Mormon Teen Lit: Jacqueline Antonovich on Temple Marriage, Feminism, and Non-Traditional Marriage in Tamra Norton’s “Molly Mormon?”

Jacqueline is a PhD student at the University of Michigan, where she studies gender, medicine, and politics during the Progressive Era.  She also earned an MA from the University of Wyoming and a BA from Mesa State College where she graduated summa cum laude.  I am happy to have her contribute to this series.  Since she arrived at Michigan, she has demonstrated a thorough knowledge of the American West and a commitment to feminist politics.  She is also a ton of fun.  Both of these characteristics are on show at her group blog Nursing Clio.

Note: You will find Molly Mormon published by both Tamra Torero and Tamra Norton.  They are one and the same.  Tamra Torero is the married name of the author.

Like many young, gawky preteens growing up in the 1980s, I had a very intimate relationship with teen literature. Because I didn?t exactly have an open line of communication with my parents, I often sought out these books to help answer my most pressing teenage-angsty questions. Of course, my favorite author was Judy Blume.  I still look back fondly at my trips to the local library, searching longingly for any dog-eared copy of a Blume book I might have missed. Some of her novels ? Are you there God, It?s me Margaret, Then Again Maybe I Won?t, and It?s Not the End of the World ? I must have read at least three times each (I never did get my hands on the coveted, yet controversial, Forever).

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Dear Lord, Why Did I Decide to Go to Graduate School?

At a meeting with my advisor today, she told me that I was one of the easiest graduate students that she had ever had.  I did my work on schedule.  I don?t tend have to breakdowns.  And, I have a fairly good record at winning fellowships.  What she doesn?t know is that I am a mess inside.  Every time I send out a fellowship application, I am certain that I am going to fail.  Before every meeting I have with her or another committee member, I spend hours putting together an outfit and trying on different combinations of clothes.

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I Found it in the Archives: Archival Code Breakers

I have to admit, as completely unpalatable as I find Nicolas Cage (despite his influential corner of internet memes), every once in a while I wish that archival research was a little less sitting and reading a little more jumping to action and making remarkable and miraculous connections?preferably in some deep lost underground tunnel holding documents no one has seen for a couple hundred years or more. (Dr. Jones, Jr. is clearly more acceptable than Cage, were it not for that crystal skull and his inability to get tenure, but I don?t really need to get in a row with cannibalistic natives.) Despite this desire for excitement, most archival finds and brief moments of epiphany occur only after a lot of work amidst the mundane.

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Guest Post: Natalie R., “Mormon Female Adolescence, Diaries, and Religiosity

When I started my research project on adolescent Mormon women from the late 1860s to the 1920s, I was met with questions from a few people asking me something along the lines of ?Do those sources exist?? Despite the growth of scholarship on the lived experiences of adolescents and children in the last few decades, there is, unfortunately, still some uncertainty about finding these ?elusive? sources created by children and adolescents. Thankfully for my research, I embraced this doubt as a challenge that has proven to be successful.  There are a number of diaries written by young women  in the archives, and there have already been quite a few scholarly articles centered on these diaries.

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The Juvenile Instructor turns 5 today

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since that fateful day at J-Dawgs when five lowly BYU students decided to start a blog devoted to the academic study of Mormon history. Yup, that’s right. The Juvenile Instructor turns 5 today. We’ve added new bloggers (there’s 25 of us now! 25!), regretfully said goodbye to a couple of others, and grown and developed and (hopefully) improved during that time. I’ll offer my own belief that the JI is bigger and better and stronger than it’s ever been. And a lot of that has to do with you, our readers. Among the most regular comments I hear from people about the JI is how much they appreciate and enjoy the quality of conversation that goes on in the comments section, and I tend to agree. For those that have been with us since the beginning, thanks for sticking around. And for those who only recently found the blog, thanks for stopping by. We hope you’ll visit often.

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Biographically Thinking

I am currently in the early stages of a scholarly biography of Joseph F. Smith. Biographies are sort of strange beasts, largely because they seem deceptively simple. A person lives and then a biographer writes about that life. The reality of course is much more complex. The biographer has to make a great many choices before doing any research at all. Biographers have to decide what sorts of questions they want to answer using the life of their subject. Are the questions just about the subject? Or will the subject be used to demonstrate larger themes? Something in between? What about organization? Thematic? Chronological? As I wade through these and similar questions, I would like to tap the collective wisdom of JI’s readership. As readers, what kind of biographies do you prefer? What are your favorite biographies? What are your least favorites?

“Either a misogynist or proto-feminist”: Women and Polygamy in John Turner’s “Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet”

[Another installment in the roundtable on John Turner’s Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.]

Amanda's Aunt Ann Eliza, also known as Wife No. 19 and now a star of a major Lifetime Movie

I should mention at the outset of this review that I am not a dispassionate, objective observer when it comes to the subject of Brigham Young and polygamy.  In other words, I have a dog in the fight.  As a child, my grandmother regaled me of stories of my Uncle Ed?s great grandmother who had divorced Brigham Young and then went on a lecture tour revealing his hypocrisy and tyrannical abuse of his wives.  When I was older, I realized that the woman that my grandmother had taken such pride was none other than Ann Eliza Young, the famous nineteenth wife of Brigham Young.  The fact that my great uncle?s last name was Webb confirmed the ancestral tie.  My adulthood, however, also tempered my feelings about Brigham Young, which had ranged from bemusement at his ideas about Adam-God to disgust at the number of his wives.  Although I still joked about what I would like to say to the Mormon prophet if we ever met in the afterlife, I also began realized that he was a man who had loved his children deeply and had experienced a great deal of pain and suffering during his time as a missionary and as a man in Nauvoo.  I still remember reading about the aid that he rendered to his daughter Susa after she found herself unable to support herself after divorcing her alcoholic first husband.

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Found in the Archives: James Covel in Canada, circa 1818?

In March of this year, the newly rebranded BYU Studies Quarterly published an article I wrote entitled “Mormonism in the Methodist Marketplace: James Covel and the Historical Background of Doctrine and Covenants 39?40.” The article, which began as a short and poorly-written blog post here at JI a few years earlier, represented the culmination of a year in the archives pouring through manuscript sources and rolls and rolls of microfilmed newspapers and church records from three different Methodist churches (assisted by the indefatigable staff at the United Methodist Archives and History Center in Madison, New Jersey), piecing together the life and preaching career of a man I initially knew next to nothing about. It also represented the culmination—or so I thought at the time—of my research on connections between Methodism and early Mormonism. I’d moved on to what I imagined at the time as an entirely unrelated project: my dissertation, which examines the growth and development of Methodism in North America and the Caribbean from 1760 to 1815.

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Boston-area lecture: “The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism”

We thought that some of the New England branch of the JI community might be interested in this upcoming event at Brandeis University:

?The Faces of Eve: Varieties of Mormon Feminism?

A lecture by Janet Bennion, author of Polygamy in Primetime

Thursday, October 25, 2012, 7:00 to 9:00pm

Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, Epstein Building, Brandeis University
515 South Street, Waltham MA 02454

Media portrayals of Mormon women have focused on the potential for oppression and abuse within both the mainline church and fundamentalists sects. Drawing on her 17 years of fieldwork among fundamentalist polygamous Mormons, Janet Bennion argues that some “sister wives” find fulfillment and even empowerment through their domestic arrangements. In this lecture, she will be joined by historian Laurel Ulrich to look beyond the official patriarchy and find the subtle feminisms Mormon women embody.

Janet Bennion is a professor of social sciences at Lyndon State College in Vermont. Her latest book, “Polygamy in Primetime: Media, Gender, and Politics in Mormon Fundamentalism”, was published in 2012 by the Brandeis Series on Gender, Culture, Religion, and Law, a collaboration between the HBI and the University Press of New England.

Free and open to the public.

Parking in Epstein Lot.

RSVP encouraged: hbi@brandeis.edu

Found in the Archives: Heidi Harris, “Too coincidental to be merely coincidental”

We’re delighted to feature this contribution from JI’s good friend and former blogger Heidi Harris as part of our “I Found it in the Archives” series.

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