Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a historian’s historian. For more than three decades, she has dazzled her profession with archival discoveries, creative spark and an ability to see “history” where it once appeared there was none to be seen. Her most famous book, “A Midwife’s Tale” (1990), focused on what seemed for generations to be a useless source — the prosaic, detailed diary of an 18th-century New England midwife. Out of these centuries-old jottings, Ulrich conjured an entire social world centered on women’s emotions, experiences and labor. It was one of the most celebrated historical works of the 1990s, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and required reading for any self-respecting history graduate student. To an unusual degree, Ulrich put her stamp on a particular historical method: She went in search of women’s daily lives before the Industrial Revolution, and she used the personal diary as her point of entry.
This approach figures prominently in Ulrich’s latest book, “A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870.” This time, there are several diaries, all of them written by men and women who lived through the perilous early years of the Mormon Church. These intimate sources survived through a variety of means: tucked away in tin bread boxes, stashed in basements, hidden in log-cabin walls. Through them, Ulrich seeks to uncover how women experienced the strange and controversial new practice of polygamy, or “plural marriage.”
The basic texture of her subjects’ lives will be familiar to any fan of “A Midwife’s Tale.” In Ulrich’s telling, mid-19th-century Mormon women spent most of their time giving birth; tending to children; surviving bouts of malaria, ague and typhus; and watching in agony as their children succumbed to similar diseases. In between, they performed herculean feats of domestic labor — what the church described as the “privilege to make and mend, and wash, and cook for the Saints.” In return for this “privilege,” early Mormon women also had to contend with a new social difficulty. Beginning in the 1840s, their husbands were suddenly permitted — indeed, encouraged and sometimes coerced — to take on additional wives as a path to eternal salvation.
Ulrich notes that the practice of plural marriage did not descend fully formed from the heavens. It was a social experiment that had to be negotiated and developed by all concerned. The church founder, Joseph Smith, introduced the idea approximately two decades after he supposedly uncovered the sacred golden plates of the Book of Mormon on a hillside in upstate New York. His sudden insight that God wanted men to take multiple wives coincided with rumors about his own extramarital affairs, but Ulrich sidesteps the question of whether Smith encouraged the practice “in order to justify illicit relations with vulnerable young women” (as other biographers have suggested).
Her main interest is in what plural marriage meant for Mormon women in the 19th century, forced to adapt on the fly to a situation they could never have anticipated. This is in some ways a personal question for Ulrich, herself a mother of five and a practicing Mormon as well as a Harvard history professor. All eight of her great-grandparents settled in Utah before the Civil War, members of the faith’s pioneer generation. To ask what it was like for the women who made that journey is also to ask how the modern Mormon Church developed its tight-knit social world, and to think about who mattered within it.
Despite Ulrich’s emphasis on women’s voices and ideas, “A House Full of Females” centers its narrative in part on a man named Wilford Woodruff. An apostle of the church and one of Mormonism’s early converts, Woodruff played a significant role in Mormon history. But his most important quality, from Ulrich’s perspective, is that he kept a detailed diary. That diary paid attention to women, noting on one occasion that the local ward meeting house “was full of females quilting sewing etc.” (thus providing Ulrich with her title). Woodruff married his wife Phebe Carter in 1837 and by all accounts loved her deeply, despite long sojourns apart for missionary work and the difficult deaths of several children. In the mid-1840s, he nonetheless “sealed” himself to two teenage girls, the beginning of a decades-long adventure in polygamy.
In asking readers to enter Wilford and Phebe’s world, Ulrich assumes a certain amount of background knowledge. She takes for granted that her readers know something about the landmark events of early Mormonism, including the mob attacks on Mormon communities in Missouri and Illinois, Smith’s murder and Brigham Young’s ascendancy, and the dismal wagon train journey to the promised land of Utah. She assumes, too, that readers understand the basic tenets of Mormon theology and the controversies that the church inspired in the rest of the United States.
Ulrich focuses instead on the confusion and excitement that accompanied the “glorious” revelation sanctioning plural marriage within the Mormon community, especially among its most elite members. She remains unsure about whether the first plural relationships necessarily involved sex, noting the “scarcity of babies” produced. What does seem clear is that many Mormon women were less than thrilled with the development. Smith’s wife Emma objected from the first and never let up, eventually helping to found a dissident anti-polygamist branch of the church after her husband’s death.
“A House Full of Females” is sensitive to the difficulty and confusion that accompanied early plural marriage, with its implied loss of status for women. But the book also tells a more complicated tale about women’s on-the-ground experiences. While some women objected to plural marriage, Ulrich notes, others sought it out as a means of securing economic stability or of escaping from abusive marriages. Still others came to embrace plural marriage as a form of communitarianism, in which women shared domestic burdens and labor. Ulrich describes friendships and rivalries between wives (themes that will be familiar to any viewer of HBO’s “Big Love”). She even makes a case for plural marriage as a vehicle for a form of feminist consciousness-raising. Although outsiders referred to Brigham Young’s home as his “harem,” Ulrich writes, “it could also have been described as an experiment in cooperative housekeeping and an incubator of female activism.”
As evidence for this budding political sensibility, she points to the little-known fact that the territory of Utah granted women the right to vote in 1870, a full half-century before the federal constitutional amendment. Unlike Wyoming, the first to approve woman suffrage, Utah was already majority-female at that point, and many of those Mormon women supported both suffrage and plural marriage.
This approach figures prominently in Ulrich’s latest book, “A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870.” This time, there are several diaries, all of them written by men and women who lived through the perilous early years of the Mormon Church. These intimate sources survived through a variety of means: tucked away in tin bread boxes, stashed in basements, hidden in log-cabin walls. Through them, Ulrich seeks to uncover how women experienced the strange and controversial new practice of polygamy, or “plural marriage.”
The basic texture of her subjects’ lives will be familiar to any fan of “A Midwife’s Tale.” In Ulrich’s telling, mid-19th-century Mormon women spent most of their time giving birth; tending to children; surviving bouts of malaria, ague and typhus; and watching in agony as their children succumbed to similar diseases. In between, they performed herculean feats of domestic labor — what the church described as the “privilege to make and mend, and wash, and cook for the Saints.” In return for this “privilege,” early Mormon women also had to contend with a new social difficulty. Beginning in the 1840s, their husbands were suddenly permitted — indeed, encouraged and sometimes coerced — to take on additional wives as a path to eternal salvation.
Ulrich notes that the practice of plural marriage did not descend fully formed from the heavens. It was a social experiment that had to be negotiated and developed by all concerned. The church founder, Joseph Smith, introduced the idea approximately two decades after he supposedly uncovered the sacred golden plates of the Book of Mormon on a hillside in upstate New York. His sudden insight that God wanted men to take multiple wives coincided with rumors about his own extramarital affairs, but Ulrich sidesteps the question of whether Smith encouraged the practice “in order to justify illicit relations with vulnerable young women” (as other biographers have suggested).
Her main interest is in what plural marriage meant for Mormon women in the 19th century, forced to adapt on the fly to a situation they could never have anticipated. This is in some ways a personal question for Ulrich, herself a mother of five and a practicing Mormon as well as a Harvard history professor. All eight of her great-grandparents settled in Utah before the Civil War, members of the faith’s pioneer generation. To ask what it was like for the women who made that journey is also to ask how the modern Mormon Church developed its tight-knit social world, and to think about who mattered within it.
Despite Ulrich’s emphasis on women’s voices and ideas, “A House Full of Females” centers its narrative in part on a man named Wilford Woodruff. An apostle of the church and one of Mormonism’s early converts, Woodruff played a significant role in Mormon history. But his most important quality, from Ulrich’s perspective, is that he kept a detailed diary. That diary paid attention to women, noting on one occasion that the local ward meeting house “was full of females quilting sewing etc.” (thus providing Ulrich with her title). Woodruff married his wife Phebe Carter in 1837 and by all accounts loved her deeply, despite long sojourns apart for missionary work and the difficult deaths of several children. In the mid-1840s, he nonetheless “sealed” himself to two teenage girls, the beginning of a decades-long adventure in polygamy.
In asking readers to enter Wilford and Phebe’s world, Ulrich assumes a certain amount of background knowledge. She takes for granted that her readers know something about the landmark events of early Mormonism, including the mob attacks on Mormon communities in Missouri and Illinois, Smith’s murder and Brigham Young’s ascendancy, and the dismal wagon train journey to the promised land of Utah. She assumes, too, that readers understand the basic tenets of Mormon theology and the controversies that the church inspired in the rest of the United States.
Ulrich focuses instead on the confusion and excitement that accompanied the “glorious” revelation sanctioning plural marriage within the Mormon community, especially among its most elite members. She remains unsure about whether the first plural relationships necessarily involved sex, noting the “scarcity of babies” produced. What does seem clear is that many Mormon women were less than thrilled with the development. Smith’s wife Emma objected from the first and never let up, eventually helping to found a dissident anti-polygamist branch of the church after her husband’s death.
“A House Full of Females” is sensitive to the difficulty and confusion that accompanied early plural marriage, with its implied loss of status for women. But the book also tells a more complicated tale about women’s on-the-ground experiences. While some women objected to plural marriage, Ulrich notes, others sought it out as a means of securing economic stability or of escaping from abusive marriages. Still others came to embrace plural marriage as a form of communitarianism, in which women shared domestic burdens and labor. Ulrich describes friendships and rivalries between wives (themes that will be familiar to any viewer of HBO’s “Big Love”). She even makes a case for plural marriage as a vehicle for a form of feminist consciousness-raising. Although outsiders referred to Brigham Young’s home as his “harem,” Ulrich writes, “it could also have been described as an experiment in cooperative housekeeping and an incubator of female activism.”
As evidence for this budding political sensibility, she points to the little-known fact that the territory of Utah granted women the right to vote in 1870, a full half-century before the federal constitutional amendment. Unlike Wyoming, the first to approve woman suffrage, Utah was already majority-female at that point, and many of those Mormon women supported both suffrage and plural marriage.
by Beverly Gage, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Edward Martin
