Mormon Women’s History

Beyond Biography

Edited by Rachel Cope; Amy Easton-Flake; Keith A. Erekson and Lisa Olsen Tait

Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories.

Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion.

The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 300 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-61147-964-5 • Hardback • November 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-61147-966-9 • Paperback • February 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-61147-965-2 • eBook • November 2017 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Mormon Studies Series

Subjects: Religion / Christianity / Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Religion / Christianity / History, History / Women

Mormon Women’s History

Beyond Biography

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories.

Mormon Women’s History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing “civilization” in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion.

The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

Details

University Press Copublishing Division / Fairleigh Dickinson University Press

Pages: 300 • Trim: 6¼ x 9¼

978-1-61147-964-5 • Hardback • November 2017 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-61147-966-9 • Paperback • February 2020 • $47.99 • (£37.00)

978-1-61147-965-2 • eBook • November 2017 • $45.50 • (£35.00)

Series: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Mormon Studies Series

Subjects: Religion / Christianity / Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Religion / Christianity / History, History / Women

Author

Rachel Cope is associate professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University.

Amy Easton-Flake is assistant professor of ancient scripture at Brigham Young University.

Keith Erekson is director of the LDS Church History Library, associate member of the graduate faculty at The University of Texas at El Paso, and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Indiana Magazine of History.

Lisa Olsen Tait is a historian and writer specializing in women’s history at the LDS Church History Department.

Table of Contents

Contents

Introduction
Rachel Cope
Chapter 1. Charting the Past and Future of Mormon Women’s History
Keith A. Erekson
Chapter 2. Sifting Truth from Legend: Evaluating Sources for American Indian Biography
through the Life of Sally Exervia Ward
Jenny Hale Pulsipher
Chapter 3. Silent Memories of Missouri: Mormon Women and Men and Sexual Assault
in Group Memory and Religious Identity
Andrea G. Radke-Moss
Chapter 4. Early Mormonism’s Expansive Family and the Browett Women
Amy Harris
Chapter 5. Poetry in the Woman’s Exponent: Constructing Self & Society
Amy Easton-Flake
Chapter 6. Aesthetic Evangelism, Artistic Sisterhood, and the Gospel of Beauty:
Mormon Women Artists at Home and Abroad, ca. 1890–1920
Heather Belnap Jensen
Chapter 7. Leah Dunford Witdsoe, Alice Merril Horne, and the Sacralization of Artistic Taste in Mormon Homes, circa 1900
Josh E. Probert
Chapter 8. Double Jeopardy in Pleasant Grove: The Gendered and Cultural Challenges of
Being a Danish Mormon Missionary Grass Widow in Territorial Utah
Julie K. Allen
Chapter 9. Kings and Queens of the Kingdom: Gendering the Mormon Theological Narrative
Benjamin E. Park
Chapter 10. Individual Lives, Broader Contexts: Mormon Women’s Studies and the
Refashioning of American History and Historiography
R. Marie Griffith
Bibliography
Contributor Biographies

Mormon Women’s History

Beyond Biography

Edited by Rachel Cope; Amy Easton-Flake; Keith A. Erekson and Lisa Olsen Tait

Mormon Women’s History

Beyond Biography

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