Sister Saints
Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy
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- 209,00 kr
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- 209,00 kr
Publisher Description
The specter of polygamy haunts Mormonism. More than a century after the practice was banned, it casts a long shadow that obscures people's perceptions of the lives of today's Latter-day Saint women. Many still see them as second-class citizens, oppressed by the church and their husbands, and forced to stay home and take care of their many children.
Sister Saints offers a history of modern Mormon women that takes aim at these stereotypes, showing that their stories are much more complex than previously thought. Women in the Utah territory received the right to vote in 1870-fifty years before the nineteenth amendment-only to have it taken away by the same federal legislation that forced the end of polygamy. Progressive and politically active, Mormon women had a profound impact on public life in the first few decades of the twentieth century. They then turned inward, creating a domestic ideal that shaped Mormon culture for generations. The women's movement of the 1970s sparked a new, vigorous-and hotly contested-Mormon feminism that divided Latter-day Saint women. By the twenty-first century more than half of all Mormons lived outside the United States, and what had once been a small community of pioneer women had grown into a diverse global sisterhood.
Colleen McDannell argues that we are on the verge of an era in which women are likely to play a greater role in the Mormon church. Well-educated, outspoken, and deeply committed to their faith, these women are defying labels like liberal and conservative, traditional and modern.
This deeply researched and eye-opening book ranges over more than a century of history to tell the stories of extraordinary-and ordinary-Latter-day Saint women with empathy and narrative flair.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this detailed, deeply moving book, McDannell (The Spirit of Vatican II), professor of history and religious studies at the University of Utah, traces the evolution of Mormon faith culture from its origins in the 1830s to the present day, arguing convincingly that women have always been "active creators of culture." They participate not only in the home and in the Relief Society (the church's often influential women's auxiliary), she writes, but also through political activism, scholarship, missionary work, theology, voting (which the men of the Utah Territory approved in 1870), and, more recently, blogging. McDannell argues that unique Mormon ideas about gender have shaped the community's shifting relationship to broader currents of American social life, perhaps most strikingly argued in her examination of late-20th-century Mormon feminists and antifeminists. McDannell effectively uses the long, active lives of Emmeline Wells, Belle Spafford, and Laurel Ulrich to give readers a sense of what it meant to live through these changes. These highly detailed portraits will help readers understand how and why Mormon women could experience excommunication over feminist views and the forceful elimination of plural marriage by the U.S. government as simultaneously traumatic events. McDannell's thoughtful exploration of American Mormon women is as challenging as it is enlightening.