Review
———
Title: Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon: Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife
Author: Constance L. Lieber
Publisher: Signature Books
Genre: Biography
Date: 2022
Pages: 106
ISBN: 978-1-56085-457-9
Cost (paperback): $9.95
Reviewed for AML by Julie J. Nichols
This slim little book acknowledges its limitations up front: Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon’s journals, and many of her letters, were burned at her request, so there’s much we don’t know about her private responses to her life’s vicissitudes. But Constance L. Lieber’s use of secondary sources reassures us that what she tells us, while incomplete, is as factual as she can make it. Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon: Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife is trustworthy and concise, better than adequate for any historian of Utah’s women; Lieber has written a highly readable volume filling the need to remember and honor Cannon for her place in Utah’s narrative.
Perhaps best known for running against her own husband for the Utah State Senate in 1896 and winning, Cannon was the first woman state senator in the United States. She was a physician, her husband’s fourth plural wife, mother to three children, an astoundingly accomplished person at a historically significant juncture in Utah history—and controversial at almost every turn.
Lieber’s admiration for her subject infuses the book with a positive spin. “Mattie” came with her family to Utah from Wales in 1861 when she was seven. She grew up among voting women (Utah women got the vote in 1870), set type for the Women’s Exponent and Deseret News, served as secretary to the Tenth Ward Young Women’s Retrenchment Association, and “absorbed the talks given by prominent women such as Emmeline B. Wells and Eliza R. Snow” (12).
From 1878 to 1882, she received schooling in Ann Arbor and Philadelphia, ultimately receiving diplomas from the faculty of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the National School of Elocution and Oratory. When she returned to Salt Lake, she joined the staff at the new Deseret Hospital and made a name for herself quickly as a result of her “intelligence and capacity.”
In 1884 she married Angus M. Cannon, the brother of George Q. She was his fourth wife—and this was to drive much of the rest of her life. All wives can probably say something like that (“my marriage to X drove the rest of my life”), but in Mattie’s case, the controversy around polygamy forced her to spend much of her married life in exile in order to protect her husband. Before he died in 1915, she had spent uncomfortable years in England and California, both northern and southern, complicated by the births of her three children and her own ill health.
In between, though, lay the years of political activism Lieber lauds most enthusiastically. After her first exile in England, “Mattie” started a nursing school in Salt Lake at one point and returned to her medical practice at another, but when Utah applied for statehood and the Women’s Suffrage movement recruited her to speak publicly for the cause, she became an outstanding public figure, advocating for women’s education and equality and attending the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
Lieber is meticulously fair in describing Cannon’s carefully-curated politics. She was radical for her time—not so much for ours. Nevertheless, when the vote was procured, “’the party [Democratic] thought there ought to be a lady in the senate, and a committee came and asked me if I would run and I said “yes.”…My name was offered as a candidate and I was duly nominated. Then I went home and congratulated Mr.Cannon on his nomination’” (53). The time was ripe for her. She served her first term vigorously and well, drafting several bills for public health care and earning the respect of her male colleagues.
However, scandal erupted when she became pregnant with her and Angus’s third child. Polygamy was prohibited before Utah became a state, but the birth of this daughter made it clear that Angus (among others) had never given up the practice. (In fact, he married a fifth wife after Mattie). He went to prison, and she was banned from office. Her political life was over.
As Lieber tactfully describes it, Mattie’s life was difficult after this. She loved her children and grandchildren but was never financially sound, and both she and her older daughter Elizabeth suffered physical and mental health issues. Nevertheless, when she died in 1932 at the age of 75, most obituaries hailed her as the first woman senator, and presently memorials pay tribute to her at the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall and various points in Salt Lake City.
Lieber’s esteem for her capable subject makes this tightly-organized, scrupulously-researched biography a pleasure to read. Anyone interested in Utah history, particularly where it involves women’s rights and roles, will deeply appreciate Lieber’s efforts, especially in the face of missing records and fiercely held privacy. Martha Hughes Cannon was not a paragon of everything perfect in Utah, but she helped create a foundation for strong and competent women that still holds. Lieber’s biography celebrates it appropriately.