Constance Lieber on Martha Hughes Cannon (1857-1932) the First Female State Senator (Utah) in the USA (S5, E12)

**Brad Westwood** (0:03)
Welcome to the podcast, Speak Your Peace. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting and the most accurate history of Utah, accessible to the widest audience. We hope that there's one place, one podcast, you get your Utah history fix. We hope this is the place.
The subject of this episode is Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, the first female state senator in the United States, not just in the West, not just in Utah, across the entire United States. Cannon served in Utah Senate some 24 years before most women in the US could vote.
My co-producer and co-host for this episode is Utah State Historical Society's Women's History Coordinator, Dr. Katherine Kitterman. Hello, Katherine.

**Dr. Katherine Kitterman** (0:57)
Hi, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (0:58)
Prior to joining the Historical Society, Katherine was Director of Utah's Better Days, an organization dedicated to elevating women's voices, past and present.

**Dr. Katherine Kitterman** (1:09)
Me and Brad's guest today is Dr. Constance Lieber, author of the book, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, Suffragist, Senator, Plural Wife, published by Signature Book in 2022
Holding degrees in history, Germanic and Slavic Literature, and a PhD in languages and literature from the University of Utah, Lieber has been in pursuit of Martha Hughes Cannon for many, many years. Welcome to Speak Your Peace, Constance Lieber.

**Dr. Constance Lieber** (1:32)
Thank you, I'm happy to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:34)
We're so glad to have you here.
We will include a more complete biography for Constance in the show notes. Please subscribe to Speak Your Peace podcast. Also, would you please go back and listen to the scores of other prior episodes? Finally, rate us too, would you?
Here are the questions for you too. To begin our conversation, will you discuss the story of the statue of Martha Hughes Cannon, soon to be placed among the statues of prominent Americans in the United States Capitol National Statuary Hall? What's up with that, friends?

**Dr. Katherine Kitterman** (2:11)
Well, it's been a long journey.
I'll just share what I know, which is that the Utah Legislature voted in 2018 to replace Philo Farnsworth with Martha Hughes Cannon. States have the opportunity to switch out statues every generation or so, and Utah has never switched ours out. And so that statue was supposed to be placed in 2020 for the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. The statue has been created by Ben Hammond, a local sculptor. It's sitting in the Utah State Capitol, and we are awaiting a date for the installation in the state, in the US Capitol.

**Brad Westwood** (2:43)
So I'm hoping over the next some months that people will listen to this podcast, get better acquainted with Dr. Cannon, and then come and celebrate with her statue being placed in Statuary Hall.

**Dr. Constance Lieber** (2:58)
I think that would be marvelous. I have all of my information through Mattie's great-great-grandson, Blaine Brady, and he's not very up to date either. He hopes it will happen sometime this summer.

**Dr. Katherine Kitterman** (3:11)
Fingers crossed.

**Brad Westwood** (3:12)
Yes, absolutely.
Constance, how long have you been working on Martha Hughes Cannon? How and why did you two get acquainted?

**Dr. Constance Lieber** (3:23)
Well, that gives away how old I am. I've been working on Mattie for 45 years, and I had never heard of Martha Cannon. I was working as a catalog manuscripts at what was in the Church Historical Society. And my job was to go into the stacks, grab anything I wanted, bring it back, read it, catalog it. And so I picked up three or four boxes that were under the name Maria Munn. I thought, okay, started reading the letters, and it was at once very clear that the writer was not named Maria Munn.
And I read several of the letters. It became clear that she was a polygamous wife, that she could not say her name or her husband's name, that she had a daughter, that she was in exile in England.
A later letter mentioned in the text of the letter, Angus Cannon, Mattie.
So I went to Andrew Jensen's Biographical Encyclopedia, looked up Angus Munn, and there she was, listed as his fourth wife, Martha Maria Hughes Cannon. And she was a physician. And I went on to sort of look into it more, and it was clear that at that time, which was in the mid-1970s, she had almost disappeared from public consciousness. Her family had been working to get her name on a stamp or things like that, but basically she was just a footnote. I found her memorial on North Temple, which looks like a utility box. It has its back to North Temple. You have to walk on the other side to see what it is. She was barely a footnote. Her husband had been stake president of Salt Lake Steak, very prominent person. He wasn't mentioned at all in any of the histories. So it piqued my interest and I started to do research.