This Plural Wife is Now in the Capitol

...and she's also a doctor.

Today’s post comes to you from Gabe Fleisher, who you can also find at Wake Up to Politics.

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Whenever I’m on Capitol Hill, one of my favorite rooms to stop in is National Statuary Hall.

It’s an imposing space, built to mimic an ancient amphitheater: domed ceiling, marble columns, lit by a hanging lantern. The walls are dotted with statues, the heart of a collection that spills out across the Capitol. There are 100 of them in total, two from each state. Walking around the room, you can get a real sense of the country’s history — and of which citizens each state views as among their most impactful.

Helen Keller is in the collection, courtesy of Alabama. So is Thomas Edison, from Ohio. The statues cover a very broad range, from the evangelist Billy Graham (North Carolina) to the humorist Will Rogers (Oklahoma); from Native American chief Standing Bear (Nebraska) to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy (Mississippi).

Last week, a new statue joined those prominent Americans, wedged in right next to Arkansas’ Johnny Cash: Martha Hughes Cannon of Utah.

The new addition may not have the notoriety of a Keller or an Edison, but Cannon has an important place in the history books nonetheless: she was the first female state senator in U.S. history, elected in 1896.

Cannon is a fascinating figure: an immigrant, a suffragist, a pioneering doctor, and one of six plural wives of LDS leader Angus Cannon — who, by the way, she beat in her first state senate race. That’s right: America’s first female state senator got there by running against her husband… and emerging the winner.

Let’s start at the beginning.

“Mattie,” as she was known, was born as Martha Hughes in Wales in 1857 — the Welsh government calls her a “true Welsh-American icon” — to a family of Mormon converts. When she was two years old, the Hugheses left for the United States, as part of a wave of about 5,000 Welsh Mormons who came here between the 1840s and the 1860s. The journey took a while: by the time they settled in Utah, her family’s destination (and the spiritual home of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, or LDS), Mattie had turned four.

To say Hughes was precocious would be an understatement. She enrolled in college at age 16; by the time she was 25, she had collected four (!) degrees: studying chemistry at the University of Utah, pharmacy at the University of Pennsylvania, oration at the National School of Elocution and Oratory, and receiving her medical degree from the University of Michigan. Each time, she was either the only female student in her class, or one of a tiny handful of women.

She returned home to Utah to work as a doctor (at a time when women made up only around 5% of the profession) and soon met Angus Cannon, becoming the fourth of his six wives in 1884 — two years after Congress made polygamy illegal in U.S. territories like Utah. The wedding was conducted in secret, but Angus was eventually caught and sent to jail; Martha fled to Europe, worried that prosecutors would find out not only about her own plural marriage, but force her to testify against plural wives whose children she had delivered as a doctor.

Cannon — who gave birth to her and Angus’ first child while in exile — remained abroad for more than a year, before eventually deciding it was safe to come home. “I have stuck it out so far, with the result of wearing myself out, so that I have no ambition left. … I am growing indifferent to everything that once gave keenest pleasure,” Cannon wrote her husband towards the end of her exile, according to letters unearthed by the author Constance Lieber.

When she returned to the U.S., though, so did her ambition — in ways that would conflict with Angus’, who was now out of jail having served six months.

Cannon quickly became involved in Utah’s suffrage movement: “All persons should have the legal right to be the equal of every other,” she said in one speech, drawing on her education as an orator. When the new state gave women the vote in its constitution, Cannon was the first in line to register.

A new state, of course, also needs a state legislature. Here’s how she explained what happened next: “Well, this year we got suffrage, and the party thought there ought to be a lady in the Senate, and a committee came to me and asked me if I would run and I said ‘yes.’ I went to the nominating convention as a delegate. My name was offered as a candidate and I was duly nominated.”

And the kicker: “Then I went home and congratulated Mr. Cannon on his nomination.”

Technically speaking, they weren’t running against each other one-on-one: it was an at-large election, meaning a slate of several Republican candidates was running against a slate of several Democratic candidates, competing for four open seats. But Mattie was nominated on the Democratic ticket and Angus as part of the Republicans’ — which was enough for the national press to have a field day.

For newspapers, it was a triple-whammy: Mattie Cannon’s potential election was history-making, her husband was on the opposing ticket, AND the two were in a plural marriage, which violated federal law?

Local journalists demanded a Cannon v. Cannon debate: “What would draw a bigger crowd, to whom the truths of democracy might be expounded, than the prospect of a public verbal set-to between Dr. Mattie Hughes Cannon and her husband, Angus M. Cannon?” they asked. The idea did not pan out.

Mattie Cannon was the underdog; when she won, it made headlines around the globe. “Mrs. Cannon believes in polygamy, and is a victim of it,” the Detroit Free Press reported in one representative article, “if victim she can be called when she can whip her lord and master at the polls.”

Martha Hughes Cannon, front row, first woman on the left

Cannon responded by saying that if wives were slaves to their husbands, then as a plural wife, she was “only one-fourth the slave one wife is.” (Angus, in fact, had six wives, not four, so the math doesn’t math, but….)

Once in office, Cannon focused on public health, introducing bills to create a state Board of Health and a school for deaf and blind children, both of which remain in operation. Responding to female constituents who complained that they had to sit uncomfortably while working as clerks, she introduced another bill that required businesses to provide places for their female employees to rest when they weren’t seeing customers. (All three measures passed.)

Ever forward-thinking, she also introduced a bill that would have required public schools to teach about “the dangers of alcohol and narcotics” — it passed the state Senate but not the state House — and attempted to require vaccines for schoolchildren, an issue that split the LDS community at the time.

She also continued to flex an independent streak: at one point, according to Lieber’s book, she "incensed" Angus by refusing to endorse his nephew’s bid for the U.S. Senate. (The nephew was a Republican, and Cannon was a loyal Democrat. She even once wrote, after meeting with President William McKinley, “I felt him to be a great man, notwithstanding he is not a Democrat.”)

At the time, U.S. Senators were picked by state legislatures; in the same election that Angus’ nephew competed in, one of Cannon’s colleagues cast his vote for her, which (sort of) made her the first female Senate candidate in the nation’s history, even though she wasn’t really running.

That single vote for Senate lifted her national profile once again, as did her testimony before Congress sharing the story of female suffrage in Utah, in order to advocate for women to receive the franchise nationwide.

“None of the unpleasant results, which were predicted, have occurred,” she told lawmakers. “The contentions in families, the tarnishment of woman’s charm, the destruction of ideals, have all been found to be but the ghosts of unfounded prejudices.”

Cannon’s political career was ultimately cut short: in April 1899, during her first (and only) term, she gave birth to a daughter. The public pregnancy gave way to legal trouble; Mattie and Angus, after all, were continuing to live in an illegal plural marriage. The resulting scandal doomed Cannon’s hopes at re-election; she later moved to California, where she died—mostly forgotten—in the 1930s.

Last week, though, Cannon returned to another Capitol — not in Salt Lake City, but in DC. (To make room for her, Utah yanked its statue of Philo Farnsworth, inventor of the television, sparking outcry from his family.) The bronze statue, showing her with a book in hand, depicts Cannon as she would have appeared around the time she served in the state Senate. (It is not, however, life-sized. Cannon was 4’11”.) Of the 100 Americans represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection, she is the 14th woman.

At the dedication ceremony, which was attended by all of Congress’ top leaders, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told the story of a young girl visiting the Utah State Capitol and exclaiming, after studying the portraits on the wall, “No fair! Where are the girls?”

“To that little girl I say: we’re right here,” Henderson added. “And so are you.”