The Utah territorial legislature debated whether to extend voting rights to women from January 27, 1870, until February 10, when both chambers of the legislature (the House and the Council) unanimously passed an act conferring woman suffrage.¹ Territorial secretary and acting governor Stephen A. Mann signed the bill two days later.² A native of Vermont, Mann became acting governor in December 1869 when Governor Charles Durkee, at the end of his term, returned to Wisconsin. Mann served four months before the arrival of John Wilson Shaffer, who was appointed governor by President Ulysses S. Grant on January 17, 1870, and arrived in Utah two months later.³ Mann favorably impressed Latter-day Saint leaders. George A. Smith wrote to territorial delegate William H. Hooper, “We have come to the conclusion that the Governor is really A Man, and instead of being influenced by the ring of hungry agitators, he has exercised his own Judgement, in his relations with the Legislative Assembly, and no Session has gone off more pleasantly since Governor Youngs administration terminated.”⁴

The female suffrage bill’s unanimous passage by the legislature convinced Mann to sign it into law, even though he wrote to the legislature that he had “very grave and serious doubts of the wisdom and soundness of that political economy which makes the act a law of this Territory, and that there are many reasons which, in my judgment, are opposed to the legislation.” On February 14, two days after Mann signed the bill, women voted in a municipal election in Salt Lake City, and women voted at the regular election that August.⁵

On February 19 the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Society met in the hall of the Fifteenth Ward, with representatives from most Salt Lake City wards present. Eliza R. Snow, who presided over the meeting, suggested that the women write “an expression of gratitude” to Governor Mann “for signing the Document of Woman Suffrage in Utah, for, she said we could not have had the right without his sanction.”⁶ The group then selected a committee to write a letter to Mann, which wrote the letter and delivered it to Mann that same day, February 19. George A. Smith commented, “The Ladies said they thought the Governor was about as much embarrass’d as they were.”⁷ On March 2 the weekly edition of the Deseret News published the letter to Mann along with his reply, also dated February 19. Both letters are featured below. On the same page where the letters appeared, the Deseret News also published a joint resolution of the territorial legislature, praising Mann for “wa[i]ving his personal objections and submitting his Executive prerogative in favor of the unanimous decision and undivided wishes of the Legislative body” in regard to female suffrage.⁸