Item Detail
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22746
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5
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0
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English
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The "Young Woman's Journal" and Its Stories : Gender and Generations in 1890s Mormondom
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University of Houston
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Ph.D. diss.
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"This dissertation is a study of the Young Woman's Journal , a monthly magazine for young Mormon women published in Salt Lake City beginning in 1889. My focus is on the 1890s, when the magazine was edited by its founder, Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Brigham Young and prominent Mormon women's leader and writer. This was a decade of profound change in Mormondom as the community moved away from its founding ideals-- polygamy, communal economics, and theocratic politics--toward assimilation of mainstream norms, creating a great deal of pressure and uncertainty. Gates and her Journal were important participants in this process. In response to a perceived generational crisis, Mormon writers conceived the idea of "Home Literature" that would use literary writing, particularly fiction, to reach the younger generation and keep them within the fold, resulting in the development of a distinctive Mormon culture of letters. As both a product of and a venue for the Home Literature movement, the Journal provides a complex, multivocal, gendered view of Mormon society during this difficult transitional period. The Young Woman's Journal aspired to participate in larger literary projects, modeling itself after contemporary women's magazines and employing conventions from popular fiction. At its heart was a gendered, generational voice through which Mormon women sought to address a perceived generational crisis among their daughters, encouraging younger women to develop a gendered spiritual identity that would make them true Mormon women. Marriage was the subject of greatest concern as the community began moving away from its practice of plural marriage. Journal writers attempted to create fiction that would warn young women against marrying outside the fold, but the divided nature of these texts revealed many dissonances and ambiguities. Another subject of great concern was growing socioeconomic stratification in the community. Writers employed a country/city trope to propose a geographical cure for these concerns, but, again, their own ambivalence surfaced repeatedly. After 1898, Gates and her colleagues seem to have embraced a new paradigm of progressivism that further solidified their break with some of the community's past goals." [Author's abstract]
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A Faded Legacy : Amy Brown Lyman and Mormon Women's Activism, 1872-1959
Between Two Economies : The Business Development of the Young Woman's Journal, 1889-1900
Courtship, Marriage, and Romantic Monogamy : Young Mormon Women's Diaries at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Mormon Women's History : Beyond Biography
Seeing Things: Technologies of Vision and the Making of Mormonism