First Woman Juror?

Jean Patterson Sharp Hunter in her tartan

Jean Patterson Sharp Hunter

Jean Patterson Sharp Hunter

While at another one of my Wednesday evening research sessions at the local Family History Centre, my newspaper search turned up the following small item in the May 2 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune in 1905.

Salt Lake Tribune, Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, May 02, 1905, Page 11

If that is a bit difficult to read, here it is written out.

WOMAN JUROR
____________

Mrs. Jean H. Mulholland Has Honor of Being First.

Mrs. Jean H. Mulholland has the distinction of being the first woman juror to be drawn for jury service in Utah.  She was present in Judge Lewis’s court when called, but was excused.

The Jury Commissioners are said to have made a mistake in the name and believed they were summoning a man. The name “Jean H.” on the voters’ list let them to believe that Mrs. Mulholland was not a member of the fair sex. 

So I thought I would check out a few of the facts associated with this story.

To place this in context of Jean's life, this happened in 1905. Jean is 47 years old and living in Salt Lake City.  Jean's husband and son, both called David, had already moved up to Canada in 1904. Before the year 1905 ended, Jean would also move up to Canada with her daughter Elezebeth.

Salt Lake City and County  Courthouse by JustinKrebs (creative commons licence)
Constructed by the free masons between 1891-1894 to replace the Salt Lake City Council Hall and the Salt Lake County Courthouse. It was used as the Utah State Capitol building until 1915 and also housed the city's first public library. 

Next, I wondered how much later women would be able to serve on a jury in Utah. That is when it got interesting. Most states changed the law to include women on juries between 1911 and 1921. Utah, however, became the FIRST state to allow women to be called to jury duty in 1898. (source citation below).  Salt Lake City is in the Third Judicial District  but I couldn't find out any further information on when women actually were chosen to serve on juries in Utah.  So when this news article was posted, the law already allowed Jean to serve despite being the fair sex.

Actually, Jean would have made a great juror and was more than capable of holding her own in a man's world. These excerpts from her life story show this.

• She was healthy and robust, and as boys were much needed in her family, her father allowed her to help get wood from the mountains. 

•  One day she was cutting stove-wood in the yard, when a young man saw her and came in and asked to wield the axe for her.  Not being used to wielding an axe, he broke the handle instead of cutting the wood. (That young man later became her husband.)

• Jean helped her husband dig an irrigation ditch so that they would be able to have water on their farm.  The ditch was ten miles long, and the two of them dug it themselves with pick and shovel. The cattlemen would stampede their cattle over the ditch, breaking it and causing the water to run everywhere. They had to dig a well, and to do this they used a windlass, their son led the horse, her husband dug and loaded the bucket and Jean emptied it.  The well was abandoned after going down ninety-nine feet, as the gas fumes made her husband sick. Once he had come up out of the well in the empty bucket, and as he was getting out, being overcome by the fumes, he fell, but was grabbed by his wife, Jean, and thus was saved from a fall that could have been fatal.  Jean always seemed to know what to do at the right moment.

She never had the chance to serve on a jury but she was acknowledged for all by the press that she was the first woman drawn for jury duty in all of Utah. I appreciate that she turned up to serve even though she may have known it was an unusual request. I will remember her every time I pass the downtown City and County Building in Salt Lake City. 

Lucy Fowler, Gender and Jury Deliberations: The Contributions of Social Science, 12 Wm. & Mary J.

Women & L. 1 (2005), http://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol12/iss1/2