Representing Rural Women by Thomas-Evans Margaret;Womack Smith Whitney;

Author:Thomas-Evans, Margaret;Womack Smith, Whitney;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Little documentation of Russell’s time in Utah, Arizona, and Mexico exist. Personal letters (and journals, if they ever existed) have not been preserved. Her voice remains only in the pages of the Woman’s Exponent in a handful of prose pieces and over fifty poems.

Russell is one of over three hundred women whose otherwise lost voices are preserved in the Woman’s Exponent[3]—a bimonthly journal “owned by, controlled by and edited by Utah ladies” from 1872 to 1914.[4] Living on the Western frontier and belonging to a new American religion that held distinctive religious practices, most strikingly polygamy, Mormon women had a complex and unique understanding of what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century America, and the pages of the Exponent contain an unparalleled record of their lives, experiences, accomplishments, sorrows, and trials. Taking a cue from literary scholars who have offered compelling studies demonstrating poetry’s social and central place in nineteenth-century America, I turn specifically to the poems in the Exponent to find the ideologies and collective identity Mormon women created and worked within. Additionally, I analyze how the Exponent—particularly its poetry—created a type of virtual community for these women who, like Sarah Russell, often went with their families to establish remote colonies. Women throughout these settlements sent letters, poems, and reports to the Exponent; consequently, for these geographically marginalized women, the Exponent functioned as an important medium of communication as well as a platform for constructing and promoting a community of shared values and identity. Today these poems exist as important historical sources, providing unique access to these women’s experiences and views on sisterhood, motherhood, death, polygamy, and life on the frontier.

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