History of the League in Salt Lake
The origins of the Utah League of Women Voters were set in motion on November 17, 1919, when renowned suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt spoke at the Conference of Women Voters in the Salt Lake Tabernacle. Sponsored by the Utah State Suffrage Council—then led by prominent feminists like Emmeline B. Wells and Emily S. Richards—the event reinforced the growing movement for women’s political engagement in the state.
Three years later, in 1922, momentum turned into action as 18 determined women gathered in the Ladies Parlor of the Hotel Utah for the League’s first official meeting. Their goal was clear: to transform the energy of suffrage into lasting civic participation. Leah Dunham Widtsoe, a respected community leader and wife of LDS Church Apostle John A. Widtsoe, was elected as the first State Chairman. With each member contributing a symbolic $1 in dues, they laid the groundwork for a movement that would shape Utah’s political landscape for generations.
History of the League of Women Voters
The League of Women Voters was founded as a successor organization to the National American Woman Suffrage Association by Carrie Chapman Catt in 1920, just six months before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, giving all American women the right to vote after a 72-year fight for women’s suffrage.
The League’s goals were twofold: to prepare women to be informed voting citizens and to promote the social legislation characteristic of domestic politics such as advocating for better working conditions for women, child labor legislation and prison reform. Catt was anxious to prevent women from being identified as a special interest group. Instead, her philosophy was that women’s involvement in politics would make for a naturally feminized and more humane state.
