Joseph F. Smith and the Great Hawaiian Cat Massacre*

This year, I am planning on flying to Honolulu to do research on Mormon communities such as Laie and Lahaina.  Hawai’i?s official tourism website assures me that I will enjoy the ?clear, blue waters of Kailua beach,? ?the metropolitan cityscapes of Honolulu,? and ?the historic architecture of Iolani Palace.? (http://www.gohawaii.com/oahu/about).  Had I traveled there in the nineteenth century, however, I would have found myself surrounded not by luxurious hotels and volleyball courts but a multitude of half-fed, half-wild dogs and cats.

Yellow Wallpaper in Zion: The Friendship between Susa Young Gates and Charlotte Perkins Gilman

On March 8, 1927, the Deseret News published a piece about the upcoming visit of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a noted socialist and feminist.[1]  Looking back, it is easy to assume that the piece would have been largely negative.  Gilman?s most famous work is ?The Yellow Wallpaper,? which traces the growing madness of a young woman confined to her room because she has been diagnosed with hysterical tendencies.  Forbidden from working or leaving the room without her husband?s permission, she develops a fixation with the wallpaper, which makes her think of ?all the yellow things? that she has ever seen ?not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.?[2]  Eventually, she comes to believe that she lives within the wallpaper and refuses to leave the room when their summer rental expires.  She gnaws at the bedposts and hides the key so that no one can force her out into the world where everything is too green.  She ends up crawling on the floor, where she can place her shoulder against the wall, and be protected from losing her way.  The room she once hated has become her sanctuary.

Gilman saw ?The Yellow Wallpaper” as a critique of the infantilization of women, the confinement of women to the home, and the treatment of the mentally ill and as such, the short story would be at odds with the current Mormon understanding of womanhood.  Although Mormon husbands are unlikely to confine their wives to their rooms if they show signs of depression or ?hysteria,? Gilman would have critiqued the church?s emphasis on motherhood and domesticity to the exclusion of women?s work.  Gilman believed that women should be able to enter professions and that those women who did perform housework should be paid for it in real, hard currency.  Far from condemning Gilman, however, the 1920s Deseret News praised her.  It told its readers that Gilman had come from a notable family, which included Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, and that she had ?known intimately many of the greatest people of the world.?[3]  The article also lauded Gilman for her efforts to secure women?s economic independence.

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“Mormon” Dissent: Gestures to the Past and my own Mormon Story

Update on “The Mormon Body Project:”  I found skinny jeans.  Anyone who wants pictures can visit: http://scholaristas.wordpress.com/2012/02/22/the-skinny-on-the-hunt-for-skinny-jeans/

Last week, I attended a presentation at Benchmark Books by Will Bagley, Polly Aird, and Jeff Nichols on their new book Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West.  They regaled the audience with stories of Ann Godge, a wife of John D. Lee who claimed that the Danites lived on top of caves and were willing to kill their own sons for infractions, Brigham Young Hampton, who tried to entrap several of Utah?s Gentile government officials in a prostitution ring and was instead arrested for running a brothel, and Charles Derry who could not bear the Mormon Reformation and was marginalized within his community.

As they were speaking I began to reflect on the stakes might be in labeling such people as Mormon dissenters.  Although these men and women had all once belonged to the Mormon faith, many of them had renounced Mormonism and considered themselves to exist in opposition to the church.  On the one hand, classifying them as Mormon dissidents seems to be a political statement that forces historians of the Mormon religious tradition to take voices of dissent seriously and to recognize them as belonging to the same history as men like Brigham Young and Joseph Fielding Smith.  One of the claims that Bagley, Aird, and Nichols made that night was that historians need to recognize the difficulties that everyday Mormons encountered as they tried to apply the principles of their faith to their lives.  While some people struggled through and remained within the faith, others decided to leave or to become figures of opposition.  Bagley, Aird, and Nichols want us to recognize that both options were valid.  On the other hand, to call someone like Godge Mormon does violence to the way that she saw herself.  Godge would have rejected the description and vehemently denied that it remained a part of her identity even after she had denounced the faith.  As historians, we need to think about the implications and politics of choosing certain descriptors for the people whose lives we are choosing to tell.

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The Mormon Body Project: Thoughts Toward a History of Mormon Girls

Cross-posted at Scholaristas.

I never knew I had fat calves until I tried on a pair of skinny jeans.  I tugged on the jeans ? trying to get them over the bulges of my legs.  When I finally did, it was to no avail.  Pants that were big enough to fit over my calves were way too big in the waist.  I had never realized that I had fat calves before ? it had never been an issue because the skirts and jeans that I had worn had never fit them closely or required them to be a certain size.  I soon discovered that the boots also in fashion were equally difficult to fit to my body.  Since then, I have been slightly uncomfortable with my fat calves and chubby knees.  Unfortunately, these areas of the body have proven to be especially unyielding to exercise.

In her book The Body Project, Joan Jacobs Brumberg argues that experiences like mine are not abnormal.  Women?s understandings of their bodies are influenced by pop culture, trends in fashion, and the cosmetics industry.  In the mid-twentieth century, fashion trends that required girls to bare their mid-riffs led girls to be more concerned about the firmness of their stomachs and bodies.[1]  A corset can?t hold your stomach in when you were required to bare flesh.  Brumberg?s project is to explore how the ideas that girls have had about their bodies have changed from the late nineteenth century to the present.

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