“I am going to ask you a question, and I am going to let you answer it, and I am not going to criticise you. I know what your difficulties are, because they are just like mine. I ask the Latter-day Saint husbands if you have wives that look at everything just like you do? I would not give a snap of my finger for a woman that did not fight for her rights. I am thankful that my wife happens to be one of that kind; she has her own personality, her own individuality, and we don’t always see things just alike. I am not going to ask you what kind of a wife you have, but I could believe they don’t all look at things just like you.”
– J. Golden Kimball, Conference Address, April 1913
I love JGK.
I would love to understand the context of this.
Context within his full talk is here (pp 84-90) — I’m clueless as to context in his life or 1913 society.
I love JGK, too.
Hey, I bet it’s a reference to women’s suffrage? The rationale was that women didn’t need a vote (or rights) since her husband would do the voting for them both.
While women in Utah had had the vote for many years at this date, the national debates about suffrage and “true womanhood” and related issues would still have been familiar — you may well be right, Jean.
I know they had the vote when Utah was a territory, but I was under the impression that it was taken away when Utah became a state and didn’t happen again until 1920. So I thought that women wouldn’t have had the vote in 1913. Is there a timeline of women’s suffrage in Utah??
Found one. Turns out Utah women got the vote for the second time in 1895. This is what I get for learning history through vague osmosis…(and for not being a Utahn I guess!)
Jean, if you’re on Facebook, you should look up and follow a group called Better Days 2020 — They’re commemorating woman suffrage with an especially strong Mormon flavor. Great art, great stories, in FB-bite-size pieces.
I remember from reading SWK’s biography that Andrew Kimball was arguing about women’s suffrage in the state legislature at the time SWK was born. He disagreed with his opponent, but felt that he might show he respected him by naming after him.
Olive disagreed, and he got named after someone else (I think– at any rate, not after the anti-suffragist). I don’t have the biography with me at the moment, or I’d say what the names were.
The original 1895 Utah constitution guaranteed women’s suffrage and right to hold office, guaranteed married women property rights independent of their husband, and prohibited women from employment in mines. It also contained an equal rights provision quite similar to the federal ERA that some people were all up in arms about 40 years ago.
All those provisions are still in the Utah constitution, except the mining prohibition and the property rights clause, which has become superfluous.