After years of delay, the bronze statue of Martha Hughes Cannon currently on display outside the historic Supreme Court chambers in Utah’s Capitol is finally heading to her permanent home in Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. Her send-off celebration will be held the evening of June 5. The actual installation date is expected to be later this summer, but no official date has been released.
Originally, the plan was to have the statue of Dr. Cannon, installed in the nation’s capitol in August 2020, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment and the 150th anniversary of a woman in Utah casting the first vote under a legal suffrage law. But then a pandemic happened and Martha stayed put.
Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said, ““During my time in the State Senate, no legislation brought as much excitement and public engagement as the resolution to send a statue of Martha Hughes Cannon to Washington. After six long years, I am thrilled to finally see this trailblazing pioneer of women’s equality assume her rightful place in the halls of our nation’s capitol building. The impact Utah women had on the national women’s suffrage movement has for too long been overlooked. Martha’s statue is more than a reminder of her individual accomplishments. She symbolizes the contributions of all the Utah women whose persistent and righteous efforts not only secured their own equal rights, but also ensured ours.”
The statue, created by Utah artist Ben Hammond, honors a remarkable woman who was a physician, the nation’s first female state senator, a health reformer, a suffragist, a wife and a mother. Born in Wales in 1857, Martha, or “Mattie,” as she preferred to be called, emigrated with her family to Salt Lake City when she was 4 years old. Her baby sister died while the family was crossing the plains and her father, already ill before the journey, died three days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley. A great-grandson said in a 2012 documentary on her life that he believed those two deaths spurred in her an early interest in becoming a doctor, in an era when most women did not attend college and fewer still went to medical school.
A precocious student, she began attending college at age 16 at the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah, where she earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry. She helped support herself and saved money for medical school by working as a typesetter for the Deseret News, where she learned about news and politics while she worked. She also then worked as a typesetter for the Woman’s Exponent, where she became exposed to and then immersed in the women’s rights movement.
On Aug. 13, 1878, she was set apart for her medical studies by John Taylor, then president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and his counselor George Q. Cannon. She attended the University of Michigan, one of a handful of medical schools at the time that accepted both male and female students, graduating in 1880, on the day she turned 23. She then went to the University of Pennsylvania, where she received an additional degree in pharmacy. She was a proponent of the then-new germ theory of disease. She also simultaneously earned a degree from the National School of Elocution and Oratory in Philadelphia, giving her four university degrees by the time she was 25.
She returned to Utah and set up a private practice, and was soon asked to become the resident physician at Deseret Hospital. Two years later, during the height of the national anti-polygamy movement, she secretly married prominent Latter-day Saint church leader Angus M. Cannon and became the fourth of his six polygamous wives. According to her biography from Better Days, a nonprofit dedicated to elevating Utah women’s history, as polygamy prosecutions intensified, Martha moved to England with her infant daughter Elizabeth. She lived there in exile for nearly two years to avoid incriminating her husband or being forced to testify against her obstetrics patients.
Upon her return to Utah in 1888, she established the Utah territory’s first nursing school and trained women in nursing and midwifery. She also became a leader in Utah’s growing suffrage movement. The Utah Woman Suffrage Association was formed in 1889, and shortly thereafter, Martha delivered a “well written address” at a large territorial suffrage meeting held in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square.
Utah became a state in 1896 and women’s suffrage was explicitly included in the state’s constitution. That same year, Martha ran on a slate of Democratic candidates running for five state senate positions. Her husband ran on the Republican slate, along with Emmeline B. Wells. The Democratic-leaning Salt Lake Herald endorsed Martha rather than her Republican husband, stating that she was “the better man of the two.” When the election results were counted, the Democrats swept the election and Martha became the first woman in the United States elected as a state senator.
While in office, Sen. Cannon sponsored the bill that created the state Board of Health, the Utah School for the Deaf and the Blind, a pure food law and a law regulating working conditions for women and girls.
In 2017, the Utah Legislature voted to replace a statue of TV inventor Philo T. Farnsworth with one of Cannon in the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Each state has two historically significant figures in the hall, with Brigham Young being Utah’s other figure. The 2017 vote was not without controversy, as some, including Farnsworth’s family, believed that his statue should not be replaced. When Martha does make her way to Statuary Hall, Farnsworth will head to Utah Valley University.
Martha’s official send-off celebration will be Wednesday, June 5 from 5-8 p.m. at the Utah State Capitol. According to a Better Days social media post, this outdoor festival will include live music, food trucks, activities and a short program to officially launch Martha on her journey to the District of Columbia.