A Mighty Power: The Defenses Employed by Utah’s Women against Disenfranchisement by the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds-Tucker Act, a law that disenfranchised the women of Utah Territory, even though they had the vote for more than a decade. Utah’s women, both Mormon and non-Mormon, used their public forums (including the Mormon women’s periodical the Woman’s Exponent and an indignation meeting that overflowed the Salt Lake Theater with more than 2,000 people) to speak out as their own best defenders against the indignities heaped on them by this law. Analysis of these women’s writings shows that they used three primary arguments in their own defense. First, the people who wrote the law framed their image of the women affected by the law as that of uneducated children or savages who were subordinate to their husbands’ will. Second, the law violated the women’s constitutional rights as citizens of the United States. And, third, the law framed the women as criminals by revoking constitutional rights without due process.