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"We Know How To Keep House And We Know How To Keep A City": Contextualizing Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon's Feminism, Jennifer L. Duqué

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

“I can’t bear a mannish woman or a mannish man either,” Martha Hughes Cannon declared a few days after she was elected the first female state senator in the United States. “All the best men I know are ladylike and all the best women I know are gentlemanly.” Throughout her life, Cannon pulled seemingly subversive stunts framed within a milieu of social support that demystifies, or at least partially elucidates, her frequent departure from normative female behavior. However, the purpose of this paper is not to join the voices of scholars arguing that nineteenth-century Mormon culture was one of radical …