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“Mormon” Women’s Protest. An Appeal For Freedom, Justice and Equal Rights. The Ladies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints protest against the tyranny and indecency of Federal Officials in Utah, and against their own disenfranchisement without cause. Full Account of the Proceedings at the Great Mass Meeting, held in the theatre, Salt Lake City Utah, Saturday, March 6, 1886.

[Salt Lake City,] Deseret News Co., Printers, [1886]. 8vo (9” x 6”), original printed tan wrappers. 91 pp. Early ownership inscription in ink at top of title page, “Mary H. White May 2.” CONDITION: Very good, some wear and light soiling to wrappers, dampstain at top right of front wrapper, affecting top margin of initial leaves.

An important pamphlet in the history of women’s suffrage in America, documenting the efforts of Mormon women to retain their rights to vote, live, and worship as they choose in the face of the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887.

Women had gained the right to vote while Utah was still a territory, in 1870, and they were outraged at the prospect of losing it—among other cornerstones of their way of life—to the “Anti-Polygamy Act” not twenty years later. The volume offered here provides a record of their mass meeting, which, held on March 6th, 1886, filled the Salt Lake Theatre “almost to suffocation” with a “dense but orderly multitude.” Speeches protest the “indecent” questions of federal “inquisition,” underscore the “righteousness and virtue” of Mormon women, harken back to father and grandfathers who fought for American rights and liberties in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, and underscore that “The ballot in the hand of woman is a mighty power, and our enemies know it…May the day never dawn that shall see the women of Utah without the ballot, but may that time speed[i]ly arrive when all the women of this nation will be alike blessed with us.” An address by “Mrs. Marilla M. Daniels” decries those members of Congress who would put Mormons “in the same position…that the negroes were before their emancipation from slavery,” and revoke their right to vote simply because “we have not used this privilege to free ourselves from the ‘chains’ that bound us to this Priesthood or ‘hierarchy,’ as they are pleased to call it.”

The final pages of the volume reproduce the “Memorial prepared by the committee appointed at the mass meeting,” which was addressed to the President, the Senate, and the House and personally delivered by Mrs. Emmeline B. Wells and Dr. Ellen B. Ferguson.

The Edmunds-Tucker Act passed in 1887, disincorporated the LDS Church, allowing the Federal Government to seize all church properties valued over $50,000, and, of course, revoked women’s suffrage. The women of Utah would not regain their right to vote until 1896, when it was enshrined in the Utah state constitution. Utah nevertheless remained ahead of most other states: by the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, “16 Utah women had won election to the Utah legislature and approximately 120 women had been elected to county offices across the state” (Kitterman).

The inscription on the title page of  “Mary H. White” may be that of the woman who later gave testimony to LDS historian Andrew Jenson on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, but we have been unable to confirm this.

The proceedings of a landmark gathering of Mormon women, organizing for their suffrage rights in the face of sweeping anti-Mormon legislation in the late 1880s.

REFERENCES: Flake 5533; Kitterman, Katherine. “First to Vote : Utah’s Unique Place in the Suffrage Movement” and “The Andrew Jenson Collection” at BYU Studies online.

Item #10197

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