First Edition of "An Appeal for Freedom, Justice and Equal Rights" for Mormon Women MORMONS. "Mormon" Women's Protest. An Appeal for Freedom, Justice and Equal Rights. Salt Lake City, Utah: 1886. Full Description:
"Mormon" Women's Protest. An Appeal for Freedom, Justice and Equal Rights.
Salt Lake City, Utah, 1886.
The Ladies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints protest against the tyranny and indecency of Federal officials in Utah, and against their own disfranchisement without cause. Full account of proceedings at the great mass meeting held in the theater, Salt Lake City, Utah, Saturday, March 6, 1886.
First edition. Pamphlet. Octavo (8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches; 215 x 140 mm). iv, 5-91, [1, blank] pp. This pamphlet documents the protest meeting that took place on March 6, 1886. It contains speeches and proceedings by a committee of several Mormon women who are important figures in Mormon history and in the quest for women's rights. Some of these women include Emmeline B. Wells, Prescindia L. Kimball, Sarah H. Kimball and M. Isabella Horne. We could find no copies of this on Rare Book Hub in over 40 years.
Bound in original printed wrappers. Original stitching has been removed and wrappers glued back on. Spine mostly gone. A tear to front wrapper, affecting the word "for" in the title. Some smudging and soiling to wrappers. Internally very clean.
"On March 2, 1886, the Deseret Evening News announced that a mass meeting would be held four days later in Salt Lake City 'for the purpose of making known the grievances of the women of Utah, and protesting against the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the present anti- ‘Mormon’ crusade.' These Latter-day Saint women met to protest the Edmunds Act, a federal statute signed into law in March 1882 that disenfranchised participants in plural marriage, created a new category of crime for 'unlawful cohabitation' to make prosecutions for polygamy easier, and provided for fines and imprisonment for participants in plural marriage. Increasingly rigorous federal enforcement of the Edmunds Act caused intense tumult in territorial Utah. As one legal historian explains, 'By the mid-1880s the territorial courts were awash in indictments, arraignments, trials, and appeals. The gradually accelerating pace of legal process defined the course of events in Utah, affecting all aspects of life.' The women’s protest was also directed at the Edmunds-Tucker Bill then pending in Congress, which proposed to take even more drastic measures to end plural marriage than had the Edmunds Act. When this bill became law in 1887, it placed most of the church’s property and financial holdings into receivership and disenfranchised all Utah women regardless of church membership or any participation in plural marriage. On the afternoon of Saturday, March 6, 1886, an estimated two thousand individuals, including some men, assembled for the protest meeting in the Salt Lake Theatre. The meeting consisted primarily of addresses by Latter-day Saint women and the formal adoption of nine resolutions. Among other things, the resolutions objected to the proposed repeal of Utah women’s right to vote under the Edmunds-Tucker Bill, the prosecution of antipolygamy laws in the district courts, and the compelling of wives to testify against their husbands. The ninth resolution called upon the women of the United States to 'come to our help in resisting these encroachments upon our liberties and these outrages upon our peaceful homes and family relations.' A month earlier, the Woman’s Exponent reprinted a January 1886 article from the Woman’s Journal, the newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association, that similarly urged its readers to oppose a bill then moving its way through Congress which proposed to deprive 'the women of Utah of that suffrage which is theirs by long-settled law and practice.'" (The Church Historian Press).
HBS 69565.
$2,000.
Price: $2,000.00
Item #69565