Mormon Women: Historical Firsts

By Dr. Mark W. Cannon

About the Author:
Mark W. Cannon served as Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren E. Burger, for 13 years. He also served as Staff Director of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution; Director, Institute of Public Administration, New York; Chairman, BYU Department of Political Science. He obtained his Ph.D. at Harvard University in Political Economy and Government.

Many people are unaware that among the fruits of Mormonism, are that Mormon women have historically been leaders in civic activity and achieved many political firsts in America. Some of these are summarized in the following paragraph from an article I wrote on Civic Duties in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism:

“Latter-day Saint women were involved in public life long before women in other parts of the United States. They have always voted in Church congregations. The University of Deseret, founded in Salt Lake City in 1850, was the first coeducational university west of the Mississippi. H. H. Bancroft's History of Utah reported that women voted in the provisional government before territorial status in 1850 (p. 272, San Francisco, 1890). The first documented women voters in modern times were in Salt Lake City on February 14, 1870. Mary W. Chamberlain was elected mayor of Kanab, Utah, with an all-female town board, in 1912 (undoubtedly the first all-female municipal council in the United States.) The first woman state senator elected in the United States (Dr. Mattie Hughes Paul Cannon, 1896) and the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate who was neither the wife nor the daughter of a politician (Paula Hawkins, Florida, 1980) were Latter-day Saints.”

Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Macmillan, 1992, pages 285-6. Paragraph on women is on p. 285. Link: http://eom.byu.edu/index.php/Civic.Duties