Utah Women Vote, and Then They Don't, and Then They Do
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
On February fourteenth, eighteen seventy, Seraph Young, a school teacher and the grandniece of Brigham Young, cast a ballot in a Salt Lake City municipal election. She was the first woman to vote under a law granting equal suffrage in the United States. Utah Territory had granted women the right to vote two days earlier, on February twelfth. Wyoming Territory had done so two months before, in December eighteen sixty-nine, making it the first. Utah was second.
The historical context is strange. The federal government and critics of the LDS church had argued that plural marriage oppressed women. Utah's territorial legislature, dominated by LDS men, responded in part by giving women the vote, betting that enfranchised women would defend polygamy at the ballot box. It was a political calculation as much as a matter of principle.
For seventeen years, Utah women voted. Then, in eighteen eighty-seven, the Edmunds-Tucker Act stripped them of the franchise as part of a broader assault on the LDS church's political power. The act also disincorporated the church, required anti-polygamy oaths for voters, and abolished the Perpetual Emigrating Fund that had financed pioneer crossings.
Utah women regained the right to vote when the territory became a state in January eighteen ninety-six, and this time they kept it. The state constitution included the guarantee. Women in Utah had the vote before most of the country, lost it for seventeen years because of federal anti-polygamy legislation, and won it back again, all before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in nineteen twenty.
