Dr. Martha Bradley Evans: 20th C. Utah & LDS Women's History (including ERA) (Season 2, Ep. 9)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting and most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place.
My guest today is Dr. Martha Sontag Bradley Evans, who was a professor at the University of Utah in the College of Architecture and Planning, and the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Undergraduate Studies at the University. Hello, Marty.

**Martha Sontag Bradley Evans** (0:50)
Hi, Brad. Happy to meet you.

**Brad Westwood** (0:52)
I'm so glad you're here on Speak Your Peace.
Dr. Bradley-Evans was President of the Mormon History Association, also Vice Chair of the Utah State Board of History and Chair of Preservation Utah, previously known as the Utah Heritage Foundation. Her publications include Kidnapped From That Land, The Government Raids on Short Creek Polygamists, The Four Zinas, Mothers and Daughters on the Frontier, Pedestals & Podiums, Utah Women, Religious Authority & Equal Rights. Our conversation will be based mainly around that book. She's also published Glorious in Persecution, Joseph Smith, American Prophet, 1839 to 1844, among numerous other books and journal articles. Her scholarship has been in four main areas, public history, gender and community, religious communities, and history of the built environment. We'll include more about Dr. Bradley-Evans and these titles and other things related to this show today on our show notes, which we hope you'll refer to.
Today's program will close out 2020 with its year-long focus on women's history in Utah. 2020 had a great deal of recognition related to women's history. First for the 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th Amendment, an amendment to the US Constitution that prohibits states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States based on sex. 2020 was also the 150th anniversary of Utah's own women's suffrage law, which was first granted in 1870, some 26 years before statehood. Second only to Wyoming within the American states and territories. Only to have it taken away 17 years later in 1877 as part of the US Congress's Edmunds Tucker Act. This was an effort to curtail the Mormon Church's influence on territorial government. The organization, Better Days 2020, and various other universities and symposia have spotlighted the deficiencies, the need for more gender diverse history for Utah. In so many ways, the deep structural imbalances of our state history, the general neglect of women, 50% of the population in our society, has been made glaringly apparent in 2020 I hope the attention that has been served this last year will be the first measure, the first effort at a concrete corrective action that will balance our history. My guest today, who is one of Utah's most respected historians on women's history, gender and community, is someone I hope more Utahans will get to know more and read her books.
We will make a link to her books in the show notes.
In our discussion with Dr. Bradley-Evans, I hope we will talk about the 19th, but even more so, the 20th century, including Utah's central involvement in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. With that, Marty, thank you so much for being here. History is often described as what happened in the past, when perhaps it should be thought of as who has the driving interest, the power and the resources to have that history written, and tell it the way they want it to be told. So with that comment, Marty, what does Utah need to do in your mind? What actions need to be taken to offer a more balanced, inclusive history for Utah?

**Martha Sontag Bradley Evans** (4:34)
I think most of us that write history, and this is truly in terms of Utah history, we write about what sees as our interests, and I would say that perhaps the best way to come up with a more balanced and diverse history of the state would be to educate a more diverse group of young historians whose interests would broaden out the landscape of what we study and why we study it. I mean, even if you studied something like power differentials in the state of Utah, if you come from a minority population, you're going to look at that very differently than you would if you were someone who was more privileged.
Just the greater diversity in terms of the minds who put their attention to history I think will help bring us closer to a more balanced story of the past. That's certainly been true if you think about the time period since the 1970s when many women, and I'm one of that group, started writing not only about women's history but about community history in a more broad sense. Thinking about the contribution that women made to community building in our state's history.