If you love history, especially women’s history, you need to read this book! Pioneering the Vote: The Untold Story of Suffragists in Utah and the West tells the story of the fight for the women’s right to vote in western states and territories. It was fascinating learning about the unique challenges Western women faced in advocating for their rights. I would highly recommend this book, I really enjoyed it.

In Pioneering the Vote, Neylan McBaine takes the reader through a very colorful history of the women of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Idaho who fought for and won the right to vote sometimes decades before the Nineteenth Amendment. This story is wrapped around the Rocky Mountain Suffrage Convention where national leaders such as Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw met the pioneering women of the West.

Why haven’t we heard this story before? One of the reasons pointed to by the author is that the quest for suffrage in Utah was tied to the practice of polygamy which is still a subject of discomfort to many Americans in 2020. The other factor is that the nature of living and working in the Western United States in the 1800’s that runs counter to the group collective action model that is more familiar to people.

An overall very interesting book that challenges a lot of commonly held perceptions about the women’s suffrage movement and gender roles more broadly.