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Show avoid arrest and imprisonment. While in Europe she visited the leading hospitals. Returning to Utah, she established the first training school for nurses. Again, after the birth of her second child, she left the state and lived in San Francisco. Martha Cannon played an active role in the woman suffrage movement. She a national spoke in Chicago at the suffrage meeting at Columbian Exposition in 1893; in 1898 she went to Washington D.C. where she spoke at a convention honoring the 50th Anniversary of the Seneca Falls declaration of women's rights and appeared before a congressional committee in support of women's right to vote. She was strong in defense of women working and in promoting worthwhile activities outside the home. She felt women should run for political office except perhaps for such offices as governor. These she considered too "mannish",which she was not. Her friends described her as charming, attractive and completely feminine but with an independent spirit and mind. In her first two years in the Senate"she acted as chairman of the Apportionment Committee and in the last two she was chairman of the Public Health Committee. In the Senate she introduced three bills, which would: Protect the Heal th of Women and girl employees; Provide for the Compulsory Education of Deaf, Dumb and Blind children; and create a State Board of Health and defining its duties. The third act was the one The act which had principally spurred her entry into poli tics. for attack on of Utah law and provided the basis became part The sanitation. of disease and legislation problems contagious She spent her second term working on them. needed more "teeth". The act provided quarantine rules and regulations fo suppression of nuisances and contagious diseases; promoted protection of water suppl ies; inspection of schools and exc l usion of persons wi th infectious or contagious diseases from schools; and provided burial permits Cannon introduced the bill for building the Utah School for the Deaf and Dumb and served as a member on the until appointed to the newly created State Board of Health. Senator Mattie 1896, her husbands to own. Much of her mind a had the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in excommunicated switched her vote to Moses Thatcher, an the forty-third vote. Cannon annoyance, Mormon State board she on at re-election, she continued to practice Al tho she did not seek medicine and serve on the State Board of Health. When the state built a new Health Building in 1985, they named it the Martha H. Cannon Health Building. Martha worked on July 10, in 1932, the Graves Clinic in Los Angeles She died there and was buried in Salt Lake City, Utah. 27 |
