Jill Mulvay Derr - Womens Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints 1830-1900

1982 Deseret Book Company. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P.O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company. Deseret Book is a registered trademark of Deseret Book Company.

Acknowledgments

Shortly after he became Church Historian, Dr. Leonard Arrington wrote a letter and asked me to write a book containing selections from the letters, diaries, and journals of Mormon women. Prior to receiving Dr. Arrington's letter I had published at least one article regarding Mormon women and had, furthermore, given several talks on the same subject. Because of my great interest in the subject and because of the glaring lack of material regarding our pioneer sisters in the major histories of the Church, I readily accepted the assignment.

Just a few weeks thereafter, my wife and I decided to do the book together, because she, too, had developed a great interest in the feminine aspects of Mormon history. In January 1974 the Church Educational System granted me a sabbatical leave to do the research. Working in the Church Historical Department Archives, Audrey and I read more than 250 women's diaries, letters, and journals and selected those we thought were the most moving, important, and informative to be included in this book. After we received a call from the First Presidency to preside over the Pennsylvania-Pittsburgh Mission, Jill Mulvay Derr kindly consented to work on the manuscript and selection of materials. Soon it was concluded that the three of us would be authors of what we believed to be a very important book.

In order to facilitate the reading of this book, footnotes have been kept to a minimum. However, readers who desire full documentation of material referred to are invited to study fully footnoted manuscripts on deposit in the LDS Church Historical Library in Salt Lake City and the Brigham Young University Library, Provo, Utah. Furthermore, it became apparent as the manuscript was being prepared for publication that due to space limitations, some of the original material would have to be deleted; with some reluctance, though with great care, this was done. Thus, the published book is somewhat shorter than was originally intended; however, we do not believe that the quality of the book has been significantly diminished by reducing the quantity of material presented.

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Church Historical Department in helping us locate material and in granting permission to publish the same. Special thanks are due to Maureen Ursenbach Beecher for editorial assistance and to Carol Cornwall Madsen and Susan Staker Oman for assisting in the research. We also appreciate the help of the descendants of the women included in this book. Special thanks go to our families for love, encouragement, and support. Furthermore, this book would not have been possible without the assistance of Arlene Patterson and Louise Palmer, my secretaries, and Debbie Lilenquist, secretary in the Historical Department. The authors also express appreciation to former Church Commissioner of Education Neal A. Maxwell and Associate Commissioner Joe J. Christensen for granting the sabbatical leave that made the research possible. Profound gratitude also goes to Leonard Arrington, director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at Brigham Young University, and to the Church Historical Department, with Earl E. Olson, assistant managing director, and Donald T. Schmidt, director of Library Archives, for granting permission to use much of the material found in this book.

Finally we wish to express not only our gratitude but our admiration to the women whose writings we have published. We have been made better because of their courage, their faith, their love, and their deep devotion to their families, their faith, and themselves. We believe they represent the very best of Mormonism and womanhood. We hope you find as much satisfaction in reading what they wrote as we did in spending the past six years in their presence. In many ways we feel that we know them better than we know many of the people with whom we associate from day to day.

Kenneth W. Godfrey

February 1982

Chapter One

Introduction

"True Record... of Some Worth"

Mormon women are not unsung heroines. Throughout the last half of the nineteenth century they were celebrated within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints almost as readily as they were censured by its critics. Long after they lost the rapt attention of American journalists and antipolygamy crusaders, they survived in the Mormon consciousness as sturdy and faithful foremothers. More recently, in the wake of new scholarship in LDS Church history and a concurrent surge of interest in women's studies, Mormon women have received new consideration from Mormons and non-Mormons alike. These sister Saints are not unsung, but neither are they fully understood.

"There are few lives so uneventful that a true record of them would not be of some worth," Martha Cragun Cox wrote in the preface to her 300-page autobiography. In fact, the "true records" or personal writings of Martha and dozens of other Latter-day Saint women are of critical importance to anyone who wants to understand Mormon women. Through their letters, diaries, journals, reminiscences, and autobiographies we can begin to reconstruct their experience as Mormons and as women. To those interested in that experience, the following selections from the writings of Latter-day Saint women will be of some worth.

While recent studies of Mormon women have focused primarily on women's achievements and contributions, their personal writings have not been overlooked. Excerpts from diaries, journals, and autobiographies have served to illustrate the spiritual dimension of sisters' lives, for example, or their birthing and medical practices. Women's accounts have animated discussions of women's involvement in Mormon colonization, politics, and plural marriage. Few of the studies of Mormon women published during the past decade are devoid of extracts from first-hand accounts. The sources are simply too plentiful to be ignored.

The Church's long-standing commitment to record-keeping has resulted in a rich cache of personal records produced and preserved by Latter-day Saints. The LDS Church Historical Department, Brigham Young University, the University of Utah, the Utah State Historical Society, and other local and regional archives have opened their Mormon holdings to scholars. From 1939 to the present the Daughters of Utah Pioneers have reproduced in serial publications various women's writings. And some Mormon families have privately published journals or memoirs of their foremothers. The Early Autobiography and Diary of Ellis Reynolds Shipp, M.D., edited and published in 1962 by her daughter Ellis Shipp Musser, is one of the most significant. More recently, scholarly editions of Mormon women's documents have been made widely available. The University of Utah Tanner Trust Fund's A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography of Annie Clark Tanner (1973) and