Item Detail
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32044
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3
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5
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English
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Fascinating and Happy : Mormon Women, the LDS Church, and the Politics of Sexual Conservatism
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Devotions and Desires : Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the Twentieth-Century United States
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Chapel Hill, North Carolina
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University of North Carolina Press
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"This chapter first examines how Helen Andelin’s writings and workshops present women’s sexuality as a privilege and a pleasure—one that could bring earthly fulfillment while also guaranteeing an eternal reward. It then demonstrates how Davison’s politicization of Andelin’s message importantly built from that sacred notion of sexuality. In doing so, it distinguishes Happiness of Womanhood from its peer anti-ERA organizations, particularly STOP ERA, which historians have paid closer attention to. Women in those organizations, on the one hand, showcased more conventional politics, lobbying their legislators and leading public rallies as respectable, traditional, and demure women concerned about the nation’s shifting sexual mores. Led by Jaquie Davison’s unique example, the women of Happiness of Womanhood, on the other hand, capitalized on their femininity and 'proper' sexuality as married women to defend the traditional home and heterosexual marriage against the Equal Rights Amendment they believed would radically alter both. As Mormon women moved from participating in Andelin’s marriage workshops into political activism through Davison’s organization, they came to understand that they not only could embrace their wifely duties but also could defend God’s plan of human sexuality and the traditional family against the threats of women’s liberation, sexual freedom, and homosexuality." [Author]
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Mormon Doctrine
'The ERA is a Moral Issue' : The Mormon Church, LDS Women, and the Defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment
The Mormon Culture of Salvation : Force, Grace, and Glory
The Mormon Image in the American Mind : Fifty Years of Public Perception
The Mormon Question : Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America