Were you aware that the very first town in the United States to have an entirely female city council serving with a female mayor was in Utah?
I wasn’t, either, until Jill Derr mentioned it on Thursday afternoon at the annual FairMormon conference. It happened in Kanab, of all places, in 1912.
Here’s a little item about the episode:
By the way:
Utah women were granted the right to vote on 12 February 1870, during the reign of the tyrannous misogynist Brigham Young.
(Only Wyoming was earlier on the issue, granting women voting rights on 10 December 1869. Wyoming Territory had roughly 5000 men at the time, but just 1000 women — the population of Utah Territory, by comparison, was approximately 90,000 — and, among other things, it was thought that granting the franchise to Wyoming’s women might help to attract more of them to that Territory.)
In a bid to liberate Mormon women, however, the federal government took away their right to vote via the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887. Nonetheless, in January 1896 Utah became the third state to join the Union with equal suffrage for both men and women. Finally, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States granted the vote to all adult female citizens in late 1920.
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