On Thursday, the Weber County League of Women Voters invited the public to a Voter Rights Celebration at the Pleasant Valley Branch of the Weber County Library System. Thursday’s festivities included keynote appearances by author Neylan McBaine and Weber County Clerk/Auditor Ricky Hatch. Afterwards, attendees were able to interact with several locals in period-dress acting as suffragists from state and national history such as Seraph Young and Susan B. Anthony.

Pioneering the Vote

McBaine, who authored “Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West” spoke about her interest in the women’s suffrage movement and how Utah played a huge role in it.

She said that interest was sparked by reading about Emmeline Wells.

“Ten years ago, I was already kind of well-known within the LDS community for doing a lot of women’s activism, and I had written a very defining book called ‘Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact,'” she said. “As part of that interest, I was reading about Emmeline Wells, I was trying to study about this woman who I kind of had an inkling was really significant in the history of LDS women.”

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

McBaine just happened to see a very brief mention about Wells’ contribution to state voting history and was instantly intrigued.

“There was a line that said, Emmeline may have been among the 26 women who voted on the morning of February 14th, 1870, in the first municipal election legally open to women,” she said. “It might have even been a footnote — I’ll have to go back and look — but it was definitely a throwaway comment. And I just was stunned, and I kind of stopped and said, ‘Is this saying what I think it’s saying?'”

McBaine went on to co-found Better Days 2020 — now known as Better Days — in 2016, which is a nonprofit that, according to its website, is “dedicated to popularizing Utah women’s history in creative and communal ways.”

She also went on to write Pioneering the Vote.

Over the course of a half-hour, McBaine discussed a handful of figures brought up in her book that were crucial to the women’s vote in Utah and beyond, including Wells, Seraph Young, Martha Hughes Cannon and more.

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

McBaine said there are a couple of important lessons from the story of women’s suffrage.

“The story of suffrage isn’t just about voting,” she said. “This massive movement was really a modern American women’s foray into coming into themselves. It was really at a time when women were not necessarily welcomed into every professional sphere and into every educational sphere. It was a gateway for them to gain confidence on the public stage. It was really their first foray into the public participation. It taught them oratory skills, it taught them legal skills, it taught them skills around petitioning and organizing, presenting themselves publicly.”

She added there is also a major reality to voting rights.

“One of the things that is often misunderstood is that there is no finish line,” she said. “There is no declaring victory. … I think, as we’re seeing right now, it’s very possible to lose ground very quickly without a lot of concerted effort to maintain the rights and privileges that we have painfully earned over the years.”

Following McBaine was Hatch, who started off his segment of the evening acting as his eighth great-grandfather William Bradford, an English Pilgrim who arrived on the Mayflower and served as Governor of Plymouth Colony. As Bradford, Hatch took time to detail what voting and how elections were administered in the Plymouth Colony before speaking at length about how modern elections are administered in Utah and the rigorous processes used be Weber County and others in the state to make sure that ballots and elections are safe.

‘We need to understand’

Rob Nielsen, Standard-Examiner

“We had a pretty good crowd,” Terri McCulloch, president of the Weber County League of Women Voters, told the Standard-Examiner following the event. “(McBaine and Hatch) were both excellent speakers — there’ s a lot of history in there.”

She said that it was important to show the past and how it relates to navigating the present state of voting.

“The past tells us what people went through to give us the right to be able to say who is going to govern us,” she said. “The future and the present, we need to understand some of the legislative things that have gone through, why are we doing this, where is the truth, what really proves whether or not the ballot is right — those things people really need to understand. There’s tricks being played in places sometimes — I can’t say all of the time — but the public needs to be aware  and be able to know where to go look for information.”