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Show Page 259 federal courts to crush polygamy in Utah. And, while men should be permitted to have plural wives, Orson could see no reason why women should not be permitted to vote - on February 12, 1870, he sent up to the territorial 48 governor legislation giving the franchise to women. Woman suffrage thus found in Orson Pratt's signature one of its earliest legislative imprimaturs in America; and, when in 1871 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony gratefully attended an Independence Day celebration in Salt Lake City, it was Orson Pratt who gave a "fervent and patriotic prayer, 49 invoking blessings upon the Union and President Grant." When, against Orson Pratt's official protest, the Cullom Bill passed the House of Representatives in Washington, three thousand of Utah's just-enfranchised women marched into the Tabernacle to try their new powers. The huge mass meeting, in which Orson served as "vice president," sent the sharp message East that Utah's women sustained the principle of celestial marriage and would not yield on this or any other question of 50 religious conscience. Startled that the women showed such unqualified support for "the principle," the controlling Republicans stalled the Cullom Bill in the Senate. Most of them, Radical crusaders who had succeeded in dismantling the "barbaric" Southern culture, had firmly believed Mormon women to be in some kind of bondage, and Brigham Young to be maintaining women as chattels by a system of terror. Actually, polygamy never involved more than one in ten Mormon households, even in those days when it was stringently defended by the Church. Mormon men who sustained even two wives were rare enough; those with more than two amounted to only a handful of leaders. Some have suggested that the privileges of polygyny were restricted to a prosperous elite - Orson's case clearly shows otherwise. Most felt it their duty to set an example by living the principle as far as they could, and Orson, who married his 51 tenth and laSt WlSe, Margaret Graham, in 1868, was no exception. In regard |