Item Detail
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27995
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0
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0
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English
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"We Know How to Keep House and We Know How to Keep a City" : Contextualizing Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon's Feminism
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AWE : A Woman's Experience
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2
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Provo, UT
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Brigham Young University
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11-19
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Throughout her life, [Martha Hughes] Cannon pulled seemingly subversive stunts framed within a milieu of social support that demystifies, or at least partially elucidates, her frequent departure from normative female behavior. However, the purpose of this paper is not to join the voices of scholars arguing that nineteenth-century Mormon culture was one of radical egalitarianism. As Catherine Brekus notes in "Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency," Mormon scholars sometimes react to charges of a sexist, patriarchal past (and present) with overly effusive depictions of early Mormon women as independent proto-feminists. [...] Rather, I argue that Cannon's personal understandings and explorations of gender performance must be contextualized in an environment in which negotiations between the customary and the progressive were conventionalized, coded as acceptable at the leadership level, and emulated as such at the congregational and individual level. [From the text]