Gendered Power in Mormon History Rebecca L. Davis (bio) Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017. xxv + 484 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. The practice of plural marriage among nineteenth-century Mormons did not suppress women's voices or deprive them of rights; to the contrary, it raised their political consciousness. Such are the complex and controversial claims of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's gorgeous and devastating chronicle of early Mormon polygamy. Though subtly written, the book is dense with argument, whether about the religious qualities of early Mormonism, the nature of its patriarchal organization, or the relationship between polygamy and women's rights. Ulrich shows that Joseph Smith and his followers practiced polygamy, that early Mormons gave women access to the obligations and power of the priesthood, that women laid the foundation for the global success of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and that the plural household functioned as "an incubator of female activism" (p. xvii). Written in Ulrich's signature understated style, the book provocatively argues that the Mormon religion enabled rather than suppressed the political activism of women in the faith's founding generation. An archival alchemist, Ulrich turns fabric scraps and diary doodles into narrative gold. Her book renders a history more often told as one of male domination into a fascinating tale of how Mormon women shaped their religion despite the attempts of some men to silence them. Ulrich's latest book is not only a resounding retort to narratives of Mormon women as slaves of the Mormon patriarchy. It is also an example of the continued salience of women's history as a discipline, an intellectual defense of the act of "recovering" women's voices and experiences as a way to understand histories of gendered power. Ulrich gleaned stories from slips of paper, bits of cloth, and embellished notes. She shows on page after page that everyday lives (more often, women's) not just well documented ones (more often, men's) leave traces, and are important to historical complexity. As is so often the case in Ulrich's work, she makes multiple points simultaneously. She wants her readers to understand that not only must we search harder for the evidence of women's lives (and shows us how to do this through her intensive reading of [End Page 428] diaries, letters, illustrations, quilt squares, poetry, architecture, and the minute books of women's societies), but also that we must continue to search beyond formal politics for evidence of political history. Ulrich insists that pregnancy, childbirth, sewing, cooking, tending to the sick, and burying the dead are as central to a narrative of theological disputation and political struggle as any manifestoes, military engagements, or legislative disputes. A House Full of Females begins in 1835, the first year of Wilford Woodruff's diary, as he a small group of Joseph Smith's followers built a settlement in Kirtland, Ohio. Woodruff would eventually become the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; in 1890, he issued the "Manifesto" that announced the end of polygamy as part of a deal to mitigate federal sanctions against the church, despite having several plural wives of his own. He could foresee none of this when, in 1837, he wrote in a brief entry in his diary that he had met Phebe Carter, another early convert to Mormonism. He became one of Smith's twelve Apostles of the faith. Phoebe became his wife, a mother, and a pivotal actor in the unfolding drama of Mormonism's founding decades. The book follows the Woodruffs and dozens of other nineteenth-century Mormons who left trails of documents, many of them fragmentary, as they heeded what they believed was God's command that they criss-cross the United States, its territories, and the oceans and nations beyond in order to unite believers under the glorifying banner of true faith. Ulrich traces their stories as they settled in—and fled, when violent anti-Mormon mobs attacked—communities in Independence, Missouri and Nauvoo, Illinois. The book covers the murder of...
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Apr 18, 2024
Lawrence Morris 
Open Access