By March 18, 2012
Inspired by Ardis Parshall’s serial posting of the missionary diary of Willard Larson Jones at Keepapitchinin, I announce an occasional series on missionary life in the Southwestern States Mission around 1900.
By March 17, 2012
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.
By March 13, 2012
Thanks to J. Stapley for his post contributing to Women’s History Month here at the Juvenile Instructor.
It has been a year or so since the article on female ritual healing that Kristine and I wrote was published (available here). In that time I have continued to gather sources relating to the topic as I come across them. Without looking particularly hard (once you start looking, references are ubiquitous), I have gathered seventy-four more examples and added them to the database. In the last couple weeks, however, I have found two that are fairly unique.
These two texts were both written by non-Mormon women for popular audiences.
By March 13, 2012
We might be a little late kicking off our Women?s History Month events here at the Juvenile Instructor. But our spirit is willing, and we still have sufficient time that we are pleased to offer your some significant contributions on Mormon women?s history from Jonathan Stapley, Amanda Hendrix-Komoto, guest blogger David Pulsipher, myself, and others. National Women?s History Month should be even more important to Mormons, intersecting as it does with the yearly March anniversary of the founding of the female Relief Society of Nauvoo. While the latter is given varying degrees of attention depending upon the particular ward or branch and its available resources, the former is sometimes dismissed as a tool of feminist political correctness. Still, I think the correlation of the two provides unique opportunities for LDS scholars to broaden our understanding of women?s experiences in the past, and to look for new ways to honor their contributions, spirituality, and sociality.
By March 7, 2012
My first interest in the 1893-94 diary of Lucy Smith stemmed from her brief visit to the Chicago World?s Columbian Exposition of 1893. ?Fair diaries,? as I like to call them, are difficult to find, especially those written by women, with those by Mormon women even more rare. For my own scholarship, visitors to the fair potentially have much to reveal about contemporary American views on women?s rights, race, American patriotism, imperialism, technological progress and culture in the 1890s.[1] Lucy?s diary didn?t give me as much of the cultural comment that I was hoping for, but a few promising nuggets.
By March 7, 2012
The first day of class we spent talking about perceptions of Mormonism using Pew Forum surveys (among others) as well as clips from a variety of TV shows like South Park and The Colbert Report. We spent the next two days of the class reading Richard Bushman?s A Very Short Introduction to Mormonism. Basically, I wanted to give the students a good overview and especially a vocabulary list. I think it was a very good idea, and it certainly helped the students get a good first look at many of the issues we will be dealing with.
For the first unit of the class we read large portions of Richard Bushman?s Rough Stone Rolling. Bushman?s biography is a good one for several reasons, but mostly because I think it?s a biography that takes the historical data at face value, yet doesn?t try to make metaphysical claims that go above and beyond the historical data.
By March 5, 2012
Paul Gutjahr, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington has a new book forthcoming in about a month with Princeton University Press. The book is The Book of Mormon: A Biography. See an excerpt here, the table of contents and prologue here, and the first chapter here.
By March 1, 2012
Given the ongoing public discussion of the Mormon practice of baptism for the dead, and particularly how this ritual been conducted by Latter-day Saints in behalf of notable public, ?celebrity? figures, it seemed appropriate to post a piece of my ongoing research into this singular religious concept. Specifically, here I note the emergence of the doctrine and practice of baptism for the dead and how it initially came to be performed on behalf of celebrity figures. Of course, the development of baptism for the dead fits into a number of larger contexts, including currents of developing Mormon theology in Nauvoo (as Sam Brown?s new book shows), and into a broader culture where Christian baptism was a common but diversely understood and valued practice. So this post doesn?t explain how baptism for the dead came into being, but it does describe how, once the practice was established, it first came to be a way for Mormons of claiming those whom they saw as the deserving dead beyond their family and personal friends.
By February 20, 2012
David Golding is a PhD student in the History of Christianity at Claremont Graduate University, is a co-editor (with Loyd Ericson) of the Claremont Journal of Mormon Studies, and assisted in creating the new MHA website. He also wrote the leading book on the web programming framework, CakePHP. He has been kind enough to share a little bit about an exciting new primary source project.
See his previous posts here and here.
We all have become hybrids in this day and age, haven?t we? In another life?and it still manages to remain with me no matter what I might do to shake it off?I worked in software development and desktop publishing. I can?t help but return to systems theory and technology as I build my own research agenda as a historian. For years now, I?ve anticipated historians taking advantage of what software engineers work with every day: open source data and logic. And yet nothing quite like open source technology has taken root in the archival and historical professions. It?s time for us to consider the benefits of pushing our research into a collective and open system, a system already possible (and free of charge) thanks to advances in social media, software versioning, and cloud computing.
By February 17, 2012
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