By B KimeSeptember 17, 2017
This is the fifteenth entry in the Third Annual Summer Book Club at Juvenile Instructor. This year we are reading Laurel Thatcher Ulrich?s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women?s Rights in Early Mormonism (Knopf, 2017). Check back every Sunday for the week?s installment! Please follow the book club and JI on Facebook!
What did it mean for Mormon women to work ?behind the throne? (372) but not as ?pawns of the patriarchy?? (385) What did it mean for Mormon women to ?speak for themselves,? (387) but in defense of polygamy? In what sense, in other words, were Mormon women free? Were they free?
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By B KimeSeptember 27, 2016
This is a fantastic, convincing book. It was a real pleasure to read. I think it has a few problems but I want to start with Simpson?s cogent thesis and compelling story.
Simpson?s thesis, stated baldly, is that ?modern Mormonism was born in the American university? (1?2). By American university he means the archipelago of research and graduate education institutions that emerged mainly between the upper Midwest and the Northeast after the Civil War. By modern Mormonism, he means a Mormonism with ?a genuine, passionate sense of belonging in America? (2). In some important senses, Mormons moved from outsider to insider status between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Simpson sees the American university as the most important facilitator of that transition. Between 1867 and 1940, university settings were uniquely irenic spaces where Mormons could ?rehearse for American citizenship? and imagine themselves as both American and Mormon (2). So Simpson joins the significant historiographical minority?from Thomas O?Dea to Grant Underwood, Kathleen Flake, Steven Taysom, and recent graduates like Christopher Blythe?who have placed the makings of modern Mormonism long before and long after the 1890s.
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By B KimeSeptember 1, 2016
It?s been a good year for top-notch journal articles on early Mormonism. Religion and American Culture added another one to the mix this past month: ?Ordering Antinomy: An Analysis of Early Mormonism?s Priestly Offices, Councils, and Kinship? Religion and American Culture 26 (Winter 2016): 139?183, by Kathleen Flake, Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies at the University of Virginia. Flake?s article approaches a pair of perennial questions. Was early Mormonism populist? And to the extent that it was, how did its prophetic center hold?
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