer class near the beginning of World War II was atypical. They encountered, or at least were made very aware of, sexual harassment on the job. That, too, was a fairly common experience, one of the hazards of employment for women. Their paychecks helped to support ailing parents and relatives laid off work during the depression. Other women in Utah were also breadwinners. Coming from a large family, the sisters were unusual in having no children themselves. That
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 338
Two delegates, George B. Squires and Samuel R. Thurman, contested for the title of “uncompromising champion of the fair sex,” with
8/26/20 6:43 PM
There has been in almost all ages a discrimination on account of sex, not because of the difference in work, not of the . . . amount performed, but simply because of sex. There are instances in this Territory where parties at the present time contract for certain kinds of work. I would instance the case of tailors . . . where there has been a discrimination on account of the sexes that were employed. The articles made are sold to the public without a difference in price. The work is performed just the same by the lady tailors as by the men. . . . There has been, too . . . a difference in the amount paid to those who were engaged as typesetters . . . and this provision is intended to prevent anything of this kind.11 Needless to say, Cannon’s fellow delegates did not concur. One claimed the measure would interfere with the rights of citizens to make contracts, another that it brought women down to the level of men, a third that it was an impossible task, wages being subject to supply and demand. Women did achieve some gains in the new state constitution, however. Chiefly, they regained the right to vote that had been taken away from them in 1887 by the Edmunds-Tucker Act. And subsequent sessions of the state legislature also
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 339
Of greater potential consequence to women, other state laws of that time provided for uniform compensation for female and male public schoolteachers, limited the hours women could work on a daily and weekly basis, established minimum wages for female employees, and instructed businessmen employing women as clerks to provide chairs or other seats for them.13
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
The defeat of this measure did not stop Cannon from introducing another, more controversial concept—equal pay for equal work. In a most eloquent, but nonetheless futile, plea, he proclaimed:
dealt with the problems of working women. Frequently, the legislation enacted in the early twentieth century limited the scope of female employment and often lumped adult women and children under a certain age together, as if they had similar needs. For example, women, along with children under the age of fourteen, were prohibited by the constitution from working in underground mines. Other statutes and local ordinances enacted in the period between statehood and World War I forbade the employment of women in saloons at any time or their hire as musicians in dance halls, public gardens, railroad cars, steamboats, and other such spots. Nor were women to be hired as dancers except for legitimate theatre performances. Women under twenty-one could not work where alcoholic beverages were made or dispensed, and girls under sixteen were forbidden to sell newspapers or other merchandise on the streets or in public places. Finally, employment agencies were warned not to send females to find work at any place of bad repute.12
U H Q
Squires claiming to be “in favor of woman having whatever she wants in this world.”8 Despite the good Squires’s claim, however, to George M. Cannon goes the credit for espousing several revolutionary ideas.9 On March 15, 1895, he introduced to the convention a proposition that would prohibit any organization from discriminating against a person on the basis of sex in “acquiring knowledge of any trade or profession” or in limiting the number of persons of each sex that could be employed in a given field. What a blow that might have been to some unions and professional organizations had it been approved.10
339
But, as Elise Boulding has pointed out, “A description of the life of women in any society today, from tribal to industrial, based exclusively on a reading of law codes, would be most misleading.”14 Certainly one would be misled by the 1896 law providing equal pay for female and male public schoolteachers. The Utah Education Association has detailed the failure of local school boards to comply. An examination of school reports indicates that for many years men were paid more than were women for the same kind of work and with the same training. In 1907, the average salary for men in Millard County was 85 percent more than that of lady teachers. The average salary of men in Box Elder County in 1909–10 was more than 40 percent above that of lady teachers. The range of difference was even larger in the high schools than in the elementary.15
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
340
One result of these rather shocking disparities was high teacher turnover. As the UEA was to ask: Why should a woman prepare herself to teach at a salary of $60 to $85 a month for ten months when a short course at a business college would give her access to jobs paying from $75 to $125 a month the year around, including a twoweek paid vacation. Despite continuing efforts by the UEA to boost teacher salaries, little was accomplished. During the 1930–31 school year the average male high school teacher received a salary more than 50 percent higher than the average woman teacher in an elementary school. The following year salaries for both women and men were reduced and teaching loads increased because of the depression.16 Besides their generally lower pay, women teachers were saddled with another handicap that cut short their careers and effectively kept them from working toward higher-paying supervisory positions. Most school districts fired women teachers who married. Some women deeply resented this, and some women kept their marriage a secret as long as they could in order to continue working.17 Comprehensive data on working women are found in census reports for the years 1900 to 1940. The statistics reveal what kinds of jobs women had and where, as well as age, marital status, and race or national origin. Charts also compare the number of women and men employed in the same occupation. Several generalizations may be made from this data.
First, women have been employed nationally in almost every occupation defined by the census. However, too much should not be made of this, for in the main most women have worked at jobs where they predominated and men were in the minority; and, likewise, men have predominated in jobs where women were in the minority. In the 1900 census, for example, one can find 14 women miners (presumably not underground miners) in Utah but 6,629 men and in nursing 14 men but 452 women. Although such anomalies teach us the dangers of stereotyping the sexes, they are of little consequence statistically. Nevertheless, as one analyst in the 1920s put it, “It is by no means certain that women have as yet filled the place they will ultimately occupy in the industrial world.”18 Second, in some job classifications women and men continued to be employed in fairly large— but not necessarily equal—numbers. Teaching was one such occupation. In 1900 there were 1,040 female teachers and 648 male teachers in Utah. By 1930 their numbers had increased to 3,649 females and 1,556 males. The job of waitress or waiter was another that consistently attracted both women and men.19 Third, some employment categories in which one sex was well established in 1900 became overwhelmingly dominated by the opposite sex. For instance, at the turn of the century in Utah 40 percent of the stenographers were men. By 1930 men could claim less than 9 percent of such positions. Less dramatic perhaps,
The interior of Walkers Beauty Parlor, April 27, 1921. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 21111.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 340
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Expounding on these changes for the Bureau of the Census, Joseph A. Hill suggested that The inducements may be better pay in many cases, regular and shorter hours, more congenial companionship, and pleasanter surroundings, also probably a better social standing, since the occupation of domestic servant and that of laundress or washerwoman, in particular, are very commonly looked upon as being menial pursuits.22 Additionally, there was a lessening demand for some jobs: More women were buying readymade clothing instead of employing a dressmaker and using the services of a steam laundry rather than a washerwoman. The small boarding houses of the turn of the century were also disappearing from the urban scene. For many women the changes visible in the twenties seemed to usher in a new era. “A greater proportion of women were receiving Ph.D.s at American universities at that time than at any time since.�23 Commenting on these phenomena, Elise Boulding noted: It is no wonder that young women born after 1940 cannot easily imagine how
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 341
Sixth, race and national origin were significant factors in defining female employment. In Salt Lake City in 1930 more than one-third of the black women over age ten were employed. For native-born whites the figure was slightly less than one-fourth, and for foreign-born whites about one-fifth. For other races the figure dropped to about one-seventh of the females over ten years of age.26
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Fifth, a higher percentage of women were employed in urban than in rural areas. Looking at Ogden as a case in point, in 1910 17.7 percent of the women of that city who were over age ten were employed. In the state as a whole the percentage was 14.4 percent. This nationwide trend continued. In 1940, among females fourteen years of age or older in Utah, more than one in five living in urban areas was employed. In rural nonfarm areas of the state the number dropped to one in eight, and for rural farm areas to one in ten.25
I
Fourth, new job opportunities created dramatic shifts in employment patterns for women. On the national level the 1920 census recorded very large net losses against the 1910 figures in such occupational classifications as servants (-20.5 percent), dressmaker (-47.3 percent), home laundress, milliner, and boarding and lodging house keeper, among others. Showing large net increases in 1920 over 1910 were clerk, other than in a store (+ 288.3 percent), college professor or president (+ 240.6 percent), semiskilled manufacturing operative (+ 33.4 percent), stenographer, bookkeeper, saleswoman, and teacher, among others, A similar shift may be seen in Utah employment figures. For example, the job category of female servant suffered a net loss of 31.4 percent during the decade from 1910 to 1920, while female stenographers and typists increased by 106 percent in the same period.21
promising the world looked to women beginning their careers in the twenties. The women of the twenties were world shapers. The women of the forties, while they entered the labor force in large numbers as war workers, were already beginning the psychological retreat into the home so graphically described by Betty Friedan.24
U H Q
in the professional field women accounted for 11 percent of Utah’s physicians and surgeons in 1900 and only 3 percent in 1930.20
341
The relatively low economic status of blacks, both nationally and in Utah, would seem to account for the higher percentage of employed black women. Quite simply, black women experienced a greater need to find work, and find it they did, although usually at the lower end of the pay scale.27 In the case of some foreign-born white women, entirely different factors operated to preclude their employment. Economic necessity notwithstanding, cultural values effectively kept most first-generation Greek, Serbian, and Italian women from entering the job market. A few eastern and southern European women worked unobtrusively in stores operated by their husbands or other male relatives or ran small boarding houses that catered to newly arrived immigrants (usually relatives or others from their old-country villages). Jobs that took women away from home or out from
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
under the eye of a male relative were considered improper. So strong was the proscription that even a poor widowed Greek woman would have been unlikely to seek employment but rather would rely on support from the extended family or the godfathers of her children.28
342
Seventh, age and marital status affected employment among women. The census data for 1930, if laid out in graph form, would show a significant peak for the ages of 18 through 24. Almost half of the women in that age group in Salt Lake City were employed. From age 25 on the percentages decline fairly steadily. Going down the scale one finds one in five women between the ages of 50 and 54 employed. And with no Social Security to look to, one in ten women between 65 and 69 was working in Salt Lake City in 1930. As for marital status, nationally in 1920 one married woman out of eleven was employed. Or, another way of looking at that statistic is to note that two out of nine employed women were married. Utah did not lag too far behind with 17.5 percent of the female work force married in 1920.29 Although the census data provide a large body of information on working women, they tell nothing of the conditions of employment such as wages and hours, not to mention those more subtle but very significant evaluations of the employer or boss. Some of the problems faced by women teachers have already been discussed. Office workers in Utah had no association to champion their cause, but women who worked as secretaries, stenographers, typists,
and bookkeepers have expressed opinions— some positive, some negative—about their experiences. Taken as a whole, their employment seems to have been ordinary enough and fits into the national picture. In her excellent study of the American working woman, Barbara Wertheimer wrote that white-collar positions were, for a time, anyway, almost the exclusive prerogative of young, single, native-born white women. This was the case in Utah in 1910 when native-born white women, in proportion to their numbers in the population, were five times more likely to find employment in office positions than the foreign-born and almost six times more likely than black women. Only three black women had office jobs in Utah in 1910, and it seems highly probable that these were with black organizations.30 According to Wertheimer: The appeal of office work was real: it was cleaner and less strenuous than factory work, and socially much more acceptable. Workers were paid a weekly salary rather than hourly wages, and work tended to be regular, layoffs less frequent. Most important for young women of that time, it meant working for men on an individual basis, which provided at least the possibility of finding a husband. That was the credit side of the ledger. On the debit side were the long hours, the often low salaries, the need
Employees of the Richfield Bank. Women usually found better hours, pay, and working conditions in offices. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 17186.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 342
8/26/20 6:43 PM
We were grateful to have these jobs. We never thought of taking breaks or needing them. I don’t recall any of the girls complaining about the amount of work given them and we did work hard. We didn’t know about discrimination or breaks then. We didn’t know or never considered the possibility of advancing to jobs the men held. Of course, the two jobs I held were exceptionally good for this area. Some girls were clerking at $30.00 a month so I can’t speak for them.33 The hours worked were generally longer than today—forty-eight in many instances, although some women claim to have worked longer—with time on the job beginning to approach the standard forty-hour work week later in the period under consideration. Their starting wages in the mid-1930s ranged anywhere from 22.5 cents an hour for a secretary at a mill in Logan—with part of that amount in credit at the company store— to about $60 a month. Some women changed jobs when they could to improve their income. (Starting salaries seem to have been higher in the 1920s before the depression, with one woman reporting an $85 monthly stipend in 1924.) Most office workers received a paid vacation after a year’s employment, but they enjoyed few other fringe benefits common today such as health and life insurance, retirement programs, or sick and overtime pay. Perhaps for these young women,
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 343
The pressure . . . was terrible—no time even to go to the rest room. Boss also expected personal attention. Wanted to hire me an apartment and be my “friend.”
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
The office supervisor was most often, but not always, a man. And that leads into the debit side of office employment. Although a majority of those interviewed found their work experiences pleasant enough, about one-fifth did not. Here are a few of their complaints:
I
Utah women office workers generally found conditions similar to Wertheimer’s description. These stenographers, bookkeepers, and typists usually received much of their training in high school, taking such courses as shorthand, accounting, and typing. A few attended business college. Once on the job they found it fairly enjoyable, and often they were thankful just to have a paycheck of any kind during the depression.32 As one secretary who worked in the 1930s expressed it:
most of them single, retirement funds and hospital insurance seemed unrelated to their needs, for many of them left their jobs upon marriage or with the birth of their first child. Some who wanted to continue working after marriage were not allowed to do so. One worker who married was jolted to hear upon returning from her honeymoon that “We don’t have married women working for us.”34 Another office worker was required to give up her job as a WPA stenographer following her marriage in 1937 “so that an unmarried girl could take over.”35
U H Q
to dress well (an added cost), and working conditions that ranged from poorly lit desks to rooms filled, with cigar smoke from the men who shared office space with the women. Then there were the advances of men who felt the young women were fair game and would not dare to protest.31
Conditions improved at this woman’s next job, but she objected to “the dirty stories told by the salesmen to each other” in her hearing.36
343
A secretary-typist for two Salt Lake City firms reported excessive overtime on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays without extra pay. She also resented having a meter attached to her typewriter to keep track of the number of strokes typed. Each typist had to hand in a daily meter reading.37 One head bookkeeper found herself in a dilemma. She felt a responsibility to complete the tasks she was hired to do, but that was not easy given an unfortunate precedent. When I refused to sit on the assistant manager’s lap or kiss him as the former bookkeeper had done, he harassed me and made life miserable at work, so after I got the books all balanced, and had given him adequate notice, I quit my job.38 A stenographer in northern Utah disliked having to cover for the infidelities of my boss. Having to take part in his petty vendettas. I sometimes left my
8/26/20 6:43 PM
The physical environment was fairly pleasant for office workers, although some women complained about smoking in enclosed spaces, cramped work areas, and excessive heat or cold depending on the season. As one woman described it, she “worked in [a] small cubicle next to the V.P.’s office—no windows—[and it] became very stuffy at times espec[ially] when cigar-smoking men waited for their app[ointmen] ts.”40 Canning or food processing was one of the new industries that beckoned many women workers during the early twentieth century. This was arduous labor in many instances, and as Barbara Wertheimer has suggested,
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
initials off of his letters. I left with a great sense of relief when I got married. Later he offered me double my pay to work part time. I couldn’t do it.39
344
Because the industry was seasonal, manufacturers were able to get exemptions from hours limitations for their workers. From the start, women made up over half the work force in canning. . . . Farmers’ wives and daughters, sometimes whole families were employed. Some manufacturers preferred to hire newly arrived immigrant women. As one owner told an investigator, “They are the best workers I have; they keep at it just like horses.”41 Most women cannery workers were between the ages of sixteen and twenty. Blanche Jensen remembers working for three summers at the Del Monte plant in Spanish Fork during
the late 1920s. She was sixteen years old when she began. Supervised by a “stern” matron, the women and girls “sat on benches beside a moving belt and took out leaves, damaged peas, or anything not suitable for canning. . . .” The women had to remain alert and work quickly for hours at a time with rest breaks only “if the pea load slacked up.” The length of lunch and dinner breaks was also determined by the volume of peas to be processed. Depending upon the harvest and the weather, the hours might vary from five one day to ten or twelve the next. The starting wage was 15 cents an hour with seasoned workers making 17.5 cents an hour or about $6 or $7 a week. By 1940, Mrs. Jensen said, one woman worker reported earning 35 cents an hour—more than her farm-worker husband who made only $1.50 a day. The women were required to wear “heavy blue, cotton dresses with matching caps. . . . The uniforms were supplied by the company and a small fee was taken out of each check for the rental of the uniform which was handed back to the company at the termination of work.” String beans followed peas in the canning season. At this task the women worked regular hours from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with an hour for lunch. They snipped off the ends of the beans, cut them in even lengths, and placed them in boxes. A supervisor inspected each box and punched the worker’s tally card. The pay was about 7.5 cents a box, with two boxes per hour being produced by most of the women. “We grumbled about the job but wouldn’t think of quitting,” Mrs. Jensen said. The plant had “a waiting list of people who wanted work.”42
Packing fruit in Hurricane, Utah, circa 1935. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 3539.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 344
8/26/20 6:43 PM
A Salt Lake City factory worker was employed throughout the 1930s as a stacker and packer for wages beginning at 25 cents an hour and eventually climbing to $20 a week. As she described the duties, “The stacker picked cookies off warm pans and placed them in a trough
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
These factory workers certainly toiled long and hard for their meagre but much-needed wages. Whether some of them “worked like horses,” as suggested earlier, is conjectural. However, for Salt Lake City the 1930 census does show that a foreign-born white woman (but not necessarily a newly arrived immigrant) was almost twice as likely to be found working in various manufacturing and mechanical pursuits as a native-born white woman. Black women, on the other hand, were very unlikely to find such employment, at least in 1930.46 Like their sisters in the East, some women factory workers in Utah struck or threatened to strike, and in these efforts they, too, were unsuccessful at significantly improving employment conditions or gaining union recognition. In fact, during the 1930s Utah women were much more successful at helping their husbands, sons, and brothers achieve union status than in achieving it for their own sex. One remembers, for example, Helen Papanikolas’s description of
I
Women worked in other kinds of factories, too. A Grantsville woman was employed at a nearby plant where she filled, by machine, cans and bags with salt and then pasted on labels or sewed up sacks that weighed as much as twenty-five pounds. The wages at this factory were 30 cents an hour in 1927 and 40 cents an hour by the early 1940s. The workers had few benefits until later when the plant was unionized and better working conditions and higher pay were achieved. Like so many women, this factory worker was grateful to have a paycheck during the depression, for her family depended upon her support. She rode a bus to and from work. As a sidelight on those grim depression days, she remembers being paid in cash during the time the banks were closed. “Payday could be any one of 5 days so we wouldn’t be held up on the way home. . . .”44
for the packer to put . . . in cartons, boxes or caddies.” She worked in a large area at a table staffed by sixteen young women. Two conveyors brought the cookies down from the ovens to be stacked and packed. Full boxes were conveyed to the scales for weighing. According to this informant, “the boss screamed and swore at the girls” and often called them back early from their lunch hour. The employees struck for better working conditions in 1937. Although conditions did improve somewhat, the strikers lost and the plant was not unionized.45
U H Q
At the Morgan canning factory in northern Utah women also canned peas and beans for wages ranging from 12 cents an hour to 22 cents for floor ladies. Shifts lasting up to nineteen hours during peak times were reported. When some of the women became dissatisfied with the pay and threatened to strike, the plant management vowed to bring in Mexican workers if the women left their jobs.43
345
Seamstresses at work at the Barrow-Beasley Company Overall Factory, using Singer sewing machines, May 18, 1926. Shipler Commercial Photographers. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 25126.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 345
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
the fearless Milka Dragos and other immigrant women in Carbon County during the 1933 coal miners’ strike that led to recognition of the United Mine Workers of America.47
346
If strikers have their folk heroines in women like Milka Dragos and Mother Jones, so, too, do nurses. During the Civil War the tireless Mother Bickerdyke worked at emergency hospitals on the front lines, recruited volunteers, and raised money. When asked by a doctor on whose “authority she presumed to act in his hospital,” she supposedly replied, “On the authority of Lord God Almighty; have you anything that outranks that?”48 More recently, in central Utah, Marva Christensen Hanchett became a heroine of sorts. Born in the little town of Annabella in Sevier County in 1908, Marva was fascinated by medicine at an early age. In 1927, soon after her eighteenth birthday, she entered the Salt Lake General Hospital School of Nursing. The first six months of the nurses training consisted of a full day of classes and demonstrations with long study assignments to be done at night. The nurses who successfully completed this period of schooling were given their caps and, besides continuing the classes and study, were assigned to work an eight-hour shift on one of the wards.49
At that time and on into the early 1930s the old Salt Lake County General Hospital had so heavy a patient load that beds were sometimes set up in halls. “Nurses worked six and a half days a week, took regular classes, and studied in their off hours.” After three years of this grueling schedule, Marva graduated and returned to Sevier County as the area’s only available registered nurse. With no real hospital to work in, she and the local doctors delivered babies and performed surgery in patients’ homes. “Many times she was paid with a bucket of honey or a loaf of bread instead of money. Sometimes she received no pay.” After her marriage in 1933 Mrs. Hanchett’s career took a new turn as she set up Sevier County’s first regular public health program, and later she became nursing supervisor for the new Sevier Valley Hospital in Richfield. Few nurses have been responsible for so large a geographic area—almost one-fifth of the state—as was Mrs. Hanchett.50 Nursing was another occupation that experienced a dramatic change in the decade between 1910 and 1920. The earlier census showed 225 trained nurses in Utah and 643 midwives and untrained nurses. By 1920 the number of trained nurses had jumped 241.7 percent while the number of untrained nurses (midwives are not mentioned in this census breakdown) showed a slight loss.51 Before the turn of the century few nurses had formal training, and working conditions, including wages and hours, were poor.
Nurses at St. Mark’s Hospital, January 18, 1945. Nursing became increasingly professionalized in the early twentieth century. Ray King, photographer. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 12307.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 346
8/26/20 6:43 PM
A town of about seventeen hundred in the first years of the twentieth century, St. George offered women a variety of occupations. In addition to jobs as dressmaker and servant, teacher and saleslady, women were employed or self-employed as farmer, gardener, printing compositor, merchant, telegraph operator, postal clerk, photographer, and physician—unexpected diversity for a small rural town in the West. Obviously, the
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
In summary, then, what can be said about Utah working women? During the forty-five-year span from statehood to World War II women filled a wide variety of jobs. Many of their occupations were of signal importance to education, health care, manufacturing, communications, retailing, business—the lifeblood of most communities, in fact. Despite unfavorable working conditions in some occupations, the percentage of women employed in Utah increased steadily over the years from 11.2 percent in 1900 to 17.5 percent by 1940. Working out of economic necessity as well as for personal fulfillment, women were harassed or handicapped in some instances because of their sex. Nevertheless, they remained dedicated and persistent. As social and economic conditions changed they abandoned old occupations and took up new ones. Their horizons changed constantly. Young and old, single and married, black, white, and foreign-born, Utah women went off to work as did their sisters in other parts of the country. Yet, they remained essentially invisible in history. In 1929 Joseph Hill noted:
I
To cover in some detail several occupations typically associated with women has, in a sense, reinforced a stereotype of the working woman as either a teacher or a nurse, a secretary or a saleslady. And, indeed, these occupations have been important to women and important to society as well. Nevertheless, it is necessary to shatter the stereotype. A look at St. George in 1900 will do that.
variety of jobs in a city such as Salt Lake or Ogden would be too great to list conveniently. So, St. George can make the point for all of Utah.53
U H Q
Standards were gradually imposed, and nursing became a true profession. In 1917 a registration law was enacted, and three years later graduating nurses were required to pass a qualifying examination. The first nursing schools in Utah were operated by hospitals, a situation that may have affected the professional status of nurses. As one educator has pointed out, in hospital nursing schools “the doctor became the teacher and supervisor of the nurse, a role which tended to keep the nurse in a subservient position.” Not until World War II did nursing programs begin to move from hospitals to universities, with the University of Utah offering the state’s first baccalaureate nursing program in 1942. Undoubtedly, university-based education has enhanced the professional status of nurses.52
347
Whatever opinions may be held as to the proper sphere of woman, the fact is that, to a considerable extent, women’s place is no longer in the home. In addition to her social contributions to the preservation and welfare of mankind, the contributions of her sex to economic production in its commer-
A handful of the many American women who worked for the defense industry during World War II, in this instance at Hill Air Force Base. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 19988.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 347
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
cial aspects are of such substantial proportions that not only is it impossible to ignore them as a factor in industrial progress, but they are worthy of serious study as an important element in this progress.54
348
Fifty years later such studies are beginning to be made. The invisible woman is becoming fleshed out, her contributions recognized, her significance to all aspects of human society acknowledged.
6.
Notes 1. This editor’s note owes much to Craig Fuller’s remembrance of Miriam B. Murphy, contained in “The Utah Historical Quarterly Editorial Fellowship,” Utah Historical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2018): 69–70. See also, “Miriam Murphy,” Deseret News, May 19, 2013; U.S., School Yearbooks, 1880–2012, database online, s.v. “Miriam Brinton,” accessed May 18, 2020, ancestry.com. Note that the women who open this article, Lois and Josie Maxfield, were the elder sisters of Miriam Murphy’s mother. 1900 United States Federal Census, database online, Murray, Salt Lake, Utah, page 4, enumeration district 63, Julia Maxfield, accessed May 18, 2020, ancestry.com. 2. Interview with Lois Maxfield Recore and Josie Ellen Maxfield Reenders, May 10, 1979, Salt Lake City. The offices of the UITC were at 115 South State Street, and the old police station was around the corner at 120 East First South. Regent Street runs intermittently northsouth between Main and State streets; the particular block referred to as a red-light district was between First and Second souths. The old Lyric Theatre at 321 South Main was a silent movie house at the time Josie Maxfield worked there. The restaurant-resort business was the original Maxfield Lodge in Big Cottonwood Canyon east of Salt Lake City. 3. John Clifton Moffitt, A Century of Service, 1860–1960: A History of the Utah Education Association (Salt Lake City: Utah Education Association, 1960), pp. 464–65. To cope with the need for more personnel, since funds were insufficient to support the extended compulsory education law, local school boards hired teachers at lower salary levels, to which the UEA, not surprisingly, objected. 4. In 1910 there were 90 females and 1,040 males between ages ten and thirteen employed in Utah, mostly in agriculture, although 24 girls and 19 boys are listed as servants. By 1930 employment in this age group had dropped sharply to 281 males and only 24 females. See U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States . . . 1910. Vol. 4, Population 1910: Occupation Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914), p. 73; U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930; Occupation Statistics, Utah (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1931), p. 3. The 1940 census lists employed persons over age fourteen, an indication of declining child employment. 5. Another regional variation in 1910 was the higher proportion of employed females in the professions and
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 348
7.
8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13.
in domestic and personal service in the Mountain Division (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada) than in any other geographic region. See Thirteenth Census . . . Occupational Statistics, p. 51. Nationally in 1910 23.4 percent of the females age ten and older were employed; the figure for Utah was 14.4 percent. (In Utah’s two largest cities, however, female employment was appreciably higher: 17.7 percent in Ogden and 19.7 percent in Salt Lake City.) Males were also underemployed in Utah, 76.9 percent as opposed to 81.3 percent nationally. The song was “a satire on the sentimental ballads of the 1890s, introduced by Marie Dressier in the Broadway production Tillie’s Nightmare.” The lyrics were by Edgar Smith and the music by A. Baldwin Sloan. The song was revived in musicals in 1926 and 1944. See David Owen, American Popular Songs from the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 139. Official Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Convention . . . 1895 . . . to Adopt a Constitution for the State of Utah, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City, 1898), 1:120–25; Deseret News, March 13, 1895. MacMasters told the News that she intended to remember “the names of all the delegates who voted against her employment in order . . . to show her lady friends at the first election of equal suffrage in the Territory, that the men who did so—if candidates—should not receive their votes. ‘And,’ with manifest assurance she concluded, ‘I’ll see that they don’t get them either.’” Deseret News, March 14, 1895. A son of Angus M. and Sarah Mousely Cannon, George M. Cannon was reportedly the first white boy born at St. George. He graduated from the University of Deseret (Utah) in 1881 and shortly thereafter was elected Salt Lake County recorder. He organized his own real estate company and also served as cashier of the Salt Lake Security & Trust Co. A Republican, Cannon was elected to the first state senate and was named senate president. See Press Club of Salt Lake, Men of Affairs in the State of Utah (Salt Lake City, 1914), p. 168. Official Report of the . . . Convention . . . 1895, 1:164. Ibid., 2:1169–70. See, for example, George L. Nye, comp., Revised Ordinances of Salt Lake City, Utah, 1903 (Salt Lake City, 1903), sec. 323; P. J. Daly, comp., Revised Ordinances of Salt Lake City, Utah . . . 1913 (Salt Lake City, 1913), secs. 4243, 4244, 1339–6, 1339–8, 1339–9, 722. See Moffitt, A Century of Service, p. 455; James T. Hammond and Grant H. Smith, comps., The Compiled Laws of the State of Utah, 1907 (Salt Lake City, 1908), Title 66, chap. 9, sec. 1853 and Title 43, chap. 3, sec. 1339; Allen T. Sanford and Richard B. Thurman, comps., The Compiled Laws of the State of Utah, 1917 (Salt Lake City, 1919), Title 58, chap. 4, secs.3671, 3673, 3677; The Utah Code Annotated, 1943 (Salt Lake City, 1943), Title 49, chap. 4, secs. 3, 5, 8. Minimum wages for women in the 1917 compilation were 75 cents a day for minors under age eighteen, 90 cents a day for adult apprentices (with apprenticeships not to exceed one year), and $1.25 a day for experienced adults. In 1933 the Industrial Commission was empowered to determine if women’s and minors’ wages were adequate to secure “a proper living” (see 1943 reference above). In the 1917 compilation legal hours for women workers were nine per day or fifty-four per week with exceptions made if life or property were in danger. In the Utah Code Annotated,
8/26/20 6:43 PM
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 349
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
28. Interviews with Helen Z. Papanikolas and Philip F. Notarianni, May 1979, Salt Lake City. One Greek woman drove supplies to a sheep camp where her husband worked, and an Italian woman drove the school bus to Notre Dame School; but these were unusual activities for southern and eastern European women and may not, in fact, have been “gainful employment” as defined by the census. 29. Fifteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, Utah, table 8; Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. 75; Fourteenth Census . . . State Compendium: Utah, table 26. 30. Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 233; Thirteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, table 7. Two of the three black women were clerks (not in a store), and one was a stenographer or typist. There were a few black businesses that may have employed these women. 31. Wertheimer, We Were There, pp. 234–35. 32. General statements made about Utah office workers are based on compilations from the questionnaires mentioned in n. 16. Only specific statements will be individually identified. 33. K. W., Provo, questionnaire. 34. Gwen W. Jensen, Salt Lake City, questionnaire. 35. Maurine B. Campbell, Delta, questionnaire. 36. Gwen Jensen questionnaire. 37. L.S.W., Salt Lake City, questionnaire. 38. V. H., Logan, questionnaire. 39. Z.W.T., Logan, questionnaire. 40. K. W. questionnaire. 41. Wertheimer, We Were There, p. 217. 42. Blanche J. Jensen, Spanish Fork, questionnaire. 43. Ruth Gregory West, “‘Those Good Peas’: The Morgan Canning Company in Smithfield, Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 36 (1968): 176. 44. Ellen B. England, Grantsville, questionnaire. 45. A. M., Salt Lake City, questionnaire. 46. Fifteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, Utah, table 11. Only 8.3 percent of employed native-born white women in, Salt Lake City worked in manufacturing or mechanical pursuits, whereas 15.4 percent of the foreign-born women workers were so employed. 47. Helen Z. Papanikolas, “Unionism, Communism, and the Great Depression: The Carbon County Coal Strike of 1933,” Utah Historical Quarterly, 41 (1973): 284–85. 48. Wertheimer, We Were There, pp. 135–36. 49. Patricia H. Sorenson, “The Nurse: Marva Christensen Hanchett of Sevier County,” Utah Historical Quarterly 45 (1977): 166. 50. Ibid., pp. 168–71. 51. Thirteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, table 7; Fourteenth Census . . . State Compendium: Utah, table 25. 52. Sandra Hawkes Noall, “A History of Nursing Education in Utah” (Ed.D. diss., University of Utah, 1969), pp. v– vi, 28. 53. Twelfth Census of Population, 1900, Utah, manuscript, National Archives, Washington, D.C., microfilm at Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. See St. George, Washington County. Many of these women were heads of household with several dependents. All are identified by name, marital status, age, and place of birth. 54. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. xv.
U H Q
1943 legal hours were eight per day or forty-eight per week with domestic service and packing and canning industries excepted. 14. Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976), p. 220. 15. Moffitt, A Century of Service, p. 455. 16. Ibid., pp. 462, 470–71. 17. Helen P. Sheffield, Kaysville, questionnaire, 1979, and interview with Aurelia Bennion Cahoon, May 16, 1979, Salt Lake City. Some fifty women who worked in Utah during the period under consideration responded to a two-page questionnaire on the conditions of their employment. These questionnaires are in the author’s possession. Women who requested anonymity will be cited by their initials and city of residence. 18. Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870 to 1920: A Study of the Trend of Recent Changes in the Numbers, Occupational Distribution, and Family Relationship of Women Reported in the Census as Following a Gainful Occupation (1929; reprint ed., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 32, see also pp. 46–47; U.S., Census Office, Twelfth Census of the United States . . . 1900. Vol. 2, Population, Part 2 (Washington, D.C: Census Office, 1902), table 93. 19. Twelfth Census . . . Population, Part 2, table 93; Fifteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, Utah, table 4. 20. Ibid. 21. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. 33; Thirteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics table 7; U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States. State Compendium: Utah (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1924), table 25. 22. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, p. 35. 23. Boulding, The Underside of History, p. 753. 24. Ibid., p. 755. The large increase in women as college professors noted earlier was one kind of breakthrough for women in the first decades of the twentieth century. Ralph V. Chamberlain, The University of Utah: A History of Its First Hundred Years, 1850 to 1950 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1960), appendix P, lists teaching staff during 1850–1915. Over ninety women are listed. Of these, only sixteen began their employment prior to 1900. Outstanding among her peers was Maud May Babcock (for whom the Babcock Theatre at the university is named) who rose from instructor to professor of speech and physical education during 1892–1938 and eventually served as chairman of the Department of Speech. She originated one of the first university theatres in the United States. See pp. 175–77. Although more women were teaching at the college level, the stereotype of the male professor persisted. On. p. 339 the author lists the “new men” who signed teaching contracts for the university’s 1915–16 school year following an academic crisis that had decimated the faculty. Almost 20 percent of the “new men” were women! 25. Thirteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, pp. 256, 138; U.S., Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Population, Second Series: Characteristics of the Population, Utah (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1941), table 16. 26. Fifteenth Census . . . Occupation Statistics, Utah, table 6. 27. Fully 90 percent of employed black women in Utah in 1930 worked in domestic and personal service occupations, primarily as servants.
349
8/26/20 6:43 PM
HISTORIOGRAPHY
8 8
I
N O .
4
Women’s History in Utah Historical Quarterly: A Selected Bibliography
U H Q
I
V O L .
Across the decades, Utah Historical Quarterly has published a goodly number of articles that contribute to an understanding of women in Utah’s past: both as intentional women’s history and otherwise. A selection of those articles is below; most of them are freely available online at issuu.com/utah10/stacks.
350
gh
“The Carol Carlise Summer Wedding Dress Collection.” 83, no. 3 (2015): 216–33. Aird, Polly. “Small but Significant: The School of Nursing at Provo General Hospital, 1904–1924.” 86, no. 2 (2018): 102–27. Alexander, Thomas G. “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah in 1870.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 20–30. Arrington, Chris Rigby. “The Finest of Fabrics: Mormon Women and the Silk Industry in Utah.” 46, no. 4 (1978): 376–96. Arrington, Harriet Horne. “Alice Merrill Horne, Art Promoter and Early Utah Legislator.” 58, no. 3 (1990): 261–76. Arrington, Leonard J. “Women as a Force in the History of Utah.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 3–6. Avery, Valeen Tippets, and Linda King Newell. “The Lion and the Lady: Brigham Young and Emma Smith.” 48, no. 1 (1980): 81–97. Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. “Women’s Work on the Mormon Frontier.” 49, no. 3 (1981): 276–90. Beeton, Beverly. “A Feminist among the Mormons: Charlotte Ives Cobb Godbe Kirby.” 59, no. 1 (1991): 22–31. ———. “Woman Suffrage in Territorial Utah.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 100–120. Bennion, Sherilyn Cox. “Enterprising Ladies: Utah’s Nineteenth-Century Women Editors.” 49, no. 3 (1981): 291–304. Bitton, Davis, and Gary L. Bunker. “Double Jeopardy: Visual Images of Mormon Women to 1914.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 184–202. Bohman, Lisa Bryner. “A Fresh Perspective: The Woman Suffrage Associations of Beaver and Farmington, Utah.” 59, no. 1 (1991): 4–21.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 350
Brooks, Juanita. “Jest a Copin’—Word f’r Word.” 37, no. 4 (1969): 375–96. ——— and Janet G. Butler, ed. “Utah’s Peace Advocate, the ‘Mormona’: Elise Furer Musser.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 151– 66. Bunker, Gary L., and Carol B. Bunker. “Woman Suffrage, Popular Art, and Utah.” 59, no. 1 (1991): 32–51. Bapis, Elaine M. “In the Hands of Women: Home Altar Tradition in Utah’s Greek Orthodox Homes.” 65, no. 4 (1997): 312–34. Bate, Kerry William. “Diary of Mary Elizabeth (May) Stapley, a Schoolteacher in Virgin, Utah.” 60, no. 2 (1992): 158–67. Bennion, Sherilyn Cox. “The Women’s Exponent: Forty-Two Years of Speaking for Women.” 44, no. 3 (1976): 222–39. Blakesley, Katie Clark. “‘Save ‘em, Wash ‘em, Clean ‘em, Squash ‘em’: The Story of the Salt Lake City Minute Women.” 71, no. 1 (2003): 36–51. Blomquist, Roger. “A Most Horrible Crime: The 1908 Murder of Mary Stevens in Orderville, Utah.” 84, no. 2 (2016): 118–35. Bradley, Martha S. “Mary Teasdel, Yet Another American in Paris.” 58, no. 3 (1990): 244–60. Brimhall, Sandra Dawn. “Sara Alexander: Pioneer Actress and Dancer.” 66, no. 4 (1998): 320–33. Brimhall, Sandra Dawn, and David A. Hales. “Frances R. Burke: Toquerville Presbyterian Missionary.” 72, no. 2 (2004): 156–66. Brodie, Fawn M. “Inflation Idyl: A Family Farm in Huntsville.” 40, no. 2 (1972): 112–21. Bunnell, Helen E. “Depression Memories.” 54, no. 3 (1986): 265–67. Buck, Holly. “Utah 4-H, 1940–1960.” 72, no. 1 (2004): 69–84.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 351
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I
Katsanevas, Michael, Jr. “The Emerging Social Worker and the Distribution of the Castle Gate Relief Fund.” 50, no. 3 (1982): 241–54. Kaufman, Kathleen, and Dianne Knorr. “By Foot, by Horse, by Crummy: Louise Van Ee, School Nurse in Bingham Canyon, 1921–39.” 69, no. 1 (2001): 46–59. Larson, Gustave O. “An Industrial Home for Polygamous Wives.” 38, no. 3 (1970): 263–75. Larson, T. A. “Woman Suffrage in Western America.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 7–19. Lieber, Constance L. “‘The Goose Hangs High’: Excerpts from the Letters of Martha Hughes Cannon.” 48, no. 1 (1980): 37–48. Lubomudrov, Carol Ann. “A Woman State School Superintendent: Whatever Happened to Mrs. McVicker?” 49, no. 3 (1981): 254–61. Lyman, Edward Leo. “Dr. Elizabeth Tracy: Angel of Mercy in the Pahvant Valley.” 66, no. 2 (1998): 118–38. MacKay, Kathryn. “The Chocolate Dippers’ Strike of 1910.” 83, no. 1 (2015): 38–51. ———. “Sisters of Ogden’s Mount Benedict Monastery.” 77, no. 3 (2009): 242–59. Madsen, Carol Cornwall. “Decade of Détente: The Mormon–Gentile Relationship in Nineteenth-Century Utah.” 63, no. 4 (1995): 298–319. ———. “‘Sisters at the Bar’: Utah Women in Law.” 61, no. 3 (1993): 208–32. Maw, Herbert B. “In Memoriam: Marguerite L. Sinclair Reusser, 1895–1976.” 44, no. 4 (1976): 397–98. McCormick, John S. “Red Lights in Zion: Salt Lake City’s Stockade, 1908–11.” 50, no. 2 (1982): 168–81. McPherson, Robert S., and Mary Lou Mueller. “Divine Duty: Hannah Sorensen and Midwifery in Southeastern Utah.” 65, no. 4 (1997): 335–54. Mortensen, A. R. “In Memoriam: Kate B. Carter, 1892– 1976.” 44, no. 4 (1976): 395–96. Mulvay, Jill C. “The Liberal Shall be Blessed: Sarah M. Kimball.” 44, no. 3 (1976): 205–21. ———. “The Two Miss Cooks: Pioneer Professionals for Utah Schools.” 43, no. 4 (1975): 396–409. Murphy, Miriam B. “‘If Only I Shall Have the Right Stuff’: Utah Women in World War I.” 58 no. 4 (1990): 334–51. ———. “Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael: Poetic Genius of Pioneer Utah.” 43, no. 1 (1975): 52–66. ———. “Women in the Utah Workforce from Statehood to World War II.” 50, no. 2 (1982): 139–59. ———. “The Working Women of Salt Lake City: A Review of the Utah Gazetteer, 1892–93.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 121–35. Noble, Antonette Chambers. “Utah’s Rosies: Women in the Utah War Industries during World War II.” 59, no. 2 (1991): 123–45. Noble, Kate. “A Great Adventure on Great Salt Lake—A True Story.” Edited by David E. Miller. 33, no. 3 (1965): 218–36. Notarianni, Phillip F. “In Memoriam, Helen Zeese Papanikolas.” 73, no. 1 (2005): 87–89. Oman, Susan Staker. “Nurturing LDS Primaries: Louie Felt and May Anderson, 1880–1940.” 49, no. 3 (1981): 262–75. Pace, Josephine. “Kimberly as I Remember Her.” 35, no. 2 (1967): 112–20. Papanikolas, Helen Z. “Growing up Greek in Helper, Utah.” 48, no. 3 (1980): 244–60. ———. “Magerou: The Greek Midwife.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 50–60. Pearman, Irene Stoof. “The Memory Box.” 52, no. 4 (1982): 389–92.
U H Q
Callahan, Kathryn. “Sisters of the Holy Cross and KearnsSt. Ann’s Orphanage.” 78, no. 3 (2010): 254–74. Carroll, Lavon B. “Melba Judge Lehner and Child Care in the State of Utah.” 61, no. 1 (1993): 40–62. Carver, Sharon Snow. “Salt Lake City’s Reapers’ Club.” 64, no. 4 (1996): 108–20. Constantino, Carlyle. “Emerging from the Archive: Helen M. Post’s Photographs of Twentieth-Century Navajos.” 87, no. 4 (Fall 2019): 316–33. Cooley, Everett L. “In Memoriam: Fawn McKay Brodie.” 49, no. 2 (1981): 204–208. Cooper-Rompato, Christine. “Women Inventors in Utah Territory.” 83, no. 3 (2015): 194–215. Costa, Janeen Arnold. “A Struggle for Survival and Identity: Families in the Aftermath of the Castle Gate Mine Disaster.” 56, no. 3 (1988): 279–92. Davis, Daniel. “‘Appreciating a Pretty Shoulder’: The Risqué Photographs of Charles Ellis Johnson.” 74, no. 2 (2006): 131–46. Dix, Fae Decker. “The Josephine Diaries: Glimpses of the Life of Josephine Streeper Chase, 1881–94.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 167–83. Driggs, Ken. “Who Shall Raise the Children? Vera Black and the Rights of Polygamous Utah Parents.” 60, no. 1 (1991): 27–46. Dykman, Judy. “Utah’s Silver Queen and the ‘Era of the Great Splurge.’” 64, no. 1 (1996): 4–33. Embry, Jessie. “Diploma Nursing at Salt Lake City Religious Based Hospitals.” 76, no. 3 (2008): 281–99. Foster, Lawrence. “Polygamy and the Frontier: Mormon Women in Early Utah.” 50, no. 3 (1982): 268–89. Gates, Susa Young. “From Impulsive Girl to Patient Wife: Lucy Bigelow Young.” 58, no. 3 (1977): 270–88. Geary, Edward A. “A ‘Visitable Past’: Virginia Sorensen’s Sanpete.” 58, no. 3 (1990): 216–31. Godfrey, Audrey M. “An Ogden Cottage Industry Goes Global.” 68, no. 3 (2000): 258–68. ———. “Housewives, Hussies, and Heroines, or the Women of Johnston’s Army.” 54, no. 2 (1986): 157–78. Godfrey, Kenneth W. “Warmth, Friendship, and Scholarship: The Life and Times of Virginia Hanson.” 60, no. 4 (1992): 335–52. Hales, David A. “School Days and School Marms.” 67, no. 2 (1999): 100–111. ———. “‘There Goes Matilda’: Millard County Midwife and Nurse.” 55, no. 3 (1987): 278–93. Hanson, Virginia. “I Remember Hiawatha.” 40, no. 3 (1972): 265–74. Harris, Linda W. “The Legend of Jessie Evans Smith.” 44, no. 4, (1976): 351–64. Hefner, Loretta L. “The National Women’s Relief Society and the U.S. Sheppard-Towner Act.” 50, no. 3 (1982): 255–67. Heimann, Phila. “Life More Sweet than Bitter.” 52, no. 4 (1984): 396–98. Hill, Michelle. “Hoop Mania: Fashion Identity, and Religious Condemnation in Nineteenth-Century Utah.” 85, no 2 (2017): 127–44. Howard, Mary W. “An Example of Women in Politics.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 61–64. James, Laurence P., and Sandra C. Taylor. “‘Strong Minded Women’: Desdemona Stott Beeson and Other Hard Rock Mining Entrepreneurs.” 46, no. 2 (1978): 136–50. James, Louise. “From Gunnison Utah, to Kagoshima, Japan: The Story of Mary Kimura Tokonami.” 73, no. 2 (2005): 175–84. Johnson, Catherine M. “Emma Lucy Gates Bowen: Singer, Musician, Teacher.” 64, no. 4 (1996): 344–55.
351
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
352
Price, Raye. “Utah’s Leading Ladies of the Arts.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 65–85. Pulsipher, Ernest. “A Few Personal Glimpses of Juanita Brooks.” 55, no. 3 (1987): 268–77. Rands, Lorrie. “Food, Comfort, and a Bit of Home: Maude Porter and the Ogden Canteen, 1942–1946.” 84, no. 1 (2016): 70–85. Reeder, Jennifer. “Making an (In)delible Mark: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Girls and their Manuscript Papers.” 85, no. 2 (2017): 273–78. Rigby, Chris. “Ada Dwyer: Bright Lights and Lilacs.” 43, no. 1 (1975): 41–51. Roper, Roger. “Homemakers in Transition: Women in Salt Lake City Apartments, 1910–1940.” 67, no. 4 (1999): 349–66. Rose, Blanche E. “Early Utah Medical Practice.” 10 (1942): 14–32. Rust, Val D. “Male and Female Teachers in Early Utah and the West.” 82, no. 2 (2014): 151–66. Saunders, Richard. “Placing Juanita Brooks among the Heroes (and Villains) of Mormon and Utah History.” 87, no. 3 (2019): 218–37. Schindler, Harold. “In Memoriam: Olive Woolley Burt, 1894–1981.” 49, no. 4 (1981): 388–90. Scott, Patricia Lyn. “Jennie Anderson Froiseth and the Blue Tea.” 71, no. 1 (2003): 20–35. Sillito, John R. “Women and the Socialist Party in Utah, 1900–1920.” 49, no. 3 (1981): 220–38. Smith, Beatrice Scheer. “The 1872 Diary and Plant Collections of Ellen Powell Thompson.” 62, no. 2 (1994): 104–131. Smith, Melvin. “In Memoriam: Juanita T. Brooks, 1898– 1989.” 58, no. 2 (1990): 201–203. Smith, Michaele. “Rape Law in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Sexual Violence in Salt Lake City.” 85, no. 2 (2017): 224–37. Solórzano, Armando, Lisa M. Ralph, and J. Lynn England. “Community and Ethnicity: Hispanic Women in Utah’s Carbon County.” 78, no. 1 (2010): 58–75.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 352
Sorenson, Patricia H. “The Nurse: Marva Christensen Hanchett of Sevier County.” 85, no. 2 (1977): 163–72. Swensen, James R. “Dorothea Lange’s Portrait of Utah’s Great Depression.” 70, no. 1 (2002): 39–62. Thatcher, Linda. “‘I Care Nothing for Politics’: Ruth May Fox, Forgotten Suffragist.” 49, no. 3 (1981): 239–53. Thatcher, Linda, and John R. Sillito. “‘Sisterhood and Sociability’: The Utah Women’s Press Club, 1891–1928.” 53, no. 2 (1985): 144–56. Turley, Kylie Nielsen. “Kanab’s All Woman Town Council, 1912–1914: Politics, Power Struggles, and Polygamy.” 73, no. 4 (2005): 308–28. Uchida, Yoshiko. “Topaz, City of Dust.” 48, no. 3 (1980): 234–43. Ursenbach, Maureen. “Three Women and the Life of the Mind.” 43, no. 1 (1975): 26–40. Ventilla, Andrea. “The History of Saint Mary’s Academy in Salt Lake City 1875–1926.” 80, no. 3 (2012): 226–41. ———. “Women and the Kindergarten Movement in Utah.” 81, no. 2 (2013): 133–48. Vinson, Michael. “From Housework to Office Clerk: Utah’s Working Women, 1870–1900.” 53, no. 4 (1985): 326–35. Wallis, Eileen V. “The Women’s Cooperative Movement in Utah, 1869–1915.” 71, no. 4 (2003): 315–31. Wahlquist, Loreen P. “Memories of a Uintah Basin Farm.” 42, no. 2 (1974): 165–77. Weiss, Megan. “Crazy Quilt: Material Objects as Autobiography.” 86, no. 4 (2018): 366–69. Willie, Gertrude Chapoose. “I Am an American.” Interview by Norma Denver. 39, no. 2 (1971): 194–96. Wilson, Marian Robertson. “Wanda Robertson: A Teacher for Topaz.” 69, no. 2 (2001): 120–38. White, Jean Bickmore. “Gentle Persuaders: Utah’s First Women Legislators.” 38, no. 1 (1970): 31–49. ———. “Women’s Place is in the Constitution: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Utah in 1895.” 42, no. 4 (1974): 344– 69. Young, Clara Decker. “A Woman’s Experiences with the Pioneer Band.” 14 (1946): 173–76.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
REVIEWS
David Berman has contributed a good deal to that literature over many years. In this book, he provides an overview of the era at the state level: brief descriptions of governors’ reform programs around the country and some of the results of their efforts. Scholars of the era have studied individual governors, especially Wisconsin’s Robert La Follette (including books by Robert Maxwell and Nancy Unger and La Follette’s own autobiography); California’s Hiram Johnson (Michael A. Weatherson and Hal W. Bochin); and New Jersey’s Woodrow Wilson (Ray Stannard Baker, David W. Hirst). The careers of Wilson and the most famous of all “progressives,” Theodore Roosevelt, have spawned hundreds of books and thousands of articles, mostly focused on their presidential years. Berman makes a persuasive case in this book that while national legislation and U.S. presidents get plenty of scholarly attention, most reform legislation came at the state level, in what Louis Brandeis called the “laboratories of democracy.” The book moves from region to region, highlighting the varying accomplishments of governors while remaining alert to
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 353
In this work, as a working definition, a truly Progressive governor is viewed, rather loosely, as a person who, as indicated by a conscientious examination of relevant materials, called for a broad package of fundamental political, economic, and social reforms going beyond honesty and efficiency (14).
4 N O . I
For all the strengths of this book, there are some debatable choices. They begin with the title’s reference to the “Progressive Movement,” and Berman’s use of the capital P throughout. Progressive is a much-argued about term today, just as it was in the early twentieth century, and lumping such a variety of reform efforts (by Populists, Democrats, and Republicans) into a single “Progressive Movement” seems problematic. Berman admits that the Progressive label is slippery, in clunky prose that unfortunately mars the book in some places:
8 8
The years from 1890 to 1920 saw a blizzard of reforms on a dizzying array of subjects, including a graduated income tax, women’s suffrage, prohibition of alcohol, pure food and drug, direct election of United States senators, regulation of corporate power, and the IRR reforms (initiative, referendum, and recall), among others. An enormous body of literature has dissected aspects of this busy period. Among the most influential synthetic works that explain the reasons for this reform impulse are Richard Hofstader’s The Age of Reform and Robert H. Wiebe’s The Search for Order. More recent, culturally focused works include Nell Irvin Painter’s Standing at Armageddon and Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent.
V O L .
Louisville: University Press of Colorado, 2019. xii + 303 pp. Cloth, $49.00
I
By David R. Berman
regional differences and contexts, especially race in the South and mining and railroad company power in the West. Berman makes a plausible argument that populist governors of the 1890s should be included as part of a continuous push toward reform.
U H Q
Governors and the Progressive Movement
353
Berman’s definition leads to some odd bedfellows: should we really consider, for example, the Mississippi Democrat Theodore Bilbo (“an out-and-out white supremacist”) and New York Republican Charles Evans Hughes part of the same Progressive Movement because they favored some of the same issues (101)? Berman also passes over eugenics too quickly, defining it narrowly as “the sterilization of people who were considered deficient or undesirable” (310). That leaves out eugenic legislation like antimiscegenation marriage laws or the “positive” campaigns that featured “best baby” contests at state fairs. These reservations aside, David Berman has written a useful, comprehensive reference volume that covers the entire nation and that gives governors their due. Jeff Nichols − Westminster College
8/26/20 6:43 PM
Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory By Cynthia Culver Prescott
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. 408 pp. Cloth, $39.95
354
Fully 130 years after the professed closure of the frontier, the myth of American pioneer spirit and the centrality of “manifest destiny” has yet to die out. Cynthia Culver Prescott’s 2019 Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory asks how and why this myth persists on American landscapes and in American cultural memory through public art. Prescott weaves together the history of “some 200 public monuments erected in the American West (and East) since 1890, including 185 . . . pioneer monuments,” to highlight regional, political, and religious patterns of artistic representations of pioneer women (xii). She asserts that, “Since the 1890s, Americans have claimed their place within a national story of westward expansion and responded to local social change by erecting pioneer monuments” (18). In her examination of these “pioneer mother monuments,” historian Prescott engages with art history, anthropology, and sociology to analyze not only the works of art themselves, but also the meaning various communities have made and remade through these monuments. More importantly, she approaches this task by highlighting the literal role women have played in representations of the mythic Old West, noting that despite many changes in American culture, one constant is that “pioneer monuments used gendered imagery to enshrine white settlers on the landscape” (4–5). While Prescott points to the ways public monuments emphasize racist notions of Anglo-American dominance of the West, she argues that it is also the oftentimes misogynistic portrayals of women in pioneer statues that reinforce this false memory of the triumph of white civilization. Prescott establishes a rough periodization of various trends in these pioneer mother monuments. From 1890 to 1920, first generations of western pioneers expressed anxiety about whiteness in these early monuments that often repeated assumptions about Social Darwinism. Women in these statues moved from allegory to depictions of “actual western women,”
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 354
representing domesticity even in the wilderness (41). Then from 1920 to 1940, “white westerners turned their attention to a new source of anxiety: white women’s sexuality.” They “responded . . . by erecting pioneer monuments that enshrined their gender ideals.” Prescott argues that this genre of conservative, white motherhood in pioneer-themed art was so popular and widespread it should “be called the Pioneer Mother movement” (48). From 1940 to 1975, artists experimented with avant-garde versions of pioneer womanhood, but “many westerners remained committed to traditional representations of pioneer women in long dresses and wide-brimmed sunbonnets as an antidote to what they perceived to be the ills of modernity” (98). A Cold War emphasis on displaying pioneer families with “children embodying hope for the future” was also replaced by frustrations with rebellious 1960s American youth (111). Prescott says, “Amid this growing generational gap, previous decades’ longing for the supposed golden age of the 1850s appeared outdated and even wrong-headed” (121). But, she notes, “Interest in pioneer monuments increased again amid the culture wars of the late 1970s through the early 1990s, offering a way for smaller western communities to claim significance within a larger national story” (129). And these “clashing cultural values . . . produced very different pioneer commemorations in disparate locations,” often showing rifts between progressive cities and conservative locales (17). Finally, Prescott looks from the 1990s until present in an increasingly diverse United States, where “Americans’ varied efforts to remember—or forget—early white settlers reveals the limits of inclusivity in pioneer commemoration and the persistence of U.S. settler colonialism” (253). Prescott’s emphasis on pioneer monuments that received local pushback or feedback in the process of memorialization supports her argument that these public monuments reflected their respective cultural moments and geographical places. She also demonstrates the investment many members of the public had and continue to have in representations of the western pioneers, especially where it might lead to heritage tourism. For example, Prescott describes how the oil magnate E. W. Marland led a national competition for a pioneer
8/26/20 6:43 PM
These religious connections to pioneer women monuments become even more obvious in the context of the Mormon artistic tradition that Prescott explores, especially in chapter four, “Mormon Exceptionalism, Assimilation, and Americanness, 1890–1980.” At first blush, it might seem Prescott’s examination of Mormon pioneer monuments would be better served in a project dedicated to Mormon cultural history.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 355
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Pioneer Mother Monuments is a truly exceptional look at over a century of memorializing the American West through monuments; however, the public art Prescott cites does not always include the pioneer mothers she seeks to highlight. Where women are conspicuously absent in the monuments she describes (like Mahroni Young’s 1947 This is the Place in Salt Lake City, Utah), these examples might have benefitted from a more thorough discussion about what their absence meant and the intentions of presumably male donors and artists in constructing a vision of the West that did not include even allegorical women. Or, when appropriate, she might have broadened her argument to one comparing representations of gender.
I
Prescott’s reading of pioneer monuments also includes observations about religious iconography and how religion manifests physically onto these works of art. She describes the ideal of a “Prairie Madonna” as not only an antidote to the shocking modern values of the New Woman in the 1920s, but also as part of a religious framing of pioneer women of the past. Prescott also explains that “by coopting Catholic Madonna imagery, these prominent male artists simultaneously proclaimed the moral superiority of Protestant Anglo-American women over Catholic women (many of whom were Latina or European immigrants) in the West” (55). Artist August Leimbach built on this imagery in his Madonna of the Trail, a series of “twelve identical Pioneer Mother monuments . . . for a dozen states, stretching from Maryland to California” (66). Fittingly, Leimbach’s work was commissioned by the “conservative women’s organization” the Daughters of the American Revolution, whose lineage Prescott reminds readers was “presumably white” (67). Certainly monuments featuring pioneer women holding Bibles were also allegorical markers of their civilization and purity.
However, this particularly strong chapter supports her larger argument that turn-of-the century Latter-day Saints seeking assimilation into American culture used their westward migration as a way to signal true Americanness, as well as whiteness (134). The examples Prescott notes of Mormon pioneer monuments also complicate the varying representations of gender she notes in other American communities over the last 125 years; the statues that included women were much more conservative and emphasized patriarchal families in ways that mirrored LDS theology. These public representations of pioneer women, she argues, “depicted Mormon migration as a crucial part of the national project of western conquest and settlement, while holding up Mormon frontier families as models for the American nation” (135).
U H Q
monument in his adopted home of Ponca City, Oklahoma, in 1927. It culminated in an exhibition of the designs at galleries across the United States, even in eastern cities like Boston and New York (68–69). The clear winner was artist Bryant Baker’s vision of Pioneer Woman, which Prescott argues “was likely favored by the public and selected by the competition’s sponsor because it skillfully balanced Marland’s desire for a sunbonneted mother with the bolder Pioneer Woman imagery that had emerged in western painting and illustration more than twenty-five years earlier.” Public audiences reached this decision in spite of the recommendations of “the professional art community” (71).
355
Nevertheless, Pioneer Mother Monuments is an ambitious undertaking in both the scale of the study and its potential for public outreach. In addition to her academic writing, Prescott has created a website (www.pioneermonuments. net) to bring the conversation about gender and pioneer monuments to audiences outside the ivory tower, which also provides an easy resource for readers to find images displayed elsewhere in the book. Indeed, Prescott is very aware of nonacademic audiences, and she addresses ongoing public engagement with Old West mythology and its incongruence with or reaction to increasing American multiculturalism. For example, in
8/26/20 6:43 PM
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L . I U H Q
356
Upland, California—a community roughly forty miles east of Los Angeles with a large and growing Latinx population—Prescott observes how residents have maintained a fondness for their copy of Leimbach’s Madonna of the Trail statue into the twenty-first century. She concludes that “Uplanders’ devotion to the postwar middle-class American dream may help explain their continued embrace of their Madonna’s maternal ideology, while their efforts to come to terms with their community’s growing ethnic diversity no doubt increases the appeal of the Madonna’s whiteness” (260–61). She also acknowledges that even though there may be more pushback to building monuments to a pioneer past in more progressive communities, as a whole, “Americans remain hesitant to question national mythology centered on westward expansion” (289). And even when they do resist these public monuments, pioneer statues still receive more criticism for their depictions of race rather than gender. Pioneer Mother Monuments does the hard work of documenting 125 years of public monuments depicting pioneer women and the American West, showing how artists, donors, and communities have grappled with this past in conjunction with their contemporary values and beliefs. Representations of the past are inherently political, and Prescott’s worthy book acknowledges not only how and why different communities remember American westward expansion, but also how these memories and representations have and continue to obscure the history of the West and the diverse peoples who shaped it. Amanda Tewes − University of California, Berkeley
Iron Mining and Manufacturing in Utah By Evan Y. Jones and York F. Jones Cedar City: Southern Utah University Press, 2019. xvi + 484 pp. Paper, $24.99
In 1850, Brigham Young issued a call for a socalled iron mission to southern Utah (Iron County) to establish an iron manufacturing industry that would mine the iron ore deposits discovered west of present-day Cedar City,
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 356
Utah. During the next six years many furnace test runs were made, with varying degrees of success. Numerous problems beset the iron works, which were never as successful as had been hoped. On October 8, 1858, Brigham Young advised Isaac C. Haight, the manager of the Deseret Iron Company, to shut the operation down. However, that was not the end of iron mining in Utah. Iron Mining and Manufacturing in Utah, by Evan Jones and York Jones, focuses on the major iron mining operations of Iron County and the Ironton and Geneva smelters. There were other iron mines in Utah, as well as coal mines and limestone quarries whose products were used in the steel-making process. All these enterprises were important, but the focus of this book is a strip of land west of Cedar City, Utah, about twenty-one miles long and three miles wide, that contained some of the most extensive and spectacular iron ore deposits in the western United States. Iron Mining and Manufacturing takes a long view, beginning with the formation of iron ore millions of years ago. It then discusses the Iron Mission operation in Cedar City in the 1850s and the subsequent operation at Iron City in the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1920s, after nearly forty years of inactivity, came the building of the Ironton plant, the coming of the railroad to Cedar City, and the iron mine at Iron Springs. These developments were followed by operations at Desert Mound (1924–1936) and Iron Mountain (1935–1943). The book covers the construction of the Geneva plant by the United States government during World War II and the resulting dramatic expansion of the mining operations at the five iron mining areas of Iron County. After the booming post-war years, the mines suffered a long slow winding down period (1960–1980). The decline and ensuing mine closures are also discussed, with the last mining operation closing in 2014. York Jones—who worked for thirty-three years at the iron mines for Utah Construction Company, beginning as a surveyor and ending as the mine manager—began this book. After retiring, York worked another twelve years overseeing the dismantling, disposal, and environmental reclamation of the mine’s assets. Evan completed the book started by his father. He too
8/26/20 6:43 PM
− Southern Utah University
Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture By Chip Colwell Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 348 pp. Paper, $19.00
In Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, Chip Colwell studies the troubled relationship between Native Americans and museums in the United States; he does so by looking at the historic battle to reclaim Native artifacts looted and hoarded for centuries by whites. Colwell believes that repatriation offers a path toward reconciliation for Indigenous peoples and museums: “repatriation extinguished the old idea that museums could preserve and present Native American culture without input from Native Americans themselves” (264). As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, Colwell has personally negotiated repatriations and offers an insider’s account of the process. He therefore offers new insights for a history well known to scholars of Native American studies. Colwell skillfully uses his experiences to drive the narrative’s structure. He pivots the historical and contemporary struggles around four repatriations involving the Zuni, Cheyenne, Tlingit, and Miccosukee peoples. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Repatriation and Graves Protections Act (NAGPRA).
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 357
4 N O . I 8 8 V O L .
Paula Mitchell
There has been little scholarship on these questions since 1990. Colwell mixes analysis and personal experience in a meaningful way, and the stories that emerge are captivating. Connie Hart Yellowman, a Cheyenne, was among the nation’s delegation that visited the Smithsonian in 1993 to retrieve remains of those who died in the Sand Creek Massacre, and she kissed the skull of a thirteen-year old female. Years later at a powwow, Colwell asked her why, to which she replied, “Because she had never been held for years” (95). Native people’s perspectives control the narrative, and Colwell acts as a liaison between them and the reader. He also includes “a note on the terms American Indian, Native American, etc.” that explains why he uses certain terms to describe groups of people (271). He supports his decisions with a historical discussion regarding how popular labels such as American Indian and Native American developed and changed over time. Colwell’s primary concern is bringing forward Indigenous perspectives, but the individuality of his story can be challenging for historians.
I
Iron County has a rich history of iron mining, and the Joneses tell about the people, companies, smelters, railroads, and mines that created that history: their successes and failures, and the mines that were worked, when, where, how, why, and by whom. This book is well researched, and it synthesizes many primary resources into a narrative that provides the story of over 160 years of iron mining and manufacturing in the state of Utah.
NAGPRA sketched out a path for repatriating remains and objects, but the procedure relied on compromise between American Indians and museum officials. Colwell is in the both fortunate and unfortunate position of being able to directly assess the law’s effectiveness over the last twenty-five years. While there have been many victories for American Indians, Colwell warns that there is a long way to go before Native America’s culture is entirely reclaimed. After all, NAGPRA doesn’t apply to private collectors.
U H Q
spent his career in mining, first for the iron mines west of Cedar City, Utah, and eventually moving to Farmington, New Mexico, where he worked at Utah Construction Company’s coal mines located there.
357
To put it simply, Colwell’s story can’t be recreated in any meaningful way by scholars. His personal experiences consistently fill gaps where historians would need to place empirical evidence. Nonetheless, Colwell’s sincerity and thoroughness alleviate potential problems, as in this explanation: “some of the dialogue was reconstructed from people’s memories or written notes from meetings, which understandably vary in quality and reliability; it was impossible to corroborate exact quotes” (p277). Not every reader will be satisfied with this, but most readers will sympathize with Colwell’s busy life and accept his expertise as a good enough reason to believe him.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
willingness to have frank discussions about the controversies around labeling groups of people. Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits stands as a definitive study about repatriation’s necessity for Native American to retain and preserve their diverse cultures. Dean McGuire − Utah State University
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
Colwell successfully articulates the struggles of American Indians to reclaim their culture from museums in the United States. His success comes from the sincere and careful way he tells the story. Colwell uses his insider knowledge to empower other people’s voices rather than his own, and this in of itself is worthy of high praise. Terms and labels are something historians often take for granted, and scholars in the field should take note of Colwell’s
358
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 358
8/26/20 6:43 PM
ELIZABETH EGLESTON GIRAUD has worked as a planner and architectural historian for the Idaho State Historic Preservation Office and the Salt Lake City Planning Division, and she is currently employed at the Utah Department of Transportation. In 2010, she authored Twin Falls, Idaho for the Images of America series (Arcadia). She is pursuing her second graduate degree at the University of Utah, this time in history, with a focus on the Progressive Era. TIFFANY H. GREENE graduated as a Service-Learning Scholar from the University of Utah with a bachelor’s degree in secondary education, specializing in history. She enjoys learning about and sharing stories of women past and present. She currently works as a historical research consultant for Better Days 2020, where she has spent the last eighteen months researching Utah’s rural suffrage movement. KATHERINE KITTERMAN is the historical director for Better Days 2020, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing Utah women’s history.
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 359
MIRIAM B. MURPHY attended the University of California, Berkeley, and graduated with a degree in English from the University of Utah. After working in New York and San Francisco, she returned to Utah, where she began a long career with the Utah State Historical Society. Murphy wrote extensively on Utah history, and her poem about the 1924 Castle Gate mine disaster was selected for the state’s centennial literary anthology.
I 8 8 V O L . I
She is the co-author of two recent books about the history of women’s voting rights in Utah, Champions of Change: Twenty-Five Women Who Made History and Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah. Kitterman is also a Ph.D. candidate at American University. Her dissertation analyzes the rhetoric of women’s struggle for suffrage in nineteenth-century Utah, highlighting the two-way connection between suffragists in West and East.
U H Q
REBEKAH RYAN CLARK is a historian for Better Days 2020 and co-author of Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah. She holds a law degree from BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School and a history and literature degree from Harvard University, where her honors thesis examined Utah’s national suffrage activism.
N O .
4
CONTRIBUTORS
359
WENDY SIMMONS JOHNSON is the regional director for the Commonwealth Heritage Group, Inc. Ogden, Utah, Office. She has worked for over twenty years in historic archaeology and historic research in the Intermountain West, specializing in archaeological documentation of the transcontinental railroad throughout Utah. Simmons Johnson received her master’s degree from Brigham Young University in 1992, with her thesis focusing on the role of women in ancient Middle Eastern cities between the years 0–400 A.D.
8/26/20 6:43 PM
U H Q
I
V O L .
8 8
I
N O .
4
U TA H I N F O C U S
360
Russell Lee, Sweet corn and daughter of a Mormon Farmer. Snowville, Utah. This August 1940 image belongs to the corps of work created by Russell Lee as he traveled throughout rural Utah, documenting socioeconomic conditions for the Farm Security Administration. Snowville, Utah, lies in the Curlew Valley and on the northern edge of Box Elder County. Settlement began
UHQ 88_4 Text.indd 360
in the 1870s, and from the start, the water from Deep Creek played a key role in the livelihood of this agricultural town. Today, Snowville’s location just off Interstate 84 makes it a gateway point for travel between Idaho and Utah. Lee’s photograph provides a glimpse of family life in a beautiful, arid landscape. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USF34-037244-D.
8/26/20 6:43 PM