A House Full of Females by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Professor Ulrich graciously replied, but informed me someone must have misunderstood:

I don’t know much more than an assertion that there was a lot less sex than most people assume and that none of the children are Joseph’s.” I wrote: “My friend’s sister, your friend, mentioned you have just submitted the manuscript for a book on Joseph Smith and polygamy, the definitive book, she asserted. As I had by that time completed my Faithful Joseph series of blog posts, I reached out to Professor Ulrich. I first heard of this years ago, when a friend with a sister in Professor Ulrich’s Boston congregation told me Professor Ulrich was writing “the definitive” book about Joseph Smith. In A House Full of Females, Professor Ulrich for the first time puts forward a scholarly book that addresses Mormon history. “Well-behaved women seldom make history…” She is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian, a Harvard professor, and, perhaps most enduringly, the one who wrote: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their 'sex radicalism'-the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.It is daunting presuming to review the work of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.

From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun-a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination.Ī stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon 'plural marriage,' whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements.

A House Full of Females by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich