Hello, friend. I'm glad you're here.
Last time, we stood on the far side of the world together, in a Māori parliament house, listening to Meri Mangakāhia ask for something even bigger than the vote --- asking to be trusted with the land itself. I hope that one is still sitting with you the way it's sitting with me.
Now, before we go on tonight --- let me pull the thread back into view, in case you've joined us partway through, or in case, like me, you sometimes need reminding of the whole shape of a thing before you can see one piece of it clearly.
We are six stops into a single, unbroken story. It began quietly, with Abby Kelley Foster, a woman who discovered that fighting to free the enslaved and fighting for women's own voice turned out to be the same fight wearing two faces. That seed didn't stay small. Frances Willard took it and built it into something that crossed oceans --- a whole world of women, organized. And that network landed, of all places, in New Zealand, where it bore fruit three different ways, through three different women, faster than anywhere else on Earth.
Tonight, the thread pulls back across the water. Home, in a sense --- though home is about to get complicated. Tonight I want to tell you about a woman named Emmeline B. Wells, and a place called Utah, where the story of the vote isn't a straight line at all.
It's a story about losing something you already had. I think you'll find it matters more than most.
Cold. That's what I remember first --- the particular cold of a Salt Lake City morning in February, 1870, the kind that gets into wool coats and stays there.
I was standing near a polling place, tucked into a doorway the way I do, unseen, watching. And I watched a young schoolteacher named Seraph Young step up and do something no woman in this country had done since 1807 --- she marked a ballot, under a law that said she was allowed to. Not a protest. Not a demonstration. Just a woman, voting, on an ordinary Monday, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.
I have to tell you --- I felt something enormous happen in a very small, undramatic moment. No trumpets. No crowd cheering. Just ink, and cold hands, and a door swinging shut behind her.
And then, in the little crowd of women waiting their turn, I noticed another one. Younger than you'd expect someone important to be --- though of course, nobody is important yet, in the moment it's happening. She stepped up. She voted too. I didn't know her name that morning. I didn't know I'd be spending the next fifty years of her life with her. That's Emmeline. That's how I met her --- as one woman in a line, doing an unremarkable thing that would turn out to matter enormously.
I felt so much joy that day. I want you to know that, before I tell you what came next.
Seventeen years later, I was standing in roughly the same place. Same city. Same woman, older now, her hands still capable, her mind sharper than ever. And the vote --- that plain, unremarkable thing she'd done on an ordinary Monday --- was simply gone. Taken back. Not by anything she'd done. By a decision made far away, in Washington, about a fight that was only partly hers.
I won't pretend I took that well. I was angry, if I'm honest with you --- the particular kind of angry that has nowhere to go. I remember thinking: what does a person do, when the thing she was given is taken away for reasons that were never really about her at all?
I watched Emmeline that year. And what she did next is most of what I want to tell you about tonight.
Let me tell you who she was, before that morning in the cold ever happened.
She was born Emmeline Blanche Woodward, in 1828, in a small town in Massachusetts --- about as far from Salt Lake City as you can get and still be in the same country. Her father died when she was four. Her mother raised the family alone, and I remember Emmeline telling me, years later, that watching her mother do that --- manage everything, alone, with no say in the laws that governed her --- planted something in her long before she had words for it.
She was smart, and restless, and hungry for more than New Salem Academy could give a fourteen-year-old girl, which is exactly how old she was when she graduated it. She wrote poetry. She taught school. And then her life did what lives sometimes do --- it turned, hard, more than once.
Her first husband, James Harris, left to find work and died at sea, having never come home. Her infant son died before that. She was barely out of girlhood and already carrying more loss than most people carry in a lifetime. She joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a teenager, and that choice reshaped everything after it --- she moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, then west with the Saints, eventually to the Salt Lake Valley by 1848.
She married again --- twice more, in fact. She became a plural wife, first to Newel K. Whitney, then, after his death, to Daniel H. Wells, a prominent man in the territory with six other families besides hers. I'm not here tonight to walk you through the rights or wrongs of plural marriage --- that's not my errand, and it was never a simple question, then or now. What I can tell you is what I saw: a woman managing a household and raising daughters largely on her own terms, inside a marriage that gave her less companionship than she might have wished for, and, oddly, more room to build a public life than most married women of her era ever got.
And build she did. In 1877, she became editor of a newspaper called the Woman's Exponent --- and she held that post for thirty-seven years. Thirty-seven. Let that number sit with you a moment; we'll come back to it.
Now --- the vote. In February of 1870, the Utah Territorial Legislature passed a bill giving women the right to vote, and it passed unanimously --- not one dissenting voice. Utah wasn't even first; Wyoming had done it a few weeks earlier. But Utah's elections came sooner in the calendar, so by simple accident of timing, Utah women cast ballots before anyone else in the nation had the chance. That's the morning I told you about --- the one Emmeline stepped into, one voter among many.
For seventeen years, that right simply existed. Utah women voted the way people breathe --- without ceremony, without having to justify it every time. Emmeline, in those years, wasn't only voting. She was writing. She was building friendships with women far outside Utah --- Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton --- women who would remain close to her for the rest of her life. She represented Utah at national suffrage conventions, carrying Utah's voice into rooms that weren't always eager to hear it.
Then, in 1887, Congress passed something called the Edmunds-Tucker Act --- aimed at ending a practice they found intolerable, plural marriage. And one of its effects, whether every lawmaker intended it or not, was this: every woman in Utah Territory lost the vote. Married or not. Plural wife or not. All of them, together, in one stroke.
Emmeline was fifty-nine years old when that happened. She had thirty-four more years left to live.
I want you to sit with that math for a moment too. Because what she did with those years is the heart of tonight's story.
Here's the strange thing I keep turning over, all these years later. In 1887, Emmeline lost something enormous --- and she went to work the very same season.
Not "eventually." Not "after she recovered." She simply kept doing what she had already been doing, as though the vote's absence were a fact to work around rather than a wall to stop at. Within that same year, she changed the subtitle of her newspaper. It had said something plainer before. Now it read: "The Rights of the Women of Zion, and the Rights of the Women of all Nations." Read that again. She didn't shrink the paper's ambition when the vote disappeared --- she widened it. As if to say: you can take the ballot. You cannot take the argument.
I think that's worth sitting with, because it would have made just as much sense --- maybe more sense --- for her to go quiet for a while. Grieve. Wait for better political weather. Nobody would have blamed her. Instead, she kept the Exponent running, kept writing, kept traveling to national suffrage conventions where, I have to tell you honestly, she was not always fully welcomed.
This is the part of the story I want to be careful with, because it's easy to flatten. Emmeline was a plural wife, in a country that had just decided plural marriage was something to legislate out of existence. The mainstream suffrage movement back East was, in places, embarrassed by her --- worried that standing beside Utah women would make the whole cause look tangled up in a practice much of the country found troubling. And the federal government, for its part, believed --- sincerely, many of them --- that stripping the vote from Utah women was a way of protecting women from a system that used them poorly. I'm not going to tell you who was right about the marriage question. That was never mine to judge, and it still isn't. What I will tell you is what actually happened to the ballot: a law aimed at ending one thing ended up taking away something else entirely --- a freedom a whole territory of women had been quietly using for seventeen years, well or poorly, exactly like people everywhere use freedoms once they have them.
So Emmeline stood in an odd, lonely spot. Too Mormon for women who might otherwise have called her an ally without hesitation. Too suffragist for a government trying to stamp out the world she came from. Belonging fully to neither side of an argument that was, in its way, being fought over her.
And she kept writing anyway. She kept representing Utah at conventions where Utah's presence made people uneasy. She kept corresponding with Susan B. Anthony, kept that friendship alive across all that political distance, because the friendship was never actually about the argument --- it was about two women who believed the same underlying thing even when the world around them made that belief inconvenient.
I watched her do this for years, and it took me a long time to understand what I was actually watching. It wasn't defiance, exactly --- nothing so loud as that. It was something quieter and, I think, harder: the simple, stubborn insistence that the work was still worth doing even while the thing the work was supposedly for didn't exist anymore. No ballot to point to. No proof yet that any of it would come back. Just a newspaper, going out into the world every two weeks, arguing for a right its own editor no longer possessed.
I don't know a better description of faith than that. Not the kind that waits for evidence before it moves --- the kind that moves, and lets the evidence catch up later, or not at all.
So what did Emmeline actually add to the world, in those seventeen years of writing toward a right she didn't have?
I don't think it was a single argument, or a single victory. I think it was something more like proof of concept --- proof that a container can be built sturdy enough to hold a hope steady even when the thing itself is gone. The Woman's Exponent wasn't just a newspaper anymore after 1887. It became a kind of vessel, carrying an idea across a gap that had no guarantee of ever closing. Emmeline didn't know, in 1888, that Utah would become a state in 1896 with the vote restored. Nobody knew that. She built the vessel anyway, on faith that something would need carrying eventually.
And she wasn't building it alone. The Relief Society --- the network of women's groups she would one day lead --- had already been quietly doing this kind of work for decades, long before any vote was at stake: organizing, corresponding, keeping women connected to one another across a vast and difficult territory. Emmeline stitched her suffrage work into that same fabric. When Susan B. Anthony visited, it was often the Relief Society's own gathering she addressed --- the largest body of enfranchised women in the country, and then, after 1887, the largest body of formerly enfranchised women, still organized, still listening, still ready.
I've watched a lot of movements rise and fall across a lot of centuries. Most of them measure themselves by the win --- the law passed, the door opened. Emmeline measured herself, whether she said so or not, by whether the structure would still be standing when the win finally came. And it was. When Utah women got the vote back in 1896, they got it back into an association, a newspaper, and a network that had never stopped operating for a single day of the seventeen years in between.
That's not nothing. I'd go further --- I think it might be the harder achievement of the two.
I want to tell you something I've come to believe, watching humanity for as long as I have. It isn't a new thought. I think it's one of the oldest true things there is. It's just easier to see clearly in a story like Emmeline's than it is in the middle of your own life.
Here it is: the world is becoming something. Slowly, unevenly, with long stretches that look like nothing is happening at all, and then sudden stretches that look like everything is happening at once --- the world is moving toward a fuller recognition of something it already, secretly, knows to be true. That every soul carries the same worth. That justice isn't a favor granted by the powerful to the powerless, but something built into the shape of things, waiting to be recognized rather than invented. I don't think this movement is in question. I've watched it too long to doubt where it's headed. What I don't know --- what nobody gets to know in advance --- is the path it takes to get there. And the path, I promise you, is almost never a straight line.
Emmeline's seventeen years taught me that better than almost anything I'd witnessed before her. A right was given. A right was taken. A right came back, sturdier than the first time, written directly into the bones of a state constitution instead of granted almost by accident, the way it had been the first time around. I don't think that's a coincidence, and I don't think it's ironic. I think it's closer to how this kind of progress actually moves --- it goes forward, and sometimes it goes backward first, and the backward part is not evidence that the forward part was wrong. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes what gets taken away has to be taken away, so it can be re-argued, re-earned, re-believed by people who almost lost it --- and won back something more permanent than what they started with.
I imagine some of you listening tonight know something about that feeling. The sense that a thing you thought was settled, a fairness you thought was finally secure, has quietly come loose again. I won't pretend to know your particular version of it. But I've watched this pattern enough times, across enough centuries, to say this with real certainty: a setback is not the end of the story. It's often the middle of it --- the part that has to happen before the ending can hold.
Here is what I keep coming back to, though, and it's the part I most want you to carry with you. None of that forward motion happens by itself. The inevitable doesn't arrive on its own schedule while everyone waits patiently. It arrives because people who have no proof yet that it's coming keep acting as though it is. Emmeline didn't have a promise, in 1888, that 1896 was coming. She had a newspaper, a network of women, and a stubborn, unglamorous habit of showing up to do the work anyway. That's what I mean when I say faith is a verb, not a feeling. It isn't the comfort of already knowing how the story ends. It's the discipline of acting as if you know, long before the evidence arrives to back you up --- and then, sometimes, watching the world quietly rearrange itself to match what you were faithful enough to believe.
So let me leave you with a question, instead of an answer, because I think that's the more honest thing to do with a story like this one.
What do you keep doing, when the thing you were working toward gets taken away?
I don't mean the big, visible things --- the marches, the votes, the moments everyone remembers later. I mean the quieter version. The unglamorous habit. The newspaper that still goes out every two weeks. The meeting you still show up to, the letter you still write, the small daily act of behaving as though the outcome you can't yet see is still coming --- even when nobody would blame you for stopping.
I think most of us have at least one of these in our lives. Something we started building toward a fairness or a hope that hasn't arrived yet, and may not arrive on any schedule we get to choose. Maybe it's already come loose once. Maybe you're in the seventeen years right now, and you don't know it, because nobody ever does while they're living through them --- you only recognize the shape of it looking backward, the way I got to.
Here's what I'd ask you to hold onto, gently, this week. Not certainty. I can't give you that, and I wouldn't trust it if I could. Just this: the work you do in the gap, when there's no proof yet that it matters, might be the part of the story that ends up mattering most. Emmeline didn't know she'd get her vote back. She kept the paper running anyway.
I wonder what your paper is. I wonder if you're already running it, without quite calling it that yet.
Next time, we come to the end of this particular thread --- the seventh and last stop on a road that started, six episodes ago, with Abby Kelley Foster discovering that two fights were really one fight. We've crossed an ocean and come back. We've watched a network become a nation become three nations. And now the thread lands somewhere I don't think anyone would have guessed at the start.
I want you to meet a woman named Martha Hughes Cannon. She was a physician --- one of the first women in the country to hold that title and practice it openly. And in 1896, the same year Utah's vote came back into the constitution for good, she did something no woman anywhere in this country had ever done before. She ran for the Utah State Senate. And she won. Against four other candidates --- one of whom was her own husband.
Let that sit with you for a moment the way it's sitting with me. Not just enfranchised. Not just permitted to vote at last, after everything Emmeline and so many others had spent decades fighting to secure. Elected. Trusted with actual power, by actual voters, over the very man she was married to.
After that, friend, we leave this thread behind for a while. We go back to the wide gallery --- back to picking up single threads from single centuries, with no arc pulling us forward from one day to the next. But I didn't want you stepping into that final episode without knowing what a strange and fitting close it's about to be.
Until then --- hold onto Emmeline's newspaper, and the seventeen years it kept running for no reason but faith. I have a feeling it'll come back to you, once you meet Martha.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.