Women Inventors in Utah Territory from the UHQ (S4 E6)

**Brad Westwood** (0:00)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. 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, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. I hope if there's one place, one podcast, this is the one you come to for your Utah history. In today's episode, we are speaking about Mormon and Utah women's history in the 19th century.
My guest today is Dr. Cassie Clark, who is a public historian for the Utah Division of State History.
In her role, Cassie works on history of women and other underrepresented voices in Utah. Hello, Cassie. Thanks for being here.

**Cassandra Clark** (0:44)
Thanks for inviting me back to Speak Your Piece, Brad. I'm excited to continue to talk with you about women's history in Utah.

**Brad Westwood** (0:50)
Cassie joined the Division of State History in November of 2021 as a full-time public historian. She's also an adjunct instructor for the Salt Lake Community College. Dr. Clark's research or her research interests are the history of the American West, mental health, the environment, race, and science. By the way, how did you get to all those subjects?

**Cassandra Clark** (1:13)
I don't know, Brad. Yeah, it's quite the mouthful.

**Brad Westwood** (1:17)
It is, but it's also so connected. Mental health, race, science, environment, all topics that are so pertinent and I think timely today in the 21st century.

**Cassandra Clark** (1:28)
Yeah, and especially like really fits well into our discussion today.
This intersection of environment and not necessarily race. There's not a lot of discussions of race, so there's an underlying theme of it in there, but also science too and how it's the inventions and scientific innovations during the 19th century.

**Brad Westwood** (1:46)
We're going to talk about women and their inventions specifically to Utah. These are Utah inventors. In today's episode, Cassie and I will be discussing Christine Cooper-Rompato's Utah Historical Quarterly article entitled Women Inventors in Utah Territory, published in 2015
As a public historian focusing on Utah's women history, why did you select this article for us to discuss it?

**Cassandra Clark** (2:14)
That's a great question. In honor of Women's History Month, I really wanted to feature just content and search through stories of just different women and how they participated. That goes beyond the traditional idea that women were always occupying the domestic sphere or that their influence was related to the home.
And that's just not correct. We can look back, even if you look back as far as the Revolutionary War era and that road to the Revolutionary War, women are participating in the public sphere in many different ways. The Daughters of Liberty are participating, they're protesting in their own ways and they protest with the Sons of Liberty.

**Brad Westwood** (2:55)
They're very involved in the public sphere.

**Cassandra Clark** (2:57)
They are. And I think a lot of times we assume because of like 19th century prescriptive literature and all these different ideologies of where women should be that they are only influential within the home.

**Brad Westwood** (3:13)
They became in a sense that, or that concept of separate spheres.

**Cassandra Clark** (3:16)
Indeed, yeah. And that's why like Laurel Ulrich's quote that is like now on, it's everywhere. It's that well-behaved women rarely make history and it's on water bottles, it's on t-shirts, it's everywhere now. But really the reality is that well-behaved women and that narrow definition of what women should do is confined to the home.
And although that's a laudable and something I applaud, like women who want to do that and have the choice to do that is, if they choose to do that, that's excellent.
But at the same time, women are influential regardless of what society tells them that they're supposed to be doing. They're making history, they're influencing in the home, they're influencing the men in their life, they're influencing other women, they're influencing their children, they're doing work, they're outsourcing their work, they're making new ways of like improving their lives.
And so when I thought, when I was thinking about how to do Women's History Month for this year, I thought, well, what if we examine, I take a deeper dive and produce information about how women worked. And this is one really interesting way of thinking about it is how, what women invented and how they gained patents for that. And then what that tells us about Utah society as well as national society in general.

**Brad Westwood** (4:31)
So what are the authors' arguments or sub-arguments in this article?

**Cassandra Clark** (4:36)