About the 2020 Law Day Theme​

Your Vote • Your Voice • Our Democracy: The 19th Amendment at 100
The Law Day 2020 theme is “Your Vote, Your Voice, Our Democracy: The 19th Amendment at 100.” In 2019-2020, the United States is commemorating the centennial of the transformative constitutional amendment that guaranteed the right of citizens to vote would not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex. American women fought for, and won, the vote through their voice and action. 
The women’s suffrage movement forever changed America, expanding representative democracy and inspiring other popular movements for constitutional change and reform. Yet, honest reflection on the suffrage movement reveals complexity and tensions over race and class that remain part of the ongoing story of the Nineteenth Amendment and its legacies.

​ Message from the Utah State Bar PResident



Law Day 2020: Your Vote, Your Voice, Our Democracy: the 19th Amendment at 100

by Herm Olsen
 
The ratification of the 19th Amendment in August of 1920 was a pivotal moment in in society, a culmination of a decades-long struggle to gain the right to vote for all citizens. Even in the midst of a pandemic, it’s important to commemorate the transformative 19th Amendment and the sacrifice made by so many in gaining the right for all citizens to vote. Here are just two examples from the pages of history of women who forever changed America and the right to vote.

Rosa Parks
Born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, Rosa was the granddaughter of slaves and lived in a world of separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, separate elevators, and separate schools. I have personally seen the Coca Cola machines used in the South which charged blacks fifteen cents a bottle while whites paid ten cents.

Rosa tried to register to vote in 1943 but was denied. She tried again the next year and was again denied. Then one evening in 1955, after a tiring day’s work at a department store in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa found a vacant seat in a bus behind the “Colored” sign. Three other black people were also seated on that row while several “Whites Only” seats were empty in front.

As the bus continued its route, white people filled the front seats and left a white man standing. The bus driver ordered the four black people to vacate their seats so the white man could sit. According to the law, no black person could sit in the same row as a white person. The three others moved; Rosa refused.

“Y’all better make it light on yourself and let me have those seats,” warned the bus driver. She again refused and was arrested by two white officers and taken to jail. While at jail, she attempted to get a drink of water from the fountain, but an officer intervened, shouting: “You can’t drink no water. It’s for whites only!” Her arrest incited the Montgomery bus boycott, which ultimately forced the city to eliminate its hateful seating policy.

“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. The only tired I was, was tired of giving in,” she said. Speaking in her behalf, Martin Luther King, who had only six months before received his doctorate, observed:

There comes a time that people get tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked out by the brutal feet of oppression. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice. If you will protest courageously and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations the historians will pause and say, “There lived a great people – a black people – who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.”

Martha Hughes Cannon
It would be difficult to find a woman more influential in Utah’s history than Martha Hughes Cannon. Martha was born in Wales in 1857 and was four years old when she crossed the plains by wagon in 1861.

Her mother, widowed shortly after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, married James Patten Paul in 1863, and it was Paul who encouraged Martha to chase her dream of becoming a medical doctor.
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Martha graduated from what is now the University of Utah with a degree in chemistry in 1878 and, encouraged by a conference address of Brigham Young, she was one of four women set apart for medical studies and practice.

In the autumn of 1878, Cannon began studying medicine at the University of Michigan. Following her graduation, she earned a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Pennsylvania and a further Bachelor’s in Oratory from the National School of Elocution and Oratory. At the age of twenty-five, she had earned four degrees.

She returned to Salt Lake City and began practicing medicine. While working as the resident physician at the Deseret Hospital she met and married Angus Munn Cannon, becoming his fourth wife. Angus was jailed for polygamy, and Cannon fled to Europe.

When the Edmunds-Tucker act disenfranchised women of the Utah Territory, Cannon became a leader in the Utah Women’s Suffrage Association and was a speaker at the Woman’s Conference at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Later that year she testified before a congressional committee on her woman’s suffrage work in Utah.

Cannon felt that education and freedom were vital to women. “Somehow I know that women who stay home all the time have the most unpleasant homes there are,” she is reported to have said. “You give me a woman who thinks about something besides cook stoves and wash tubs and baby flannels and I’ll show you, nine times out of ten, a successful mother.”

Cannon was the first women elected as a state senator in the United States, defeating her own husband in the election of 1896. She was a strong proponent of childhood vaccinations and served on the Utah Board of Health and the Board of the Utah State School for the Deaf. She moved to California in 1904 for health reasons and died in Los Angeles in 1932.

Cannon was a pioneer in every meaning of the word.

Thank you, Rosa; thank you, Martha, for your work in gaining the right to vote for all citizens, and for making a more just society.
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Law Day 2020 is more than a celebration. It’s an open acknowledgement of gratitude for the genius of women, for the contribution made to suffrage movement and to the heart and soul of our country, and for the collective commitment to the honor, bravery, and sacrifice made (and yet to be made) by the women of America.