Utah’s congressional delegation and state officials unveil the statue of Martha Hughes Cannon during a dedication ceremony at the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 11, 2024. (Courtesy of the Utah Lt. Governor’s Office)
After seven years of legislative effort to make it happen and 128 years after she became the country’s first female state senator, the statue of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon — a renowned leader in the women’s suffrage movement — has finally been installed at the National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.
Members of Utah’s congressional delegation and state officials joined a dedication ceremony in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday to celebrate the milestone.
Two of the state’s top elected women, U.S. Rep. Celeste Maloy and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, stood alongside male dignitaries to pull a black covering off of Cannon’s statue, which now stands as one of two representing the state of Utah in the hall devoted to displaying sculptures of prominent Americans.
“Took us a long time to get here,” Henderson said in a speech during the ceremony.
Henderson, who previously served in the Utah Senate, told a story of a mother who brought her daughter to visit the Utah Capitol building in Salt Lake City several years ago. When she showed her a framed picture of all the senators hanging outside the Senate chamber, Henderson said the daughter noticed something that made her scoff.
“No fair,” Henderson said the girl huffed. “Where are all the girls?”
Now standing in front of Cannon’s statue, Henderson, who holds Utah’s second-highest statewide elected position, said, “To that little girl, I say, we’re right here. And so are you.”
Henderson recalled she also shared a similar experience when she visited the Library of Congress for the first time in 2016, when there were 16 bronze statues “of important and accomplished men with names like Beethoven, Plato, Shakespeare and Moses.” There were also statues of women, she said, but they were “allegorical women,” with names like “Religion, Commerce, Law and History.”
They represented “symbols of civilized society,” Henderson said. “Not real, actual women.”
“This realization gnawed at me,” she continued. “And I began looking around the building and then around other areas of our nation’s capital for depictions of real women. And there weren’t many. I knew there were women who had done incredible and important things, and I wondered, is it significant that they weren’t represented in American monuments?”
Henderson posed the question: “What are we missing if we are only looking out of one eye?”
“It’s time to pay attention to all those who worked for the betterment of humanity, including those like Martha, who contributed their efforts to the movement of political freedom, equality, and self governance,” she said. “The fight to give women equal political rights was the longest reform movement in American history. And Utah men and women led that fight.”
One hundred statues stand in the National Statuary Hall, two representing each state. Now, Cannon’s statue is among 14 depicting women.
Utah’s other statute is of Brigham Young, who founded Salt Lake City, served as the Utah Territory’s first governor, and was also a religious leader as the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Cannon’s statue replaces one depicting Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor whose discoveries were integral to the development of the television.
State legislative efforts to place Cannon’s statute in the U.S. Capitol trace back to 2018 when the Utah Legislature passed SCR1, a resolution requesting the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress approve replacement of Utah’s Farnsworth statue with one of Cannon.
Doctor, state senator, suffragist: Utah’s statue of Martha Hughes Cannon heads to D.C.
Cannon — who was also a doctor and a public health advocate — ran as a Democrat and defeated her own husband and other candidates to win her Senate seat in 1896, becoming the first woman elected to a state senate. After she retired from the Legislature in 1901, “she continued to fight for public health improvements, women’s rights, and other important policy improvements until she passed away in 1932,” SCR1 states.
The resolution, which called for “no public funds to be used for any cost related to the creation and replacement of the statue,” set a deadline for the statue to be unveiled in D.C. in August of 2020 to commemorate the month of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment.
In 2019, the Martha Hughes Cannon Oversight Committee and the Legislature announced artist Ben Hammon was selected to sculpt the statue, and that it would be funded through private donations and in-kind support. In September 2020, her bronze statue was unveiled. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, delayed the statue’s journey to Washington. For years it waited at the Utah Capitol, until June, when her departure was announced.
It took six months, but that journey came to an official end Wednesday when her statue was officially unveiled in the hall, where it will indefinitely stand — barring any future legislative effort to place a new statue in her place.
Though female representation has grown significantly since the ’90s, men continue to outnumber women when it comes to elected positions on the national level, and in Utah. The Beehive State also continues to rank as the worst state in the nation for women’s equality based on workplace environment, education and health, according to WalletHub.
Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, thanked her male congressional counterparts for passing up the opportunity to speak at the ceremony “to let the only woman in our delegation welcome (Cannon) to the Capitol. And I really appreciate that, thanks guys.” She added they were “no less excited about this than I am.”
“I didn’t do anything to get her here,” Maloy said, noting that she came to Congress at the end of the process to install the statue. “But she did a lot to get me here.”
Arline Arnold Brady, Cannon’s great-granddaughter, also spoke at the ceremony, expressing gratitude on behalf of the family, including 19 descendants that attended the dedication.
“Martha Hughes Cannon was a woman ahead of her times,” Brady said. “At a time when women were primarily homemakers and mothers, Mattie dreamed of something more.”
Brady said Cannon experienced loss, including the death of her younger sister as her family migrated to Utah. Only three days after they arrived, her father died too.
“She looked around her in the world in which she lived, and there were so many children that were sick, she decided that she wanted to do something about it,” Brady said. “She never lost sight of her goal to bring medical knowledge in the East to the West.”
Brady said Cannon made sacrifices and used her knowledge “she worked so hard to obtain to make real changes in the world.”
“If she were alive today, she would still be seen as remarkable,” she said. “But there are many women, as well as men, who work hard and make sacrifices and contribute to making this world a better place. … May we all do the best we can to do our part.”
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