Remarkable Utah Women

Utah offers a paradox in women’s history a state founded by polygamists who offered women early suffrage and encouraged career education in the nineteenth century. Remarkable Utah Women tells the stories of fifteen strong and determined women who broke through the social, cultural, or political barriers of the day. The women in these pages include Emmeline B. Wells (1828-1921), president of the Mormon Women’s Relief Society, editor of Exponent, and president of the Woman Suffrage Association of Utah; and Reva Beck Bosone (1895-1983), Utah Congresswoman and the state’s first female judge, who voted against the formation of the CIA and was smeared in the anticommunism crusade of the 1950s. The second edition features new biographies on historian Helen Papanikolas, who researched Utah’s immigrant communities; Mae Timbimboo Parry, who collected oral histories of the Shoshone people, including about the Bear River Massacre, and helped create the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act; and Barbara Toomer, a disability rights activist. Each of these women demonstrated an independence of spirit that is as inspiring now as it was then. Read about their extraordinary lives in this captivating collection of biographies.