150 years ago today - Feb 19, 1870

During the nine-day interim between the first meeting of the Ladies' Cooperative Retrenchment Society and this second meeting held on February 19, 1870, Utah's acting territorial governor, Stephen A. Mann, signed into law a woman suffrage bill. When women from various ward Relief Societies gathered for their second retrenchment meeting, they discussed the developing movement for table retrenchment formally initiated nine days earlier. Additionally, they shared a range of opinions regarding their newly granted right to vote and women's rights generally. The varied nature of the discussion suggests that by the second time these Latter-day Saint women assembled as the Ladies' Cooperative Retrenchment Society, they had some sense that this interward gathering could serve as a forum for sharing, vetting, and directing their expanding collective responsibilities. ...

[3.16 Ladies' Cooperative Retrenchment Meeting, Minutes, February 19, 1870, as quoted in Matthew J. Grow, Jill Derr, Carol Madsen, and Kate Holbrook, editors, The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women's History, The Church Historian's Press, 2016, https://churchhistorianspress.org/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society/]

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