By July 24, 2009
So in my ever-stewing never-ending revisions of my work on Mormonism in the Philadelphia area, I’ve decided that I need to say more about women. This is a challenge since my sources are overwhelmingly written by men. I do have some detailed journals that I can mine better than I have though.
Anyway, up at the archives the other day and I came across another letter from a woman in the area (making a total of 5 letters by women in all).
By March 27, 2009
So, I am more than a little embarrassed that almost all of Women’s History month has passed and the JI has not published even one post on women and Mormonism. I was hoping to put together a more analytical post on how gender shaped some of the early Mormon narratives and poems written after the expulsion from Missouri, but that’s a project that will have to wait for now. But here is an Eliza R. Snow poem that describes the Haun’s Mill massacre. How does Snow use gender to shape the memory of the massacre?
By January 29, 2009
Although I have drafted this post, I acknowledge that the idea for it and one of the sources comes from frequent commenter and guestblogger Steve Fleming.
As Connell O’Donovan has shown in his brilliant research on Walker Lewis and the origins of the Priesthood ban, Brigham Young initially did not see black skin as an impediment to a man holding the priesthood (unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from O’Donovan’s article). In fact, as late as March 1847, Young is quoted as saying that
Its [that is, priesthood restrictions] nothing to do with the blood for [from] one blood has God made all flesh, we
By January 16, 2009
Inspired by Edje, I dug this out of the archives. Originally posted in slightly different form here.
By 1910, 55 out of every 100 American Protestant missionaries – a group numbering in the tens of thousands whose reach extended from the cities of the United States to Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America – were women.[1] Furthermore, the congregational associations who supported these missionaries were also dominated by women. Though it could be argued this merely reflects the historic gender gap within Christian congregations, such a boring sociological explanation was not how these missionaries explained themselves to themselves, or how their leaders lauded them.
By April 3, 2008
At least that’s the message that early twentieth-century Mormon author Nephi Anderson was trying to send in his short story “The Inevitable,” published in the Improvement Era in 1907. I think it is significant that Anderson wrote this story after the death of his first wife, Asenath Tillotson in 1904, and just before his second marriage to Maud Rebecca Symons in 1908. Questions of his marital status with his first wife and a potential second wife in the hereafter were likely on his mind.
Given the recent discussions around the ‘nacle concerning celestial polygamy, I thought I’d post this here so we can get some feel for the emergence of this idea in Mormon thought in the post-1890 era. It’s a bit long, but it’s a short story, so it should be a quick read for the curious.
By March 5, 2008
Following the Manifesto of 1890 and the decline of officially-sanctioned plural marriages among the Latter-day Saints, many Mormons worked to construct explanations for the practice of polygamy. The discursive means used by Mormons to situate their peculiar institution in their past reveal insights into how Mormons saw themselves during the first decades of the twentieth century and how they wanted the world to perceive them. One strategy, highlighted here, was to downplay the significance of plural marriage in both practice and in doctrine. However, at the same time that this was occurring, many Mormons were arguing that polygamy had produced a large and righteous posterity, “racially” superior to o
By February 29, 2008
An important part of early Mormon culture making was the promotion of polygamy in the ranks. Although Kathy Daynes is correct to note that the brethren had to preach polygamy from the pulpit in order to get the members to enter into polygamous relationships, it is also important to remember that polygamy was promoted in other forms as well, such as in the following song. According to Carmon Hardy, “[t]his verse appeared as part of a ballad sung to the tune of ‘Rosa May’ in the 17th Ward School House in Salt Lake City, on 15 October 1856,” at the height of the Mormon Reformation
By November 18, 2007
Warning: Plot spoilers follow.
Tonight my girlfriend and I attended an advance screening of the forthcoming movie, Emma Smith: My Story. It was, to say the least, better than we had expected. I’m not a film critic, so I cannot critique the movie based on editing, music, camera angles, or even dialogue. However, none of these more aesthetic characteristics stuck out as being “bad” to me, despite being told before hand that the movie was still very rough. If I came into this movie with little historical
By November 2, 2007
Latter-day Saints (including me) in the 21st century have, to say the least, a complex relationship with their past. A friend once told me that Mormon history offers everything a historian could ask for—polygamy, visions, ancient books, violence, prophets, etc. While these things fascinate historians and buffs alike, for many contemporary Mormons that are missionary minded, they present uncomfortable difficulties when brought up with friends of other faiths. I think that part of this discomfort stems from the fact that we no longer see ourselves in parts of our past. When we share stories about ourselves with others, we choose aspects of our past that we feel define us. In like manner, we hide or diminish those things that embarrass us. One of these things is Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy.
By October 31, 2007
Rumors have floated around since earlier this year that Warren Jeffs had renounced his role as Prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and that he had not held the FLDS priesthood since he was twenty years old. Court documents containing these allegations had been sealed so as not to influence jurors in his recent trial, but the judge recently reversed this decision and released the documents. Jeffs recanted these confessions in February of this year.
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