McBaine, “Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West” (Reviewed by Julie Nichols)

Title: Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West
Author: Neylan McBaine
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Genre: Popular History
Year of Publication: 2020
Number of Pages: 228 (notes begin p. 197)
Binding: Cloth
ISBN13:  978-1-629727363
Price:  $19.99

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters

When I was in my early teens, my mother gave me an age-appropriate, historically accurate depiction of the Mountain Meadows Massacre debacle that opened my eyes to people and events I hadn’t known anything about. I’d never heard of “popular history,” but the book fulfilled the mission of that genre–though the title and author of the book are lost to me, I’ve never forgotten the images, the sense of suspense and injustice, or the names of the perpetrators and victims. And because the book handled a sensitive subject with respect for all sides, I’ve felt a sense of engagement with that event ever since.

Now Neylan McBaine has performed the same service for an even more universally important historical moment.

On August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, legally guaranteeing American women the right to vote. In this centennial year, McBaine’s  Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West provides an entertaining and informative account of the women in the Western territories who held conventions, drafted resolutions and petitions, networked with such national figures as Susan B. Anthony and the Reverend Anna Shaw, and otherwise found ways to persuade non-Mormons, anti-polygamists, and suffrage opponents that the vote belongs not only to men but incontrovertibly to women as well.

It’s a lively narrative—a novel of sorts—recounting the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention of May 12-14, 1895, with Emmeline B. Wells at the center. The book’s value, like all the best of popular history, is in its capacity to bring to life the context of the events, the characters’ personalities, the details of the setting, and the significance of the work it describes. It reveals a great deal that’s little known about the suffrage movement in the West.

McBaine, a Yale graduate and CEO of the Better Days 2020 organization, speaks and writes about women’s leadership, especially in Utah and the West. To fully realize her subjects in Pioneering the Vote, she makes effective use of several devices. Each of the sixteen chapters begins with a poem or song lyric written by and for suffragists of the time:

“Rise, Columbia’s daughters, rise;/Heaven has surely heard our cries,/Yet to the world we must appeal…./Now let woman’s watchword be–/’Equal Rights and Liberty” (145).

Lines like these set the stage. Emmeline B. Wells and her cohorts penned and recited such verse liberally, apparently, so McBaine’s epigraphs provide the background sound that inspired the movement to persistent action.

Next, in each chapter a few hours of the Suffrage Convention are recorded like fiction, with well-imagined dialogue, energetic movement among the characters and places of the Convention, and plenty of meticulously-researched particulars of clothing, architecture, and other local color.

“It’s quite a morning, Sister Sarah, isn’t it?” Emmeline smiled, squeezing Kimball’s hand. “We’ve come a long way. And we couldn’t have done it without you.” Her devotion to the older woman was sincere. Sarah had been a giant in Emmeline’s eyes since those first days in Nauvoo when Kimball had initiated the Relief Society…. (48).

In scenes like this McBain imaginatively demonstrates the relationships and attitudes of the leaders of the suffragist movement in Utah, acknowledging the braided origins of their work together in church, politics, family, and shared history.

Within each chapter, two other devices further McBain’s intentions. Sidebar bionotes provide focused profiles of the leading women who appear in the scenes, one-page summaries of their lives and accomplishments.

In addition, flashbacks of events prior to this Conference explain the context of the events and previous wins and losses of the movement. Some of these are direct quotes from speeches given at the Convention, so that we hear the actual cadence of the words and feel the power of the sentiments. Other such flashbacks are carefully worded to be easily understood, their significance to the “scene” portion clearly explained.

Alternating these four different but complementary kinds of writing keeps the non-academic reader engaged. What’s on offer is a smorgasbord of significant but probably never-considered information about the role of the women of the West in laying the foundation for the ratification of the 19^th Amendment. In her preface, McBain explains that “one reason the suffrage leadership of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and Idaho is not more fully explored [in standard studies of the suffragist movement] is because the forces that drove the movement in those areas are now uncomfortable and even foreign to contemporary audiences. Each of the first four suffrage wins was the result of specific local pressures that have little resonance in our modern world” (viii) –pressures like polygamy, temperance, and racism. In her fiction-like scenes and her more expository flashbacks, McBain discusses these forces in terms that are easy to swallow, though not simple.

She justifies her telling of these stories in four ways:

¹ “The story of suffrage is really the story of American women transitioning from the localized influence of the domestic sphere to the broad influence and visibility of the public sphere….[2 By] ignoring the activities and accomplishments of the nineteenth-century women, we fall into the anti-feminist trap of silencing women’s voices….Particularly in the case of the polygamous women of Utah, we owe it to them to genuinely seek out what they wanted us to know about them, not what Eastern newspapers or legislators said about them….[3] the 19^th Amendment is actually just one milestone in a lengthy and ongoing process to recognize all American’s rights to civic participation…[and 4] we underestimate the way interactions between [U.S.] East and West in the past have forged our political, economic, and cultural structures even today” (viii-xi, passim)

Her focus on the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention, when Susan B. Anthony and the Reverend Anna Shaw came to Salt Lake City along with over eight thousand other women and men to push the campaign forward for women’s enfranchisement, fulfills these four intentions. Like that book about the Mountain Meadows Massacre that I read as a tweener, Pioneering the Vote provides an emotional entrance into a significant intersection of Mormon/Western/U.S. history.  “Popular” readers will come away from this book entertained and engaged as well as enlightened. They may even feel a new sense of ownership toward these characters and events, and on a larger scale, toward the rightness of all such social justice causes—as well they should.