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

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome, this is Brad Westwood, and you've been listening to the podcast Speak Your Piece. Our guest today is Neylan McBaine, and we're speaking about her book, Pioneering the Vote, The Untold Story of the Suffragists in Utah and the West. Neylan, thank you for being with us on the second half.
You in your book, you explain this inner personality, the creative mind of Emeline B. Wells, her convictions. Will you talk about this fascinating person and her part in this whole story?

**Neylan McBaine** (0:49)
Yeah, I absolutely love Emeline.
She was really the person who got me started on this journey initially, by reading one of her biographies several years ago. I feel a lot of connection with her, I think as a native Easterner, as a writer, I have so much love and sympathy for her.

**Brad Westwood** (1:11)
Didn't you grow up in the same area, Nyland, as she came from?

**Neylan McBaine** (1:14)
Well, I'm from New York. She was from Massachusetts originally and I'm from New York City. But she talked so often about New England, I went to school in New England, so I think I have many of those same blogging living in Utah. As much as we love Utah and are working towards its betterment and greatness, I think she's, I like Emma Lyne, always have roots back in the East. So a lot of, I do feel close to her. I also think that her early hardships really were important in shaping her vision of herself and her need to be self-reliant.
And I try to bring that out as one of the themes of her personality is that she really was forced to be self-reliant financially, emotionally, you know, in her socially.
She suffered some trauma in her teenage years through her first marriage, which you'll have to read the book to hear about because it's one of my favorite stories. I don't want to, I don't want to spill the beans here, but, you know, she, she becomes the second wife of Newell K. Whitney in Nauvoo, Illinois. And then her third marriage is to Daniel Wells here in Salt Lake, who was the mayor of Salt Lake City, but really didn't, wasn't able to support her financially or emotionally or romantically because she was the sixth wife. And, and so she lived on her own for most of her life and had to support herself by editing the Woman's Exponents. And I think that that self-reliance, again, is sort of a byproduct of polygamy, was that she couldn't rely on, you know, this, this fabled domestic life for a providing husband for her. And so that really drove a lot of her philosophies around women needing to have outlets for expression, for creating policy, for making their own money, and for educating themselves.

**Brad Westwood** (3:26)
And she is rightly so a prominent person in this story as far as the influence.
I get the impression she's constantly creating relationships. She's building all these connections with other journalists, women's papers, the suffrage movement nationally, and she takes this kind of very soft approach. Could you talk about maybe some of the counter-interactions she had with members here in Utah that were wanting to do something different, and what was her unique way of managing this big effort?

**Neylan McBaine** (4:03)
Yeah. So, Emmaline, as I mentioned, edited The Woman's Exponent for 36 years, and so she had a platform where she could write thousands of editorials. And the suffrage newspapers at that time, of which there were dozens across the country, were really the women's way of sharing their opinions and getting to know the other suffragists in the far-flung geographic areas of the country. And so these papers really circulated across the country, and it was the women's way of sharing their ideas and getting to know each other. They also had, I will just mention sort of as an aside, you know, really the only other political tool available to them at the time was the petition.
And so between newspapers and the petition, those are really the tools that women had at that time to create this movement and to learn and to sort of train themselves, educate themselves on the issues, and then have their voices heard. And so Emeline made really good use of that newspaper network and as you say, really was a bridge builder in building connections across the country and representing the Utah women's point of view.
She definitely was very much in line with the strategy of the day, the women's strategy of the day nationally, which was to be very compliant and to be very...

**Brad Westwood** (5:27)
I mean, this client model is not, I mean, it's part of the 19th and it's part of our life today, but somehow I think this story you share kind of shows the turbulence of how do you push something through and make a change? Sorry, go ahead.