Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: "Indignation! Women’s Activism in Early Utah"
January 11, 2017
Salt Lake City Public Library
Well over 300 people attended this standing-room-only event in Salt Lake City! Our thanks to all of you who attended and made the evening a success. For Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's full address (and Q&A session), please listen or read the transcript of the speech below.
TO READ TRANSCRIPT: Please scroll down.
TO DOWNLOAD AUDIO AS AN MP3 FILE: Click on "Download File" below, then click on download arrow to save file.
TO STREAM AUDIO: Click on round orange "Play" button below or on the SOUNDCLOUD logo on the image below.
Salt Lake City Public Library
Well over 300 people attended this standing-room-only event in Salt Lake City! Our thanks to all of you who attended and made the evening a success. For Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's full address (and Q&A session), please listen or read the transcript of the speech below.
TO READ TRANSCRIPT: Please scroll down.
TO DOWNLOAD AUDIO AS AN MP3 FILE: Click on "Download File" below, then click on download arrow to save file.
TO STREAM AUDIO: Click on round orange "Play" button below or on the SOUNDCLOUD logo on the image below.
| mwhit_ulrich_lecture_indignation_1-11-2017.mp3 |
Transcript:
Lisa Olsen Tait:
I'm Lisa Tait. I'm a member of the executive committee of the Mormon Women's History Initiative. And we welcome you to this event for Laurel Thatcher Laurel's new book, as you've see, A House Full of Females. We're very excited to have you here tonight and for all of you to join us.
A little bit about the Mormon Women's History Initiative team. Actually, we go by MWHIT, as you saw on our banner out there. We're an independent group of scholars. And we foster networking and awareness of work in Mormon women's history. We're a hub for scholars that we facilitate networking and collaboration between scholars working in the field. And then we're a bridge to the community, where we sponsor events like this a couple of times a year and invite the community to come and be more aware of the great work that's being done in Mormon women's history. If I could, I'd like to have the members of our team who are in the room, anyway, stand up and give a wave and be recognized.
[Applause]
We have Taunalyn, Barbara, who's organized everything. We have a couple of our founding members here, as well, Jill Derr and Cherry Silver. And we're excited for them to join us, as well. You can connect with us on social media. We have a Facebook page, “I Love Mormon Women's History.” And so like us, follow us. We are looking forward to sponsoring another event in a couple of months and we'll be putting out announcements about that. And you won't want to miss it, because there's another great Mormon women's biography coming out. With that, let's proceed. Barbara Jones Brown, who's a member of our team, is going to introduce Laurel, and then we'll proceed from there.
Barbara Jones Brown:
Well-behaved women seldom make history." That slogan, which is loved by women across the nation, has appeared for decades now on bumper stickers, jewelry, fridge magnets, mugs, t-shirts, and greeting cards. That saying is frequently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, and sometimes even more, Marilyn Monroe. But we are privileged to have with us tonight the real woman who coined that phrase, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
[Applause]
When Laurel wrote that statement years ago, she didn't necessarily intend it to take on the meaning that it has today, that many of us interpret it as, is that if you are a well-behaved, you're never going to make history, so you might as well be a notorious woman, not well-behaved. But what she meant it to mean was that common, ordinary, well-behaved women were being ignored in historical writing. At the time that she wrote that phrase for an essay, the only women being written about were witches, she said. So Laurel wanted to place ordinary, common, well-behaved women, like so many of us here, and give them their rightful place in history. So she has spent her life writing books on these type of women, telling their stories, in books titled Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, The Age of Homespun, Good Wives, and A Midwife's Tale, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and several other prizes.
Professor Ulrich is not only a gifted writer and researcher, but a talented, renowned teacher, mentor, and lecturer, as we will see again tonight. She's a professor at Harvard University and she's also been recognized with the MacArthur Genius Award. Now, what many of us may not know is that Laurel was actually homegrown here in the West. She grew up, born and raised, in the tiny little town of Sugar City, Idaho, and then came to the University of Utah, where she received a degree in journalism before going on to receive a Master's degree at Simmons and a Ph.D. at University of New Hampshire.
So she writes in her acknowledgements for this book, A House Full of Females, "When I began graduate school in the 1970s, I briefly considered writing about Mormonism, but Colonial and Revolutionary America captured my attention and I took another path. This book is my first attempt to approach early Mormonism as a work of scholarship." And so now we are so honored that Laurel has chosen to place well-behaved Mormon women in their rightful place in American history. Tonight, she will be speaking to us. Her lecture title is "Indignation: Women's Activism in Early Utah." And please join me in welcoming Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
[Applause]
Brown:
I forgot to say, "Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a well-behaved woman who makes history both literally and figuratively."
[Laughter]
[Applause]
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:
Thank you for coming. So many old friends and gracious voices and faces here. I'm really overawed. And I'm especially grateful to be here to offer thanks to so many of you in this audience who have really made this book possible through your prior work. I look down here—if I start naming you, I'm going to get in big trouble. But yes, Jill Derr, and others in this room whose work over many years in Mormon women's history, and too, the organizers and promoters of MWHIT, these witty, wonderful women who so graciously organized this event tonight. So I'm glad to be here. And I'm a little bit awed and hoping that I will not disappoint.
I thought maybe I would read a bit from the book. Anna Rolapp told me she read three pages of the book, she's been so busy today doing such good things. And I said, "Oh, gosh. I hope it's not the same three pages I'm going to read." But for Anna, you may have to hear this again.
This is from the introduction to A House Full of Females.
"Light snow obscured the view of the mountains on January 13th, 1870 as masses of Mormon women crowded into the old peak-roofed tabernacle in Salt Lake City. The pine benches were hard, the pot-bellied stoves inadequate against the cold. No matter. They would warm themselves with indignation. The news had come by telegraph a week before. The much feared Cullom Bill had passed the United States House of Representatives. If the Senate concurred, the government would soon have the power to confiscate Mormon property, deprive wives of immunity as witnesses, and imprison their husbands.
This wasn’t the first time Congress had attempted to outlaw the Mormon marriage system. Calls for federal action had begun 14 years before with the Republican party platform of 1856, which linked polygamy in Utah and slavery in the South as 'twin relics of barbarism.' Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont enunciated the essential argument: 'Under the guise of religions, this people has established and seek to maintain and perpetuate a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world.' Novelists and the new illustrated weeklies took up the chorus, linking Utahns not only with Southern slaveholders, but with Turks, Africans, and Indians on both sides of the world.
Although Congress responded by passing an anti-polygamy statute in 1861, there was little hope of enforcement during the Civil War. Now, with Reconstruction underway in the South, reformers decided to try again. Arguing that Utah women were slaves to a system worse than death, they scoffed at 'the sickly sentimentality which proposes to punish nobody, which proposed to hang nobody, which proposes to let all the unchained passions of the human heart become free to prey upon mankind.'
'What nonsense,' Eliza Snow exclaimed from the platform of the old tabernacle. She and other leaders among Salt Lake City women had acted quickly to organize an indignation meeting."
Now, that was a well-recognized form of public protest in the 19th century United States. Indignation was more than anger. It was sympathetic outrage directed at an injustice. And the goal was to publicize that injustice and to get sympathy from the larger public.
"Cleverly banning all males except the press, the women showcased their most effective speakers, Amanda Smith, widowed years before by anti-Mormon mobs in Missouri, brought tears to her listeners eyes as she repeated the story of her suffering.
Hannah King, an English immigrant, asked, 'Are we really in America, the world-renowned land of liberty, of freedom, of equal rights, the land of which I dreamed in my youth, where freedom of thought and religious liberty were enjoyed by all?' Eleanor Pratt said she had been turned out of doors for her faith and would willingly give her life for it. Phoebe Woodruff warned that if Congress chose to imprison Mormon men, 'They would have to make their prisons large enough to hold their wives. For where we they go, we go also.' The reporter for the New York Herald, disgusted at the sight of infatuated females, nevertheless produced a full-page account of the speeches.
The publicity worked. And among other things, it killed the Cullom Bill temporarily. The government would come back, and a long period that eventually ended with the elimination of polygamy in the Territory of Utah.
There was another immediate response to the indignation meeting, and it's a response that historians for a long time thought was a kind of ploy by the Mormon hierarchy to try to get away from the notion that they were victimizing women. And that was within weeks, the Utah territorial legislature granted women in Utah the right to vote. Now, in the pre-indignation meeting planning session, which was held in the upper room of the 15th Ward Relief Society hall, the women had laid out a series of propositions that they were going to outline in their indignation meeting.
And they added to that list the vote. They went even further and suggested that women be represented in Washington, and they elected several of their sisters for that role. But the indignation meeting, of course, was directed at the US Congress. It had nothing to do with giving anyone the right to vote. The proposal to receive the right of suffrage went quietly to the legislature, so quietly that some people later, who until they discovered the minutes of the planning meeting, figured women hadn't even asked for it. But they had asked for it and they got it.
Now, the spectacle in Utah attracted the attention of national women's suffrage leaders. And what very few people pause to recognize is that a group as scandalous as Mormons probably wasn't going to have their reputation raised by joining up with a group as scandalous as those in the women's suffrage movement. They were both considered anathema. But in a curious and fascinating way, they eventually joined ranks. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been – long been planning a tour of the Western states. And they had been attracted by the fact that Wyoming, a few weeks before Utah, had passed a women's suffrage bill. But there were very few white settlers in Wyoming at the time, ten times as many in Utah. And of course in Wyoming, most settlers were men. So it looked like a kind of gimmick to get more women to come to the territory.
But the situation in Utah was just inexplicable. People didn't know what to make of it. And that has continued to the present, for the few people in the United States who even know that Utah women were the first in the nation to exercise the suffrage. Wyoming voted women's suffrage a few weeks earlier, but Utah had an election first, so they won that prize. People considered this a kind of paradox. How could women simultaneously support a national campaign for political and economic rights, which they did through the end of the 19th century, while defending marital practices that to most people seemed relentlessly paradoxical?
And that is the framing question of A House Full of Females. A House Full of Females, I think to most people – people immediately say, "No. It's a book about Mormonism." "Oh, yeah. Houses full of females, all those wives, the women in Brigham Young's harem." But the House Full of Females title comes from a passage in the diary of Wilford Woodruff when he had, on a day in February, 1857, paid a visit to the 14th Ward meetinghouse in Salt Lake City to attend a meeting of the ward Relief Society. And he was a polygamist. He had three wives and was about to acquire a fourth. But the house full of females was a group of 50 or 60 women under the leadership of his legal wife, Phoebe Carter Woodruff, who was president of the Relief Society.
So what I have tried to understand in this book is the relationship between houses, domestic dwellings that were full of women or at least had one or two extra, and houses, meeting houses, council house, endowment house, places that were presumed to be more public or community oriented, and what were the women doing there? And in fact, from the very beginning, the Latter-day Saints attracted women. It's a truism in religious studies that religious communities, religious congregations, are peopled by women, largely. And that has continued over time. And people have wondered if that was so for the Latter-day Saints. In some places, like Boston, most of the first early converts were female.
And we – we're still trying to define – in the population of Utah, it was pretty well balanced. But if you went into the houses of Church leaders, there almost always were those "extra" women because plural marriage was associated with female leadership and with the high status families in the Church. So what, if any, relationship was there between a willingness to defend polygamy, or at least endure the practice of polygamy, and the activities of women in the so-called public sphere?
Well, at the first level, the answer is pretty obvious, I think. In 1870, when the women ascended the platform in their indignation meeting, their own community was threatened. And by standing up as women, they defended their homes, their loved ones, and their religious identity. It's a classic example of dual identities. They're not just women. They're Mormons. And we see this phenomenon over and over in the world today.
But that explanation is too simple. And I write in the introduction, "Utah may have looked like an Old World patriarchy with its biblical terminology, theocratic government, and retreat into a valley with a dead sea and a river Jordon." But those who migrated there had been touched by the radical energies of the 1830s and 1840s, not only in the United States, but in Great Britain and in continental Europe. By the time the Americans – the Mormons arrived in Utah, female as well as male leaders knew how to circulate petitions, sign affidavits, lobby public officials, and employ the power of the press. That was evident in 1839 and 1840 after the Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri. Masses of petitions went in to the federal government.
And I was just struck as I went through those petitions, most of them signed by men because men were heads of household and they were asking for redress from lost land. But what intrigued me as I read those petitions – the women, most of whom had been widowed in those attacks and had – and therefore were heads of their own household – what fascinated me was the way they talked not just about loss of property, loss of loved ones, but loss of citizenship. This is long before there was a campaign for women's suffrage. And this conforms to other scholarship on the early United States about women having a sense of investment in the polity, in the larger society. They had a sense of citizenship.
Petitioning is a right women have had under monarchies. Those who are subjects always have the right to petition. But Latter-day Saint women used that right of petitioning in Nauvoo, in several circumstances when there were conflicts with local governments, and then later when massive petitions were sent, continuing to ask for redress in Missouri. So they had learned through the things they had suffered that you cannot take for granted your religious liberty. And they were ready to act upon that knowledge.
As Latter-day Saints, the women who founded the indignation meeting were victims of ignorant and sometimes willful misrepresentation by outsiders. But they were surely exaggerating when they claimed they had experienced nothing but liberty in Utah. As their own writings attest, they had endured both the condescension, and in some cases, the open opposition, of their own church leaders. So this is not only a story of indignation directed toward outside persecution, but what some of us over the last two days have begun to call "opportunism" directed at their own male leaders and husbands.
I'm not saying they were insincere in standing up to defend their church. I believe they were absolutely serious in what they were doing. But it's also true that they used this opportunity to ask for the things that they wanted. And one of the things they wanted was the vote. They wanted to be full citizens. How could that have happened?
So a lot of this book deals with the long evolution of a cadre of leaders among Mormon women from 1835 to 1870, their long evolution as leaders within their own religious community, and their struggles with plural marriage, their struggles with migration, their struggle with husbands' decisions, their struggles with what appeared to be an unjust and peremptory decision by Brigham young to forbid any meetings of the Female Relief Society. After Joseph Smiths' death, when Emma Smith, Joseph's first wife and legal wife, who was president of the Relief Society, refused to accept Brigham Young as her husband's successor. And for a lot of complex reasons, Brigham really feared Emma's opposition. And he said at one point to a group of male leaders, "If you see women huddling together, stop it."
So this is a complicated story. It's a very instructive story, particularly for someone like me. My life was transformed when Susan Kohler, who is in the audience, my friend – we were in the same religious community, the Cambridge Ward in Massachusetts, at one point. And a group of us were beginning to study early Mormon history as a kind of hobby. And Susan went to work researching the stacks in Widener Library at Harvard and found the Women's Exponent, which began in 1872, just two years after the indignation meeting. And we were blown away.
This was the early '70s. All of us had been raised as Latter-day Saints. We had never heard of this newspaper. And we opened it up at a time when there was a national resurgence of feminism in the '70s, much talk of women's rights, much talk of the early women's suffrage movement. And my goodness, there were our ancestors. How could that have been possible? And that, of course, lead to the founding of Exponent II, which is still being published today, and to a nascent Mormon feminist movement.
So at one point, I wrote that in this era, "We were shocked to discover that the past was more up to date than the present." Because we saw women encouraged to have professions. We saw women speaking out for better pay for working girls. We sang songs at our Exponent retreats: "Sisters, rise, thy penance o'er. Sink thou in the dust no more!" Equality, songs that were just so stirring. We didn't pay much attention, however, to polygamy and to the fact that these two strands in 19th century women's history emerged together and intersected at every point in a very powerful way. So this was a fascinating historical problem. And as I have published a number of books, and most of them on earlier periods and most of them on New England, it occurred to me that maybe – I was past 70. What did I have to lose? I would explore the roots of my own activism.
And so I did. And there are lots of books on polygamy. This is not the definitive book on polygamy. It's a book that really tries to look at relationships among women and between women and men in the formative period of Latter-day Saints or Mormon culture. And because I wanted to understand the society as it was developing, not as it ended up, but as it was developing, I chose not to work with those wonderful, abundant family stories, memoirs, retrospective accounts of "what I did in my youth." I really wanted to see what people were saying at the very moment these things were happening. So I focused on day-to-day accounts that were concurrent with the events they were describing.
And that meant diaries. That meant minutes of meetings. I used scrapbooks, lots of letters, and some material objects, including the wonderful 14th Ward album quilt that Carol Nielson had discovered and researched a number of years ago. And I discovered a world that was far different, and yet recognizable in strange ways. It was like seeing things you already knew, but they looked different.
I've been thinking this week about the Emily Dickenson poem some of you may know, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant." And I feel like that's what happened with this book. I tried very much to use my professional skills as a historian to really write a serious, scholarly, documented history of this period. But at each point, I was telling it slant or the sources pulled me to telling it slant. I could go on and illustrate a number of ways that happened, but my half an hour is just about up. So I'm just going to quickly suggest some things that really did surprise me.
One of the first was – provoked me to a simple change in vocabulary. I don’t think it's appropriate to talk about Winter Quarters, for example, as a temporary Mormon settlement, even if it was laid out according to the block pattern and had wards and ostensible streets. It was a Mormon refugee camp. I’ve spent a lot of time studying early American history. I’ve had a really hard time finding anything parallel to the expulsions of Latter-day Saints. We're talking about 10,000 to 15,000 people in the expulsions from Missouri and the expulsions from Nauvoo. Lots of expulsions of Indigenous Americans. This was really remarkable.
So I began to appreciate and look very differently at those stories of suffering and pioneering. Pioneering? The terms began to look different to me. And I tried to think about trauma, not in a sophisticated, psychological way, but just as I read the documents and the diaries, to try to capture, in some way, in – using their words and in my own prose, what it felt like to be at the peak of a kind of religious ecstasy, through sealings in the Nauvoo Temple, when so many of those plural marriages were contracted. That was the big boom, after Joseph's death and those sealings in the temple.
And then, bam! Whoa! That trip across Iowa. Whoa. I titled that chapter "Mud Aplenty." And it wasn't just about mud. It was what Eliza Snow talked about, family discord and the – there was scurvy. There were infant deaths. There was horrendous suffering. But a lot of the suffering was a kind of loss of hope and idealism.
And what was powerful to me as I read this was the way in which the women who later found themselves on the platform at the indignation meeting, many of the same women, were rebuilding themselves through religious and spiritual exercises, particularly the kinds of religious expression that are not familiar to Latter-day Saints today – lots of speaking in tongues. Lots. And different ways of banding together, often, women alone, sometimes women and men together.
So the Relief Society has been banned. There's no Relief Society. But there's an augmentation, and indeed, a really flourishing of spiritual gifts that had been present among men and women in Kirtland, as early as Kirtland. But now, they were taking on this particular female form that continued into the Sale Lake Valley in the terrible winter, the next two winters in the Salt Lake Valley. And the way in which women were built – healing one another, building solidarity, and indeed, helping to keep the religious community intact in many ways through their spiritual gifts. And that's just as hint of what I found and what I'm trying to talk about in the book.
The other thing that was a surprise to me was the fluidity of family relationships. Lot of divorce, and sanctioned divorce, which seemed to be an interesting outgrowth of plural marriage. I'm going to read just one more paragraph here from the book. And then I'm going to open it up for questions. Lots – lots of other things that surprised me, but these two things were really important as I – as I contemplated how the world looked so different to me as I really focused on the development of the female community in Utah and the context in which it developed, not – it developed out of trauma and suffering and sorrow and out of tension about gender in the Church.
And it's really fascinating how some men really resonated. I mean, one man said, "This is the best meeting I've ever been to." And another leader thought, "You should not be meeting." And they met. They solved it in part by calling these gatherings "organized parties."
So I'm going to read just one quick passage here. And this is partly for Connell O’Donovan (who somebody told me is here) because he was so wonderful in sharing his work on Augusta Adams Cobb, who's a real – a real – she's a character in this book.
So Eliza Snow, when the first National Women's Rights Convention met in Wooster, Massachusetts in October, 1850 – not Seneca Falls, now, but the first National Women's Rights Convention, Eliza Snow was living in Brigham Young's log row on the hill two blocks beyond Temple Square. And she learned about this from Eastern newspapers. And the Eastern newspapers weren't very kind to the suffragists. They dismissed the convention as "an awful combination of socialism, abolition, and infidelity got up by fanatical and crazy mongrels in britches and petticoats."
Eliza had a more ladylike response. In a poem published in Salt Lake City's Desert News, she acknowledged the desire of these women to create a better world. But she warned that, "Any agitation for female rights would fail, and they might as well attempt to realign the stars and planets as to remove woman from the sphere assigned to her by God." And then she said, "Let those fair champions of female rights, female conventionists, come here. Yes. In these mountain vales, here are noble men whom they'll be proud to acknowledge to be far their own superiors and have no need of being congresswomen."
Well, Eliza had no idea that 20 years later, champions of women's rights would come to Utah, not to acknowledge the superiority of Mormon men, to investigate the newly acquired rights of Mormon women. What interests me is Eliza knew about those conventions, and it's a sense she's protesting way too much. Eliza saw liberty through submission to the men she considered God's vicars on Earth.
Her housemate Augusta Cobb was different. Writing to Brigham Young in the autumn of 1850, Augusta mused, "Is there any such a thing as an independent woman in the economy of God? If there is, I want to be that woman." And she made a lot of trouble for Brigham over time.
And so in this chapter of the book, I really try to talk about the range of women, including Vilate Kimball and Patty Sessions and Bathsheba Smith and Lucy Meserve Smith, in relation to Augusta, who's so challenging and so interesting, and see what it was that was working and not working for these women in terms of their polygamist relationships and also their relationships in the larger community. And what was interesting in just looking – comparing the platform in the national women's suffrage meeting in 1850 with these women in Utah was how many of the things the Eastern women wanted, Utah women always had – already had, which was accidental, by and large. One of them was to get rid of the common law, which made women subordinate, economically and legally, to men. Well, Utah got rid of the common law because the common law forbad bigamy, and so they said no practice of the common law in Utah. But by doing that, they also opened up the way for different kinds of property relationships.
Another was the women complained about lack of access to the professions. Again, Utah solved that problem by eliminating the professions. They didn't like doctors and lawyers. But they allowed women to practice law, if they wanted to. Very few did, immediately. But they had a council of health that included both women and men. In principle, at least, they also embraced co-education. I'm proud to say the University of Desert, which became the University of Utah, opened its doors to women in its second year. Unfortunately, in its third year, it collapsed for lack of funding.
And finally, in Utah, women had more opportunity economically because nearly everybody in the territory had less. They moved backward from an industrializing economy into an area where there was still a lot of informal exchange. And Utah women really – that was important for them in creating considerable independence, which is one reason they were so supportive of the retrenchment movement later, when Brigham Young began to promote it.
So I'm going to simply say that these things, in a way, were the problem that made Augusta Cobb's life so difficult. Because she wondered whether a wife's ability to manage her own earnings mattered if she was forced to lived in poverty, which she was. And while in principle, she embraced plural marriage, she asked whether deference to other women was any improvement over obedience to a husband. And she had a lot of difficulty with that, because she wanted to be in charge in some level, as the second plural wife of Brigham Young. And suddenly, there were all these other women, younger women, which made her life very difficult.
Well, okay. I'm not defending plural marriage. I'm not attacking plural marriage. I'm not arguing here that plural marriage, it liberated Latter-day Saint women. I'm arguing – or that it repressed Latter-day Saint women. I'm arguing here that the combination of plural marriage, which made them outcasts in the nation, and the experience of being at the heart of an anti-capitalist communal society that required cooperation among women at many levels in order to sustain the society gave them a strength that ultimately allowed to overcome the reservations about female organization and to reestablish a vibrant Female Relief Society in the late 1860s.
So the indignation meeting in Salt Lake City was very successful, but it was followed by indignation meetings in 58 towns in the territory. How did that happen? The Female Relief Society. So this is a heritage that has been too little understood and that I hope you will enjoy exploring, at least a bit, in A House Full of Females. Thank you.
[Applause]
So how – are you going to call on people?
Brown: Thank you, Professor Ulrich. We will now open it up to the audience for the next 20 minutes or so. If you'd like to ask questions of Laurel, she'll be happy to take them. And we have two microphones going around. And so if you'll just raise your hand and stand up and we'll get the microphone to you.
Audience: Thank you so much. It's just so interesting to hear you speak.
Ulrich: Where are you?
Audience: I'm way up here in the top.
Ulrich: Oh, okay. Got it.
Audience: Thank you. I just wondered if you could tell me, what do you think happened with the gift tongues in the LDS religion? Do you have any insights on that?
Ulrich: There's been some scholarship on it. It was sort of surprising to me how much I found. Because some people have thought it really largely ended after Kirtland because there was a fear of it kind of getting out of hand. But it's there. Wilford Woodruff is enjoying Elizabeth Whitney singing in tongues, which was something she did frequently. I think it remained for a long time.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the more – the latter – the first generations began to be succeeded by younger people. There was probably less – they were modernizing, after the railroad, and increasing numbers and perhaps fewer that had come from Methodist or other traditions where that was a common religious practice. But there are probably others who've studied 19th century Mormonism who could answer that better than I can. But I think it was really starting to fade in the early '70s. I did read a fascinating diary entry from a woman who said, "Eliza wanted us to speak in tongues." And she seemed somewhat resentful of that.
Brown: Okay.
Audience: I can speak pretty loud. Are there characters that you connected with more than others, in the book? As you wrote it, were you surprised by different ways that you responded to the characters and are there some that you really resonated with?
Ulrich: I really love them all. I've – I mean, that's – anybody who left records, I adore. And not many did. It's a small – it's a small group. I'll mention two that may be less familiar to you. There're a lot of familiar people, Vilate Young, Eliza Snow, Zina Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, Zina D.H. Young, of fame; Bathsheba Smith, fabulous; Lucy Meserve Smith, wonderful. But I actually stumbled across, in the Church history library, a little diary from Wilford Woodruff's stepmother. And that was pretty amazing to discover that.
And then one of my all time favorite diarists is Caroline Crosby. And I finally ended up giving her a whole chapter. And that chapter is centered in California. I have 15 chapters in the book. Six are primarily about Utah. So it's a little different in that regard, as well. Because I tried to keep the – I tried to keep the understanding that this was a church of gathering. And in order to gather people to Zion, you've got to have people out there doing the gathering. And it was very, very interesting to look at the San Bernardino community, for example, through the eyes of Caroline Crosby.
Audience: So you speak about tension in the Church, gender tension. How has that changed in your life and how do you see the current state today?
Ulrich: Oh, are you asking how did that change over the course of the book or how has that changed in my life? I didn't quite –
Audience: Oh. I guess both.
Ulrich: I think it's endemic in human societies. I think there're going to be tensions over gender and they're going to be resolved in productive and non-productive ways. And we have a lot of work to do in American society, as we know. Some of us who came up as activisits in the '70s and '80s are really sad right now to see some things that we thought were passé reemerge. And I think – there was an interesting kind of comfort for me in discovering how complicated gender relations were in early Mormonism. It would be easy to think, "Oh, it was patriarchal, the women had little voice," or to think, "Oh, they were more liberated because they had their sister wives and they could go to medical school," or whatever. I mean, these stereotypes that we live with about early Mormonism. But often, the conflicts were strikingly familiar in the ways people were negotiating relationships within their own households.
And Mary Richards is an amazingly interesting wife – first wife of Samuel Richards, a very, very outspoken – she did not like polygamy. And yet, the way Samuel dealt with that in a kind of – we could call it passive aggressive. We could call it patient. It depends on how you want to look at it. I mean, it just seems so very human in the way that was worked out. So I saw a lot of continuity.
I also saw some real differences. 19th century women were much more likely to work – let's see. Somebody today gave the example, if someone says no, you're respectful, but you kind of move to the side and go at it another way. And they were pretty good, eventually, at getting a lot of what they wanted. But 19th century women, with the small exceptions of the really powerful feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony – who were not terribly successful, in truth, although they woke a lot of people up. But Mormon women got their way some of the time in surprising ways. And I'm sorry I can't be more specific. You can look at the book and see if you can find some good examples of that.
Okay. I don't know that they're – I will say I'm not sure they're role models for us, because we speak a different language now. And maybe we do need to learn to be more open and express our voices more. These women had not – that was not done in quite the same way in the 19th century.
Audience: Hi. Over here. Maybe this is a similar question, but I was curious if you see parallels or common threads between women's activism in the 1800s and some of the women's activism that's occurring today, for example, the march in Salt Lake – the Women's March in Salt Lake City on January 23rd and the Utah Women Unite group that's coming together and a whole bunch of different forms of activism that are sort of coming to the fore now. I just wonder if there are sort of cultural themes or things that we can learn from our foremothers in that respect.
Ulrich: Okay. I appreciate that question. That's a great question. So I think the thing that I would learn, although I'm still struggling to figure out how to apply this, is you need to be present and you need to have a voice. But you're going to be much more powerful if you also have some very specific goals in mind and you're not just protesting that somebody else is not making your life better or easier. So easy to do that. Why don't they solve this problem? And so we march and we parade and we say, "Solve that problem." I think to be able to define the problem and come up with a platform and a program to do it and then find ways to make it happen is the way.
And so the way I see this happening among 19th century women – now, the Relief Society comes and goes several times in the course of this book. It tends to come when it looks like – let's see how I can say this quickly. There are individual women who go to the tabernacle, listen to a sermon where somebody is defining a problem, and they don't wait for that somebody to call them to a particular assignment to solve that problem. And they just go start solving it.
It was very, very interesting to see Matilda Dudley do that when she created the so-called Indian Relief Society. And then several months later, Brigham Young noticed what they were doing. And he said, "Bishops, I'd like you to organize Indian Relief Societies." I mean, it was not waiting to be told what to do. That seems like a really, really good model to follow. Okay.
Audience: So actually, my question – by the way, I'm part of the organizing team for the march on the 23rd, okay? So my question is this. I'm an outsider. I don't know very much about the Relief Society. Obviously, I'm not LDS. But you have talked about activism in regards to how the Relief Society really was working. And my question kind of asks what the person just said before, was what can members of the Relief Society do now, being that we as all women are being threatened – our rights are being threatened right now? And we need to speak. I understand the organizing. We are doing organizing. We are doing things – specific things and legislations. But I want to know as a group and body of Relief Society, what would you suggest that they could do based on – I know they have restrictions. I don't know specifics, as I'm not LDS. But what can do they based on what they have, a system already in place, to help make sure that those rights that we have fought for and they have fought for, obviously, from what you're telling me, will not be taken away?
Ulrich: Yeah. Yeah. I think I've got your point. I have no prescription for the Relief Society. I'm really writing for everybody, whether they're a Latter-day Saint or not a Latter-day Saint. And I think we can learn from the past. And what I was saying in response to the other person is I think one of the things we can learn from this little case study of women who faced roadblocks all around them was they did things. They planned things. They organized things. And that would be true for men and women.
Yes, everyone in this room has the power to make a difference in this community and in this nation. You have to figure out a goal and go for it and figure out how to make it happen. And that means understanding how the power structures in your community or your nation work. In the United States, they work through voting and the electoral college. You can spend a long time trying to amend the Constitution. But another thing you can do is vote and become informed.
[Applause]
So that is the lesson I would take. This is a long time ago in a different kind of society, a different group of women. But I came away quite admiring – but didn't admire everything. But I admired a lot of things, that women who appeared to outsiders to be totally powerless had accomplished for themselves and for other people in their community, and also in the world. I think the ability to stand up and say, "Hey, I'm here. I'm not a victim. Listen to me –" even though they lost, they gave a model of the way a democratic society works. Okay.
Audience: So thank you very much. I really appreciate how you're incorporating the history of Mormon women, not just Mormon polygamy featuring women. And I was wondering if you would mind just suggesting two or three ideas in Mormon history where you think something similar could be done, where the voices of women could be recovered, and not just as a part of the story, in terms of patriarchy or other stereotypes, but where scholars could go in two or three different direction with that.
Ulrich: Oh, thank you. That sounds like a question from a historian, sort of setting me up. I think the first step is to recognize that we've hardly begun to tell the story of most people in Mormon history. And I would say that in history in general. I mean, I came from another field of history into Mormon history. And I learned these lessons by writing about an 18th century midwife who write a diary everybody thought was boring, okay? So go read some boring documents. Make the people who create those documents at the center of your story. Try to hear what they have to say and work forward.
And two or three examples – there – I think there needs to be, not just in Mormon history, but in Utah history, far more attention to material culture. The – I have a whole chapter in here about a quilt, fabulously wonderful document. There are artifacts in people's attics and basements and bottom drawers that are important historical sources. And then I think in terms of Mormon history, hey, we've probably got to get out of the 19th century. There's a lot still to do and to learn. But there are so many interesting questions also about the 20th century, clear to the end of it. And then the final point is something I preach, but not always practice – preserve your own records and save your letters and e-mails and all the good stuff. Thank you.
[Applause]
Brown: Can we take one or two more? Okay. Okay. We're – are there any – are there any people who have the mic in their hand?
Audience: I do. Yeah.
Brown: Okay. So we'll take two more quick questions and then we'll go ahead and finish up. After the Q&A, we will continue to sell – we still have – what, 40 more books available if you'd like to purchase one. And Laurel will be happy to sign the books afterwards. So two more questions.
Ulrich: Oh. There was one right there.
Brown: You have the mic in your hand.
Audience: [Inaudible]
Ulrich: That looks like Jeannie.
Audience: I do not – I do not know how to work with the suffrage movement – suffrage movement, please – how to work in that movement.
Brown: I'm lost .
Audience: Yeah, for suffrage, please.
Brown: We lost that one.
Audience: How to work in the suffrage movement – how to work in the suffrage movement, your idea. Your theory – how to work in the suffrage movement in your opinion.
Brown: Right. What about the suffrage movement? I'm sorry.
Audience: [Inaudible]
Ulrich: There's something with the mic. I'm so sorry. I can't – can somebody closer –
Audience: Suffrage movement [crosstalk].
Brown: We'll do the next question while we're sorting out that question [crosstalk].
Ulrich: Okay. How 'bout right there, with Jeanie? Right, he has a question.
Audience: I have a practical question about polygamy. The women crossed the plains. They had suffered a lot. They got to the valley. What is here for them? They don't have a way to make a living. They have lost husbands. They have lost children. So was polygamy a means to an end?
Ulrich: Oh. So that's a terrific question. So women had lost husbands or children, were in poverty, came to the valley. Was polygamy a means to an end? That is, polygamy was a way of rescuing women who had no other recourse? Absolutely, for some women. Absolutely.
What's interesting, though, are the women who left legal husbands other places and came to Utah precisely to join the Saints and to go into polygamy. So the notion that they're there because they have no other recourse is a – is a element of the story. It's a – only one part of a very complex story. And of course, there are the women who leave. So thanks for that, pointing out that very important phenomenon. I'm thinking, for example, of my own father, who told me that his grandfather had been asked by the bishop to take as a plural wife a little crippled woman in their ward who had no one to take care of her. So it's an interesting kind of expansion on the idea of home teaching.
[Laughter]
I'm only partially joking here. I mean, really and truly, this is a society where every women was supposed to have a husband. And for some women, that was a blessing. Okay.
Moderator: With have two people up here with a microphone. Go ahead.
Audience: I want to thank you, first and foremost, for your clarity and complexity of your work. It's touched my life deeply. I do come from Mormon heritage and through your work and through some of my own research, I have a newfound comfort in my – in my heritage and a newfound faith, which I'm grateful for. And I've found that faith, actually, by being very involved in interfaith women's organizations here in Salt Lake City. I am with Utah Women Unite, just as Noor is. So we'll be marching here in the capitol on the 23rd, and very excited about that. And we're having great meetings, much in the manner of women who you have researched. I do have a question about – I'm wondering if you ever went on any tangents during your research, wondering if this sort of phenomena had happened before in the human race and if you found that it happened, starting off with plural women with just a few men in African some time in the past –
Ulrich: Yeah.
Audience: That's one question. And I have another question that's – I apologize that I'm a little zealous here. Another question is I couldn't help but hear you mention multiple times that it's so human, it's so human, it's so human what you kept finding. And it did make me think of our – the plural marriage of our past made me think of our Muslim brothers and sisters and how they often have plural wives or different kinds of marriages. And I think the word you used was negotiation of relationship. And I saw opportunity for a wonderful bridge between Mormon brothers and sisters and our Muslim brothers and sisters and coming to understand one anther very deeply through understanding our own history more deeply, and I would like your comments on that.
Ulrich: Yeah. Well, that was an eloquent speech and a really – it was! It was a really eloquent speech. I'm teaching a seminar at Harvard this spring, starting in a couple of weeks, on polygamy debates, starting in the 16th century and coming up to the present. So I'm very – one of the things that's interesting about the Mormon story – and you may have noticed in my opening quote, they're compared to Africans, Turks, Mohammedans, barbarians of all kinds. The anti-polygamy stance that was used against the Latter-day Saints was used first against Muslims by Christians in Europe, and was used remarkably against American Indians and against Africans in the settlement of the New World. So I'm building here on my work in Colonial history and trying to situate that in relationship to things that happened in the 19th century.
There are polygamists in the United States today have no relationship with Mormonism. Some of them are refugees from Africa or from the Middle East. Some – there are some black Muslims who have experimented with difficulty with finding marital partners. I'm not advocating for any position in terms of marriage here. But I think we need to be honest and open and recognize the multiple ways that people have defined marriage and the way in which people have defined and exposed their own conflicts by attacking other people. That was a constant theme among Latter-day Saints. They felt like, "Go address the problem in your cities with prostitution. Why are you out here worrying about us?" And I think these things are extremely complex.
The Muslim example has been in my mind for a number of years as I mix and know students, for example, who wear head coverings and pursue a Ph.D. and people – "How can this happen?" which seemed to me so very similar to some of the things people were saying about – also about Catholics. I mean, Catholics were attacked and mobbed. Convents were considered to be sinks of iniquity, as well. So we – we've actually come quite a ways in the United States, in publicizing and uplifting notions of religious liberty in ways that they were not written into law in the 19th century. We still have a long ways to go.
Moderator: Laurel, the final question back here at the back was specifically about the suffrage movement, perhaps how that –
Ulrich: Yes. Oh, thank you.
Moderator: Yes, how that fits into your theories and the fabric of your book.
Ulrich: Yes. Well, there are some wonderful historians working on the relationship between Latter-day Saint women and the national women's suffrage movement as it developed to the end of the 19th century. So the federal government disenfranchised Mormons, eventually, in their fight against polygamy. And they took away women's suffrage. And so Mormon women became really ardent supporters of the national women's suffrage movement because they had to fight back and get the vote, which they did, when Utah finally became a state. And some of them became national participants, on national boards and officers in the suffrage movements.
Bathsheba Smith, in 1871, I think, wrote to The Women's Journal telling them about the passage of the Utah Constitution, which the editor of The Women's Journal said – agreed with Bathsheba – was the first constitution in the world that had been written with the participation of women, which it was. There were female delegates to that constitutional convention. But the federal government turned own statehood, so that was an exercise in futility. They weren't able to adopt that constitution in statehood. So there's a lot to be written about the suffrage movement in relation to Latter-day Saints. Okay.
[Applause]
Brown:
On behalf of the Mormon Women's History Initiative Team, we'd like to thank all of you for coming tonight and participating in this discussion. And we'd especially like to thank Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for her comments tonight and for coming all the way from Boston to be with us here tonight. Let's give her one more round of applause.
[Applause]
So women, let's all go out – women and men here tonight, let's all go out and make our voices heard with this women's march on January 23rd. And any other way that we feel like we can make our voices heard, let's do that.
Audience: [Crosstalk] on the 23rd, on the [inaudible] Monday.
Brown: That's right. The march is on Monday, January 23rd at 3:00 PM.
Audience: No, 2:00. 2:00 [crosstalk].
Brown: 2:00.
Audience: [Crosstalk].
Brown: Okay. 2:00, the general march. Yeah. Yeah. So if you would like to purchase a book –
[End]
I'm Lisa Tait. I'm a member of the executive committee of the Mormon Women's History Initiative. And we welcome you to this event for Laurel Thatcher Laurel's new book, as you've see, A House Full of Females. We're very excited to have you here tonight and for all of you to join us.
A little bit about the Mormon Women's History Initiative team. Actually, we go by MWHIT, as you saw on our banner out there. We're an independent group of scholars. And we foster networking and awareness of work in Mormon women's history. We're a hub for scholars that we facilitate networking and collaboration between scholars working in the field. And then we're a bridge to the community, where we sponsor events like this a couple of times a year and invite the community to come and be more aware of the great work that's being done in Mormon women's history. If I could, I'd like to have the members of our team who are in the room, anyway, stand up and give a wave and be recognized.
[Applause]
We have Taunalyn, Barbara, who's organized everything. We have a couple of our founding members here, as well, Jill Derr and Cherry Silver. And we're excited for them to join us, as well. You can connect with us on social media. We have a Facebook page, “I Love Mormon Women's History.” And so like us, follow us. We are looking forward to sponsoring another event in a couple of months and we'll be putting out announcements about that. And you won't want to miss it, because there's another great Mormon women's biography coming out. With that, let's proceed. Barbara Jones Brown, who's a member of our team, is going to introduce Laurel, and then we'll proceed from there.
Barbara Jones Brown:
Well-behaved women seldom make history." That slogan, which is loved by women across the nation, has appeared for decades now on bumper stickers, jewelry, fridge magnets, mugs, t-shirts, and greeting cards. That saying is frequently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, and sometimes even more, Marilyn Monroe. But we are privileged to have with us tonight the real woman who coined that phrase, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
[Applause]
When Laurel wrote that statement years ago, she didn't necessarily intend it to take on the meaning that it has today, that many of us interpret it as, is that if you are a well-behaved, you're never going to make history, so you might as well be a notorious woman, not well-behaved. But what she meant it to mean was that common, ordinary, well-behaved women were being ignored in historical writing. At the time that she wrote that phrase for an essay, the only women being written about were witches, she said. So Laurel wanted to place ordinary, common, well-behaved women, like so many of us here, and give them their rightful place in history. So she has spent her life writing books on these type of women, telling their stories, in books titled Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, The Age of Homespun, Good Wives, and A Midwife's Tale, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and several other prizes.
Professor Ulrich is not only a gifted writer and researcher, but a talented, renowned teacher, mentor, and lecturer, as we will see again tonight. She's a professor at Harvard University and she's also been recognized with the MacArthur Genius Award. Now, what many of us may not know is that Laurel was actually homegrown here in the West. She grew up, born and raised, in the tiny little town of Sugar City, Idaho, and then came to the University of Utah, where she received a degree in journalism before going on to receive a Master's degree at Simmons and a Ph.D. at University of New Hampshire.
So she writes in her acknowledgements for this book, A House Full of Females, "When I began graduate school in the 1970s, I briefly considered writing about Mormonism, but Colonial and Revolutionary America captured my attention and I took another path. This book is my first attempt to approach early Mormonism as a work of scholarship." And so now we are so honored that Laurel has chosen to place well-behaved Mormon women in their rightful place in American history. Tonight, she will be speaking to us. Her lecture title is "Indignation: Women's Activism in Early Utah." And please join me in welcoming Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
[Applause]
Brown:
I forgot to say, "Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a well-behaved woman who makes history both literally and figuratively."
[Laughter]
[Applause]
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich:
Thank you for coming. So many old friends and gracious voices and faces here. I'm really overawed. And I'm especially grateful to be here to offer thanks to so many of you in this audience who have really made this book possible through your prior work. I look down here—if I start naming you, I'm going to get in big trouble. But yes, Jill Derr, and others in this room whose work over many years in Mormon women's history, and too, the organizers and promoters of MWHIT, these witty, wonderful women who so graciously organized this event tonight. So I'm glad to be here. And I'm a little bit awed and hoping that I will not disappoint.
I thought maybe I would read a bit from the book. Anna Rolapp told me she read three pages of the book, she's been so busy today doing such good things. And I said, "Oh, gosh. I hope it's not the same three pages I'm going to read." But for Anna, you may have to hear this again.
This is from the introduction to A House Full of Females.
"Light snow obscured the view of the mountains on January 13th, 1870 as masses of Mormon women crowded into the old peak-roofed tabernacle in Salt Lake City. The pine benches were hard, the pot-bellied stoves inadequate against the cold. No matter. They would warm themselves with indignation. The news had come by telegraph a week before. The much feared Cullom Bill had passed the United States House of Representatives. If the Senate concurred, the government would soon have the power to confiscate Mormon property, deprive wives of immunity as witnesses, and imprison their husbands.
This wasn’t the first time Congress had attempted to outlaw the Mormon marriage system. Calls for federal action had begun 14 years before with the Republican party platform of 1856, which linked polygamy in Utah and slavery in the South as 'twin relics of barbarism.' Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont enunciated the essential argument: 'Under the guise of religions, this people has established and seek to maintain and perpetuate a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world.' Novelists and the new illustrated weeklies took up the chorus, linking Utahns not only with Southern slaveholders, but with Turks, Africans, and Indians on both sides of the world.
Although Congress responded by passing an anti-polygamy statute in 1861, there was little hope of enforcement during the Civil War. Now, with Reconstruction underway in the South, reformers decided to try again. Arguing that Utah women were slaves to a system worse than death, they scoffed at 'the sickly sentimentality which proposes to punish nobody, which proposed to hang nobody, which proposes to let all the unchained passions of the human heart become free to prey upon mankind.'
'What nonsense,' Eliza Snow exclaimed from the platform of the old tabernacle. She and other leaders among Salt Lake City women had acted quickly to organize an indignation meeting."
Now, that was a well-recognized form of public protest in the 19th century United States. Indignation was more than anger. It was sympathetic outrage directed at an injustice. And the goal was to publicize that injustice and to get sympathy from the larger public.
"Cleverly banning all males except the press, the women showcased their most effective speakers, Amanda Smith, widowed years before by anti-Mormon mobs in Missouri, brought tears to her listeners eyes as she repeated the story of her suffering.
Hannah King, an English immigrant, asked, 'Are we really in America, the world-renowned land of liberty, of freedom, of equal rights, the land of which I dreamed in my youth, where freedom of thought and religious liberty were enjoyed by all?' Eleanor Pratt said she had been turned out of doors for her faith and would willingly give her life for it. Phoebe Woodruff warned that if Congress chose to imprison Mormon men, 'They would have to make their prisons large enough to hold their wives. For where we they go, we go also.' The reporter for the New York Herald, disgusted at the sight of infatuated females, nevertheless produced a full-page account of the speeches.
The publicity worked. And among other things, it killed the Cullom Bill temporarily. The government would come back, and a long period that eventually ended with the elimination of polygamy in the Territory of Utah.
There was another immediate response to the indignation meeting, and it's a response that historians for a long time thought was a kind of ploy by the Mormon hierarchy to try to get away from the notion that they were victimizing women. And that was within weeks, the Utah territorial legislature granted women in Utah the right to vote. Now, in the pre-indignation meeting planning session, which was held in the upper room of the 15th Ward Relief Society hall, the women had laid out a series of propositions that they were going to outline in their indignation meeting.
And they added to that list the vote. They went even further and suggested that women be represented in Washington, and they elected several of their sisters for that role. But the indignation meeting, of course, was directed at the US Congress. It had nothing to do with giving anyone the right to vote. The proposal to receive the right of suffrage went quietly to the legislature, so quietly that some people later, who until they discovered the minutes of the planning meeting, figured women hadn't even asked for it. But they had asked for it and they got it.
Now, the spectacle in Utah attracted the attention of national women's suffrage leaders. And what very few people pause to recognize is that a group as scandalous as Mormons probably wasn't going to have their reputation raised by joining up with a group as scandalous as those in the women's suffrage movement. They were both considered anathema. But in a curious and fascinating way, they eventually joined ranks. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had been – long been planning a tour of the Western states. And they had been attracted by the fact that Wyoming, a few weeks before Utah, had passed a women's suffrage bill. But there were very few white settlers in Wyoming at the time, ten times as many in Utah. And of course in Wyoming, most settlers were men. So it looked like a kind of gimmick to get more women to come to the territory.
But the situation in Utah was just inexplicable. People didn't know what to make of it. And that has continued to the present, for the few people in the United States who even know that Utah women were the first in the nation to exercise the suffrage. Wyoming voted women's suffrage a few weeks earlier, but Utah had an election first, so they won that prize. People considered this a kind of paradox. How could women simultaneously support a national campaign for political and economic rights, which they did through the end of the 19th century, while defending marital practices that to most people seemed relentlessly paradoxical?
And that is the framing question of A House Full of Females. A House Full of Females, I think to most people – people immediately say, "No. It's a book about Mormonism." "Oh, yeah. Houses full of females, all those wives, the women in Brigham Young's harem." But the House Full of Females title comes from a passage in the diary of Wilford Woodruff when he had, on a day in February, 1857, paid a visit to the 14th Ward meetinghouse in Salt Lake City to attend a meeting of the ward Relief Society. And he was a polygamist. He had three wives and was about to acquire a fourth. But the house full of females was a group of 50 or 60 women under the leadership of his legal wife, Phoebe Carter Woodruff, who was president of the Relief Society.
So what I have tried to understand in this book is the relationship between houses, domestic dwellings that were full of women or at least had one or two extra, and houses, meeting houses, council house, endowment house, places that were presumed to be more public or community oriented, and what were the women doing there? And in fact, from the very beginning, the Latter-day Saints attracted women. It's a truism in religious studies that religious communities, religious congregations, are peopled by women, largely. And that has continued over time. And people have wondered if that was so for the Latter-day Saints. In some places, like Boston, most of the first early converts were female.
And we – we're still trying to define – in the population of Utah, it was pretty well balanced. But if you went into the houses of Church leaders, there almost always were those "extra" women because plural marriage was associated with female leadership and with the high status families in the Church. So what, if any, relationship was there between a willingness to defend polygamy, or at least endure the practice of polygamy, and the activities of women in the so-called public sphere?
Well, at the first level, the answer is pretty obvious, I think. In 1870, when the women ascended the platform in their indignation meeting, their own community was threatened. And by standing up as women, they defended their homes, their loved ones, and their religious identity. It's a classic example of dual identities. They're not just women. They're Mormons. And we see this phenomenon over and over in the world today.
But that explanation is too simple. And I write in the introduction, "Utah may have looked like an Old World patriarchy with its biblical terminology, theocratic government, and retreat into a valley with a dead sea and a river Jordon." But those who migrated there had been touched by the radical energies of the 1830s and 1840s, not only in the United States, but in Great Britain and in continental Europe. By the time the Americans – the Mormons arrived in Utah, female as well as male leaders knew how to circulate petitions, sign affidavits, lobby public officials, and employ the power of the press. That was evident in 1839 and 1840 after the Latter-day Saints were driven from Missouri. Masses of petitions went in to the federal government.
And I was just struck as I went through those petitions, most of them signed by men because men were heads of household and they were asking for redress from lost land. But what intrigued me as I read those petitions – the women, most of whom had been widowed in those attacks and had – and therefore were heads of their own household – what fascinated me was the way they talked not just about loss of property, loss of loved ones, but loss of citizenship. This is long before there was a campaign for women's suffrage. And this conforms to other scholarship on the early United States about women having a sense of investment in the polity, in the larger society. They had a sense of citizenship.
Petitioning is a right women have had under monarchies. Those who are subjects always have the right to petition. But Latter-day Saint women used that right of petitioning in Nauvoo, in several circumstances when there were conflicts with local governments, and then later when massive petitions were sent, continuing to ask for redress in Missouri. So they had learned through the things they had suffered that you cannot take for granted your religious liberty. And they were ready to act upon that knowledge.
As Latter-day Saints, the women who founded the indignation meeting were victims of ignorant and sometimes willful misrepresentation by outsiders. But they were surely exaggerating when they claimed they had experienced nothing but liberty in Utah. As their own writings attest, they had endured both the condescension, and in some cases, the open opposition, of their own church leaders. So this is not only a story of indignation directed toward outside persecution, but what some of us over the last two days have begun to call "opportunism" directed at their own male leaders and husbands.
I'm not saying they were insincere in standing up to defend their church. I believe they were absolutely serious in what they were doing. But it's also true that they used this opportunity to ask for the things that they wanted. And one of the things they wanted was the vote. They wanted to be full citizens. How could that have happened?
So a lot of this book deals with the long evolution of a cadre of leaders among Mormon women from 1835 to 1870, their long evolution as leaders within their own religious community, and their struggles with plural marriage, their struggles with migration, their struggle with husbands' decisions, their struggles with what appeared to be an unjust and peremptory decision by Brigham young to forbid any meetings of the Female Relief Society. After Joseph Smiths' death, when Emma Smith, Joseph's first wife and legal wife, who was president of the Relief Society, refused to accept Brigham Young as her husband's successor. And for a lot of complex reasons, Brigham really feared Emma's opposition. And he said at one point to a group of male leaders, "If you see women huddling together, stop it."
So this is a complicated story. It's a very instructive story, particularly for someone like me. My life was transformed when Susan Kohler, who is in the audience, my friend – we were in the same religious community, the Cambridge Ward in Massachusetts, at one point. And a group of us were beginning to study early Mormon history as a kind of hobby. And Susan went to work researching the stacks in Widener Library at Harvard and found the Women's Exponent, which began in 1872, just two years after the indignation meeting. And we were blown away.
This was the early '70s. All of us had been raised as Latter-day Saints. We had never heard of this newspaper. And we opened it up at a time when there was a national resurgence of feminism in the '70s, much talk of women's rights, much talk of the early women's suffrage movement. And my goodness, there were our ancestors. How could that have been possible? And that, of course, lead to the founding of Exponent II, which is still being published today, and to a nascent Mormon feminist movement.
So at one point, I wrote that in this era, "We were shocked to discover that the past was more up to date than the present." Because we saw women encouraged to have professions. We saw women speaking out for better pay for working girls. We sang songs at our Exponent retreats: "Sisters, rise, thy penance o'er. Sink thou in the dust no more!" Equality, songs that were just so stirring. We didn't pay much attention, however, to polygamy and to the fact that these two strands in 19th century women's history emerged together and intersected at every point in a very powerful way. So this was a fascinating historical problem. And as I have published a number of books, and most of them on earlier periods and most of them on New England, it occurred to me that maybe – I was past 70. What did I have to lose? I would explore the roots of my own activism.
And so I did. And there are lots of books on polygamy. This is not the definitive book on polygamy. It's a book that really tries to look at relationships among women and between women and men in the formative period of Latter-day Saints or Mormon culture. And because I wanted to understand the society as it was developing, not as it ended up, but as it was developing, I chose not to work with those wonderful, abundant family stories, memoirs, retrospective accounts of "what I did in my youth." I really wanted to see what people were saying at the very moment these things were happening. So I focused on day-to-day accounts that were concurrent with the events they were describing.
And that meant diaries. That meant minutes of meetings. I used scrapbooks, lots of letters, and some material objects, including the wonderful 14th Ward album quilt that Carol Nielson had discovered and researched a number of years ago. And I discovered a world that was far different, and yet recognizable in strange ways. It was like seeing things you already knew, but they looked different.
I've been thinking this week about the Emily Dickenson poem some of you may know, "Tell all the truth, but tell it slant." And I feel like that's what happened with this book. I tried very much to use my professional skills as a historian to really write a serious, scholarly, documented history of this period. But at each point, I was telling it slant or the sources pulled me to telling it slant. I could go on and illustrate a number of ways that happened, but my half an hour is just about up. So I'm just going to quickly suggest some things that really did surprise me.
One of the first was – provoked me to a simple change in vocabulary. I don’t think it's appropriate to talk about Winter Quarters, for example, as a temporary Mormon settlement, even if it was laid out according to the block pattern and had wards and ostensible streets. It was a Mormon refugee camp. I’ve spent a lot of time studying early American history. I’ve had a really hard time finding anything parallel to the expulsions of Latter-day Saints. We're talking about 10,000 to 15,000 people in the expulsions from Missouri and the expulsions from Nauvoo. Lots of expulsions of Indigenous Americans. This was really remarkable.
So I began to appreciate and look very differently at those stories of suffering and pioneering. Pioneering? The terms began to look different to me. And I tried to think about trauma, not in a sophisticated, psychological way, but just as I read the documents and the diaries, to try to capture, in some way, in – using their words and in my own prose, what it felt like to be at the peak of a kind of religious ecstasy, through sealings in the Nauvoo Temple, when so many of those plural marriages were contracted. That was the big boom, after Joseph's death and those sealings in the temple.
And then, bam! Whoa! That trip across Iowa. Whoa. I titled that chapter "Mud Aplenty." And it wasn't just about mud. It was what Eliza Snow talked about, family discord and the – there was scurvy. There were infant deaths. There was horrendous suffering. But a lot of the suffering was a kind of loss of hope and idealism.
And what was powerful to me as I read this was the way in which the women who later found themselves on the platform at the indignation meeting, many of the same women, were rebuilding themselves through religious and spiritual exercises, particularly the kinds of religious expression that are not familiar to Latter-day Saints today – lots of speaking in tongues. Lots. And different ways of banding together, often, women alone, sometimes women and men together.
So the Relief Society has been banned. There's no Relief Society. But there's an augmentation, and indeed, a really flourishing of spiritual gifts that had been present among men and women in Kirtland, as early as Kirtland. But now, they were taking on this particular female form that continued into the Sale Lake Valley in the terrible winter, the next two winters in the Salt Lake Valley. And the way in which women were built – healing one another, building solidarity, and indeed, helping to keep the religious community intact in many ways through their spiritual gifts. And that's just as hint of what I found and what I'm trying to talk about in the book.
The other thing that was a surprise to me was the fluidity of family relationships. Lot of divorce, and sanctioned divorce, which seemed to be an interesting outgrowth of plural marriage. I'm going to read just one more paragraph here from the book. And then I'm going to open it up for questions. Lots – lots of other things that surprised me, but these two things were really important as I – as I contemplated how the world looked so different to me as I really focused on the development of the female community in Utah and the context in which it developed, not – it developed out of trauma and suffering and sorrow and out of tension about gender in the Church.
And it's really fascinating how some men really resonated. I mean, one man said, "This is the best meeting I've ever been to." And another leader thought, "You should not be meeting." And they met. They solved it in part by calling these gatherings "organized parties."
So I'm going to read just one quick passage here. And this is partly for Connell O’Donovan (who somebody told me is here) because he was so wonderful in sharing his work on Augusta Adams Cobb, who's a real – a real – she's a character in this book.
So Eliza Snow, when the first National Women's Rights Convention met in Wooster, Massachusetts in October, 1850 – not Seneca Falls, now, but the first National Women's Rights Convention, Eliza Snow was living in Brigham Young's log row on the hill two blocks beyond Temple Square. And she learned about this from Eastern newspapers. And the Eastern newspapers weren't very kind to the suffragists. They dismissed the convention as "an awful combination of socialism, abolition, and infidelity got up by fanatical and crazy mongrels in britches and petticoats."
Eliza had a more ladylike response. In a poem published in Salt Lake City's Desert News, she acknowledged the desire of these women to create a better world. But she warned that, "Any agitation for female rights would fail, and they might as well attempt to realign the stars and planets as to remove woman from the sphere assigned to her by God." And then she said, "Let those fair champions of female rights, female conventionists, come here. Yes. In these mountain vales, here are noble men whom they'll be proud to acknowledge to be far their own superiors and have no need of being congresswomen."
Well, Eliza had no idea that 20 years later, champions of women's rights would come to Utah, not to acknowledge the superiority of Mormon men, to investigate the newly acquired rights of Mormon women. What interests me is Eliza knew about those conventions, and it's a sense she's protesting way too much. Eliza saw liberty through submission to the men she considered God's vicars on Earth.
Her housemate Augusta Cobb was different. Writing to Brigham Young in the autumn of 1850, Augusta mused, "Is there any such a thing as an independent woman in the economy of God? If there is, I want to be that woman." And she made a lot of trouble for Brigham over time.
And so in this chapter of the book, I really try to talk about the range of women, including Vilate Kimball and Patty Sessions and Bathsheba Smith and Lucy Meserve Smith, in relation to Augusta, who's so challenging and so interesting, and see what it was that was working and not working for these women in terms of their polygamist relationships and also their relationships in the larger community. And what was interesting in just looking – comparing the platform in the national women's suffrage meeting in 1850 with these women in Utah was how many of the things the Eastern women wanted, Utah women always had – already had, which was accidental, by and large. One of them was to get rid of the common law, which made women subordinate, economically and legally, to men. Well, Utah got rid of the common law because the common law forbad bigamy, and so they said no practice of the common law in Utah. But by doing that, they also opened up the way for different kinds of property relationships.
Another was the women complained about lack of access to the professions. Again, Utah solved that problem by eliminating the professions. They didn't like doctors and lawyers. But they allowed women to practice law, if they wanted to. Very few did, immediately. But they had a council of health that included both women and men. In principle, at least, they also embraced co-education. I'm proud to say the University of Desert, which became the University of Utah, opened its doors to women in its second year. Unfortunately, in its third year, it collapsed for lack of funding.
And finally, in Utah, women had more opportunity economically because nearly everybody in the territory had less. They moved backward from an industrializing economy into an area where there was still a lot of informal exchange. And Utah women really – that was important for them in creating considerable independence, which is one reason they were so supportive of the retrenchment movement later, when Brigham Young began to promote it.
So I'm going to simply say that these things, in a way, were the problem that made Augusta Cobb's life so difficult. Because she wondered whether a wife's ability to manage her own earnings mattered if she was forced to lived in poverty, which she was. And while in principle, she embraced plural marriage, she asked whether deference to other women was any improvement over obedience to a husband. And she had a lot of difficulty with that, because she wanted to be in charge in some level, as the second plural wife of Brigham Young. And suddenly, there were all these other women, younger women, which made her life very difficult.
Well, okay. I'm not defending plural marriage. I'm not attacking plural marriage. I'm not arguing here that plural marriage, it liberated Latter-day Saint women. I'm arguing – or that it repressed Latter-day Saint women. I'm arguing here that the combination of plural marriage, which made them outcasts in the nation, and the experience of being at the heart of an anti-capitalist communal society that required cooperation among women at many levels in order to sustain the society gave them a strength that ultimately allowed to overcome the reservations about female organization and to reestablish a vibrant Female Relief Society in the late 1860s.
So the indignation meeting in Salt Lake City was very successful, but it was followed by indignation meetings in 58 towns in the territory. How did that happen? The Female Relief Society. So this is a heritage that has been too little understood and that I hope you will enjoy exploring, at least a bit, in A House Full of Females. Thank you.
[Applause]
So how – are you going to call on people?
Brown: Thank you, Professor Ulrich. We will now open it up to the audience for the next 20 minutes or so. If you'd like to ask questions of Laurel, she'll be happy to take them. And we have two microphones going around. And so if you'll just raise your hand and stand up and we'll get the microphone to you.
Audience: Thank you so much. It's just so interesting to hear you speak.
Ulrich: Where are you?
Audience: I'm way up here in the top.
Ulrich: Oh, okay. Got it.
Audience: Thank you. I just wondered if you could tell me, what do you think happened with the gift tongues in the LDS religion? Do you have any insights on that?
Ulrich: There's been some scholarship on it. It was sort of surprising to me how much I found. Because some people have thought it really largely ended after Kirtland because there was a fear of it kind of getting out of hand. But it's there. Wilford Woodruff is enjoying Elizabeth Whitney singing in tongues, which was something she did frequently. I think it remained for a long time.
Toward the end of the 19th century, the more – the latter – the first generations began to be succeeded by younger people. There was probably less – they were modernizing, after the railroad, and increasing numbers and perhaps fewer that had come from Methodist or other traditions where that was a common religious practice. But there are probably others who've studied 19th century Mormonism who could answer that better than I can. But I think it was really starting to fade in the early '70s. I did read a fascinating diary entry from a woman who said, "Eliza wanted us to speak in tongues." And she seemed somewhat resentful of that.
Brown: Okay.
Audience: I can speak pretty loud. Are there characters that you connected with more than others, in the book? As you wrote it, were you surprised by different ways that you responded to the characters and are there some that you really resonated with?
Ulrich: I really love them all. I've – I mean, that's – anybody who left records, I adore. And not many did. It's a small – it's a small group. I'll mention two that may be less familiar to you. There're a lot of familiar people, Vilate Young, Eliza Snow, Zina Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, Zina D.H. Young, of fame; Bathsheba Smith, fabulous; Lucy Meserve Smith, wonderful. But I actually stumbled across, in the Church history library, a little diary from Wilford Woodruff's stepmother. And that was pretty amazing to discover that.
And then one of my all time favorite diarists is Caroline Crosby. And I finally ended up giving her a whole chapter. And that chapter is centered in California. I have 15 chapters in the book. Six are primarily about Utah. So it's a little different in that regard, as well. Because I tried to keep the – I tried to keep the understanding that this was a church of gathering. And in order to gather people to Zion, you've got to have people out there doing the gathering. And it was very, very interesting to look at the San Bernardino community, for example, through the eyes of Caroline Crosby.
Audience: So you speak about tension in the Church, gender tension. How has that changed in your life and how do you see the current state today?
Ulrich: Oh, are you asking how did that change over the course of the book or how has that changed in my life? I didn't quite –
Audience: Oh. I guess both.
Ulrich: I think it's endemic in human societies. I think there're going to be tensions over gender and they're going to be resolved in productive and non-productive ways. And we have a lot of work to do in American society, as we know. Some of us who came up as activisits in the '70s and '80s are really sad right now to see some things that we thought were passé reemerge. And I think – there was an interesting kind of comfort for me in discovering how complicated gender relations were in early Mormonism. It would be easy to think, "Oh, it was patriarchal, the women had little voice," or to think, "Oh, they were more liberated because they had their sister wives and they could go to medical school," or whatever. I mean, these stereotypes that we live with about early Mormonism. But often, the conflicts were strikingly familiar in the ways people were negotiating relationships within their own households.
And Mary Richards is an amazingly interesting wife – first wife of Samuel Richards, a very, very outspoken – she did not like polygamy. And yet, the way Samuel dealt with that in a kind of – we could call it passive aggressive. We could call it patient. It depends on how you want to look at it. I mean, it just seems so very human in the way that was worked out. So I saw a lot of continuity.
I also saw some real differences. 19th century women were much more likely to work – let's see. Somebody today gave the example, if someone says no, you're respectful, but you kind of move to the side and go at it another way. And they were pretty good, eventually, at getting a lot of what they wanted. But 19th century women, with the small exceptions of the really powerful feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Anthony – who were not terribly successful, in truth, although they woke a lot of people up. But Mormon women got their way some of the time in surprising ways. And I'm sorry I can't be more specific. You can look at the book and see if you can find some good examples of that.
Okay. I don't know that they're – I will say I'm not sure they're role models for us, because we speak a different language now. And maybe we do need to learn to be more open and express our voices more. These women had not – that was not done in quite the same way in the 19th century.
Audience: Hi. Over here. Maybe this is a similar question, but I was curious if you see parallels or common threads between women's activism in the 1800s and some of the women's activism that's occurring today, for example, the march in Salt Lake – the Women's March in Salt Lake City on January 23rd and the Utah Women Unite group that's coming together and a whole bunch of different forms of activism that are sort of coming to the fore now. I just wonder if there are sort of cultural themes or things that we can learn from our foremothers in that respect.
Ulrich: Okay. I appreciate that question. That's a great question. So I think the thing that I would learn, although I'm still struggling to figure out how to apply this, is you need to be present and you need to have a voice. But you're going to be much more powerful if you also have some very specific goals in mind and you're not just protesting that somebody else is not making your life better or easier. So easy to do that. Why don't they solve this problem? And so we march and we parade and we say, "Solve that problem." I think to be able to define the problem and come up with a platform and a program to do it and then find ways to make it happen is the way.
And so the way I see this happening among 19th century women – now, the Relief Society comes and goes several times in the course of this book. It tends to come when it looks like – let's see how I can say this quickly. There are individual women who go to the tabernacle, listen to a sermon where somebody is defining a problem, and they don't wait for that somebody to call them to a particular assignment to solve that problem. And they just go start solving it.
It was very, very interesting to see Matilda Dudley do that when she created the so-called Indian Relief Society. And then several months later, Brigham Young noticed what they were doing. And he said, "Bishops, I'd like you to organize Indian Relief Societies." I mean, it was not waiting to be told what to do. That seems like a really, really good model to follow. Okay.
Audience: So actually, my question – by the way, I'm part of the organizing team for the march on the 23rd, okay? So my question is this. I'm an outsider. I don't know very much about the Relief Society. Obviously, I'm not LDS. But you have talked about activism in regards to how the Relief Society really was working. And my question kind of asks what the person just said before, was what can members of the Relief Society do now, being that we as all women are being threatened – our rights are being threatened right now? And we need to speak. I understand the organizing. We are doing organizing. We are doing things – specific things and legislations. But I want to know as a group and body of Relief Society, what would you suggest that they could do based on – I know they have restrictions. I don't know specifics, as I'm not LDS. But what can do they based on what they have, a system already in place, to help make sure that those rights that we have fought for and they have fought for, obviously, from what you're telling me, will not be taken away?
Ulrich: Yeah. Yeah. I think I've got your point. I have no prescription for the Relief Society. I'm really writing for everybody, whether they're a Latter-day Saint or not a Latter-day Saint. And I think we can learn from the past. And what I was saying in response to the other person is I think one of the things we can learn from this little case study of women who faced roadblocks all around them was they did things. They planned things. They organized things. And that would be true for men and women.
Yes, everyone in this room has the power to make a difference in this community and in this nation. You have to figure out a goal and go for it and figure out how to make it happen. And that means understanding how the power structures in your community or your nation work. In the United States, they work through voting and the electoral college. You can spend a long time trying to amend the Constitution. But another thing you can do is vote and become informed.
[Applause]
So that is the lesson I would take. This is a long time ago in a different kind of society, a different group of women. But I came away quite admiring – but didn't admire everything. But I admired a lot of things, that women who appeared to outsiders to be totally powerless had accomplished for themselves and for other people in their community, and also in the world. I think the ability to stand up and say, "Hey, I'm here. I'm not a victim. Listen to me –" even though they lost, they gave a model of the way a democratic society works. Okay.
Audience: So thank you very much. I really appreciate how you're incorporating the history of Mormon women, not just Mormon polygamy featuring women. And I was wondering if you would mind just suggesting two or three ideas in Mormon history where you think something similar could be done, where the voices of women could be recovered, and not just as a part of the story, in terms of patriarchy or other stereotypes, but where scholars could go in two or three different direction with that.
Ulrich: Oh, thank you. That sounds like a question from a historian, sort of setting me up. I think the first step is to recognize that we've hardly begun to tell the story of most people in Mormon history. And I would say that in history in general. I mean, I came from another field of history into Mormon history. And I learned these lessons by writing about an 18th century midwife who write a diary everybody thought was boring, okay? So go read some boring documents. Make the people who create those documents at the center of your story. Try to hear what they have to say and work forward.
And two or three examples – there – I think there needs to be, not just in Mormon history, but in Utah history, far more attention to material culture. The – I have a whole chapter in here about a quilt, fabulously wonderful document. There are artifacts in people's attics and basements and bottom drawers that are important historical sources. And then I think in terms of Mormon history, hey, we've probably got to get out of the 19th century. There's a lot still to do and to learn. But there are so many interesting questions also about the 20th century, clear to the end of it. And then the final point is something I preach, but not always practice – preserve your own records and save your letters and e-mails and all the good stuff. Thank you.
[Applause]
Brown: Can we take one or two more? Okay. Okay. We're – are there any – are there any people who have the mic in their hand?
Audience: I do. Yeah.
Brown: Okay. So we'll take two more quick questions and then we'll go ahead and finish up. After the Q&A, we will continue to sell – we still have – what, 40 more books available if you'd like to purchase one. And Laurel will be happy to sign the books afterwards. So two more questions.
Ulrich: Oh. There was one right there.
Brown: You have the mic in your hand.
Audience: [Inaudible]
Ulrich: That looks like Jeannie.
Audience: I do not – I do not know how to work with the suffrage movement – suffrage movement, please – how to work in that movement.
Brown: I'm lost .
Audience: Yeah, for suffrage, please.
Brown: We lost that one.
Audience: How to work in the suffrage movement – how to work in the suffrage movement, your idea. Your theory – how to work in the suffrage movement in your opinion.
Brown: Right. What about the suffrage movement? I'm sorry.
Audience: [Inaudible]
Ulrich: There's something with the mic. I'm so sorry. I can't – can somebody closer –
Audience: Suffrage movement [crosstalk].
Brown: We'll do the next question while we're sorting out that question [crosstalk].
Ulrich: Okay. How 'bout right there, with Jeanie? Right, he has a question.
Audience: I have a practical question about polygamy. The women crossed the plains. They had suffered a lot. They got to the valley. What is here for them? They don't have a way to make a living. They have lost husbands. They have lost children. So was polygamy a means to an end?
Ulrich: Oh. So that's a terrific question. So women had lost husbands or children, were in poverty, came to the valley. Was polygamy a means to an end? That is, polygamy was a way of rescuing women who had no other recourse? Absolutely, for some women. Absolutely.
What's interesting, though, are the women who left legal husbands other places and came to Utah precisely to join the Saints and to go into polygamy. So the notion that they're there because they have no other recourse is a – is a element of the story. It's a – only one part of a very complex story. And of course, there are the women who leave. So thanks for that, pointing out that very important phenomenon. I'm thinking, for example, of my own father, who told me that his grandfather had been asked by the bishop to take as a plural wife a little crippled woman in their ward who had no one to take care of her. So it's an interesting kind of expansion on the idea of home teaching.
[Laughter]
I'm only partially joking here. I mean, really and truly, this is a society where every women was supposed to have a husband. And for some women, that was a blessing. Okay.
Moderator: With have two people up here with a microphone. Go ahead.
Audience: I want to thank you, first and foremost, for your clarity and complexity of your work. It's touched my life deeply. I do come from Mormon heritage and through your work and through some of my own research, I have a newfound comfort in my – in my heritage and a newfound faith, which I'm grateful for. And I've found that faith, actually, by being very involved in interfaith women's organizations here in Salt Lake City. I am with Utah Women Unite, just as Noor is. So we'll be marching here in the capitol on the 23rd, and very excited about that. And we're having great meetings, much in the manner of women who you have researched. I do have a question about – I'm wondering if you ever went on any tangents during your research, wondering if this sort of phenomena had happened before in the human race and if you found that it happened, starting off with plural women with just a few men in African some time in the past –
Ulrich: Yeah.
Audience: That's one question. And I have another question that's – I apologize that I'm a little zealous here. Another question is I couldn't help but hear you mention multiple times that it's so human, it's so human, it's so human what you kept finding. And it did make me think of our – the plural marriage of our past made me think of our Muslim brothers and sisters and how they often have plural wives or different kinds of marriages. And I think the word you used was negotiation of relationship. And I saw opportunity for a wonderful bridge between Mormon brothers and sisters and our Muslim brothers and sisters and coming to understand one anther very deeply through understanding our own history more deeply, and I would like your comments on that.
Ulrich: Yeah. Well, that was an eloquent speech and a really – it was! It was a really eloquent speech. I'm teaching a seminar at Harvard this spring, starting in a couple of weeks, on polygamy debates, starting in the 16th century and coming up to the present. So I'm very – one of the things that's interesting about the Mormon story – and you may have noticed in my opening quote, they're compared to Africans, Turks, Mohammedans, barbarians of all kinds. The anti-polygamy stance that was used against the Latter-day Saints was used first against Muslims by Christians in Europe, and was used remarkably against American Indians and against Africans in the settlement of the New World. So I'm building here on my work in Colonial history and trying to situate that in relationship to things that happened in the 19th century.
There are polygamists in the United States today have no relationship with Mormonism. Some of them are refugees from Africa or from the Middle East. Some – there are some black Muslims who have experimented with difficulty with finding marital partners. I'm not advocating for any position in terms of marriage here. But I think we need to be honest and open and recognize the multiple ways that people have defined marriage and the way in which people have defined and exposed their own conflicts by attacking other people. That was a constant theme among Latter-day Saints. They felt like, "Go address the problem in your cities with prostitution. Why are you out here worrying about us?" And I think these things are extremely complex.
The Muslim example has been in my mind for a number of years as I mix and know students, for example, who wear head coverings and pursue a Ph.D. and people – "How can this happen?" which seemed to me so very similar to some of the things people were saying about – also about Catholics. I mean, Catholics were attacked and mobbed. Convents were considered to be sinks of iniquity, as well. So we – we've actually come quite a ways in the United States, in publicizing and uplifting notions of religious liberty in ways that they were not written into law in the 19th century. We still have a long ways to go.
Moderator: Laurel, the final question back here at the back was specifically about the suffrage movement, perhaps how that –
Ulrich: Yes. Oh, thank you.
Moderator: Yes, how that fits into your theories and the fabric of your book.
Ulrich: Yes. Well, there are some wonderful historians working on the relationship between Latter-day Saint women and the national women's suffrage movement as it developed to the end of the 19th century. So the federal government disenfranchised Mormons, eventually, in their fight against polygamy. And they took away women's suffrage. And so Mormon women became really ardent supporters of the national women's suffrage movement because they had to fight back and get the vote, which they did, when Utah finally became a state. And some of them became national participants, on national boards and officers in the suffrage movements.
Bathsheba Smith, in 1871, I think, wrote to The Women's Journal telling them about the passage of the Utah Constitution, which the editor of The Women's Journal said – agreed with Bathsheba – was the first constitution in the world that had been written with the participation of women, which it was. There were female delegates to that constitutional convention. But the federal government turned own statehood, so that was an exercise in futility. They weren't able to adopt that constitution in statehood. So there's a lot to be written about the suffrage movement in relation to Latter-day Saints. Okay.
[Applause]
Brown:
On behalf of the Mormon Women's History Initiative Team, we'd like to thank all of you for coming tonight and participating in this discussion. And we'd especially like to thank Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for her comments tonight and for coming all the way from Boston to be with us here tonight. Let's give her one more round of applause.
[Applause]
So women, let's all go out – women and men here tonight, let's all go out and make our voices heard with this women's march on January 23rd. And any other way that we feel like we can make our voices heard, let's do that.
Audience: [Crosstalk] on the 23rd, on the [inaudible] Monday.
Brown: That's right. The march is on Monday, January 23rd at 3:00 PM.
Audience: No, 2:00. 2:00 [crosstalk].
Brown: 2:00.
Audience: [Crosstalk].
Brown: Okay. 2:00, the general march. Yeah. Yeah. So if you would like to purchase a book –
[End]
