Born to Peter and Elizabeth Hughes in Wales in 1857, Martha “Mattie” Hughes was the child of two Mormon converts who left the rocky terrain of Llandudno for the American Great Plains. Mattie was raised in Utah where Brigham Young, the Latter-day prophet of her youth, encouraged women to pursue education and careers: “We wish the sisters, so far as their inclinations and circumstances permit, to learn bookkeeping, telegraphy, reporting, typesetting, clerking in stores and banks and every branch of knowledge and kind of employment suitable to their sex and according to their several tastes and capacities.” Obediently following the prophet, Mattie went on to pursue a degree in medicine from the University of Michigan Medical School. After completing her studies, with a new title and distinction added to her name, Dr. Hughes returned to her family in Utah. She began work as an official MD at Deseret Hospital, where she met the superintendent, the charming Angus Cannon, who became her husband and the man she eventually ran against and defeated for Utah State Senator.
From premed student to physician, and eventually from physician to state senator.
Joan Jacobson, author of Colorado Phantasmagorias: A Mashup of Biography, Fantasy, and Travel Guide and Small Secrets: A Tale of Sex, Shame and Babies in Midcentury America (Arcadia Publishing, Oct 2023), brings us a slim but packed account of Dr. Martha Cannon’s life and career and the juxtaposition of conservative Victorian society with the shockingly progressive Utah Mormon lifestyle. The bulk of Dr. Martha Cannon of Utah: The Unexpected Victorian Life of America’s First Female Senator focuses on Victorian America’s views on sex — female versus male sexuality, sex work, and the misogyny of Victorian men — contrasted with Brigham Young’s thriving Mormon church where women were encouraged to work and find security and independence in the church’s polygamist practices. The coexistence of these two societies propelled Dr. Cannon’s rise as a professional woman and eventually successful politician.
Jacobson challenges the ideas of polygamy without excusing its troubling past by illustrating the lives of Victorian women outside the Mormon church, who — without generational wealth — struggled to support themselves and were often forced into sex work, left with unwanted children, and trapped in a cycle of poverty. In contrast, Mormon women in the late 1800s were members of a community in which many shared a husband with several other women. These wives worked together to create homes in which they cared for their children and secured their basic needs of food and shelter. Jacobson even includes quotes from Mormon women who enjoyed the independence they had in their homes when their husbands left to tend to their other wives. “I had the attitude of many Mormon women in polygamy. I felt the responsibility of my family, and I developed an independence that women in monogamy never know,” said Daisy Yates Barclay.
Jacobson alternates chapters discussing Victorian and Mormon life in America with Dr. Cannon’s journey from Wales to Utah, from premed student to physician, and eventually from physician to state senator. However, the overall amount of information on Dr. Cannon’s life is slight compared to the anecdotes about American society. This could be a factor of the limited records kept on Dr. Cannon, which Jacobson immediately addresses in the preface of her book, “Why isn’t Senator Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon famous?” She supplements Cannon’s life with stories from Victorian and Mormon households as well as numerous images, including an impressive number of newspaper cartoons and illustrations poking fun at Mormon polygamists and attempts of glamorizing Victorian women’s fashions.
Minimizing the stories of Mormon women is a tradition as strong as polygamy once was in the Church, and I am grateful to Joan Jacobson for allowing her curiosity to push back against this still-existing trend. Her account of Dr. Martha Cannon is succinct and also brings attention to some ways in which the early Mormon Church successfully championed feminism in an American society determined to conceal it.
