Utah Women of the 19th Amendment Series Part 8: Ellen Ferguson

 Unlike in most of the States, the Utah Territorial Legislature granted women the right to vote in 1870. At around that same time, a woman in Illinois named Ellen Brooke Ferguson was becoming keen on helping the suffrage movement throughout the US. 

Ellen was born in Cambridge, England on April 10, 1836, and as the daughter of a prominent lawyer, enjoyed the best education of that time. She had command of French, Latin, German, drawing, elocution, drama, and music and later lectured on those subjects; she also studied medicine.

In 1860, she and her Scottish husband, Dr. William Ferguson, immigrated to the US, specifically to Ohio, where they bought the newspaper, the Eaton Democrat. Ellen believed that she should take every opportunity to insert her influence into politics since she believed it would be years before women would have the vote.

Rendering of Clare, Ellen's daughter.
No known picture of Ellen exists.

They sold the paper and moved to Illinois where she began lecturing on women’s health issues. Although she had no medical degree, Ellen began referring to herself as Dr. Ferguson. Nine socialites wrote a newspaper article urging women to attend her lectures. They said, “We do feel that woman’s needs, her wants — her whole being cannot be more clearly portrayed than has been in this course and in a manner so clear and delicate that the most fastidious cannot take offence.” 

In addition to speaking on women’s health, Ellen became an active suffragist, speaking at the Illinois Women’s Suffrage Association’s meeting with Susan B. Anthony. The newspaper reported that “She inveighed against the practice of taxation without representation. She thought no woman should pay any more tax until she was granted a vote.” Furthermore, Ellen objected to the lack of good schooling for girls: “finery and feathers and not enough in the direction of useful information and the knowledge of how to take care of themselves.”

Around 1873 Ellen opened a medical institute “for the treatment of chronic diseases of women and children” and continued lecturing in the Eastern States. Once the clinic was established, Ellen toured Europe in 1875. Upon her return, she was stunned to learn that her husband had embraced the “Mormon” church and was planning their move to Utah. 

The Fergusons were both baptized in St. George and the next year moved to Salt Lake City. Ellen was devout, and immersed herself into her new religion but was also extremely busy. She co-founded the Utah Conservatory of Music, while lecturing throughout the US on women’s health and suffrage, and maintaining her medical practice. 

At this time, the national suffrage leaders protested Utah women joining their movement due to their opposition to polygamy. But, in 1879 they invited Ellen and another woman to attend their Washington convention and allowed Utah women to join their movement. 

After her husband died in 1880, Ellen moved east for a year to undertake more formal medical training. Back in Salt Lake, she drew up plans for a hospital which became the Deseret Hospital in 1882 where she was appointed chief physician and surgeon. She also established the first professional medical training center in Utah there in obstetrics.

Still involved in women’s rights, in 1886, Ellen was part of a delegation to President Grover Cleveland to petition against the impending Edmunds-Tucker Act, which removed the right of suffrage in Utah the following year. She redoubled her efforts and in 1886 spoke to the Great Mass Suffrage Meeting in Salt Lake. A portion of her speech follows:

“We are assembled here to-day in the capacity of a mass meeting, to lift our voices in protest against certain wrongs that are being perpetrated in this community, at the close of the nineteenth century, wrongs that would shame civilization two hundred years ago.

 

“It is indeed a shame that in free America, among a people where men pride themselves upon being the defenders and protectors of woman, women are compelled to meet and protest against insult and indignity heaped upon them in the courts. Strange it is that while in New York Americans are erecting a statue to liberty that shall lift up the beacon light of freedom to all the nations of the earth, that here in one of the dependencies of this republic women are led to prison and subjected to insult for no crime. Strange it is that here in Utah the purest, noblest and best of America’s citizens should be compelled to make public protest against injury and injustice received from those who have sworn to uphold and maintain the laws—but no less strange than true.”

 

Ellen served as the only woman to the Democratic National Convention in 1896, the same year Utah became a state, and with it, the women’s right to vote in Utah was reinstated. But, Ellen left her religion in 1897 and moved to New York. Some believe it was because of being asked to resign from Deseret Hospital due to implementing elevated professional standards with which the staff could not comply. Others thought that the anti-polygamy/Mormon sentiment from the National Suffrage movement upset her; after joining the church, her former Eastern admirers grew critical of her lectures. She died on March 15, 1920, just months before the 19^th amendment was passed. 

(Written by Kathryn Latour, member of the JRCLS WIL and Media Committees)