By Edje JeterMarch 17, 2013
Last week Ardis (from Keepapitchinin) pointed out that in the early 1900s some church assignments held by females did not require ?setting apart.? [1] Female missionary did, however, and Amelia Carling received her ?missionary blessing? on 1901 Jun 25 from Apostle John W Taylor. Below I comment on some gendered aspects of her blessing in comparison to a selection of contemporary male blessings. [2] The complete text of Carling?s blessing is in the footnote. [3]
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By JJohnsonMarch 14, 2013
On the second day of October conference 1929, LDS Church President Heber J. Grant introduced three other Presidents without warning?Sisters Louise Robison, Ruth May Fox, and May Anderson. President Grant commented,
?We have listened to a great many testimonies from our brethren during this conference.
We shall now call on some of our sisters??[1]
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By Edje JeterMarch 10, 2013
Amelia B Carling was one of the first ?official? full-time female missionaries for the Church and was the first for the Southwestern States Mission. [1] I have previously transcribed her account of the events leading to the mission call and her defense of ?lady missionaries?? right to preach. Below I transcribe her mission call letter and compare it to the letters received by male missionaries.
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By Tona HMarch 9, 2013
Suppose that you were interested in Mormon women?s history, and suppose that you owned a library card and a computer. Now suppose you wished a smart group of LDS scholars would make you a list of classic texts and maybe comment a bit on why each book is worth a read. And while they were at it, throw in a roundup of web and digital resources for Mormon women?s history, too.
Voila! Today is your lucky day. The JI authors have been busy crowdsourcing this annotated bibliography of our must-read books and online archival resources for the history of Mormon women.
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By ChristopherMarch 7, 2013
?We Latter-day Saints are Methodists, as far as they have gone, only we have advanced further.? -Joseph Smith to Peter Cartwright[1]
I?ve argued elsewhere that the above quote encapsulates how many Methodist converts to early Mormonism understood their new religion. The more I study the trajectory of Methodism in antebellum America and the beginnings of Mormonism, the more I?m convinced that the statement also highlights an actual historical truth. In matters of ecclesiology, theology, and liturgy, early Mormons?whether consciously or not (and I think there?s some of both going on)?took a concept originated and/or popularized by Methodists and went one step further, thus simultaneously building on and challenging the foundation from which the new religion sprang.[2] For this reason, among others, I think a close reading of Mormon texts?including scriptural texts?that pays particular attention to Methodism?s discursive community can yield important insights into the Mormon past.[3]
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By Tona HMarch 3, 2013
Although we may not be able to top black history month, which had a stellar lineup of contributors, posts, and CFPs and then ended with a major change to the LDS scriptures concerning the church’s conscious remembering (literally, re-membering) its early African American priesthood holders and rejecting any revelatory basis for the priesthood ban – and here, let me interject a hearty hallelujah! – we would like to begin (lamb-like) with some thoughts, questions, and considerations for women’s history month in March. My tongue-in-cheek hope would be that, if our mojo is similar, Joseph Smith’s 1842 revelation to the Relief Society recorded in Eliza R. Snow’s Minute Book becomes D&C 139. By April 1st.
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By MaxFebruary 26, 2013
Note: It is a pleasure to have Margaret Blair Young contribute to JI’s monthlong series on issues of Race and Mormonism. Margaret Blair Young has written extensively on Blacks in the western USA and particilarly Black Latter-day Saints. Much of her work has been co-authored with Darius Gray. She authored I Am Jane.
The first staged reading of I Am Jane was on the Nelke theater stage at BYU. It was the climax of a playwriting class, and met some deserved criticism. It was, as I recall, about 120 pages. Too many words. The first draft I wrote used a clichéd convention: rebellious teenager dreams about/ learns about/ re-enacts the life of a heroic ancestor and gains self-respect and courage. But such a play is more about the teen than the character whose life I wanted to explore. And I was researching it even as I was scripting the play.
After I had chiseled away at the script, I thought it ready for its debut, which happened on March 5th, 2000. The play was that month?s Genesis meeting. There was no stage, so we threw a blanket over a trellis to suggest a covered wagon, used the sacrament table for Jane?s death bed, and the clerk?s table for other scenes.
I knew there was more sculpting to do, and revised several times before our performances in Springville?s Villa Theater. During that two-week run, I played Lucy Mack Smith, who let Jane handle a bundle purportedly containing the Urim and Thummin. (This is according to Jane?s life story, which she dictated near the end of her life.)
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By February 19, 2013
By Quincy D. Newell
Jane Manning James (Wikimedia Commons)
Jane James haunts me. Not in the way you?re thinking?I don?t see her ghostly specter on cold evenings, or hear her humming a tune in the other room as I?m trying to sleep. What I mean is that she just won?t let me go. Every time I learn something new about her, it seems that I go down a rabbit hole. It takes me days to return, mentally, to whatever I was doing. James, an African American woman who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s, moved to Nauvoo after her conversion and worked as a servant in Joseph Smith?s home. After Smith?s death, she worked for Brigham Young. She was in one of the first companies to arrive in the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and she remained a faithful Latter-day Saint until her death in 1908. She left a pretty substantial paper trail, including a short autobiography, an interview with the Young Woman?s Journal, appearances in the Woman?s Exponent, and multiple petitions to church leaders for endowments and sealings. (The largest published collection of this material is in Henry J. Wolfinger, ?A Test of Faith: Jane Elizabeth James and the Origins of the Utah Black Community,? in Social Accommodation in Utah, ed. Clark S. Knowlton, American West Center Occasional Papers [Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1975], 126-172. I have a new transcription of James?s autobiography and a reprint of that Young Woman?s Journal interview coming out in the Journal of Africana Religions this spring.)
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By Andrea R-MDecember 14, 2012
“Mark what I say: the woman who quarrels with her clothes, and puts on the dress of a man, is like the man who throws off his fur gown and dresses like John the Baptist: they are followed, as surely as the night follows the day, by bands of wild women and men who refuse to wear any clothes at all.” — The Inquisitor, St. Joan (Penguin Books, 1982).
George Bernard Shaw?s interpretation of the life of Joan of Arc reminds us of an element of Joan?s influence– her straining of a woman’s role by dressing like a man– that caused such discomfort for her contemporaries and partly led to her excommunication and execution in 1431. The zealous reactions to Joan’s gendered nonconformity in the 1400s allow us to think about similar ways that modern faith communities are also stretched by challenges to their gender expectations.
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