Review: Dr. Martha: The Life of a Pioneer Physician, Politician, and Polygamist by Mari Graña

In September 2020, an elegant statue by Laura Lee Stay Bradshaw was unveiled before Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City. It honours a remarkable Welsh-American medical doctor, women's rights activist and suffragist by the name of Martha Hughes Cannon (1857-1932). Once the Covid-19 restrictions have been sufficiently lifted to allow a proper inauguration ceremony, "Mattie" will be transferred to the National Statuary Hall in Washington D.C., to be included among a host of overwhelmingly male dignitaries from times past. I have reason to be proud of the stepdaughter of my 3x great uncle, James Patten Paul, who, like Mattie, was a Mormon pioneer from Britain. Dr. Martha is the second book about pioneering female physicians by Willa Cather award winner Mari Graña, whose earlier work, Pioneer Doctor (2005), was a biography of the author's own grandmother, Mary Babcock Atwater.

Mattie's parents were Welshman Peter Hughes and an Englishwoman of partly Welsh descent called Elizabeth Evans. The Hughes family grew up in Wales, where they became Latter Day Saints (or Mormons, as they are usually referred to by non-LDS members), whereas James Paul's family embraced the faith in Ayrshire, Scotland. Both the Hughes and the Pauls set off on separate, exceedingly perilous treks which would eventually take them to the Utah territory.

By the time the Hughes' arrived in New York, Peter had fallen seriously ill, forcing Elizabeth to take on sewing work to feed the family. Thanks to a loan, the Hughes, along with six-year-old Mary, four-year-old Martha/Mattie and newborn baby Annie, set off to Nebraska to join the Joseph Horne Company destined for Salt Lake City, a distance of altogether almost 2,000 miles. With Peter becoming increasingly ill, Elizabeth was forced to walk almost the entire route to allow her sick husband and children to rest in the wagon. Tragically, Annie died on the trek, probably of typhoid, and Peter passed away shortly after they arrived in Utah. According to Graña, the traumatic experience of not being able to properly treat the ill was what later prompted young Mattie to study medicine.

What followed in Salt Lake was a pragmatic, but successful, marriage between Elizabeth and recently-widowed multiple father and master carpenter James Paul, who set about building an adobe house. When the Pauls ran out of material to finish the roof, Elizabeth sold lace heirlooms she had brought over from Wales to help complete the home. At fourteen, Mattie became a schoolteacher, then worked at a printer's, and finally, despite opposition from men who objected to what they scathingly called "petticoat doctors", and with the encouragement of two influential women, editor Emmeline Wells and Eliza Snow, the so-called "Matriarch of Mormonism", studied to become a physician. Mattie's stepfather could ill-afford to pay for her education, but he supported her as best he could financially, and by building her a trunk for her textbooks and clothes. Later, he added a wing to the house specifically for Mattie to use as a surgery. Mattie became a highly respected doctor, and was soon offered a post as resident physician at a hospital.

At a time when polygamy was common in the LDS Church, Mattie in 1884 became the fourth wife of the much older Angus Munn Cannon, a prominent Mormon leader and Republican politician. Although the Utah-based LDS Church is usually associated with male-dominated conservatism, Utah gave the vote to women as early as 1870, partly because the Mormons believed that women would be loyal to their church when voting, but the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887 later put a stop to women’s suffrage, presumably a "Gentile" move to keep Mormon influence in check. Ironically, as a polygamous wife with shared duties and a husband who spent much of his time travelling and attending multiple events, Mattie and her "sisters" found it easier than monogamous wives to find time for activities outside the home. In a newspaper interview in 1896, Mattie said:

Somehow I know that women who stay home all the time have the most unpleasant homes there are. You give me a woman who thinks about something besides cook stoves and wash tubs and baby flannels, and I'll show you, nine times out of ten, a successful mother.

Of course, all this communal marital bliss had to end some day. Trouble loomed when Angus was convicted of unlawful cohabitation with more than one wife, but he appealed to the court, claiming that he had stopped having sexual relations with the surplus wives, and was eventually pardoned. Mattie, pregnant with her first child, Elizabeth, went into hiding, and then lived in exile in England with her daughter to avoid having to testify against her husband. Angus thereafter married two further wives, and Mattie grew increasingly angry and jealous, but homesickness and overdependence on relatives ultimately made her return to him. Her Letters from Exile, edited by Constance L. Lieber and John Sillito, and free to download at the Internet Archive, are an interesting insight into 19th century polygamy. Aside from their first daughter Elizabeth, later McCrimmon, a writer who together with her uncle (Mattie's stepbrother), university principal Joshua Hughes Paul, wrote a book on plants as well as several novels and an unpublished memoir of her mother, Angus and Mattie had two further children back in Utah; James, a later company director and inventor, and Gwendolyn, who sadly died in her twenties, leaving behind a husband and an underage child. Mattie now taught nursing, and in 1896, when women's suffrage was restored in Utah, she was put up as a Democratic Party candidate for state senator, becoming the first woman in the United States to be elected in that position. The real sensation at the time was, however, that she had competed directly with Angus, who ran for the same office under the Republican banner and was beaten by his own wife. The Salt Lake Herald wrote: "Mrs. Mattie Hughes Cannon, his wife, is the better man of the two. Send Mrs. Cannon to the State Senate and let Mr. Cannon, as a Republican, remain at home to manage home industry." As a politician, and as a member of the Board of Health, Mattie helped introduce numerous reforms and improvements, including schemes to help working women and to educate the deaf, dumb and blind, vaccination and food programmes, and measures against tuberculosis. After Angus' death, Mattie joined her children in California, where she spent the remainder of her life, retaining her allegiance to Mormonism until the end. It is only just that this representative of LDS feminism is now receiving the honour she deserves.

I can also strongly recommend the aforementioned (illustrated) Letters from Exile, the KUED University of Utah documentary DVD on Martha Hughes Cannon, and a lovingly written historical novel of Mattie's life, Her Quiet Revolution, by Marianne Monson, whose books include non-fiction stories of pioneering women.

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