Hello, my friend. Come sit with me a moment longer --- I have one more suffrage story to tell.
Last time I told you about Emmeline Wells, and that stubborn little newspaper of hers, and a vote that Utah women held, then lost, then had to go and win back with their own two hands. I still think about that word --- back. As if a right, once it's been yours, leaves a shape behind even after it's taken. You knew the shape. You just had to fill it in again.
That was the sixth thread in something I haven't done before --- seven women, one after another, close together, because I told you their story wouldn't make sense any other way. We started with Abby Kelley Foster, who grew her fight for women's votes right up out of the fight against slavery. Then Frances Willard, who turned one country's reform society into a world of them. Then New Zealand --- Kate Sheppard, Harriet Morison, Meri Mangakāhia --- three different women, three different doors, the same house. Then Emmeline, and her crooked path.
And now, my friend --- one more. The last name in the chain. The one where all of it comes down to a single election, a single ballot, and a very particular kind of surprise.
Let's finish this together.
Come with me somewhere modern for a moment --- I do like doing that, now and then, catching you off guard.
Picture a room in Washington, D.C. Marble floor, glass ceiling arching overhead, letting in a flat gray winter light. It's called Emancipation Hall, and it's full --- genuinely full --- of people. Nearly three million of them pass through in a year, phones raised, necks craned, moving in that particular shuffle people do in rooms built to be looked at. And all around them, standing perfectly still while the crowd flows past, are a hundred figures in bronze and marble. Two for every state in the country. This is where America keeps its official memory, more or less. Statesmen. Inventors. A few reformers. The names get taught in schools, printed in the good textbooks, carved in stone so nobody forgets them.
I've spent a long time in rooms like this one. I like watching who gets a plinth, and who doesn't, and how long it takes.
There's a figure near the back who's newer than the rest. You can tell --- the bronze still catches the light a little too brightly in places, where hands haven't yet worn it dull the way they have with the older ones. She's small. Barely five feet tall in life, they tell me, though she stands taller than that now, the way statues do. A book held in both hands. A face that looks like it's already decided something.
She was unveiled in this hall in December of 2024.
Now --- here is where I'd like you to lean in, because I want you to hear how strange this is. This woman was a physician. She studied germs before most doctors took the idea seriously. She was also, by law and by choice, a plural wife --- the fourth of six --- married to a man during the very years the federal government was hunting down households like hers. She once fled the country rather than testify against her own husband in court.
And there she stands. Not softened. Not explained away. Exactly as she was --- honored, by the State of Utah, in the nation's capital, in our own lifetime.
Who would believe it?
Her name was Martha Hughes Cannon.
She wasn't born anywhere near Utah. She was born in Wales, in 1857, in a small town whose name most Americans still can't pronounce right --- and I remember the crossing well, because so many families made it in those years, packed onto ships bound for a desert most of them had never seen a picture of, chasing a faith that had asked them to come. Martha's family made that crossing in 1861, when she was four years old. She lost her father not long after. Then a younger sister. Grief has a way of turning some children inward, and other children outward, toward the exact thing that took someone from them. Martha turned outward. She decided, very young, that she wanted to understand sickness well enough to stop it.
She started working at fourteen --- teaching school for a year, though by her own account she wasn't much good at keeping the bigger boys in line. Then typesetting, which suited her better. She set type for the Deseret News, and later for a small newspaper called the Women's Exponent, run out of Salt Lake City by a sharp, tireless editor named Emmeline B. Wells . I imagine you remember that name.
That's not a coincidence I'm going to let slide past you quietly. Martha met Emmeline at that press. She met Eliza Snow there too. And both women --- older, already hardened by the particular fights of their generation --- looked at this quick, restless girl setting type all day and told her she should become a doctor. Not many people said that to young women in 1873. Martha listened anyway.
At sixteen, she enrolled at the University of Deseret to study chemistry. Then east, to the University of Michigan, one of the only medical schools in the country that would let a woman sit in the same lecture hall as the men. She earned her degree. Then further east still, to the University of Pennsylvania, to study pharmacy --- the only woman in that classroom too, as she so often was.
She came home a physician. And not long after, she became something else as well: the fourth of six wives married to a man named Angus Cannon, a prominent leader in his church, at the exact moment the federal government had decided to make examples of households built the way hers was. The Edmunds--Tucker Act came down in 1887, and among everything else it did, it stripped Utah women of a vote they had already been casting for seventeen years. Martha had voted before most American women had ever been allowed to imagine it. Now she couldn't.
And when the government came looking for witnesses against men like her husband, Martha did something I still find remarkable in its quiet defiance --- she left. Crossed an ocean, back the way her family had once come, and stayed in Europe long enough that no one could compel her to speak in a courtroom against the man she'd married.
She came home again once Utah reached statehood in 1896 --- and with statehood, the vote returned. Martha didn't simply take it back and go quiet. She ran for office. State senate, as a Democrat.
On the very same ballot, running as a Republican, was her own husband.
I want you to sit with that ballot for a moment, because I don't think it's the kind of thing that resolves itself easily, and I don't think it's supposed to.
A husband and a wife, running against each other for the same seat. Not metaphorically. Not as some clever historical footnote. Actually against each other, on paper, in front of their entire community --- a community that already watched this family closely, given everything that had come before. I've seen plenty of marriages tested by war, by distance, by grief. I don't know that I'd seen one tested quite like this: by an election.
Here is what strikes me most, though --- nobody at the time seemed to think this needed smoothing over. Utah newspapers wrote about it plainly. Martha ran her own campaign, gave her own speeches, made her own case, separate from her husband's name and his standing in the church he served. I don't think she ran against him so much as she simply ran --- fully, on her own terms --- and it happened that he was standing in the same race. The two things were allowed to be true at once. That, itself, was new.
She'd said something, a few years earlier, that I think tells you exactly where her convictions sat. Women who stay home all the time, she said, have the most unpleasant homes there are. It wasn't rebellion for its own sake. It was a physician's diagnosis --- she'd looked at women confined entirely to one room of life and pronounced them, plainly, unwell for it. Purpose mattered to her the way medicine mattered to her. Maybe they were the same thing, in her mind.
And I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to tell you this story as if the vote itself was the miracle --- the ballot cast, the count read out, Martha's name above her husband's. That moment mattered enormously, and I won't pretend otherwise. But watch what happened after the votes were counted, because that's where the real weight of it sits. She didn't just hold a seat. She used it. She built a commission for regulating contagious disease. She sat on the Board of Health. When smallpox tore through Utah at the end of that decade, she was one of the people trying to hold the line --- pushing for vaccination, for quarantine, for the unglamorous, unpopular work of keeping people alive against a wave of public suspicion that made her job harder than it should have been.
That's the piece I don't want you to miss. The century had spent decades arguing, in the abstract, about whether women belonged in public life --- whether they could be trusted with judgment, with authority, with consequence. Martha didn't argue the point. She simply held the pen and wrote the policy. Somewhere in Salt Lake City, a woman was deciding how a disease outbreak would be handled, and the argument that had consumed so much ink and so many stages became, for a moment, beside the point. It had already been settled by someone doing the job.
I think that's what unsettled people more than the ballot did, if I'm honest. An idea is easy enough to dismiss when it's only spoken. It gets harder to dismiss once it's sitting behind a desk, signing its name to something that will outlast the argument entirely.
Here is what I think Martha adds to the long record I keep --- not the vote itself, but the proof of what a vote is actually for.
I watched this same lesson arrive in different clothing, over and over, through this whole unbroken chain of women. Kate Sheppard's New Zealand won its vote in a rush, faster than anyone expected, and for a while that victory sat there almost like an idea on paper. Meri Mangakāhia asked for more than the vote entirely --- she asked for authority, for a seat in the very parliament making the laws, because she understood, long before most people said it plainly, that a ballot without a hand on the pen is only half the thing. Emmeline Wells fought to get her vote back at all, twice enfranchised in one lifetime, and I don't think she'd have called that fight finished the moment the ballot was restored.
Martha is where all of that finally lands somewhere solid. She didn't just receive the thing the others had been reaching for. She sat down at the desk it was meant to lead to, and she wrote something with it --- sanitation boards, quarantine measures, real decisions made in a real crisis, by a hand that had earned the standing to make them.
I don't think this is a small addition to what the world already understood about itself. For a long time, the loudest question of the age was whether women could be trusted with public consequence at all. Martha didn't answer that question with a speech. She answered it with a policy that outlived the argument.
A vote, once it's finally won, was never the end of the story. It was only ever the beginning of one.
I want to take you back to that hall for a moment --- the marble floor, the glass ceiling, the hundred still figures and the three million people moving past them every year --- because I don't think I've told you the whole truth about what that room is.
That hall isn't history. It's a decision about history. Someone, at some point, chose which hundred figures got a plinth and which didn't, out of a country that has produced millions of lives worth remembering. And I want to tell you something I noticed a long time ago, watching centuries of rooms exactly like it get built, filled, and argued over: the something that stirred loose across the world that Martha lived in --- the drive toward freeing enslaved people, and the drive toward giving women a voice in their own governance --- those were never two separate movements that happened to share a century by coincidence. They were the same impulse, finding different doors. Sometimes the very same hands worked both doors at once. You met one of those hands already, right back at the start of this --- Abby Kelley Foster never separated the two fights in her own life, because to her, I don't think they ever felt like two.
But here's the strange thing about how memory works. We do build monuments to that fight --- plenty of them. And yet the deeper victory doesn't live in the monuments. It lives in something much quieter: a shackle that simply isn't forged anymore, a chain nobody has to feel because it was never made. You don't wake up grateful, most mornings, for a chain that doesn't exist. You don't feel its absence the way you'd feel its weight. And that, I think, is the truest measure of how far the world has actually come --- not that we built statues to remember the fight, but that the thing itself receded so completely from daily life that most people don't have to think about it at all. Forgetting what no longer threatens you isn't carelessness. It's what safety feels like from the inside. Suffrage never got to fade that way --- because a ballot is something you touch again and again, every election, a right you have to keep exercising to keep it real. So it stayed visible, stayed argued over, stayed the story --- while the other victory, the deeper one, simply quieted down and let itself be forgotten, the way anything truly won eventually does.
And then --- and this is the part I really want you to sit with --- the very same thing happened again, inside the story that got kept. The tidy version you may have grown up with runs in a straight, clean line: a meeting at Seneca Falls, a determined woman or two whose names get printed in bold, an amendment, done. It's a good story. It's also nearly nothing like what actually happened. It leaves out a country on the far side of the world that won its vote first, by decades. It leaves out a Māori woman who stood up in her own parliament and asked for more than anyone else had thought to ask. It leaves out a Utah physician who had the vote, lost it to an act of Congress, fled a continent rather than betray her husband, came home, won it back, and then ran for office against that very same husband --- and won that too.
None of that fit the tidy version. Not because it wasn't true. Because it wasn't convenient.
That statue took a hundred and twenty-eight years to reach that hall. She stands there now as one of only fourteen women out of a hundred figures --- the room itself still visibly catching up to what actually happened.
Here is what I want you to carry out of that hall with you, my friend, back into your own ordinary Tuesday. Something is almost certainly stirring loose in your own lifetime right now --- plural, scattered, happening in a dozen places you'll never hear about, through people whose names won't make it into whatever tidy version gets told eighty years from now. That's not a flaw in the story. That's simply the true shape an awakening always takes. Recognizing that shape --- refusing to wait for the tidy version before you believe something real is happening --- is itself a kind of work. Not watching for history to hand you its finished verdict, but doing the unglamorous, unbold thing in front of you now, the way Martha once sat down at a desk and simply wrote the policy nobody else had gotten around to writing yet.
So here is what I'd like to leave with you, before we close this chapter together.
Martha held two things at once her whole life, and never once tried to make them match. A plural wife. A physician. A woman who fled a continent to protect her husband, and then ran against him for office and beat him. I don't think she experienced those as contradictions the way we might, looking back and trying to sort her into one tidy category or another. I think she just lived them, one after the other, and let each be exactly as true as the last.
I wonder if you might try that, too --- just for a while. Most of us carry at least one thing about ourselves that doesn't fit neatly into the story other people expect us to tell. Some part of your life that feels like it belongs to a different chapter than the rest, or doesn't photograph well, or wouldn't make the tidy version if someone were writing it down in eighty years. I don't think that part needs smoothing over. I think it might be the truest part.
And here's a smaller question, one you can carry with you the next time you're somewhere ordinary --- a hallway, a meeting, a kitchen table where a decision is quietly being made. Look around. Someone in that room is very likely doing something that matters, in a way nobody will notice for a long time yet. Maybe it's you. There's no statue for it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. That was true for Martha for a hundred and twenty-eight years, and it didn't make the work any less real while she was doing it.
What would you do differently today, if you stopped waiting to find out whether the story gets kept?
Before I let you go, my friend, I want to step outside the story for just a moment --- just Harmonia to you, no history in between.
These seven women --- Abby, Frances, Kate, Harriet, Meri, Emmeline, and now Martha --- were never meant to be told the way I usually tell things. I broke my own rule for them. Normally I give you one soul at a time, unconnected, wherever the thread happens to pull me. But this story didn't work that way. It only made sense as one unbroken pull, seven doors opening out of the same hallway, so I gave it to you close together, on purpose, all at once.
And I want you to understand that this arc wasn't its own beginning. It was an ending --- a capstone to something much longer. A good while back now, I told you I'd noticed how thin my own Women in Faith archive had grown, and I made a quiet promise to go looking, one soul at a time, for the women the record-keepers forgot to name or chose not to. Thirty-seven episodes, by my count, since I made that promise. Miaodao. Anna Kingsford. So many others in between. And these seven, the ones we just finished, were where all of that looking finally arrived --- the place the whole stretch had been walking toward without either of us quite knowing it at the time.
So here is what I want to tell you plainly. That longer season is complete now. I'm returning to my regular way of doing things --- one life at a time, wherever the thread pulls me next, the way I've always done it. But I don't intend to let go of what I learned walking so closely with all these women for so long. I'll keep a better balance going forward. You have my word on that.
Next time, we go somewhere entirely different --- not a hall of statues, not a ballot, but a quiet road in North Africa, centuries ago, where a man named Al-Shadhili walked without ever quite arriving anywhere in particular, and taught people that devotion doesn't always march toward something. Sometimes it just walks, patiently, wherever it's led --- and somehow that patience became its own kind of destination.
Thank you for staying with me through all of it --- the long season, and these seven women at the end of it. I've loved every step. I'll see you again soon, somewhere new.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.