Mormon Literature Database

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Lu Dalton Lucinda Lee Dalton and her family made the overland trek to Utah in 1849 and moved to San Bernardino, California, on a settling mission two years later. After seven years they returned to Utah, to the small community of Beaver. An intelligent and gifted daughter of a school teacher, she was often frustrated that the “mixed and ill-regulated schools of new countries” could not provide her with more than a scattered education. Her love of learning stayed with her, and she began training for her own career as a teacher at the tender age of twelve. In 1868 she became the fourth wife of Charles Wakeman Dalton and eventually gave birth to six children, two of whom died in infancy. The marriage turned out to be a difficult one at best, in part because of Charles’s drinking. An ardent suffragist, Dalton believed that women and men must work as partners on equal footing for all to progress, and this thesis was central to her writing. From 1872 to 1900 her persuasive essays and insightful poems appeared regularly in the pages of the Woman’s Exponent, addressing such topics as the power of woman’s traditional roles, her right to education, property, suffrage, custody of her children, and fair wages. Her works were included in the Utah Woman Suffrage Song Book as well as the Young Woman’s Journal, Contributor, and Juvenile Instructor. Selected poems saw national exposure when “The River” was included in Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch, a book of representative Mormon women’s poetry and art assembled for the Columbian Exposition of 1893; and “Gleams of Light” and “Longing” appeared in the anthology Local and National Poets of America (1890). [from Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, 96-97] Included in 75 Significant Mormon Poets View Works by this Person
Birth Date	1847
Death Date	1925

Works by Lu Dalton Sort by title	Year	Genre
Redemption of Jerusalem	1894	Poetry
Woman	1893	Poetry
The Star of Dawn	1887	Poetry
Woman's Sphere	1873	Poetry