Review
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Title: A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870
Author: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Genre: Mormon Women’s History
Year Published: 2017
Number of Pages: 512
Binding: Hardcover (also Kindle / Audible)
ISBN-10: 0307594904
ISBN-13: 978-0307594907
Price: $35.00
Reviewed by Christian Anderson for the Association for Mormon Letters
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is arguably the most decorated historian the LDS Church has ever produced. She holds an endowed chair at Harvard University where she has won awards for both her scholarship and teaching; she is an AAAS fellow, past president of the American Historical Association and Mormon History Association, and winner of the coveted Association for Mormon Letters Biography Prize; though this would clearly be the high point of anyone’s career, she also has won additional (but much lesser) awards such as the Pulitzer, Bancroft, JFK, MacArthur, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Despite her personal involvement in Mormon feminism, all of her professional work has centered on US colonial history until she began writing “a book about polygamy” eight years ago. So expectations were high, and have had plenty of time to go higher as she presented teasers for critique at various conferences. What she delivers is a meticulous and brilliant synthesis of dozens of diaries, material artifacts, letters, and the familiar signposts of Mormon history from 1835-1875 in the voice of unfamiliar participants who all feel like old friends by the end.
That being said, there are many things this book is not. It is not the scathing indictment of either polygamy or contemporary Mormon sexism many were hoping for and others were fearing. Ulrich is scrupulous about maintaining objective distance from the bigger issues, even as her insight and eloquence brings us into close relationships with the diarists. “I really love them all,” she declared enthusiastically in the same Q&A where she repeatedly proved unwilling to be drawn into discussions of how her work could apply to contemporary Mormon feminism or US politics. (Salt Lake Public Library, Jan 11, 2017, http://www.mormonwomenshistoryinitiative.org/ulrich-indignation-lecture.html) Neither is this a capital-H comprehensive History of Polygamy: though obviously capable of such achievements, Ulrich does not aim for the encyclopedic, nor the historiographically revolutionary.
Instead, this is a serious attempt to get into the minds of real people in order to resolve the paradox that perplexes so many modern readers: how could so many 19th century Mormon women be simultaneously “progressive” on feminist issues (suffrage, divorce, property rights, and professional opportunities) while simultaneously “regressive,” defending a “barbaric institution” like polygamy. This question is raised within the first few pages of the book.
Then follows a heartbreaking discussion of the limited opportunities early Mormon women had to create primary source materials, their loss through time, and the torturous path those few diaries that survived took to reach us. For example, one of Eliza R. Snow’s diaries survived a fire only because a neighbor happened to look inside a charred cardboard box, and thought it looked interesting enough to hang onto until giving it to a friend with an interest in history. Zina D. H. Young’s invaluable diary was rediscovered in the basement of a granddaughter when a relative went looking for Christmas ornaments.
Even when Ulrich has original documents, the authors themselves are deliberately cryptic about their own thoughts and even what life-changing events occurred. Wilford Woodruff fails to mention at least three of his plural marriages in the same multi-volume diaries where he records the recipes of soups he particularly enjoyed. Eliza R. Snow similarly started her diary the same day she married Joseph Smith, but only alludes obliquely to it.
This is where Ulrich is at her best: as a historical detective. While writing The Age of Homespun, she carried a large magnifying glass around museums and archives with her, a la Sherlock Holmes. She brings the same eye for subtle detail to this work, pointing out symbols Woodruff may have used to indicate ordinances in the margins of his diaries, in her brilliant analysis of the different blocks of the 14th Ward Quilt (sewn while the Relief Society was officially disbanded but by a “[Meeting]house full of females” that was clearly a Relief Society in everything but name), and especially in her parallel readings of multiple accounts to tease out what was really going on. Of the 1,522 statements supported by footnotes in this densely referenced work, approximately 1/3rd (487) of them refer to at least two different sources.
Even these statistics don’t give an adequate sense of the syncretic brilliance Ulrich brings to a familiar story told in a remarkably unfamiliar way. The narrative itself does not focus on the “great events” of LDS history, but rather follows the lives of Phebe Woodruff, Carolyn Crosby, Sarah Kimball, Augusta Cobb, and dozens more, mostly by just drawing out details that Ulrich personally finds charming or interesting. She also gives us another midwife’s tale via the unbreakable Patty Sessions and her son Peregrine. She insists on using only materials produced in the moment, not retrospectives which she argues compromise the integrity of the record by adding another layer of analysis.
This approach occasionally provides surprising insights. For example, the toughness of these women can hardly be overstated in the face of hunger, illness, absent husbands, dying children, and destroyed property. But amazingly, it seems to be the loss of citizenship and identity that is most devastating to these women as they are driven from their homes and their own government refuses to redress their wrongs. This sense of loss is all the more poignant when one considers what “citizenship” could have possibly meant to these women who seem so disenfranchised to us today. For example, even in Utah they lived under coverture laws that declared them legally dead upon marriage, and hence unable to work, own property, or vote.
Ulrich also dwells on the surprisingly casual attitude Mormons took to divorce and separation. Dozens of women in the narratives fled abusive or alcoholic husbands and remarried (often polygamously) with no obvious social stigma attached. Indeed, one of the primary defenses of polygamy by almost every participant was that it was completely voluntary, much more so than monogamy at the time.
While Ulrich is careful not to editorialize, she also makes sure to draw attention to women’s extensive use of priesthood blessings and charismatic spiritual gifts throughout the entire period. These are mentioned but not emphasized in most source materials, and so could easily have gone unremarked in the hands of a less sensitive chronicler.
Ulrich’s feminist sympathies extend only to presenting facts, not sensationalizing them. Chapter 9 exemplifies this approach: she uses Augusta Cobb’s exceptionally frank writings to identify the stress points common in many polygamist relationships, and then hunts out these same stressors in the more ambiguous writings of other wives.
When Ulrich works her way from the 1830s back to the 1870 Indignation Meeting that began the book, she pays the reader the compliment of not resolving the “polygamist feminist” paradox, letting her nuanced portraits of these women speak for themselves. Sadly, it’s a compliment I evidently don’t deserve. Despite the closeness I feel to many of these women, I am still unable to put myself into a worldview that saw no contradiction between a husband that must be shared and obeyed like a God, and a quest for the fundamental independence of women. (Ulrich herself admitted in an interview with RadioWest’s Doug Fabrizio that she isn’t sure she has worked this out completely herself. See https://cpa.ds.npr.org/radiowest/audio/2017/01/rw010917.mp3 minute 42.)
In conclusion, this book is a quiet tour de force. Like many of her subjects, Ulrich is so self-effacing that many of her most brilliant insights (and new discoveries that can prove problematic to modern believers) go by without fanfare. Yet in the end, it is difficult to imagine a book that could leave the reader with a deeper intuitive understanding of what life was like for women in the early church.