Lily Clayton Wolstenholme,
Legislator, Suffragist, and Organizer

“I am for women, first, last and all the time.”

By Robbie Smith

Better Days Intern

Harriet Lily Clayton was born to pioneer parents in Salt Lake City on December 19, 1863. Her father, William Clayton, served as the prominent LDS clerk for Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and famously penned the hymn “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” Lily’s deep Mormon pioneer roots served as the bedrock of her identity throughout her life, motivating her civic action.

In 1889, Lily married William J. Wolstenholme and her professional career began when she graduated from Morgan’s Commercial College, acquiring a sharp understanding of administrative mechanics in the rapidly shifting political landscape of early twentieth-century Utah.

Lily as a young woman. FamilySearch.

Wolstenholme’s entry into politics was defined by headstrong service that frequently challenged Utah’s LDS male-dominated political establishment. Originally aligned with the Republican Party, Lily grew deeply frustrated in the early 1910s as the state’s party, dominated by Apostle-Senator Reed Smoot, stalled on aggressively backing a federal women’s suffrage amendment. Recognizing that blind partisan loyalty obstructed constitutional progress, Wolstenholme broke ranks. In 1912, she joined Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose progressive party and successfully ran for the Utah House of Representatives in 1914 as a fusion candidate, backed by both Progressives and Democrats. Running against the dominant church-aligned political establishment demonstrated her understanding of political leverage and proved that her political philosophy was rooted in gender solidarity rather than party compliance. 

Once in office, Wolstenholme was one of the leading Utah women continuing suffrage advocacy for a federal amendment even decades after Utah women’s voting rights had been secured in the state constitution in 1896. In 1915, she traveled to Washington, D.C. to speak at a national suffrage convention. There she met with President Woodrow Wilson and presented a massive petition, said to be over 18,000 feet long, with over 500,000 signatures demanding a federal amendment.

Lily worked hard on the national stage to redefine American stigmas about Utah women, re-framing pioneer women not as victims of religious hierarchy, but as hardy co-builders of the state. Her efforts helped refine Utah’s complicated polygamist history into a more empowering example of the modern American woman.

Using her legislative office, Lily successfully championed both national suffrage and local social purity reforms. During her time in the Utah House of Representatives, Lily drafted the landmark Wolstenholme Bill, which broadened the punishments for alcohol, declaring that any business or establishment revolving around liquor was in direct violation of the law. It passed unanimously in the house in 1915, and Utah became one of the few states that formalized prohibition before the federal government. However, Lily’s bill was not simply a ban on alcohol, but an anti-vice measure aimed at eliminating illicit activity in the city. It specifically aimed to protect young Utah women on the growing west side of Salt Lake City, expanding top-down state surveillance and policing over newly arrived Greek, Italian, Japanese, and East Asian businesses which Lily believed were exploiting these young women.

Along with legislation, Lily was deeply involved in heritage work. Serving as the National President of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP), she maintained her characteristic institutional focus. Connecting pioneer ancestry to a unified national identity during a period of intense post-war nativism, she instituted the formal custom of saluting the American flag at the start of all DUP assemblies. Following her legislative service, in 1916, Lily helped organize the Utah chapter of the National Council of Women Voters out of her Salt Lake City home. She was elected president and worked to educate newly enfranchised women to vote as a unified, non-partisan block, encouraging them to promote legislation that would improve the situation of women in all states and territories. 

A few years later, Wolstenholme adapted her organizational skills to the demands of World War I, serving as the State Chair for the Utah Chapter of the National League for Service. In this role, she coordinated the wartime registrations of over 50,000 local women and girls for home-front defense, an achievement that earned her a national four-star service badge. Her advocacy expanded to an international scale as she traveled across the globe, going as far as Australia to deliver public lectures on the successes of women’s governance and equal rights in the American West.

Lily passed away on June 30, 1944, but her legacy lives on like her pioneer ancestors that came before. Using her office to champion both national suffrage and social reforms, she embodied fierce political independence by breaking party establishments to secure legislative power on behalf of women.

Robbie Smith is a Hinckley Institute undergraduate research intern from the University of Utah triple-majoring in History, Portuguese, and Japanese. His historical research focuses on late 19th and early 20th-century transnational movements, material culture, and utilizing digitized state records to reconstruct complex institutional histories.