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Show 26 MARTHA HUGHES Elected Senate 1897 CANNON to 1901 Martha Cannon was Utah's first woman senator, the first woman state senator in the United one States and of its colorful most politicians. The campaign in which she ran and won drew nationwide attention not only because she was running in the first statehood elections but because she was competing with her husband, Angus M. Cannon, for a seat in the State Senate. The impression has grown that she was competing directly against him as a person but this was not the case. The candidates were running "at large" from Salt Lake County, five Democrats and five Republicans, for five seats in the Senate. This meant voters coul d choose wi thout regard for party. Those receiving the most votes were declared winners. Martha Cannon, a Democrat, won and her husband, a Republican, lost. The engendered a good bit of amusement. On November 1, the Salt Lake Tribune offered the following advice to her husband: "We do not see anything for Angus M. Cannon to do but either go home and break a bouquet over Mrs. Cannon's head, to show his superiority, or to go up to the Herald office and break a chair over the head of the man who wrote that disturber of domestic peace." The Sal t Lake Herald had supported Mrs. Cannon's candidacy. contest 1896, She born on July 1, 1857, in Llandudno, Wales and came to Utah child. Her father died three days after arriving in Salt Lake and her mother married James P. Paul, a widower. as a was young During girlhood she dreamed of becoming a doctor and to that end saved the money earned from school teaching and typesetting on the DESERET NEWS. In 1876 she enrolled in pre-med at the University of Deseret. Two years later -1878-she enrolled at the University of Michigan. To add to her slender finances, she made beds and washed dishes at a boarding house. On her twenty-third birthday, she graduated with an M.D. degree. Vitally interested in public health, she went to Phi 1 adel phia and entered both the Uni versi ty of Pennsyl vania and the National School of Elocution and Oratory, feeling the latter would be of great benefit in the lectures she planned to deliver. In 1882 she received her Bachelor of Science degree and a Bachelor of Oratory degree. Martha returned to Utah where she entered private practice and acted as resident physician at the Deseret Hospital. On October 6, 1884 she married Angus M. Cannon, a member of the hospital board, twenty-three years her senior and a polygamist. The practice of polygamy' was being prbsecuted in Utah and after the birth of her first child, she went to Europe to help her husband |
