First to Vote: Utah’s Unique Place in the Suffrage Movement

BYU Studies

Volume 59:3 (2020) - February 14, 1870, was election day in Salt Lake City. Citizens might have gathered with more than the usual excitement that day to cast their ballots because this was the first election in which Utah women citizens could vote. Seraph Young (later Ford), a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher and grandniece of Brigham Young, was the first to exercise her new right and became the first woman in the United States to cast a ballot under a women’s equal suffrage law.

It makes sense that Seraph would arrive early at the polls—she had a long workday ahead of her at the University of Deseret, where she taught in the primary school. So, like many voters today, she would have gone to City Hall before work to cast her ballot. However, unlike voters today, she would have had to navigate her way through stump speeches and the Tenth Ward Brass Band to do so. Seraph’s historic vote made local and national news, but then her life went on quietly. She never ran for public office or led an organization, but she made history by simply fulfilling her civic duty.

Seraph’s role in history faded from public memory, but her vote paved the way for women’s voting rights to spread across the United States from west to east. The national women’s movement was already under way, but it would take fifty years after Seraph’s historic vote to pass a women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution.