Марта Кэннон: Өмірі мен қызметі

American physician and politician (1857–1932)

Martha Maria "Mattie" Hughes Cannon (July 1, 1857 – July 10, 1932) was a Utah State Senator, physician, Utah women's rights advocate, suffragist, polygamous wife, and a Welsh born immigrant to the United States. Her family immigrated to the United States as converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints (LDS Church) and traveled West to settle in Utah territory with other Saints. She started working at the age of fourteen. At sixteen she enrolled in the University of Deseret, now called the University of Utah, receiving a Bachelors in Chemistry. From there she attended the University of Michigan and received her MD. She became the fourth of six wives in a polygamous marriage to Angus M. Cannon, a prominent Latter day Saint leader during the anti polygamy crusade. Cannon exiled herself to Europe so she wouldn't have to testify against her husband and others. Upon returning to Utah, Cannon worked as a doctor and fought for women's rights. She helped put women enfranchisement into Utah's constitution when it was granted statehood in 1896. On November 3, 1896 Cannon became the first female State Senator elected in the United States, defeating her own husband, who was also on the ballot. Martha Hughes Cannon was the author of Utah sanitation laws and was a founder and member of Utah's first State Board of Health. The Hughes family were converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints and emigrated to the United States with their two daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Martha Maria. They embarked from Liverpool, England on March 30, 1860, on the ship Underwriter and arrived in New York City, New York on May 1, 1860. Peter was very sick at the time and Elizabeth gave birth to their third child, Annie Lloyd. They stayed in New York to earn money to travel the plains to Utah territory. Erastus Snow, a Mormon leader, invited the family to join a pioneer company funded by the LDS Church for the less fortunate. The family accepted the invitation and traveled by train to Florence, Nebraska, and left with The Joseph Horne Company on July 11, 1861. Shortly before the family's arrival in the Salt Lake Valley, on September 3, 1861, Martha's sister Annie Lloyd Hughes died and was buried in an unmarked grave. She was 21 months old. The Joseph Horne company arrived in the Salt Lake valley on September 13, 1861. Three days after they arrived in Salt Lake City, on September 17, 1861, Peter Hughes died. Elizabeth Hughes was left a widow with two young daughters at the age of 28. Thirteen months later, Elizabeth married James Patten Paul, a widower with four sons, thereafter giving birth to the later Latter day Saints university professor and newspaper editor Joshua Hughes Paul. After Elizabeth's marriage to James P. Paul, Martha, at different times in her life, went by the surnames of both Paul and Hughes. Later in life, Paul encouraged Martha to follow her dream of becoming a medical doctor. She graduated from the University of Deseret in 1878 with a degree in chemistry. On August 13, 1878, Hughes was one of four women set apart for medical studies and practice by the LDS Church. President John Taylor and his counselor George Q. Cannon set them apart. The other three women were Romania B. Pratt, Ellis R. Shipp, and Maggie Shipp. Pratt and Ellis Shipp had already received their medical degrees while Maggie Shipp and Hughes were heading out to earn theirs. Cannon expressed concern that because of the legal pressures she might never "have any respectable married life." She then traveled to Washington D. C. to give a status report to a congressional committee on women's suffrage work in Utah. Local and national newspapers gave play to the fact that a leading Mormon polygamist was defeated by his fourth wife. Cannon introduced three bills in her first month in state senate. In consequence of her bill, an Act Providing for Compulsory Education of Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Citizens, Governor Heber Wells appointed Cannon to the board of directors for the school for the Deaf and Dumb. During her second term as State Senator, she drafted a bill for the building of a hospital at the Deaf and Dumb school. Her second bill was an Act to Protect the Health of Women and Girl Employees. The bill protected women and girls by requiring employers to give female employees something to rest on when they weren't serving customers. At the time nothing was provided and many female employees were left exhausted. Her last bill from her first month in office was an Act Creating a State Board of Health and Defining its Duties. She fought against lobbyists trying to abolish the State Board of Public Examiners. The board was in charge of certifying the qualifications of doctors and midwives, preventing impersonators from potentially hurting patients. As a doctor, Cannon took personal interest in fighting against the lobbyists attempting to terminate an association that protected physicians. In 1898 at the invitation of officials of the National American Woman's Suffrage Association, two years after becoming the country's first woman state senator, Cannon spoke at the Seneca Falls 50th year celebration in Washington D. C. Cannon also testified before the U. S. House Committee on the Judiciary of the positive effects of women's franchise in Utah. Twenty two years later, women's suffrage was added as the 19th amendment to the United States Constitution. Cannon lost only one bill: an Act Providing for the Teaching in the Public Schools of the Effects of Alcoholic Drinks and Narcotics on the Human System In 1902 she became a member of the psychology section of the Medico Legacy Society of New York. The society's main focus was tuberculosis. In October 2015 legislators formed the Martha Hughes Cannon caucus in an effort to encourage more women in Utah to participate in government. KUED produced an hour long documentary on Martha Hughes Cannon's life. The Utah State Legislature voted in 2018 to send a statue of Martha Hughes Cannon to the United States Capitol's National Statuary Hall in 2020, replacing the extant statue of inventor Philo Farnsworth.

In 2020, Her Quiet Revolution, a historical fiction novel about Cannon's life and work by American author Marianne Monson, appeared in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of US women’s suffrage.