Reissued: Amy Barry, Stories from Utah’s Cemeteries Database (S1, E7 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history.
My name is Brad Westwood, and I work for the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. Today's guest is Amy Barry from the Utah Division of State History. In our previous segment, we spoke about the program, the state cemetery and burial database. Now we're going to tell some stories, and we're going to ask Amy to lead out with one right now.

**Amy Barry** (0:33)
Oh, wonderful. I really did a little bit of focus for our 100th year anniversary coming up of the 19th Amendment that granted women the right to vote.
We're calling that better days here in Utah. And I will lead off by saying Utah actually was a pretty good vanguard for women's voting rights.

**Brad Westwood** (0:55)
1871, even though Wyoming had something going on, the person who got to the ballot box first was in Utah.

**Amy Barry** (1:03)
Yes. And so we have a really great representation of some wonderful stories of women who made a really strong contribution during that time.
Not only to our state government, but also then to the effort of suffrage. We all hear about Martha Hughes Cannon and her wonderful, compelling run for the Utah State Senate and running against her husband. But I like to focus on some of the lesser known stories that have been forgotten over time or just weren't as well known. And so we'll start off with Sarah Elizabeth Nelson Anderson. She was born in Caseville to David Nelson and Sarah Brown. She was born in 1853, so she was really early to Utah in our history. She would go on to marry a man, Porter Lee, who became a doctor, or Porter Lee Anderson. She was 17, she had five children, and her husband passed away in 1888 So she was a widow, very young, five children to raise. But it didn't stop her from being really engaged in in her community, and she became very well known and really popular in Ogden and Weber County.
And she ran for the legislature during that same time of Martha Hughes Cannon, but she ran for the state house and she won in 1896
So the compelling thing about Sarah, though, is that in Utah, women were voting in elections during the time we were a territory, but that was taken away from us with the Edmonds Tucker Act.
This act left women out of national, state and local elections. However, this question of statehood, which was before Utah, was not spelled out in the Edmonds Tucker Act. So Sarah, who was also a very vocal suffragist, decided to challenge this question, and she attempted to cast her vote in the Ogden Second Precinct. She was denied. They turned her away and she filed a lawsuit stating that she was voting for statehood. She wasn't voting in a national, state, or local election because they were not a state. She ultimately lost that court fight, but it set the stage for this larger battle. And she laid the foundation for women in Utah to regain that right to vote in all elections.

**Brad Westwood** (3:31)
Now, where is her headstone?

**Amy Barry** (3:33)
So she is buried in the Ogden City Cemetery. She died in 1900
She was part of that women's wave in the second Utah State Legislature, as I said, in 1896, along with Ureth Labarth. They were elected to the second legislature. Ureth is buried outside of, she's buried in Colorado, so she's not somebody I bio, but she made another important contribution to women's presence in local politics. Sarah promptly served as a chairperson for the Committee on Public Health, which was kind of where it was a domain women were seen to be okay.

**Brad Westwood** (4:16)
It was kind of progressive movement thing where health and child care and so on seemed to be the province.

**Amy Barry** (4:23)
In Utah, it was women who were leading that charge as nurses and rural health care providers.
They were leading that charge of public health and sanitary methods and all of those things. So that was a domain that was safe for women, but she made her mark. Unfortunately, she didn't live long enough to continue her political career and she is resting in Ogden.

**Brad Westwood** (4:49)
Hey, what a great story. With 2020 and so many things going on about the history of the suffrage movement in Utah. I mean, there is this unique story in Utah. It's because of the layers of issues, the resistance of the nation to offer statehood to Utah, polygamy. There was a certain level of independence and a lot of growth because of polygamy, because of the prior votes or access to voting.