WASHINGTON, D.C. — Current and former elected officials and religious, business and community leaders filled Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center on Wednesday, Dec. 11, to celebrate the installation of a statue of Martha Hughes Cannon to represent the state of Utah.
“I hope that as people come to Emancipation Hall, they will feel inspired by Martha Hughes Cannon’s example of service, of loving and lifting those around them, and that they’ll set their sights high,” said President Camille N. Johnson, Relief Society general president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Of the frontier physician, public-health reformer, suffragist, state senator, orator, wife and mother, President Johnson added, “The things she was doing in her time probably seemed impossible, or nearly impossible, to achieve.”
The only woman in her medical school class, Martha Hughes Cannon became the nation’s first female state senator. “She was determined. She was tenacious, and I hope that women — my daughters, my granddaughters, my great-granddaughters — will look at Martha Hughes Cannon and be inspired by her example. We’ve been asked by our Prophet [President Russell M. Nelson] to stand up and speak out, and she is a beautiful example of that.”
In 2018, the Utah Legislature voted to replace a statue of television pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth with that of a statue of Martha Hughes Cannon.
Once on display outside the historic Supreme Court chambers in Utah’s Capitol, the statue was created by Utah artist Ben Hammond. The Capitol — where 100 statues represent two prominent individuals from each state — also features a statue of Brigham Young.
President Johnson offered the opening prayer at the congressional statue dedication ceremony for the Martha Hughes Cannon statue in Washington, D.C.
Elder Gary E. Stevenson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and Elder Matthew S. Holland, a General Authority Seventy, also attended the statue installation in the Capitol Visitor Center — where some 3 million people visit each year.
Born in Wales on July 1, 1857, Martha immigrated with her family in 1861 to the Utah Territory as converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
“Martha Hughes Cannon had the desire to be a wife and mother, and it was in faith she fulfilled those roles. But those were not the only roles that she filled,” President Johnson said. “She had a desire and a passion to share her knowledge and expertise as a medical doctor. ... Because of that expertise in medicine, [she was] particularly adept as a state senator.”
During the ceremony, House Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts addressed the crowd of hundreds, praising Martha for inspiring others to “imagine the inconceivable and then [make] it true.”
She quipped that Martha — her statue — had been scheduled to arrive in 2020, but “like so many of us, her travel plans were delayed.” She also praised Martha, who is often called Mattie, for her efforts in the fight for suffrage for all women in the United States. Mattie knew, Clark said, “that every break with precedent, every step toward equality, wasn’t just in service to her daughters. It was in service to all Americans.”
Arline Arnold Brady said she learned about Martha Hughes Cannon, her great-grandmother, from an early age. “We all recognize how extraordinary she was,” she said, noting Mattie used the knowledge she gained to make real change.
“She looked around her in the world [and saw] so many children that were sick,” said Brady. “She decided that she wanted to do something about it.”
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said because of Martha’s place in the Statuary Hall collection, boys and girls, men and women from around the world “will learn about the tiny woman from Utah [Martha was 4 feet, 11 inches tall] who had a giant impact on the lives of so many.”
Henderson said Martha Hughes Cannon’s call to action was this: Do a little bit of good in the world, keep both eyes open and be intentional about remembering the past while looking to the future. “Today,” Henderson said, “is not the culmination of our efforts but a continuation of them.”
Who was Martha Hughes Cannon?
Martha “Mattie” Maria Hughes Cannon was born on July 1, 1857, in Llandudno, Wales, to parents Peter Hughes and Elizabeth Evans Hughes. After joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the family left Wales to join the main body of Saints in Utah; Mattie was 2 years old. Just days before their company entered the Salt Lake Valley, Mattie’s 1-year-old sister, Annie, died. Three days after they entered the valley, her father died.
Elizabeth Hughes took her two remaining daughters to the acre-and-a-quarter on the valley’s east bench that had been allocated to them. She dug out part of the hillside to use for a kitchen, while she and her daughters slept in the rickety wagon that had brought them across the plains.
Martha’s widowed mother remarried about a year later — a widower and carpenter named James Patten Paul, who brought four children into the family. Together, they had five more children, putting Mattie in the middle of a large and rambunctious family. Mattie loved her stepfather and, once away at medical school, used his last name as her own.
Even though most of her peers did not pursue education beyond high school, Mattie was determined to go to college and as much as possible needed to earn her way there. She became a typesetter for the Deseret News, where she stayed up to date on current events of her time, before moving over to the Woman’s Exponent, the Relief Society publication that was decidedly political and pro-suffrage. While working at the Exponent, she listened to and learned from people like Emmeline B. Wells and Eliza R. Snow and began writing her own commentary, articles and poetry.
After earning a degree in chemistry at the University of Deseret (now the University of Utah), Mattie was ready to head east for further training. At a time when early Latter-day Saint women were called to study medicine, Mattie was set apart by George Q. Cannon, her future brother-in-law. She headed east to the University of Michigan, which was one of the few schools at the time that offered co-ed medical education.
After earning a medical degree, she went on to the University of Pennsylvania, where she became the first woman to graduate with a degree in pharmacy. She seemed fascinated by a new idea — that germs could cause disease. She also enhanced her speaking abilities by earning a degree in oratory from the National School of Elocution and Oratory, giving her four degrees by the time she turned 25.
When Martha returned to Utah, she became the resident physician at Deseret Hospital, which had been established by the Relief Society. In 1884, two years after the passage of the antipolygamy Edmunds Act, she became the fourth wife of Angus Cannon, a man 23 years her senior. The next year, their first child — a daughter —was born.
Mattie ended up with a warrant out for her arrest, which would have forced her to testify against not only her husband but also other men in polygamous marriages for whom she had delivered babies. In order to avoid testifying, she gave up her growing medical practice and moved to England, waiting out the two-year span of the warrant. When their second child was born in 1890, she left again, this time going to San Francisco, California, for two years.
After returning to Utah, Hughes began using her oratorical abilities and spoke persuasively on restoring suffrage to women in Utah. Women had the right to vote in 1870, but it was taken away with the passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1877. Mattie was a featured speaker at the Women’s Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, prompting the Chicago Record to write: “Mrs. Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon ... is considered one of the brightest exponents of woman’s cause in the United States.”
When the Utah constitutional convention approved including women’s suffrage in the new state constitution in 1895, Martha was the first woman in Salt Lake City to register to vote. The territorial court, however, ultimately determined that women could not vote in that pre-statehood election to ratify the constitution and elect the new state’s first legislature. The next year, the first in which women could again cast a ballot, Martha ran on a slate of Democrats for a Senate seat. Her husband ran on a slate of Republicans, as did Emmeline B. Wells. All of the Democrats were elected, making Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon the first woman state senator ever elected in the United States.
In 1898, she testified in front of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and gave a similar speech at the Seneca Falls 50th celebration in the state of New York.
“The story of the struggle for women’s suffrage in Utah is the story of all efforts for the advancement and betterment of humanity,” she said. “The practical working of the law demonstrates its wisdom and verifies the claims, which were advanced by its ardent advocates. It has proved to the world that woman is not only a help meet by the fireside, but she can, when allowed to do so, become a most powerful and most potent factor in the affairs of the government.”
