Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West
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In 1895, Utah's leading suffragist, Emmeline B. Wells, welcomed her friends Susan B. Anthony and Reverend Anna Howard Shaw to a gathering of more than 8,000 people from around the nation at the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention. Tensions and setbacks had defined the effort to enfranchise women up until that point, but the women gathered in Utah to celebrate the suffrage movement's recent wins and strategize their next triumphs. Pioneering the Vote tells the remarkable, largely unknown story of the early suffrage victories that happened in states and territories in the American West, when the East was still decades away from the 19th Amendment. With the encouragement of the Eastern leaders, women from Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho came together in a unique moment of friendship and unified purpose to secure the vote for women in America.
Western suffragists, including Utahns Martha Hughes Cannon, Sarah M. Kimball, Emmeline B. Wells, and Zina D. H. Young, pose with national suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw at the 1895 Rocky Mountain Suffrage Meeting in Salt Lake City. Photo courtesy Utah State Historical Society.
“Combining careful historical research with a literary penchant for storytelling, Pioneering the Vote reveals a fascinating, complex history that will make you alternatingly cheer, sigh, laugh, and want to throw the book across the room. Neylan McBaine gives us characters and stories readers won't soon forget, and restores the intermountain West -- with all its frontier peculiarities -- to its rightful place as the place where American women first exercised the full and equal right to vote. For anyone who cares about the still-unfinished quest for women's equality, this book will make you appreciate anew how far we've come and how far we have yet to go.”
-Patrick Mason, Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University
