Neylan McBaine, "Pioneering The Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West" (Season 2, Ep. 5 - Part 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome, this is Brad Westwood, and you're listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is episode 5 of season 2 Remember, each episode of Speak Your Piece is two 30-minute segments. We hope you'll go back and listen and track the others in our catalog. The past is never truly in the past. It's all around us. It informs us. It speaks to both to our shared and to our separate identities. Speak Your Piece is a podcast where contributors to Utah's history share their insights and discoveries. The podcast is produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. Now, my job as Senior Public Historian is to make the very best, the most interesting history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. And if there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, we hope this is the place. From time to time, we'll urge you to listen to other podcasts and we'd like to talk about one today with you.
We hope that you will listen to this podcast. The title is, It Was Said, and it's written and narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian John Mecham.
It is about speeches, special moments in history, where we can ponder and look back and think about how we see ourselves, how we want to see ourselves in the future. It's a wonderful podcast and we recommend it highly.
Our guest today is former CEO of Better Days 2020, Neylan McBaine. Hello, Neylan.

**Neylan McBaine** (1:39)
Hello, Brad.

**Brad Westwood** (1:41)
So good to have you here. Neylan McBaine, until just recently, served as both founder and CEO of Better Days 2020, a Utah not-for-profit organization created with the intent of popularizing women's history through education, legislation, events, and the arts. Neylan has become a leader in speaking and writing about women's leadership and the US suffrage movement with a specific focus on Utah and the West and the early role that the Western states played in this national movement. In today's podcast, we'll discuss Neylan's book, her new book entitled, Pioneering the Vote, The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West, published in 2020 by Shadow Mountain, an imprint of Deseret Book Company. The intent of Shadow Mountain is to publish works that speak to a national audience. Neylan's book is part fiction and part history, blended together to make a very important statement.
In doing so, Neylan's book has brought out historical figures, events and circumstances in a way that makes it much more understandable.
Neylan's work is a shot across the bows, as they say, with the intent of urging historians and thought leaders to consider a glaring omission in the story of Women's Suffrage Movement, which is the vital story of what happened in the interior West, most particularly from Utah. I think another audience for this book is the everyday Utahn who wants to understand better women's history in Utah. 2020 was the 100th anniversary of the majority of US states that ratified the 19th Amendment, which extended to most US female citizens, not to people of color, not to Native Americans, but to white women. That is giving them the right to vote. Women of color and Native Americans all had to wait, in some cases, as far into the 1960s, in order to vote without roadblocks or harassment. As you can see, the story of full franchising of all Americans is a complex story. And this story in Utah has even more layers of confusion and conflict. And we're hoping with our speaker today that we can make those more understandable. 2020 also marked the 150th anniversary of the Utah Territories Legislative Bill, giving women the right to vote. Utah's Northern Territorial neighbor, Wyoming, passed the right to vote as well. The right to hold office. And they did this just months before Utah did. However, two days after the Utah Bill was passed, Seraph Young, a grand niece of Brigham Young, casted her ballot in the Salt Lake City Municipal Election, becoming the first woman in the country to vote under the Equal Suffrage Law. This story is just the tip of the iceberg, where Utah and women from surrounding states made vital contributions not only to their local efforts, but to national efforts. If you'd like to buy a copy of Neylan's book, Pioneering the Vote, the Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West, we'll have that information on our show notes.
Now, Neylan, thank you again so much for being here. I want to pose this general question to you first.
Now, I enjoyed the PBS American Experience documentary, The Vote, and it had the ad line, women were not given the vote, they took it. I thought it was a fabulous documentary. I really enjoyed it. I learned so much, and I highly recommend The Vote. But in it, I heard maybe two minutes in the entire show about suffragists in the West.