Uppity Mormon Women: Martha Hughes Cannon

Martha Hughes Cannon

First Female State Senator in the United States

If you were a woman who wanted to be on the cutting edge of political opportunity in the late 19th Century, then Utah was the place to be. The first female US senator was from Utah: Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon.

Yeah, you heard me Doctor Cannon. Senator Cannon. And occasionally she was called Mom.

Martha lived an interesting life. She's one of the bevy of Utah women to get a tertiary education and become a doctor. She received a chemistry degree in 1875, graduated from medical school in 1881 and earned a pharmacy degree in 1882. She worked at the Deseret Hospital as a staff physician. You go, girl!

Like so many Utahn women of the time, she fully believed in rights for women: suffrage rights, right to education, right to work and more. She did not subscribe to the notion that a woman had to remain at home with no outside interests: "Somehow I know that women who stay home all the time have the most unpleasant homes there are. You give me a woman who thinks about something besides cook stoves and wash tubs and baby flannels, and I'll show you, nine times out of ten, a successful mother."^[1]

She was also a plural wife, being number four of six to Angus M. Cannon and bore him three children.

Because she was a doctor at the Deseret Hospital, she was pressured by federal agents seeking to persecute polygamists to give out the names of babies born to polygamist fathers, which would have resulted in jail time for the fathers. She said, "To me it is a serious matter to be the cause of sending to jail a father upon whom a lot of little children are dependent, whether those children were begotten by the same or by different mothers - the fact remains they all have little mouths that must be fed."^[2] Rather than contribute to the hardship and potential destruction of families, she went into self-imposed exile to Europe.

When she returned to Utah, she entered the political arena. She supported the Utah Equal Suffrage Association and became involved in the national suffrage movement.

In 1896, the first year of Utah's statehood, she ran as a democrat for the Utah State Senate. (FYI, her husband ran in the same election as a republican. She beat him.) After serving two fruitful terms in office, she served as a member of the Utah Board of Health.

She died on July 10, 1932.

Next post: Rachel Ridgeway Ivins Grant