Eliza R. Snow

    

      One month before the Utah legislature gave Utah women back the suffrage they had lost when they gained statehood, [Eliza R. Snow] said:

Our enemies pretend that, in Utah, woman is held in a state of vassalage—that she does not act from choice, but by coercion. What nonsense!
I will now ask of this assemblage of intelligent ladies, Do you know of any place on the face of the earth, where woman has more liberty and where she enjoys such high and glorious privileges as she does here as a Latter-day Saint? No! the very idea of a woman here in a state of slavery is a burlesque on good common sense … as women of God, filling high and responsible positions, performing sacred duties—women who stand not as dictators, but as counselors to their husbands, and who, in the purest, noblest sense of refined womanhood, are truly their helpmates—we not only speak because we have the right, but justice and humanity demands we should!  quoted in J. M. Payne, “Eliza R. Snow: First Lady of the Pioneers,” Ensign, Sep 1973, 62

  During the exodus of the Latter-day Saints from Missouri, ordered by Governor Boggs, a man taunted Eliza R. Snow, saying, “Well, I think this will cure you of your faith.” She retorted, “No, sir, it will take more than this to cure me of my faith.” He...responded, “I must confess you are a better soldier than I am.” Later Eliza would write, “I passed on, thinking that, unless he was above the average of his fellows in that section, I was not complimented by his confession.”

Wrote this much earlier in the year.  Don't know why I didn't post it.  Maybe I wanted to add more.  It's only since writing it that I've learned, along with others, about her unspeakable treatment by the mobbers.