Juvenile Instructor » Women’s History

Job Post: Research Intern, Women’s History, LDS Church History Department

By Jenny RAugust 19, 2015

The Church History Department announces an opening for a research internship with the Women?s History Team. This will be a part-time, temporary position beginning in September 2015.

Qualifications

?    Bachelor?s degree in history, religious studies, or related discipline, with preference given to those with master?s degrees and/or in doctoral programs.
?    Possess excellent research and writing skills.
?    Ability to work in a scholarly and professional environment.
?    Requires both personal initiative and collaborative competence.
Please attach a vita to your application, and email a writing sample to: jreeder@ldschurch.org

Responsibilities

Duties will include research related to contextual annotation of documents (identifications and explanations, genealogical inquiries, and biographical information), as well as detailed source checking. Research will involve work in primary and secondary sources for nineteenth- and twentieth-century America and Mormonism. Work will include general assistance to authors.

Worthiness Qualification

Must be a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and currently temple worthy.

Women’s History

Elizabeth Ann Whitney, Emmeline B. Wells, and Eliza R. Snow

Call for Papers: Mormons, Race, and Gender in the Borderlands

By Andrea R-MAugust 12, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Race, Gender, and Power in the Mormon Borderlands

Mormon history lies at the borders between subaltern and dominant cultures. On the one hand, due to their unusual family structure and theocratic government, Mormons were a persecuted minority for the better part of the nineteenth century. On the other, Mormons played a significant role as colonizers of the North American West, extending their reach to the borderlands of Mexico, Canada, and the Pacific Islands. There Mormon colonists intermarried with Native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians and Samoans, even as they placed exclusions on interracial sexual relations and marriage. During the nineteenth century, Mormons also discouraged Native peoples? polygamous practices while encouraging plural marriage for white women. And Mormon religious doctrine subordinated persons of color within church hierarchy well into the twentieth century. African-American men, for example, could not hold the priesthood until 1978. Historically, then, Mormons have navigated multiple borders– between colonizer and colonized, between white and Other, and between minority and imperial identities. This limnal position calls for further investigation. We propose an anthology of essays on race, gender, and power in the Mormon borderlands.

Over the past thirty years, historians of Mormon women have expanded our understanding of gender and power in Mormon society. However, most of these studies focus on white Mormon women, while Mormon women of color have remained largely invisible. This volume seeks not simply to make visible the lived experiences of Mormon women of color, but more importantly, to explore gender and race in the Mormon borderlands. Taken together, these essays will address how Mormon women and men navigated the complications of minority and colonizer status, interracial marriage and doctrinal race hierarchies, patriarchy and female agency, violence and religious responsibility, and plural identities. These metaphoric borders were brought into play on the geographic and cultural borders of the United States. Specifically, this volume will encompass the continental U.S. West, the borderlands of Canada and Mexico, and Pacific Rim islands such as Samoa and Hawaii, exploring the intersectionality of race and gender in Mormon cultures on the borders from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. This focus will open new directions in Mormon history in concert with recent trends in western history. The anthology will have full scholarly apparatus and we welcome both historical research and interdisciplinary work.

Please submit article proposals/manuscript drafts by Sept.15, 2015, to Dee Garceau at <garceau@rhodes.edu> (901-484-1837)

Co-Editors: Dee Garceau, Rhodes College garceau@rhodes.edu ; Sujey Vega, Arizona State University, Sujey.Vega@asu.edu; Andrea Radke-Moss, BYU-Idaho radkea@byui.edu

Co-Editors’ Faculty Profiles:

Dee Garceau

Sujey Vega

Andrea Radke-Moss

Please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have.

Crowdsourcing: Woman’s Exponent Author List

By Tod R.August 7, 2015

Join the project!

I wanted to make a quick public notice of a new project at the Juvenile Instructor. We have begun the process of mapping every initialism/pseudonym in the issues of the Woman’s Exponent to their respective authors. This process is time intensive and will require a lot of work, but we figure opening the resource (a Google Doc at this point) to the public and our readership will encourage collaboration. Ultimately, this list will prove useful to many scholars as they study the lives of the women who crafted this publication and the world they shaped.

Join the project

#JMH50 Roundtable: Matthew Grow, ?Biography in Mormon Studies?

By ChristopherApril 22, 2015

Matt Grow?s contribution to the Journal of Mormon History 50^th anniversary issue takes as its subject the place of biography in Mormon Studies. As the author (or co-author) of two significant biographies in the field, Grow is well positioned to assess the state of Mormon biographical writing.

In short, Grow believes that ?the genre of Mormon biography has answered many of [the] rallying cries? of the New Mormon History?s call for ?engage[ment] with larger historical themes? and ?greater attention to women, race, ordinary Saints, the twentieth century, and international Mormons? (185), pointing to the spate of biographies produced in the last three decades on Mormon leaders (of both the Latter-day Saint and Latter Day Saint variety), dissenters, women, and racial and ethnic minorities. ?There is much to celebrate in in the outpouring of scholarly biographies in the past few decades,? he concludes (196). Nevertheless, work remains to be done, and that work mirrors the shortcomings of Mormon history more generally: ?More biographies of women, twentieth century, and international Mormons are particularly needed to advance the field? (196).

A Love Letter to Mormon Women on the Anniversary of the Relief Society, from a Mormon Historian and Feminist

By Andrea R-MMarch 17, 2015

On this, the anniversary of the founding of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo on March 17, 1842, I come out of a long and silent hibernation from blogging to write this, a love letter, to my Relief Society sisters, for each one of you, whether in the church or out of the church, whether fully active or barely hanging on.

MSWR

By Ryan T.January 10, 2015

Keep an eye out, now! A small handful of roundup links on matters of interest from the past few weeks…

TLC’s My Husband’s Not Gay

Just when you’d thought we’d exhausted all the angles for a Mormon-related reality series, we now have My Husband’s Not Gay, from TLC (of Sister Wives and My Five Wives fame). Shot in Salt Lake City, My Husband’s Not Gay premieres tonight at 10 ET, and reportedly it revolves around the lives of four LDS men who, despite feeling attraction to men, do not identify as homosexuals. Indeed, three have chosen (presumably on the basis of their religious convictions) to marry women, and the show will trace the conflicts between sexual desire, human identity, and religious conviction.

In anticipation of the premiere, the show has generated a fair bit of controversy. Gay advocates have turned up the heat on TLC, denouncing the show as “downright irresponsible”; “dangerous for LGBT people”; and “damaging for Mormons, especially gay Mormon youth.” A sizable campaign has also been petitioning for the show’s cancellation. TLC, for its part, shrugged off the criticism earlier this week, and the LDS Newsroom struck a moderating tone. On the basis of his critic’s sneak preview, NYT TV critic Neil Genzlinger characterizes the show as classic incendiary reality tv, although he does note “a few interesting and genuine-sounding moments in which the couples or their friends explore the collision of faith and feelings.” Those kinds of enlightening moments, however, he expects to be inevitably “drowned out.”

Other multifarious tidbits:

Peggy Fletcher Stack reports on Ordain Women‘s new photo illustration series envisioning female officiation in priesthood ordinances.

Regional media continue to track the unfurling of the Book of Mormon musical across the country in smaller markets, the responses of Latter-day Saints and the Church’s proselytizing response.

A new (and largely nonplussed) review of Avi Steinberg’s recent “bibliomemoir” The Lost Book of Mormon: A Journey Through the Mythic Lands of Nephi, Zarahemla, and Kansas City, Missouri.

P.S. To all last-minute applicants for the Maxwell Institute’s Mormon Theology Seminar, 2015, a reminder that Jan. 15 is your day of reckoning.

Questions about D&C 132 and Plural Marriage

By GuestOctober 31, 2014

Today’s post, the latest in our series where we answer questions about plural marriage, is about textual questions related to Doctrine and Covenants 132. Again, we are grateful to those who asked questions, wrote answers, and helped edit and format the post. Thanks especially to WVS, who answered the questions today. WVS has been a long-time bloggernacle denizen, blogging at his solo blog–boaporg.wordpress.com and at bycommonconsent.org. His fascinating multi-part analysis of the textual development of D&C 107 was recently published in Dialogue. He later wrote an in-depth series of posts at BCC on D&C 132, which he is currently expanding into a book.

One Memorable(?) Event from LDS General Conference History

By KrisOctober 14, 2014

Earlier this year, Tona wrote an excellent post about the fragility of digital archives following up on Max Mueller?s AHA paper that explored both the possibilities and pitfalls of the “I?m A Mormon” campaign as a primary source. Tona noted that, ?What is available to historians relies largely upon on goodwill, technology upgrades, and the market.?

Within this context, it is fascinating to observe, in real-time, the debate over whether or not the General Women?s Meeting is a session of General Conference. This controversy includes the editing of a video of a conference session as well as conflicting (and possibly changing) interpretations about the status of the Women?s Meeting from LDS Public Affairs, the Deseret News website as well as lds.org. While the debate about the status of the Women?s Meeting has been largely framed as a feminist issue, it also raises questions for researchers in tracing changes to historical documents and other sources as well as how ideas get lodged in the imaginations of religious believers. As Tona states,

Things come, go, vanish, launch, in a constant state of (often unannounced) change that nonetheless presents itself as final, unchanging and authoritative? it is a historian?s worst nightmare. If you cannot see the ?manuscript edits? so to speak, how do you know what changed, when, how and why? And if the old just vanishes from the online environment without a trace, what happens to the possibilities for historical research? Most of what we are all busily creating in this decade has simply been written in the equivalent of vanishing ink.

Exponent II Turns Forty

By Tona HSeptember 22, 2014

Exponent II’s board in 1974 and 2014 (credit: Heather Sundahl)

Exponent II began in 1974 in the Cambridge neighborhood of Harvard Square. On its fortieth anniversary, its founders ? silver, sassy, and more than a little surprised that what they had wrought was still going strong ? returned to one of the neighborhood?s church halls packed with guests to celebrate the organization and its achievements. I was so, so happy to be there, too.

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