A nonprofit organization that successfully pushed for legislative approval this year to replace television pioneer Philo T. Farnsworth with Martha Hughes Cannon as one of two statues representing Utah at the U.S. Capitol inadvertently turned its mission into a partisan controversy.
Cannon was the first woman elected to a state Senate seat, defeating her polygamist husband 10 months after Utah received statehood in 1896 and 24 years before women earned the right to vote in federal elections.
Among the advocates for Cannon, a feminist trailblazer and a leading voice in the suffragist movement, was a recently organized nonprofit called Better Days 2020, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to honoring and popularizing the history of the state’s women and their legacy.