Utah Women Were the First to Vote!

I have been reading a lot of books on gender and marriage and family and women's issues, etc. the last several weeks.

I completed Ashley Montagu's The Natural Superiority of Women a couple of days ago. I glanced at a turn-of-the-century book, Woman and Social Progress by Nellie Seeds and H.L. Mencken's 1917, In Defense of Women.

I was doing a book review of Montagu's book for my Social Construction of Identity class when I came across a passing, brief reference to Susan B. Anthony.

Suddenly, it came to my mind...something that I had heard once, that the first women to vote in the United States were Utah women. I decided to diverge from my paper for a bit and look into the matter. I did a search for "Utah" and "suffrage"

I read quite a few articles and biographies online about early Mormon feminism, and confirmed that Utah women were the first women in the United States of America to vote, 50 years before the 19th Amendment was ratified.

I am now doing some extensive research on and compiling an Amazon.com wishlist of books. The first list of books that I have compiled are diaries, ethnographies, historical writing by and about Mormon women, of the past and present, from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to Terry Tempest Williams.