Wells, Emmeline Blanche Woodward

▪ American religious leader and feminist

née  Emmeline Blanche Woodward  

born Feb. 29, 1828, Petersham, Mass., U.S.

died April 25, 1921, Salt Lake City, Utah

      American religious leader and feminist who made use of her editorship of the Mormon publication Woman's Exponent to campaign energetically for woman suffrage.

      Emmeline Woodward followed her widowed mother in converting to Mormonism in 1842. She moved with her first husband to the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844. He deserted her in 1845, and later that year she became one of the wives of Newel K. Whitney, presiding bishop of the Mormon group, in a ceremony performed by Brigham Young (Young, Brigham). She accompanied the main Mormon group west to “Deseret” (now Utah), and in 1852, two years after Bishop Whitney's death, she married Daniel H. Wells, a high Mormon officer. She was his seventh wife.

      After a decade devoted to domestic life, Wells became active in the work of the influential Relief Society and in 1873 began contributing to the society's bimonthly Woman's Exponent, of which she became editor in 1877. Wells was elected a vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1874. In 1878 she was proposed for the office of treasurer of Salt Lake City, Utah, but was barred by territorial law from running for the office. In the mid-1880s, when Congress threatened to repeal the Utah woman suffrage law that had been enacted by the territorial legislature in 1870, Wells turned the Woman's Exponent into a powerful voice in defense of women. She spent several months personally lobbying in Washington, D.C. (1885–86). Her campaign failed, however; in 1887 woman suffrage was repealed.

      In January 1889 Wells led in founding the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah and through it launched a campaign that succeeded in restoring the vote to Utah women in 1896. In 1893 Wells edited Charities and Philanthropies: Woman's Work in Utah as part of Utah's contribution to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and in 1896 she published Musings and Memories, a collection of her verses. She was also the author of the words of the popular Mormon hymn “Our Mountain Home So Dear.” She continued to edit the Woman's Exponent until 1914, when it was superseded by the Relief Society Magazine.

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