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.
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
