Emmeline B Wells

Emmeline "I believe in women" Wells was not only a great leader for mormon women but for women everywhere. There is much talk and criticism today of the so called modern development of mormon feminism, but progressive women have been leading in the church since its humble beginnings. Emmeline B Wells was a force to be reckoned with.

Emmeline was baptized at the age of 14 in a frozen river while her friends jeered. She withstood the laughs and scorns from her friends in the "great and spacious building" and vowed to dedicate everything she was to the building up of the church. A year later she married her friend James Harvey Harris who was also 15 at the time, and the two migrated to Nauvoo to join the saints. They had only been there a few months when Joseph and Hyrum were martyred and preparations began to leave Illinios. With growing antimormon threats and the stress of a miscarriage Emmeline had suffered, James vanished from Emmeline's life. 

After migrating west, she remarried and had two children before her husband suddenly passed away. She turned to teaching as a means to support herself and her two children. Soon after she became informed of the women's suffrage movement. This became an important issue in her life-not as a passive supporter but as one of the movement's leaders.She came to know and befriend Susan B Anthony, wearing for most of her life a ring that had been a gift from her. This friendship of theirs greatly helped to solidify ties between the suffrage movement and the “strange polygamist Mormons”, so much that the suffrage movement came to accept polygamy. It was no so much that they would practice it themselves nor did they really understand it, but they would fight for a woman’s right to live as she pleased even if it meant polygamy. 

Emmeline penned what has become my new motto: “a good Mormon was not silent; silence meant consent” and she insisted that she did not want “just the crumbs but the whole loaf of bread for women”.

Emmeline started and became the editor of the woman’s exponent-the first women's magazine in the west and only the 2^nd in the US. She insistently believed that “Mormon women should be the best informed of an women on the face of the earth, not only upon our own principles and doctrines but on all general subjects” and therefore strove to educate. The magazine carried the moto “for the rights of women of Zion and all nations”. For Emmeline it was not enough that latter day saint women have the promised freedom of eternal life in the life to come but all the freedoms that God would have them have while here on earth. 

One of the highlights of her career was when Susan B Anthony introduced her as a speaker to represent Utah at a conference of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association. She personally visited President Hayes to petition the repeal of an antipolygymy law. She helped begin the fight for Utah’s statehood and was president of the association of Utah Woman’s suffrage until 1896 when Utah became a state and gave back women the right to vote. Utah may have given women suffrage but the rest of the country still had not, so Emmeline continued to fight with the national association until the end of her life. One of her later highlights was when she spoke at the International Council of Women’s Quinquennial Convention in London in 1899.

She was the first woman (and only the second person) to receive an honorary doctorate from Brigham Young University and was one of only 100 women at the time who had received such a degree from any university in the country. Throughout her life in the church she served as chairman and leader of several projects and always gave it her all. When she became the general president of the Relief Society she coined the moto "charity never faileth". She established courses for LDS women through the Relief Society and did everything she could even in her old age to promote the education of all mormon women.

In learning about Emmeline B Wells, I was reminded that a good mormon woman stands up for what she believes in, and what she believes that God wants her to stand for. Emmeline was not satisfied with the Utah women's vote for she wanted to elevate all women everywhere. "Silence means consent" is such a powerful statement that if we see something wrong in the world we cannot sit on our thumbs and wait for it to change, for in doing so we're condoning it. 

Peterson, Janet, and LaRene Gaunt. Elect Ladies: Presidents of the Relief Society. Deseret Book, 1990.