Item Detail
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12507
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21
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0
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English
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A Mormon Woman in Victorian America
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University of Utah
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Ph.D. diss.
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"An interest in the lives of the "anonymous" in history in recent years has forced a new definition of social history. No longer a superficial accounting of social customs or material culture, it has reached into the vast reservoir of data left by the great masses of people who have lived in the past, enlarging its scope and sharpening its historical vision. The history of society, on all levels, and the social interaction of those who comprised society have become the focus of social historians today. Within that broadened framework is the history of women, no longer a study of "great" women but of largely unknown women whose lives formed the substance of the broad sweep of history. Emmeline B. Wells was one of those women. She was a Mormon, a poet, a suffragist, a club woman, a politician, an editor of a woman's newspaper, and president of a large woman's organization. She became nationally prominent through her suffrage activities and her membership in several national woman's organizations. She achieved local prominence as one of the Mormon female elite through her editorship of the Woman's Exponent, a Mormon woman's journal, and her leadership in the Mormon Women's Relief Society. Despite her active public life, her name fell into obscurity with those of her peers whose lives had meaning only in their own time and place. A study of her life, however, is instructive in illuminating the nature of the individual efforts that gave viability to the larger historical movements. Retrieving the past with this perspective requires an examination of sources different from the treaties and declarations that have made up traditional history. The new history focuses on those documents that provide data on groups of people as well as on those private legacies of the unknown: journals, diaries, reminiscences, letters, and oral histories. Emmeline Wells left volumes of personal and public writings, virtually unknown today. Extant also are minutes and records of many of the organizations with which she was involved as well as legal, political, and religious documents that provide a social context to her life and to the lives of the women who made up her world. In all of the roles in which she functioned, Emmeline Wells offers the student of social history insight into female life in the nineteenth century, for she touched in various ways on the interests and pursuits important to women of her time. Though her Mormonism was atypical of nineteenth century values, her activism linked her with a new feminist ideology that transcended region, religion, and politics. While reflecting all of the forces that shaped her, she was, like most individuals, greater than their sum. A study of her life represents one more attempt to recover the sometimes elusive, often amorphous, but always intriguing past." [Author's abstract]
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Plural marriage, biographical examples
Women, pioneer life (biographical, unpublished)
Women, politics
Women, publications
Woman suffrage
Feminists and feminism
Publications (Mormon), Woman's Exponent
Women, public life
Biographies, women, 19th-20th centuries (unpublished)
Relief Society, 19th century
Wells, Emmeline B.
Wells, Daniel H. -
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A Widow's Tale : The 1884-1896 Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney
Battle for the Ballot : Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896
Doing the Works of Abraham : Mormon Polygamy―Its Origin, Practice, and Demise
Faith and intellect : The lives and contributions of Latter-day Saint thinkers
Four Zinas : A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier
From Home Service to Social Service : Amy Brown Lyman and the Development of Social Work in the LDS Church
Journey : Connections to a Pioneer Past
Lords of Creation : Polygamy, the Abrahamic Household, and Mormon Patriarchy
Mormon Polygamy : A Bibliography, 1977-92
New Scholarship on Latter-Day Saint Women in the Twentieth Century : Selections From the Women's History Initiative Seminars, 2003-2004
Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power : Salt Lake City, 1847-1918
Put On Your Strength, O Daughters of Zion': Claiming Priesthood and Knowing the Mother
Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-century Americans : A Mormon Example
Sister Saints : Mormon Women since the End of Polygamy
Solemn Covenant : The Mormon Polygamous Passage
The LDS Church's Campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment
'The Power of Combination' : Emmeline B. Wells and the National and International Councils of Women
The Tragic Matter of Louie Wells and John Q. Cannon
Wells, Emmeline B.
Wives and Other Women : Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon