Charles Ellis Johnson and the Erotic Mormon Image by Mary Campbell

Author:Mary Campbell [Campbell, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, 20th Century, Photography, Religion, Christianity, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon)
ISBN: 9780226373690
Google: rHKpDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 29361906
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

5

Lady Saints

She has lived and died in obscurity, little known or appreciated, but she had made her calling and election sure; and her name will yet be held in honorable remembrance in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints.

—In memoriam of Josephine de la Harpe Ursenbach, plural wife, Woman’s Exponent, March 1, 1878

We are not such meek, submissive creatures as you imagine we are.

—“A Young Woman’s Testimony,” 1884

Under normal circumstances, the women of Utah would have stayed indoors on January 13, 1870. At least most of them, and at least in Salt Lake City. Even six days later, the weekly Deseret News felt compelled to comment on “the inclemency of the weather” that had swept through the territory’s capital that Thursday.1 In a city founded by rugged pioneers and bounded by prehistoric glacial canyons, minor meteorological disturbances tended not to make the papers. “Inclemency” almost certainly translated to “blizzard” in this winter-hardened corner of the country—the sort of blizzard that would eventually make Utah a new mecca for the world’s extreme powder skiers as well as its Latter-day Saints. Gazing out their windows that January, Salt Lake’s residents would have watched as the sun rose over enormous drifts of dry, feathery snow. They would have squinted as the early western light flared crystalline off the exposed stretches of black ice that varnished the roads with a treacherous gloss. For anyone unburdened by pressing public obligations, the reasonable course of action would have been to draw the drapes against the draft and hunker down by the hearth. Nonetheless, the city’s streets teemed with women that morning. A hundred and then a thousand and then three thousand Mormon women, all told. Lifting their skirts with both hands and steadying each other when their leather-soled boots started to slide, these female Saints slowly made their way to the Tabernacle at the center of town. At some point, the front door of the Lion House opened, and a group of Brigham Young’s wives joined the icy procession. Like the rest of the ladies wending their way through the frozen city on January 13, these women had important business to attend to. Like their religious sisters, the prophet’s wives weren’t about to be deterred by a spell of rough weather.

By the time that the last chilly pilgrim arrived at the Tabernacle, the building was at capacity. As per the official program, “there were to be none present but ladies.”2 With the consent of the event’s organizers, however, a handful of male journalists ducked into the crowd. Opening their notebooks and readying their pens, this largely Gentile press corps listened with amazement as the women who surrounded them collectively pledged their ongoing dedication to the practice of celestial marriage. Spurred by the introduction of two new anti-polygamy bills in Congress, the church’s plural and monogamous wives “called forth a monster demonstration,” in the words of one Ohio newspaper, taking to the podium to reaffirm their right to marry according to the dictates of their faith.

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