Mormon Womens History

Mormon Womens History: Beyond Biography demonstrates that the history and experience of Mormon women is central to the history of Mormonism and to histories of American religion, politics, and culture. Yet the study of Mormon women has mostly been confined to biographies, family histories, and womens periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Womens History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon womenjournals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical recordsto read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories. Mormon Womens History presents women as incredibly inter-connected. Familial ties of kinship are multiplied and stretched through the practice and memory of polygamy, social ties of community are overlaid with ancestral ethnic connections and local congregational assignments, fictive ties are woven through shared interests and collective memories of violence and trauma. Conversion to a new faith community unites and exposes the differences among Native Americans, Yankees, and Scandinavians. Lived experiences of marriage, motherhood, death, mourning, and widowhood are played out within contexts of expulsion and exile, rape and violence, transnational immigration, establishing civilization in a wilderness, and missionizing both to new neighbors and far away peoples. Gender defines, limits, and opens opportunities for private expression, public discourse, and popular culture. Cultural prejudices collide with doctrinal imperatives against backdrops of changing social norms, emerging professional identities, and developing ritualization and sacralization of lived religion. The stories, experiences, and examples explored in Mormon Womens History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon womens history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.