Charlotte Ives Cobb Godbe Kirby was a woman of strong opinions and she didn't mind sharing them with whoever would listen. A 19th century feminist, she promoted equality and suffrage for all women, particularly those in Utah Territory, but she seldom received the credit she felt she deserved.
Kirby found herself at odds with leaders of the Utah suffrage movement and with LDS Church officials for several reasons - because she had been married to William S. Godbe, a dissident Mormon who formed a splinter group, because of her dabbling in spiritualism and because of her personal negative comments about polygamy at a time when the church was trying to defend the practice.She claimed never to have left the Mormon Church and considered herself the leading spokeswoman for Utah women's con-cerns. But the church appears somewhat to have left her, although she was never ex-com-municated.
Lists of Utah Territory women involved in the suffrage movement often exclude her entirely, although she was well recognized in national suffrage circles and associated with several of its most outstanding proponents.
In several letters to then-President Wilford Woodruff, Kirby proclaimed her loyalty to her religion and protested the shabby treatment she received at the hands of leading LDS women.
When an affiliate of the Women's Suffrage Association (WSA) was being considered for Utah, she told the president "while I do not wish to be a general, I would like some respect shown me as the first woman who spoke for WSA for Utah and as an earnest worker in the cause of several years . . . "
Kirby's personal antagonist was Emmeline B. Wells, a recognized spokeswoman for Mormon women and editor of the Women's Exponent. In one of her letters to President Woodruff, Kirby refers obliquely to Wells as "a little woman, editor of a little newspaper . . . For ten years she has systematically misrepresented me & never has my name appeared in her little paper with credit, although she would eulogize the women I had made friends to Utah's question."
Kirby was the daughter of Augusta Adams Cobb Young, Brig-ham Young's fifth wife, but the child of an earlier marriage. Young Charlotte lived for a time in the Lion House and was treated as one of the pioneer leader's children.
In April 1869, Charlotte was married to Godbe, one of four wives. She was estranged from him for several years before divorcing him 10 years after the marriage. She sometimes described this interlude as her "painful domestic experience in polygamy." Despite her own unhappy experience with plural marriage, she defended the right of the church to follow its own dictates and she publicly protested against anti-polygamy proposals in the U.S. Congress.
In 1884, she married John Kirby, a man 20 years her junior who was involved in mining.
At every major juncture in the fight for women's franchise, Kirby was at the forefront of the battle. She was making her presence felt in 1870 when the Territorial Legislature granted Utah women the right to vote; she was a voice of protest when the federal government took away that right in its anti-polygamy movement of 1887; and she pushed for the restoration of the right when Utah's statehood convention met in 1895, leading to acceptance into the Union the following year.
On the national scene, she was a continuing goad for women's rights, writing letters, supporting favorable legislation and speaking at WSA meetings. As she told President Woodruff, her territorial activities made her "a literal representative of the question that my sister women in the U.S. were only theorizing about."
She was selected by the national WSA to speak to a House Committee and also spoke in Boston's Fremont Temple to thousands of delegates and interested parties convened for a meeting of the suffrage association.
"They insisted I take half an hour & speak of Suffrage for all women. I told them I would speak twenty minutes for (that topic) if they would let me speak ten minutes for the pure & noble women I knew in Utah. They consented & I never spoke better in my life, for both causes," she wrote the church president.
The following morning, Boston newspapers noted that "The Mormon women are fortunate in having so brave a champion as Mrs. Charlotte Ives Godbe and they would do well to send her to the coming Congress for Women as a Delegate," she noted.
Then she went on to complain that the Utah women she had so well represented had spurned her efforts and paid them little attention. She was elected corresponding secretary of the Utah WSA, a post with relatively little influence.
On March 13, 1889, the Salt Lake Herald published a letter to the editor signed "A Friend," assuring that with Kirby as corresponding secretary of the Utah WSA, "the subject is not likely to go to sleep." In all likelihood, she wrote the letter herself, as it repeated much of the self-congratulatory material she had sent to President Woodruff.
As the national debate warmed, Kirby suggested that women involved in polygamous marriages would find it difficult on that plane to work with women of other religions and that the work would go better if politics were not mixed with religion. If her sister Utahns would "uphold the hands of those who can work" she predicted, God would bless the suffrage effort and it would be resolved in one year.
President Woodruff's reply was sympathetic, but he did not offer to intervene among Utah suffragists in her behalf. He hoped that as secretary of the Utah organization "you can find scope for your talents, not only in writing, but in speaking upon a subject which has been so familiar to you, and thus be able to assist in bringing the women of this fair Territory to that place they should occupy, and be acknowledged by the women of our great nation as worthy of their association and support."
The overriding philosophy that kept Kirby plugging away for women's rights is contained in another letter to President Woodruff: "It was my dear mother's last wish that I continue the work she had commenced . . . I may err in judgment sometimes, but my zeal will pardon that when the object for which we work is attained . . . I believe I shall be able to satisfy the brethren as to my public work . . . and my sisters must try to trust me. I honor & admire a beautiful religious life, like my Mother's. I am myself a prayerful woman. Yet, unlike my mother, I enjoy a fine spirited argument, the life of a political campaign, the trushing up of old ideas, the introduction of new ones . . . "