The Slogan by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Author:Laurel Thatcher Ulrich [Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-96989-2
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

My objective was not to lament their oppression, but to give them a history.

I may have had in the back of my mind a half-remembered line from an influential study of the rise of the novel—“Happy love has no history.” (I had done graduate study in literature before I became a historian.) There are many versions of the same idea, including the famous opening sentence from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”26 I could add my own mother’s sardonic comment about housework: “Nobody notices it unless you don’t do it.” Or a friend’s witty variant, “Nobody sees clean windows.” However it happened, the words just slipped out, unbidden and without struggle.

Or so it seemed. But when I tell the story this way, I leave out several important facts. I was not only a thirty-six-year-old housewife enrolled in a graduate seminar in early American history. I was a thirty-six-year-old wife and mother who with a handful of friends in the Boston area had helped to found an independent periodical devoted to the “twin platforms of Mormonism and feminism.” Both “isms” mattered: despite my flirtation with the women’s movement, I too went to church even when it snowed. I didn’t expect to have a career. For me, history was still a kind of hobby, though, like the quilters in Iowa, I was probably “a little outrageous and naughty and out-of-control” in its pursuit.

My friends and I called our feminist newspaper Exponent II to honor a nineteenth-century pro-suffrage periodical launched by Mormon women in Utah in 1872. Most of us had grown up knowing about the heroism of pioneer ancestors who had participated in the epic trek across the United States, but until we discovered old copies of the original Woman’s Exponent, few of us knew anything about early Mormon feminism. We did not know that Utah women voted and held office fifty years before women in the eastern United States, nor that polygamists’ wives had attended medical school, published newspapers, and organized cooperative enterprises. Reading their words, we were astonished at how confidently these pioneer women insisted on their right to participate in public life and work. In our enthusiasm, we no doubt missed many of the ironies in their stories (nobody wanted to think of polygamy as a liberating force). Still, we found in their lives models for religious commitment, social activism, and personal achievement that seemed far more powerful than the complacent domesticity portrayed in popular magazines or in our own congregations.

I originally thought of doing a dissertation on pioneer Utah, but since I was studying at the University of New Hampshire, where my husband taught engineering, I decided to focus instead on the colonial period, a particular strength of the history department there. Beyond that, I found it liberating to study a world seemingly disconnected from my own life and heritage. In researching that seminar paper on funeral sermons, I discovered the attractions of strangeness and the liberation in working with material that seemed opaque and alien.

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