Mormon Women’s 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 women’s periodicals. The contributors to Mormon Women’s History engage the vast breadth of sources left by Mormon women—journals, diaries, letters, family histories, and periodicals as well as art, poetry, material culture, theological treatises, and genealogical records—to read between the lines, reconstruct connections, recover voices, reveal meanings, and recast stories. Mormon Women’s 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 Women’s History are neither comprehensive nor conclusive, but rather suggestive of the ways that Mormon women’s history can move beyond individual lives to enhance and inform larger historical narratives.

Offers information on finding female ancestors in each state, highlighting those laws, both federal and state, that indicate when a woman could own real estate in her own name, devise a will, and enter into contracts. In addition, entries contain information on marriage and divorce law, immigration, citizenship, passports, suffrage, and slave manumission. Material is included on African American, Native American, and Asian American women, as well as patterns of European immigration. Period covered is from the 1600s to the outbreak of WWII. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This four-volume reference is intended for high school students and above, as well as the general public. The first volume opens with introductory essays on the history of feminism; on women in various eras (from early America through World War II and postwar eras); and on women's history in terms of political participation and social activism, race and ethnicity, and cultural representation. These essays are signed and include references. Following are alphabetically arranged state articles, each opening with a literary quote (by a woman) and comprising a narrative history supplemented with boxed features spotlighting events, people, and trends; a timeline; a biographical section on prominent women; a description of relevant sites; resources; a state map; primary document excerpts; and a chart of key statistical information. Appendices include a chronology, primary documents, statistical tables, and an extensive general bibliography. Numerous scholars contributed, working under the editorial leadership of Weatherford (U. of South Florida). Annotation ♭2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

First published in 2006. This volume marks the tenth volume in its series: Religion in History, Society and Culture. This series is designed to bring exciting new work by young scholars on religion to a wider audience. Susanna Morrill offers here a fine and sensitive reading of the little known, and often simply caricatured, history of the religious lives of Mormon women at the turn of the twentieth century. She reads the extensive use of flower imagery in poetry and other writing by these women as a species of lay theologizing—a way that LDS women elaborated and celebrated the latent female symbolism within a still young and incomplete religious system.