The Untold Travels of Gladys Woodmansee: A Would-be Wife and

the Next Generation of Post-Manifesto Plural Marriages, 1890

By

Morgan E. KolakowskiMay 2018

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in History

Simmons CollegeBoston, Massachusetts

The author grants Simmons College permission to include this thesis in its Library and to make it available to the academic community for scholarly purposes.

Submitted by

_______________________________________Morgan E. Kolakowski

Approved by:

________________________________________ ________________________________________Frances P. Sullivan Stephen R. BerryAssistant Professor of History Associate Professor of History

© 2018, Morgan E. Kolakowski

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................................. 3

Introduction ................................................................................................................................................................ 4

Historiography ........................................................................................................................................................ 12

Chapter 1: One’s Family and One’s Faith .....................................................................................................17

Chapter 2: Travels by Land and Sea ...............................................................................................................27

Chapter 3: Destination Liverpool ....................................................................................................................37

Epilogue ...................................................................................................................................................................... 45

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................................................. 49

Appendix .................................................................................................................................................................... 54

2

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the faculty of the Simmons College History Department for their continued support and constant encouragement throughout the Ph.D. application and thesis-writing process. In particular, I would like to thank my thesis adviser and second reader, Dr. Frances P. Sullivan and Dr. Steven R. Berry, respectively, for their guidance and support throughout the entire writing and revision process. Additionally, special thanks are due to Dr. Laura R. Prieto, for her help preparing application materials and conference presentations, as well as for her constant availability throughout my career at Simmons despite being on sabbatical during the 2017-2018 academic year.

Additionally, I would like to recognize Dr. John Seung-Ho Baick and Dr. Jonathan M. Beagle of Western New England University for the time they devoted to mentoring me during my undergraduate studies and for their numerous office-hour tête-à-têtes that empowered me to see myself as a “real” historian with ideas that mattered.

The completion of this thesis would also not have been possible without the help of the archivists and student assistants of the L. Tom Perry Special Collections Department of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University as well as the staff of the Research Center at the LDS Church History Library in Salt Lake City, Utah. And obtaining such resources would have been out of the question without the Interlibrary Loan staff of Beatley Library.

Further appreciation also goes to the Office of Sponsored Programs at Simmons College for their generous travel fund award, which will make possible the presentation of my thesis at the Mormon Historical Association’s 2018 annual meeting in June of this year.

Last and certainly not least, a heartfelt thanks are due to both my parents, Kathryn S. Dell and Albert P. Kolakowski, as well as my partner, Michael Zhang, for the love and support they have shown during this wonderfully challenging, yet wholly enriching, period in my life. Though my name may be the one going on my diploma, this endeavor was truly a team effort brought about by a countless number of friends, family, faculty, and colleagues. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

3

Introduction

In October of 1890, Latter-day Saints President Wilford Woodruff, issued a public

declaration distancing the church from polygamous practices, known as the Manifesto. At

that time Mormon identity and questions of national loyalty were prominent topics of

conversation among the members of the LDS Church. Frequently, these conversations

became points of intrigue and charged debate among non-Mormons throughout the United

States. As tension between Mormon polygamists and government officials mounted, many

families were forced to and divide themselves among different communities and even

between nations such as Mexico and Canada to avoid being prosecuted under the anti-

polygamy laws establish over the previous decades by the United States government.

At this time, a young woman named Gladys Woodmansee, then unmarried, was

engaged to Joseph C. Bentley. She would go on to become the second of his three wives

after her marriage in Mexico in 1894. While waiting for Bentley to secure permission from

the church to marry her, Woodmansee traveled from her plural family in which she had

grown up on a leisure trip across the United States and the Atlantic Ocean from Salt Lake

City, Utah, to Liverpool, England, in the Spring of 1890, keeping a detailed daily journal

throughout her travels and during the earlier years of her marriage.1 This thesis examines

the day-to-day experiences of an unmarried, single, Mormon woman in her travels east

during a time of significant religious upheaval in the faith and the nation. I ask how the

1 In this thesis I refer to Gladys using her maiden name, Woodmansee. Although other scholars refer to her as “Gladys” when discussing her role as the second wife of Joseph C. Bentley, the period under discussion here takes place when she was unmarried. (B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1992), 170; Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City, Greg Kofford Books, 2008), 76-77)The engagement in itself is questionable for reasons that I explain, and it is her identity as a single, unmarried Mormon women speaking directly to an outside audience that plays the most crucial role in my analysis of her leisure vacation’s impact on her faith and ultimately her identity. For all other peoples, excluding her mother, Elizabeth, I will use their last names.

4

ordinary happenings of her life can shed significant light on scholarly discussions of

Mormon womanhood and family life, public perceptions of the LDS church, including its

impact on individual empowerment, and lastly, the place of leisure travel as a crossover to

the much more common female missionary work established exactly eight years after her

departure abroad.2

I argue that Woodmansee’s decision to become a plural wife during this uncertain

era at the end of the nineteenth century was affected by the changes in identity she

experienced in her travels east and her interactions with peoples both in and outside the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including non-Mormon travelers and Mormon

missionaries. For Woodmansee, travel was an act of exploration that empowered her as a

Mormon woman, demonstrating her own ability to choose how to live in her faith with or

without polygamy. Though this project is largely biographical, the day-day movements of

Woodmansee, and the detailed, almost romanticized accounts her diary provides, create a

picture of not only how the separate debates on living as a member of the Mormon faith

infiltrated daily life but also of how lived religion functioned on an individual level. Her

engagement with the general public reveals that non-Mormons held deeply-rooted

misconceptions about Mormon women and their position in the church, providing evidence

of the powerful authority Mormon women had over public opinion within the United

States.

First, I begin with a historiographical overview of the rise and development of New

Mormon History and Mormon Women’s Studies. My historiography tracks some of the

main voices that led to the proliferation of Mormon women’s history and ultimately 2 According to the dates in her diary, Woodmansee departed from New York City on April 9th, 1890. Inez Knight Allen, one of the first two single female missionaries sent abroad by the church to its European Mission also left on April 9th, 1898 abroad the S.S. Bilgenland.

5

brought me to questions about the empowerment and agency of Mormon women. I am

mindful of the pitfalls of using “agency” in this thesis to obscure the “contexts and

consequences of human activity” as Walter Johnson writes.3 It is not my intention to limit

Woodmansee’s thoughts or decisions to a conscientious effort of campaigning for or against

one tenet of the Mormon faith, such as polygamy, but rather to demonstrate that her

actions and feelings in this particular moment and time reflect the shared dismay and

confusion many women of the church experienced. Her travels were a side-effect of an

uncertain future for Mormons, and her removal from Utah illuminates the national debate

over the future of Mormonism in the United States.

The second section of my paper is an analysis of the role of family and home life on

Woodmansee’s decision to take her leisure trip aboard during her engagement to Bentley. I

argue that the experiences of her mother, Elizabeth Hill Mills Woodmansee, which evidence

a tumultuous relationship with the institution of plural marriage, affected the way

Elizabeth raised her children in their faith. In this section I also examine the context of

Woodmansee’s engagement to Bentley, whose social position and relationship to the

church influenced his ability to create a plural family and ultimately contributed to the

perpetuation of plural marriage among the Mormon stake, or administrative group of

multiple congregations, established in Mexico. I also argue that the emotional distress that

characterized her writings about the departure from Salt Lake City is indicative of the role

many Mormons assigned to Zion, their established base in Salt Lake City, as a homeland.

Living in this specific geographical region, the Mormons in Utah were united in their

suffering, forced migration, and continued struggle as a result of government persecution,

3 Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 114.

6

which connected Woodmansee’s generation to those that had come before them in this

shared space.

Thirdly, I address the impact of public perception and wider debates on the

continuation of polygamy among the next generation of Mormon women as they inserted

themselves in Woodmansee’s writings. I argue that travel was an act of exploration that

displayed not only a form of empowerment but also Woodmansee’s ability to choose how

to live her faith with or without polygamy. In addition, I also argue that her perspective as

an engaged Mormon woman traveling east for leisure informed her opinion on the

treatment of plural families, more specifically wives, by non-Mormon outsiders.

Woodmansee revealed the role Mormon women played in altering public perception and

righting commonly held misconceptions circulated in popular publications, reinforcing the

aim of other forms of media such as the Mormon women-run magazine, The Women’s

Exponent, which also informed Mormons and non-Mormons alike about the principles and

people found within the LDS church.

Lastly, in the fourth and final section of my thesis, I look at the overlap of

Woodmansee’s experiences with that of one of the first unwed women missionaries sent to

England nearly eight years after her leisure trip, Inez Knight. I provide the reader with a

brief analysis of Woodmansee’s exploration of faith as a leisure traveler, and argue that her

inclusion at the Mormon European Missionary Headquarters established in Liverpool,

England at 42 Islington Street contributed to calls for greater inclusion for unwed married

women. Such a comparison to the activity and travel of missionary women abroad is

important in understanding Woodmansee’s growth and exploration in the religion for the

7

role such expereinces had on her reaffirming her commitment to plural marriage and her

belief in the power of faith to protect her family in the coming years.

The practice of polygamy is at the center of many debates that appeared in and

around the Mormon community during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and a thorough

understanding of its principles is essential to contextualize such debates. Standardized as a

formal teaching in the early 1840s, Mormon marriage was a bond that was an indissoluble

endeavor that lasted through one’s earthly life and remained a relationship recognized

even in the afterlife in Heaven.4 The establishment of the Church of Christ, later named the

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Joseph Smith in 1830, who received a series

of revelations as he sought to restore the church to its original form before the “apostasy,”

or period of time between the lives of the apostles and the founding of the church in 1830.5

Among these revelations was plural marriage, a privately practiced, more secretive tenet of

Mormonism first written about by Smith in 1843 and publicly introduced as a principle of

the faith to the general public in 1852 after Smith’s death and the migration of the

Mormons west to Utah.6 As a man married each successive wife, Mormonism taught that he

and his wives, through procreation, gave life and flesh to the thousands of souls awaiting an

earthly body to spread God’s message and teachings, reaffirming a belief in the pre-mortal

existence of the Spirit.7

There was an element of power associated with entering into the practice of plural

marriage, also known as being sealed to one another. Plural marriage, as opposed to

4 B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1992), 7.5 Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City, Greg Kofford Books, 2008), 5.6 Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 9.7 Ibid, 15.

8

monogamous marriage, was believed to elevated its participants to a higher level of heaven

in which they could be gods themselves. As Robert V. Remini outlines in his short

biography, Joseph Smith, Mormonism taught that there were three levels of heaven, or

“degrees of glory,” in which a believer was placed at the end of his or her earthly life: the

“celestial kingdom” for those that practiced plural marriage or held themselves to the

highest religious standards, the “terrestrial kingdom,” for those that led moral lives but did

not believe in God or accept his teachings, and lastly the “telestial” kingdom reserved for

most wicked of people.8 Following such teachings, Mormons believed that only those that

took part in celestial marriage in a plural family could hope to end up in the highest tier of

Heaven, making plural marriage’s repeal in 1890 an issue of grave importance to the

Mormons who had lived their lives believing in such principles that were threatened by

anti-Mormon legislation in the United States.

Beginning in 1862 with the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, the Federal government

outlawed plural marriage in the United States and made it illegal for any church in the U.S.

territories to own more than fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of property.9 The Federal

government paid closer attention the Utah territory after its plea to Congress in 1867 to

repeal the Morrill Act, a move some government officials believed would legalize polygamy

within the territory.10 Such resistance to Federal laws prompted a heightened awareness of

Mormon religious practices to outsiders beyond Utah, making the region’s bid for

statehood a long, drawn-out process prevented by negative public perception of

Mormonism up until 1896 when Utah became the 45th state admitted to the United States.

8 Robert V. Remini, Joseph Smith (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 96, 106-07.9“Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act Law and Legal Definition,” U.S. Legal, accessed on September 20, 2017, https://definitions.uslegal.com/m/morrill-anti-bigamy-act/.10 Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families, 9.

9

Building on such opposition to the LDS Church, the Morrill act was amended by the

Edmunds Act of 1882. The measures of the Edmunds Act’s punitive measures punished

Mormon men and made bigamy, polygamy, and unlawful cohabitation even greater

criminal offenses. In addition, the ability to serve on a jury and hold office was suspended

for all those found guilty of such practices.11 Only a couple of years after large-scale

Mormon colonization in other nations such as Mexico began, the 1887 follow-up to the

Edmunds Act, the Edmunds-Tucker Act passed, stripping both men and women of their

franchise in Utah who were from the LDS church.12

With the start of such colonization, families spread out between different towns and

even different countries to avoid Federal prosecution. These families can be understood as

“divided families.”13 In this charged environment Woodmansee agreed to an engagement

with Joseph C. Bentley. As her relationship progressed, punitive measures and public

debate surrounding the Mormons and their beliefs would only come under greater fire

with the start of Woodmansee’s travels east. Her experiences serve as a lens into the world

of discrimination and uncertainty other Mormon women who traveled the United States

during the late nineteenth-century faced. These LDS women, who may or may not have

considered or even participated in polygamy, were forced to play the role of plural wife in

the court of public opinion during their travels. Out of such experiences, historiographic

debates emerged beginning in the 1940s questioning the role of the individual and the

importance of ordinary people’s experiences within the LDS Church. And within these

11 Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 154.12 Ibid.13 The terms “divided families” is one that I created to label such families that have emerged in my research, which lived divided between different geographical regions such as towns, states, and even countries, to avoid prosecution by government authorities..

10

debates, I found the importance of Woodmansee’s story and its contribution to the ongoing

scholarship surrounding plural marriage, Mormon women’s agency, and the role of the

family in the Mormon faith.

11

Historiography

My thesis follows the field of New Mormon History that emerged in the late 1940s

and early 1950s that highlighted a shift away from purely evangelical or theological

analysis to methodologies grounded in both the humanities and the sciences, such as

literary analysis and social psychology. This emergent field also allowed for both Mormons

and non-Mormons to provide critical analysis on lives of individuals and ultimately led to

creation of Mormon Women’s History around the same time as Women’s History emerged

as a prominent subfield in the 1960s and 1970s. Using the Gladys Bentley diaries as my

main primary source, I am examining not only the day-to-day experiences of a single,

Mormon woman in her travels east during a time of significant religious upheaval in LDS

Church and Mormonism, but also how the ordinary happenings of her life add significantly

to current scholarly debates on the issue of Mormon women’s agency and the practice of

polygamy among younger generations of Mormons.

More specifically, Woodmansee’s writings and her thoughts provide historians with

tremendous insight into daily life of an ordinary individual not involved in the Church

hierarchy but greatly affected, nonetheless, by its decisions and changes during the last

decade of the nineteenth-century due to her marital status and role as a woman in the faith.

Through the writings of Woodmansee, I am contributing not only to a sub-field of Mormon

women’s history, which has its beginnings in the 1970s, but also meeting the demands of

more current calls for “New Mormon History” such as the one found in the anthology,

Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Kate Holbrook

and Matthew Bowman, published in 2016. A contributing historian in the anthology,

Catherine Brekus cited several examples of historians discussing both the independence of

12

polygamy as well as its restrictive amount of discipline, presenting her readers with a new

rendition of the repeatedly reference duality associated with the institution of plural

marriage. Additionally, she cited the need historians have for a new model of Mormon

women’s agency, one that recognized “both the capacity of ordinary women to create

change” as well as the “structural constraints” they faced in their daily lives.14

Answering such needs, the writing and travels of Woodmansee present themselves

as a prime source of analysis in which I can flesh out questions of the future generation of

Mormon women tackling the place of plural marriage in the church and its place in their

more private lives. Woodmansee’s observations and experiences allows us to take a look at

the place of women in the church at this time and the broader perception of women’s rights

in the faith during this pivotal period at the end of the nineteenth-century. In order to

better contextualize the need for this new model, however, the origins of New Mormon

History and the scholarship behind this new field must be explained.

Prior to the emergence of women’s history as a sub-field in the larger historical

profession, the publication of Fawn Brodie’s biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My

History, was cited by many Mormon scholars as one of the first major works published that

did not fall squarely into the realm of “Old Mormon History.” Described by Mormon

historian Robert Flanders, Old Mormon History was characterized by a writing style that

either attacked or defended the Later-day Saints and the Mormon faith, with a focus on the

evangelic aspects of the faith.15 Further characterizing the old way of thinking about

Mormon history, Flanders noted that many “practitioners…usually had a clear cut position

14 Catherine A. Brekus, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” in Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, eds. Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman (Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press, 2016), 28.15 Robert Flanders, “Some Reflections on the New Mormon History,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 9, no 1 (Spring 1974): 34.

13

on Mormonism, either for or against, and tended to divide into two types: Defenders of the

faith and Yellow Journalists.”16 In this breakdown, the defenders often were Mormons

themselves and those that were the “yellow journalists” tended to be non-Mormon and of

an anti-Mormon disposition. Serving as the keynote address at John Whitmer Historical

Association that took place in Nauvoo, Illinois in September of 1973, Flander’s paper,

“Some Refelctions on New Mormon History,” was a significant essay contributing to the

advancement of Mormon history. While Flanders admitted that such a dichotomy of “Old”

historians was most certainly a generalization, he recognized the need for a more in-depth

historiographical analysis to be written, creating a path for future historians to present

their own critical analysis.

Fawn Brodie’s 1945 No Man Knows My History set in motion a wave of New Mormon

History. It was her writing style, her non-hagiographic writing style about the Mormon

founder, Joseph Smith, the way in which she showed an extreme “indifference to the

religion” yet “betray[ed]” extreme interest in her biographical subject, as cited by Flanders,

that this New Mormon History became characterized by both different practitioners as well

as different practices in critical analysis. 17 As evidenced by Brodie, a person who chose to

write a critical analysis of the faith and its believers informed in part by a more humanistic

viewpoint, this first generation of New Mormon historians used their literary or historical

training more so than a reliance on religious knowledge.18 Characterized as more of an

inderdisciplinary field, this new way of writing combined several different methodologies

16 Ibid, 35.17 Flanders, “New Mormon History,” 35. It is also important to recognize the role of Juanita Brooks’ Mountain Meadows Massacre, published not long after Brodie’s book, in 1950. Her work also took on a critical view of the individuals involved in a massacre, understanding their unique experiences in the faith that ultimately led to the mass killing they were involved in.18 Flanders, “New Mormon History,” 35.

14

taken from both humanistic as well as scientific disciplines including “philosophy, social

psychology, economics and religious studies” to round out its analysis of Mormonism and

its believers.19

New Mormon History was also characterized as an existential history. Using

Flanders’ definition of existentialism, or “an attitude which protests against views of the

world and against policies of action in which individual human beings are regarded as

helpless playthings of historical forces, or as wholly at the mercy of the operation of

naturally processes,” it was possible for the field of Mormon history to shift primarily to

focusing on the individual.20 Citing the widely celebrated religious historian, Richard

Bushman, Flanders noted that this new mode of thinking and writing became “a quest for

identity rather than a quest for authority.”21 Such a characterization led later generations of

Mormon historians to look at the lives of individuals and place them in the context of their

time as their own agents, acting uniquely in contrast to the demands of either the LDS

church or the state they lived in. This is what I hope to accomplish within my thesis.

With the creation of women’s studies and the emergence of women’s history in the

early 1970s, writings on Mormon women’s history began with a small, rather vocal group,

of female scholars and New Mormon historians, including, among others, Maureen

Ursenback Beecher, Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Claudia Lauper Bushman,

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Jan Shipps.22 Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, edited by

Bushman and published in 1976, consisted of twelve different essays on prominent women

19 Ibid.20 Flanders, “New Mormon History,” 36.21 Ibid, 34. Note, the exact location Bushman first published or expressed this quote is unknown and no citation is provided in Flanders article that indicates otherwise. It is possible that Bushman was in attendance at the conference and expressed what is quoted by the author.22 D. Michael Quinn, ed. The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past (Salt Lake City Utah: Signature Books, 1992), 20.

15

in the LDS church, and is a pioneering piece of scholarship for the focus it placed on women

in Mormonism rather than prominent men in the church, who had long been written about

in a faith characterized by its early male leadership.23 In part, this new focus was due to the

shift away from the more religious focus of earlier writing, concentrating mainly on actors

in the church hierarchy, who at the time were men. Only three years after Mormon Sisters’

publication, Shipps’ assertion that the piece was “an important addition to the literature on

the history of American women,” indicates the close relationship of early Mormon women’s

publications to the larger, nascent field of women’s history. Connecting the history of

Mormon women to the larger history of the United States, my thesis seeks to contextualize

Woodmansee’s activities not only in the Mormon faith but in the larger realm of women’s

rights during the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth.

23 Jan Shipps, “Review; Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah by Claudia L. Bushman,” The Journal of American History 66, no.1 (1979): 143-44.

16

Chapter 1: One’s Family and One’s Faith

Looking at all the work to be done in preparation for her travels, Woodmansee

remarked in her diary, “I say, when we take in the journey and the necessary preparation

thereoff [sic], it almost makes us weary, and we are tempted to feel ungrateful and next

thing to wish that we were not going after all…I believe it must be something like preparing

for ones’ marriage.”24 Woodmansee faced an uncertain future as she set out on her leisure

trip just as the church faced some major obstacles in the months leading up to the

Manifesto. Realizing such uncertainty, however, Woodmansee placed her potential

marriage on hold to experience the world outside of the Mormon cultural zone, escaping

any legal jeopardy she was in as a child born into a polygamous family while

simultaneously broadening her view of the world and her place in it.25 Writing in her diary

she noted matter-of-factly, “you must bid adieu to all who are near and dear to you, to the

scenes you have loved so long and well…one is so full of fear…they really and truly wish

they were not going. Indeed a trip to Europe seems to be a great trial.”26 In the terms that

she described her packing and final days in Utah, Woodmansee gave her travels a higher

sense of purpose and meaning as she imagined being permanently separated from

anything familiar and loved.

Thousands of missionaries made the same overland and overseas trip as evidenced

by “Arrivals” and “Departures” sections featured weekly in the Mormon European Mission

24 Gladys Woodmansee, MSS SC 1882 Folder 2, Gladys W. Bentley diaries and reminiscence, 19th Century Western and Mormon Manuscripts, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. 25 The first reference to the term “cultural region” is found in Donald Meinig’s 1965 article , “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964,” in Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 55, No. 2 (Jun., 1965), pp. 191-220. For a more in depth discussion of this term as it relates to Mormon settlement see Ethan R. Yorgason’s Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region as cited in Jeffrey S. Smith and Benjamin N. White’s article, “Detached from Their Homeland: The Latter-day Saints of Chihuahua, Mexico,” published in the Journal of Cultural Geography.26 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

17

periodical, the Millennial Star, yet Woodmansee wrote that she saw herself as a “Marter,”

with friends and family weeping at her disappearance. Most telling is the way she says

goodbye to Bentley, leaving him nameless in her diary, as “lover” and “thinking perhaps tis

[my] last meeting on Earth.”27 Using such terms as “Marter” and describing her departure

for the train depot as an act of dying or the final moments of life, Woodmansee framed her

departure as a monumental moment in her young life. Such description I argue was similar

to the departure of other young Mormon women who were leaving their families for the

unknown world awaiting them outside their familiar Mormon safehaven. An example of a

similar departure exists on front page of the Mormon periodical, the Woman’s Exponent,

from Septmeber 15th, 1890. In the last edition of an 18-volume, fictional series titled,

“Hephzibah,” a young Mormon woman leaves her friends and family in Nauvoo, Illinois, to

move West to Utah Territory with other Mormon migrants. Referencing such dismay and

fear, similar to Woodmansee, the omniscient narrator reminds the reader that “a great

mental struggle was going on in Hepsie’s mind…Her farewell to her mother was a terrible

ordeal, and yet she went through with it…No one ever knew but herself, what the effort

cost her.”28 And from such a description, we can imagine that the dismay and apparent

trauma Woodmansee wrote about feeling gives voice to the ficticious ordeal Hepsie and

other actual Mormen women endured.

In distancing herself from her family and her lover, Woodmansee made the choice to

travel, which became an act of exploration of identity, faith, and her own personal agency

as a Mormon woman at a pivotal time for Mormon church. More so than the personal

danger she hazarded by leaving, Woodmansee’s drama emerged from removing herself

27 Ibid.28 “Hephzibah, XXVIII,” Woman’s Exponent, September 15th, 1890, 1.

18

from the only home she had ever known during a crisis in the church and traveling away

from a fiancé whose legal status in the Utah Territory remained tenuous at best. Such fear

and heightened emotions were undoubtedly experienced by countless other scores of

Mormon families during this period, with Woodmansee being one of many negatively

affected by the LDS Church’s legal battle with the Federal Government.

The beginning of Woodmansee’s diary more so than any other section establish the

strong relationship that existed between Woodmansee and her immediate family. Of

particular significance is the role that Woodmansee had in her family unit and the

relationship she had with her mother. Making the decision to leave behind a family that so

clearly needed her labor to function smoothly was an important decision due to the vital

role she occupied in the home.Woodmansee performed a majority of housework for her

mother and was responsible for many of the domestic chores required by her younger

siblings. It is likely that the home she lived in at the time of her departure was one

originally purchased by her mother, Elizabeth Hill Woodmansee, shortly before her second

marriage to Joseph Woodmansee on May 7th, 1864, only ten months before Woodmansee’s

birth on March 13th, 1865.29 Woodmansee’s decision to leave her home, the only place she

knew since her birth, was a monumental one.

According to historian Jessie L. Embry, many husbands would live together in the

same home as their plural wives in the typical family Mormon polygamous family

structure. With the addition of another wife or the birth of children, new living quarters

would be made available to separate each mother and her children. Another consideration

29 This biographical note comes from Augusta Joyce Crocheron, Representative Women of Deseret: A Book of Biographical Sketches to Accompany the Picture Bearing the Same Title (Salt Lake City, Utah: J.C. Graham and Co., 1884), 88. In this biographical anthology, the most important women of the Mormon faith were chronicled in their own words, with Elizabeth Hill Woodmansee as one of them.

19

in building separate households was also available income.30 If Elizabeth had already had a

preexisting property and was marrying into the preexisting Woodmansee plural family, it is

likely that the home Woodmansee serviced, maintained, and looked after on a daily basis

was her place of birth and the home of the six other surviving children her mother had by

1877.

The entire family would have to step in once Woodmansee departed. It was “…of no

small magnitude, especially when the one leaving has been the house keeper, or in less

elegant but more impressive language, the chief cook, a bottle washer, for something like

ten years.”31 Her absence was also noted by her mother, Elizabeth, who Woodmansee

recorded as saying, “we are so busy getting ready for Woodmansee to go to Europe…there

will be no time for housecleaning when Glad has gone… besides I will be at a loss how to

manage without her.”32 While the chores Woodmansee completed are common forms of

domestic work expected of daughters both monogamous and polygamous families at the

turn of the century, her mother’s commentary on the close relationship between herself

and Woodmansee is representative of mother-child relationships that existed in

polygamous families.

Elizabeth was in her second marriage when Woodmansee was born, and although

Woodmansee was the oldest of her six surviving children fathered by her mother’s second

husaband, she was not the first child born to Elizabeth. Having committed to a plural

marriage in June of 1857, only one year after her emigration from England to the United

States, Elizabeth was abandoned by her first husband, William G. Mills, when he left her

alone with their first child for four years to perform a mission abroad in England, 30 Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families, 106-09.31 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.32 Ibid.

20

ultimately refusing to return to his family.33 In the narrative Elizabeth recited to Augusta

Joyce Crocheron, a contemporary biographer, she described how difficult it was to

comprehend “that this abandonment had been deliberately planned….All that I had

hitherto suffered seemed like child’s play compared to being deserted by the one in whom I

had chosen to place the utmost confidence…”34 In her second marriage, Elizabeth also chose

to be a plural wife.

After such a dark, sorrowful period during Elizabeth’s first years in the United

States, Woodmansee was the first of her children born into a more stable environment,

both financially and socially. In this environment, she became a symbol of stability and

relative prosperity in the faith that had encouraged her mother to immigrate to the United

States. With Elizabeth having had such a tumultuous first marriage, it makes sense that as

the next oldest woman her mother shared a home with, Woodmansee became an emotional

outlet to share Elizabeth’s struggles as an immigrant and memories as an abandoned wife.

As Embry describes in her section on mother-child relationships, complete spousal

affection was often unattainable and inconsistent with the addition of wives and children,

and in such diluted relationships, it was the children of plural families who were the

emotional outlet and confidents of their mothers.35

While the trip aboard to England came at a high price for Elizabeth, Woodmansee

left behind not only friends and family, but also the fiancé she hoped to marry. Describing

the anxious feelings she had at leaving for “lands strange and new,” Woodmansee was

engaged at the time to Joseph C. Bentley and hoped to enter into a plural marriage with

Bentley and his first wife, Margaret, her cousin. Given the current political environment in 33 Crocheron, Representative Women, 86-87.34 Ibid.35 Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families, 221.

21

the United States in 1890 at the time of her departure, Woodmansee did not have the

assurance that polygamy would still be legal in the United States by her return. In fact, only

five months after Woodmansee set out on her leisure trip, in the fall of 1890, the President

of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wilford Woodruff, issued his “Manifesto”

on September 24th demanding that the Mormon people “obey the laws of the land as they

relate to polygamy,” formally prohibiting the practice of polygamy in the Mormon church.36

As B. Carmon Hardy argues, those familiar with Mormon settlement in the Mexican

states knew that plural marriage was the primary reason for the mass emigration rather

than agricultural developments or missionary activity.37 News of Manifesto traveled quite

quickly through the Mormon community, causing Bentley, Woodmansee’s finance, to cite a

conversation with her mother, Elizabeth:

When I spoke to Sister Woodmansee about Gladys and me getting married, she said she did not object to me, but thought since the Manifesto, it would not be sanction for me to take a plural wife. I told her if we could not get married by the proper authority we would not get married at all.38

Such an acknowledgement of the Manifesto and the new legal ramifications of plural

marriage made Mexican colonization an even more important endeavor, with church

officials in Bentley’s life recommending his immediate move to Mexico.39 Mormon officials

such as Apostle, Moses Thatcher, saw Bentley as a talented businessman who could benefit

“our Mexican Colonists in Mexico” through the establishment of new business branches and

other offshoots of Mormon industry.40 President Díaz, in particular, encouraged such

36 Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 130.37 Ibid, 168.38 Bentley, Life and Letters, 78. It should be noted that it is unclear in the context that Bentley presents his father’s words if they are taken from an unpublished diary or if they were spoken to either him or another family member before Bentley’s passing in 1942.39Ibid, 78.40 Bentley, Life and Letters, 78. An Apostle was a member of priesthood in the church hierarchy of a higher authority than an elder.

22

development and maintained an open-border policy with the Mormon colonists.41

Evidencing a renewed effort at modernization and financial solvency, the first phase of the

Portfiriato, or period of Díaz’s reign in Mexico from 1876-1911, was characterized by

increased economic success through the development of an export economy and a

balanced budget.42 Coincidentally, the 1870s and 80s were a time of great economic

development for the Mormon people. Through such welcomed settlement, previous plots of

land in the arid climates of both the states of Sonora and Chihuahua were made into

important regions of agricultural in Northern Mexico.

Probing the First Presidency about a possible relocation to this economic center in

Northern Mexico, Bentley discovered that only through a second wife and bycarrying out

the Principle of plural marriage could he succeed in obtaining a greater role in the church.

Yet he was prevented at the time of his formal petition shortly after Woodmansee’s

departure in 1890 from doing so both in the United States as well as in Mexico for lack of

official approval from church officials who feared backlash for sanctioning a plural

marraige. Bentley left his meeting at the Office of the First Presidency in Salt Lake City with

zero assurances of help in his efforts to marry a second wife, and instead received a

presidential blessing to head south to see what good fortune would come.43

Returning to the emotionally charged, dramatic way in which Woodmansee wrote

about her goodbyes, her attachment to the geographical region around Utah Territory

relates to the work conducted by Richard V. Francaviglia. Francaviglia was a geographer

who conducted several studies on landscape, recording how Mormon people described the

41 Jason H. Dormady and Jared M. Tamez, eds, Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and Its Borderlands (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 40.42 Gilbert M. Joseph and Jurgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), 20-1.43 Ibid, 81.

23

landscape around them and what specific geographical features they attributed, if any, to

making it uniquely Mormon. While several members of the church involved in his survey

cited specific infrastructure patterns and architectural styles, such as the “Nauvoo-style”

house, it was also the way in which they connected the landscape around them to a higher

power, to their god, that stood out. For instance, if a participant connected Mt. Nebo,

located in the greater Rocky Mountains, as a protective feature of the Mormon settlement

in the Salt Lake Valley and an extension of the land up to heaven, they would be

demonstrating this phenomenon.44 Remarking in a similar way about her final night

viewing the landscape outside her bedroom window, Woodmansee wrote, “…you quietly

stole out on the veranda to view…you[r] native and beloved city by moonlight-The night is

beautiful and calm, a sacred stillness seems to pervade the atmosphere, and you drink in

the beauty of the scene before you…”45 This scene was special to Woodmansee,

representative of the landscape around her that she connected to her one true home.

While we do not have evidence in the early pages of Woodmansee’s diary to confirm

that she saw the landscape as uniquely Mormon, such observations about its sacredness

imply that it held a special place in her world view, geographically speaking, which was

limited up until the train first took her away from the Utah depot. The decision to leave on a

leisure trip was not only a choice that brought her into contact with new sights and sounds,

but one that, implicitly, forced her to come into contact with peoples and places that both

challenged and reimagined the landscape around her as a sacred space. Woodmansee was a

woman consciously choosing to participate in a way of life in a region of the country that

wasunder fire by peoples outside her community; before long she would actively be 44 Richard V. Francaviglia, The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a Unique Image in the American West (New York: AMS Press Inc., 1978), 158-59.45 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

24

participating in a religious practice that was made both controversial and illegal in the

United States. Her travels during a transition period in the LDS church may have been a

leisure trip, but the active decision to put herself in the public spotlight as a Mormon

woman, to combat the non-Mormon opinions beyond her cultural region, was a scary even

alienating process.

Though her diaries speak to the thoughts and emotions of an individual woman, her

fears and worries can be tied back to the general zeitgeist of her generation, expereinced by

a group of Mormen women that ultimately had to navigate their own relationships in the

faith through whatever means possible either openly or in an established underground

network in the LSD Church. These common, widespread sentiments of nervousness, fear,

and even pain felt in the LDS community are captured by an editorial in The Women’s

Exponent from April 1st, 1889. Expressing the feelings of the Mormon women around her

now scattered for one reason or another, an anonymous writer wrote, “We are scattered

afar now, but few remain at the ‘home of our childhood.’ Some were drive by adverse

circumstances and some by cruel laws; and all are struggling amidst the care and

responsibilities that rest upon all true women…Though we have a glorious hope for the

future, the present some times [sic] tries the souls, and the heart often throbs..”46 Again,

Woodmansee’s diary gives voice in a private way to more public concerns and

demonstrates such hope through the bravery and courage she displayed by exploring a

part of the United States wholly outside her home.

Woodmansee’s decision to change her surrounding environment, to uproot herself

from family and friends, was a life altering process that represented the first major choice

46 E.T, “The Girls,” Woman’s Exponent, April, 1st, 1889, 161.

25

she made reflecting individual empowerment. Leaving her family and a mother that relied

on her quite heavily for support, Woodmansee left Utah Territory to experience an

environment that was both foreign and generally unwelcoming of Mormons.

Woodmansee’s writings spoke to the undecided future that awaited the LDS church and the

Mormon people. Leaving an unstable way of life that was threatened by Federal legistlation

was a choice that suggests a great deal of personal hope and fortitude. Defending her way

of life and her right to her own beliefs, Woodmansee became an advocate of not only

Mormons but Mormon women in particular, a role she would understand only too well on

her trip to Liverpool.

26

Chapter 2: Travels by Land and Sea

Woodmansee began her travels across the United States, leaving from Utah, and

stopping in several cities as she journeyed to New York City to board the S.S. Wyoming.

This journey by both train car across the United States as well as by boat over the Atlantic

Ocean was a time of tremendous exposure to the world outside the familiar Mormon

homeland found in Salt Lake City for Woodmansee. Over the course of this short expedition

lasting from her departure on April 9th, 1890 and continuing to her arrival in Liverpool,

England on Saturday, April 26th, she would not only experienced the company of other non-

Mormons outside of her traveling party that viewed Mormons as a unique other, but she

would also contemplate the role of plural marriage in her own life as well as the differences

between her own generation and that of her mother’s traveling West with the other group

of Mormon refugees fleeing persecution in Nauvoo, Illinois.

Through her diaries, we see not only how Woodmansee grappled with plural

marriage but also how the younger generation of Mormon men and women viewed their

choice to continue with polygamy. In this chapter, I argue that Woodmansee was able to

experience interactions with the outside world that empowered her to inform others about

her faith and its teachings, demonstrating the powerful authority Mormon women had over

the public perception of the LDS church in the United States. Documenting the outside

perspectives of her fellow non-Mormon travelers on the perception and treatment of young

Mormon women and families, Woodmansee’s travel diary helps to fill in some of the gaps in

scholarship on how Mormon women thought about perpetuating the practice of plural

marriage so close to the 1890 Manifesto.

27

Not even a day into the train ride, Woodmansee’s close relationship with her mother

presents itself in her writing over the course of her ride east. While Woodmansee was

unfamiliar with her surroundings and the sights she saw outside her window, it was the

stories and memories of her mother’s experiences traveling West as part of one of the most

iconic “handcart migrations” that I argue allowed Woodmansee to connect her Mormon

identity to the landscape around her. Such handcart migrations were some of the first mass

migrations of foreign immigrants who had converted to Mormonism and wanted to head to

Salt Lake City to live among their brothers and sisters of the faith. At the time, however, Salt

Lake City did not have a transportation network connecting it by train to the rest of the

United States, with the last train stop at the time of Elizabeth’s migration in 1856 Iowa City,

Iowa.47 To cut down on costs, groups of foreign migrants pulled all their belongings behind

them in wooden wheelbarrows, or handcarts, over the 1,300 mile trek from Iowa City to

Salt Lake City.48 In particular, the tragedy of the Willie Handcart Company Elizabeth

belonged to during her journey west was well-known among the Mormons for the death

and tragedy many of its members experienced on their overland route. As a result of such

memories being brought out by the landscape, it is likely that many of Woodmansee’s

earliest observations tied back to her mother and the burdens of living up to Elizabeth’s

level of piety as a Mormon woman. Many of Woodmansee’s written reflections suggest that

her mind was compairing her own individual travel to those experienced by the

generations of Mormons that came before her, adding importance to the act of traveling.

47 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Iowa City: 1856; Handcart Beginning” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History, September 26th, 2013, https://history.lds.org/article/pioneer-story-iowa-city?lang=eng.48 Ibid.

28

Recognizing this cross-generational comparison, Woodmansee would comment on

her lack of worth as a Mormon and express self-doubt as to her own level of religiosity:

I could not but contrast [my mother’s] journey across the plains, and mine, and yet I had almost been grumbling at the way in which I was crossing, thinking that I should have something better. The thought of my mother’s privations, indurance [sic] and faith had the effect of making me feel very mean and unworthy of the blessings I was receiving. She seems so far ahead of me in sacrifice that I fear I shall never be able to reach her no matter what I do. My dear little mother what an example she sets for her children.49

With such insecurities accompanying her on her trip, I argue that Woodmansee took every

opportunity that she could to engage with her traveling party that was composed of

missionaries who earned the the title of Brother or Sister for their service to the church.

The insecurities Woodmansee commented on concerning her own piety may have

contributed to the bouts of passivity she demonstrated according to her diary accounts

when it came to the assumptions the crew and passengers of the railroad made as to her

marital status and her role as a Mormon woman. Serving as a defacto representative of the

Mormon people, Woodmansee was in a precarious situation of needing to right the

misconceptions non-Mormons had about the church while remaining civil .

A clear example of the influence of public opinion and the negative connotations it

popularized about the Mormon people can be found in a scene Woodmansee’s described in

her diary. As soon as her missionary traveling companion, Joseph Condie Sharp, left, a

particularly “over-eager women” did not hesitate to take his place. Beginning her line of

inquiry, the women skipped any sort of formalitiy and “asked if I were really a ‘Mormon’.”50

Not only was the woman’s over-eagerness telling of the desire she had to learn more about

the Mormons on board the train, but the way in which Woodmansee described the scenario

49 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.50 Ibid.

29

speaks to the irregularity of the whole scene. Describing the interaction further,

Woodmansee noted that the woman asked her “if I really meant what I said,” following up

her intial question others concerning polygamy, the number of wives each man in Utah had,

and more importantly, the role of the wife in entering into plural marriage.51 Echoing

questions that populated several national publications and common cartoons about the

near non-existent rights of Mormon women in the practice of polygamy, Woodmansee was

also asked about a woman’s right to refuse a man who wanted to take her as an additional

wife, whether she was forced to marry, and lastly, if Mormon husbands were good to their

wives. By asking such questions in the absence of Sharp, this woman may have presumed

that Woodmansee would have been restricted from speaking about such topics and

divulging the “truth,” further emphasizing the misinformation circulating on the rights and

beliefs of Mormons and Mormon women in particular.

Reiterating such misinformation, a lithograph print that appeared in 1882

portrayed the issue of plural marriage front and center as it depicted a tall tree marked

with the word “Polygamy” growing out of the ground in front of the Capitol Building

housing Congress in Washington, D.C. Partially dug into the bark of the tree is an axe that

reads “Arthur’s Message,” likely a reference to United States President Chester A. Arthur

signing the 1882 Edmunds Act into law making polygamy a felony. At the very top of the

trunk, now lerching uncertainly towards the right of the frame, sits a large man wrangling

the chains of four women who are held in his grasp via neck shackles. Standing just beyond

the tree in front of the Capitol Dome are a group of men in suits and hats, looking away

from the scene, and ignoring the gruesome spectacle before them. Kneeling next to this

51 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

30

large man, these women, more than likely meant to represent Mormons, are haggred and

powerless, perhaps symbolizing to the larger audience viewing this print the perceived

status of Mormon women and their miserable quality of life as part of the LDS church.52

Another source that gives insight as to the types of questions that populated

national newspapers is the Woman’s Exponent. Committed to educating the general public

and to providing a place for public discourse, the periodical published a correspondence

between a “Mrs. Emily Scott” and a staff member of the paper, a “Mrs. L. Greene Richards,”

from the April 15th, 1882 edition. As evidence of the open-minded nature of the columns,

Scott wrote, “I consider it the business of every intelligent, rightminded [sic] woman to ask

questions about the Mormons…in this day of licentiousness and corruption…A woman is to

be despised, who calmly sits down, folds her hands, shuts her eyes and closes her ears to

everything beyond her own home circle.”53 Though Scott does provide her own subjective

qualifications for other potential writers, her bold tone and willingness to readily ask

questions suggests the success of the newspaper and the efforts of the women running it in

encouraging frank dialogue and debate. It is hard to say whether the original letter was

edited, but the fact that it made it to the front cover of the edition also highlights the open

nature of the Exponent within the Mormon community and beyond.

In response to Scott’s letter, Richards responded, and the column is likewise

featured on the front cover of the May 1st, 1882 edition. The opening to Richards’ response

is significant for the insight it gives the reader into the reaction of the Mormon community

to Scott’s inquiry. Responding, Richards wrote, “For my own part, I feel much obliged to

you for giving us an opportunity of speaking without feeling that we are crowding our

52 See Appendix 1.53 Emily Scott, “Opinions of a Gentle Lady,” Woman’s Exponent, April 15, 1882, 169.

31

opinions, unasked and undesired.”54 In one statement, Greene not only acknowledged the

large population of Mormon women in her social circle that wanted to write in to use the

Exponent as the vehicle for their voices, but was also happy to be the one making the

connection with Scott for this current correspondence. She bridged the gap between the

two societies just as Woodmansee described in the scene in her diary.

Citing another instance of misrepresentation, Woodmansee also took the time to

record the assumption many travelers made that Sharpe was her husband, with “the

porters and the newsboys…persistently calling me Madam, while the peanut and orange

vendors…insist on Mr. S’s buying everything for his lady.”55 As Embry notes in her

discussion of the role of women in the Mormon faith, they were not immune to the cult of

domesticity that existed during the nineteenth-century, allowing women to be the

cultivators of the home and the caretakers of the men or husbands in their lives. As such,

Woodmansee’s dismissal of her misappropriated role does not seem too unusual for the

time. She also may have had alterior motives for being so accommodating of the situation:

as long as it was believed that she was Sharp’s wife, Bentley did not risk being arrested for

bigamy back in Utah, jeopardizing the safety of his first wife, Maggie, and their children.

Touching on her commitment to Bentley a secret, her reticence adds additional

weight to the conversation she would have with Sharp about her views on plural marriage

once they were crossing the Atlantic outside of the United States. At the time of her

departure, Bentley had made repeated attempts to get official approval from the Office of

the First Presidency in Salk Lake City only to be told that until he was given permission by

the church to take on a second wife, he could not hold Woodmansee to any sort of legally

54 L. Greene Richards, “To Mrs. Emily Scotts,” Woman’s Exponent, May 1, 1882, 177.55 Ibid.

32

binding engagement. In Bentley’s biography written by his grandson, Joseph T. Bentley,

Bentley recounted the story of the day he went to President Woodruff’s office to seek

approval for his marriage to Woodmansee. Sitting before the president of the church after

October of 1890, Woodruff asked Bentley, “Have you not read my manifesto?,” implying

that what Bentley and Woodmansee wanted was outside the wishes and the best interest of

the church.56 Identifying another reason that Woodmansee kept her engagement secret,

Bentley also described an additional meeting he had at the office the following week,

inquiring if a decision on his marriage had been reached. Instead, church officials

elaborated on the pressure the Mormon church faced from the U.S. Government, which

threatened to confiscate church property and to close down the LDS temples if evidence

was found of continued support of plural marriage.57

Providing the readers of her diary with evidence of her intentional concealment,

Woodmansee described the scene in which Bentley visited her in Ogden, Utah at the train

station, a waypoint on the trip out of Salt Lake where her family had seen her off. As

Woodmansee sat in the train car, Bentley said his goodbyes, appearing to be a friend for all

intents and purposes. Narrating the scene, Woodmansee wrote, “They [the Mormon

missionary party]little guessed the longing that filled my heart for a certain some body

whom they had seen but a short time ago…come into the car sit-down near me, chat and

talk a little, and then as any other friend would have done under the circumstance give me

a goodbye kiss and depart.”58 Looking at the planning that may have went into such a visit,

Woodmansee’s family situation and the mixed approval of her mother may have prompted

the secretive meeting with Bentley at a station separate from Salt Lake City. Such 56 Bentley, Life and Letters, 78.57 Ibid, 80.58 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

33

clandestine operations were common for families practicing plural marriage before and

after the Manifesto was issued in 1890. As Mormon historian, Embry notes in her book,

Mormon Polygamous Families, women were often the ones who would do more of the

traveling in underground situations, keeping a husband from being jailed in the territories

for being reported by another wife or a member of the immediate family for cohabitating

with more than one woman.59 While Woodmansee gives no suggestion that her mother

would contact authorities on Bentley, Elizabeth’s dislike of the potential marriage with

Bentley combined with her reliance on Woodmansee for household chores and the

church’s disapproval may have been reason enough. Such a scene illustrates just how

common it was to utilize tactics of the underground to sustain familial relationships in the

Mormon community, even more so by 1890.

Returning to the relationship Woodmansee fostered with Sharp during their time

traveling together across the Atlantic, the conversations she records between the two of

them are revealing of the younger generation’s opinion on the future of Mormonism. Such

conversations are also important to my argument that Woodmansee’s diaries are

enlightening for the information they provide historians about both the private and public

thoughts of potential plural wives and husbands. Knowing Sharp from their mutual

membership at The Athenaeum, a literary club established for Mormons of which she and

her brother Frank were members, one the activities she and Sharp often did to pass time

abroad the ships was to read above deck on their rented deck chairs placed next to each

other. One particular instance Woodmansee felt important enough to comment on was a

reading of a book picked out by Sharp containing “short biographical sketches of the lives

59 Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families, 26.

34

of benevolent and gifted women.”60 While the title and author are never mentioned, the fact

that this book was chosen by Sharp in particular demonstrates at least a willingness to

learn Woodmansee’s opinion on the subject, with Woodmansee noting that their readings

frequently resulted in “tete-a-tetes.”61

From such discussion, Sharp and Woodmansee discussed the topic of polygamy,

which she made a point of noting in her diary. Sitting in their deck chairs, it is clear that the

current clash between the Mormon church and the Federal government was top of mind, as

they based their conversation around the current laws surrounding polygamy. She noted

her surprise that Sharp would “ [give] me his opinion on the subject, pushing also, much

stress on what he said, he thought girls very foolish indeed to place themselves in any such

unenviable position, to which I answered that I thought so too.”62 Such agreement coming

from Woodmansee seems surprising, but given both her growing relationship with Sharp,

and the effect of the environment on her view of her place in the world, removed from the

United States, it is hard to say exactly what her motivations were for agreeing with him that

women seeking to take part in plural marriage were foolish being that she herself still

intended to marry.

Expressing such confusion in the moment and during her reflection on the

conversation, Woodmansee displayed many of the conflicting emotions Mormon women

had who wanted to take part in plural marriage at the time. Woodmansee cited her

“inconsistent” opinion, but reiterated to her readers that “I really and truly meant it, or I

should not have said it.”63 Recognizing the harshness of the laws put in place to prosecute

60 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.61 Ibid.62 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.63 Ibid.

35

husbands with plural wives, Woodmansee placed her strongest argument for plural

marriage in the romantic love she felt towards Bentley, even though she may have

fundamentally disagreed with the practice. Ending her private writing on the subject of

polygamy, she wrote, “I am full of confusion, she thou mine affliction,” quoting a bible verse

from the Book of Job.64 Even if Woodmansee was allowed to legally continue the practice of

plural marriage in the United States, such a reference implies extreme shame and guilt

associated with it, living life in a continuous underground in order to enjoy the earthly

rewards of a practice meant to benefit Mormon families in the afterlife.

64 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

36

Chapter 3: Destination Liverpool

Surveying the crowds clamoring against the decks of the Steamer Wyoming on the

morning of their arrival, Saturday April 26th, 1890, Woodmansee took note of all the

“hubbub” going on around her among her fellow passengers. Describing in detail the

contrast between the chaotic crowds around the saints and her small party of companions,

she highlights the difference in countenance and experience of “the saints from the Rocky

Mountains” from the various people that traveled on board with them:

At length to the gratification of anxious watchers the tender was seen approaching us and almost before we had time to realize the fact was along side [sic] of our boat, the occupants of one exchanging greetings with the occupants of another, the gangway was soon thrown across connecting the two boats…husbands and wives parents and children, acquaintances and friends were industriously shaking hands and kissing, each asking as many questions to the minute as possible, but seeming quite content to receive no answers to any of them all trying to talk at the same time. My companions and I had neither friends nor relatives to meet us, so we stood looking at the proceedings of the others, and were greatly interested and amused…”65

Home to the oldest established mission in Europe, Great Britain first welcomed Mormon

men as missionaries on July 20th, 1837.66 Recorded as a newly arrived visitor in the

Millennial Star, the British Mission’s periodical, Woodmansee was among twenty-four

Mormons and their unnamed children that joined her on the voyage, yet she rarely

mentioned by name the full group, and more often than not referred to “Mrs. Johnson” and

Sharp as her main companions for the voyage.

Recognizing the fulfillment of years of dreaming, Woodmansee’s entrancement with

England is left unexplained, but owing to her own mother’s childhood spent in the country

as well as its historic connection to the faith and emergence of the church, Woodmansee’s

65 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.66 Ronald G. Watt and Kenneth W. Godfrey, “ ‘Old 42’: The British and European Mission Headquarters in Liverpool, England, 1855-1904,” Mormon Historical Studies 10, no 1. (2009): 87.

37

identity as a Mormon is shaped by the very act of stepping off of the S.S. Wyoming and

being reunited with her mother’s place of birth. She writes not only of the visit being a

dream come true but of her arrival being the result of years of hoping for this “selfsome

event.” Curious is her choice to use the word selfsome, implying a very individual decision

that was self-motivated and intended above all to be of great personal value to her life

experiences. Despite the absence of family, Woodmansee looked to her surrounding

environment to inform her faith and to revive the memory of her mother’s emigration,

building on the overland travel memories she had of her mother’s experiences crossing the

United States. Additionally, such a record of her arrival in Liverpool not only adds to the

rich documentation given by missionaries of their arrivals abroad, but allows us to see the

similarities in experience that Mormon visitors had with their missionary counterparts

including shared tours, lodging, religious services, and even the job of educating the

general public about the truth surrounding the Mormon people and their beliefs.

Woodmansee’s first days in England largely mirrored the experiences of the male

missionaries that accompanied her. Her diary description of the her first stop at 42

Islington Street that is one of the best and most informative examples of one of

Woodmansee’s shared experiences with Mormon missionaries in Europe, who up until

1898, were all men. For Woodmansee, 42 Islington Street was not so much a missionary

base and publishing house as it was a “general gathering place of Saints,” and importantly

the imagined departure point for her mother’s journey west. Speaking to the significance of

the Liverpool headquarters’ address, “Old 42” as it was referred to by many Mormons,

subscribers of the Millennial Star could, according to an advertisement, purchase an

“appropriate souvenir” that consisted of “an engraving of ‘42’ suitable for binding with

38

complete volume, or for framing.”67 This offer was published in the Star to commemorate

the fiftieth anniversary of the periodical’s publication and included the claim that the

offices’ location and notoriety “are very familiar to the Latter-day Saints of every land and

clime where the Gospel has been preached, or where the…Millennial Star-has been seen.”68

Such claims evidence the location’s broad importance to Mormons throughout the world,

demonstrating the building’s general appeal and notoriety.

While the biographical sketch of Woodmansee’s mother, Elizabeth, does not

mention Old 42 or the exact departure point she took when leaving England for the United

States, it is possible that this famed Mormon waypoint came up in conversation between

Woodmansee and her mother. Located roughly two miles from Liverpool’s harbor, the

brick building with its printing press, business offices, and sleeping quarters are described

in Woodmansee writing as a revered home-away-from-home for the young and

inexperienced.69 More importantly, her narrative helps to inform us of its role in her own

journey abroad as a place in which the next generation of Saints, following in the footsteps

of the generations before them, could learn and adapt before “launching out on the mercies

of a cold and unbelieving world.”70 While her writing does mention missionaries as the

primary target of the headquarters’ training and nurturement, Woodmansee imagined

herself as one of its students in this instance, coming to its doors as her mother did for

direction and guidance, and this tells us a lot about how she viewed her role as one of the

future generation of Mormon women in the church.71

67 “Forty-Two,” Millennial Star 51, no. 19 (1889): 300.68 Ibid.69 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.70 Ibid.71 Old 42 was the initial point of contact for missionaries, service as a liaison for the surrounding missionary outposts, keeping records of the incoming missionaries, and providing temporary housing for missionaries while they stayed in the city.

39

Describing the image she had in mind of the pivotal moment in her mother’s life that

led her to travel to the offices in Liverpool, Woodmansee’s leisure trip takes on greater

significance when viewed as a reverse pilgrimage of faith and familial exploration. Her

description of her mother’s sacrifices and complete abandonment of all things familiar to

Elizabeth demonstrate her awareness of the privileges her generation, and those that she

in particular, inherited from the sacrifices of their parents. Despite the increasingly hostile

tension felt by those Mormons practicing polygamy against a backdrop of restrictive

legislation, it is still these sacrifices of the earlier generations that Woodmansee sited as the

ultimate sacrifice of faith, casting herself as unworthy by comparison.

Illustrating Woodmansee’s belief in the ease of her life experiences in comparison to

her mother’s she writes, “How vastly different were the prospects of her unworthy

daughter on first making acquaintance of the place [42]. Here had I come on a pleasure trip

with all the conveniences and luxuries that the invention and injineuty [sic] of the

enlightened nineteenth century could supply me and furnish me, and friends in abundance

to care for me, surely the sacrifice of the mother, redowned [sic] in blessing on the

daughter.”72 Absent from this conversation, as opposed to that which took place on the S.S.

Wyoming, are any direct references to polygamy or her decision to enter into a plural

marriage after her return to the United States. Yet this silence speaks to those tensions

being experienced by plural wives in the United States, some of whom entered into “the

Underground” or spoke out publicly and faced the possibility of arrest to make their voices

heard.73

72 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.73 For more general information on the formation of a Mormon “underground” see Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle by Jessie L. Embry and her chapter, “The Impact of Antipolygamy Laws.” For more specific case studies of the Federal Government’s legislation and the impact these laws had on families, including mothers and children specificially, see Kimberly Jensen James, “ ‘Between Two Fires’: Women on

40

The way in which Woodmansee described her involvement with the “company” of

saints that traveled to Liverpool solely for the prupose of going on a mission, suggests that

she was shadowing the missionaries and their wives in the earlier weeks of her arrival.

After she spoke with a local “hotel keeper” to make reservations for “the accommodations

of our company” Woodmansee was taken into their fold and included in the earliest

activities with the other missionaries. Moreover, she also described “taking off on an

inspection of the city” with her fellow “Rocky Mountain saints” and this comraderie and

inclusion indicates a very generous crossover between the initial activity of newly minted

Mormon missionaries and the Mormon women that chose to visit the city as visitors. Such a

crossover supports my argument that Mormon women had a powerful authority over the

public perception of the LDS church, even beyond the United States.

Such assertions of a cross-over between the activities of Mormon missionaries and

the experiences that Woodmansee had are important when understanding the impact this

visit had on her religious identity. Not only did she tour the local museums and the “City

Market” with the new missionaries, but she also was led around the city on a personal tour

by the main Mormon missionary responsible for the training and transition of new

missionaries to the Liverpool headquarters. Such inclusion undoubtedly improved the

connection she felt to 42 Islington and is responsible for the changes she recorded towards

the end of her diary during the first few days she spent in Liverpool.

Indicating even more of an involvement in the functions of the headquarters,

Woodmansee was also invited to attend Sunday services along with the rest of the new

missionaries. The second floor entertaining space she and her party were invited upstairs

the ‘Underground’ of Mormon Polygamy,” Journal of Mormon History 8 (1981): 49-53 and Martha Songtagg Bradley, “ ‘Hide and Seek’: Children on the Underground,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1983): 133-53.

41

to before the services contained both the editor’s room for the printing press as well as the

President’s personal meeting room, although the only known sketch of the floor plan is

perhaps not the most accurate, having been found tucked into the 1846 British Mission

manuscript history at the LDS Church History Library.74 Remarking on her comfort among

the saints as they sung the Sunday hymns, Woodmansee commented further on her

contentment among the missionaries, writing, “It really did me good, for I felt I was among

my friends, even though it was so far away from home and it seemed to make the distance

much less.”75 Through such comments it is possible for us to gain a better understanding of

the meaning of 42 Islington as both a training ground for future missionaries as well as a

welcoming host of Mormon visitors, often blurring the lines between the two while

allowing women visitors such as Woodmansee to become more involved in its daily

operations, if only at the periphery.

Officially, the Latter-day Saints’ stance prior to 1898 was that women could only

serve on missions if they accompanied their husbands, and only more informally through

word of mouth proselytization could women involve themselves directly.76 While

Woodmansee’s diary only allows us to see into the first few weeks she was in Liverpool

following around other male missionaries and attending services each Sunday at 42

Islington, as well as some dinners, she actively integrated herself into the LDS community

in Liverpool. Through such integration, Woodmansee arguable shared many of the same

74 Watt and Godfrey, “ ‘Old 42’,” 88, 90.75 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.76 Elizabeth Maki, “ ‘They Can Bear Testimony, They Can Teach’: Pioneering Efforts of the First Single Sister Missionaries,” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History, July 17, 2012, https://history.lds.org/article/inez-knight-missionary?lang=eng; for more information on the work of female Mormon missionaries see Calvin Seymour Kunz, A History of Female Missionary Activity in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1898 (thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976).

42

experiences as the first single female missionaries, Inez Knight and Jennie Brimhall, had

when they arrived in England at the request of the European Mission Presidency in 1898.

Originally, Knight and Brimhall planned on going on a leisure trip from Utah to

England just as Woodmansee did, beginning their Atlantic crossings eight years to the day

that Woodmansee boarded the S.S. Wyoming to Liverpool. Their departure coincided with

a stronger initiative to allow unmarried, single women to serve in missionary positions

without needing a husband. Following a decision made at the April 1898 General

Conference meeting among church officials, Knight and Brimhall were able to build off of

their desire to further serve the church by shifting their leisure trip into a mission.77 In

particular, Knight’s experiences over the course of her mission are well documented and

are currently digitized in the Brigham Young University’s digitized collection of Mormon

missionary diaries. Her entries are useful when comparing the missionary experience to

that of Woodmansee during the earliest weeks of the voyage.

Whereas Woodmansee filled her diary with persistent, even dramatic detail over the

course of her sea voyage, Knight simply noted, “As I am unable to describe the monotony of

a sea voyage I will say no more about the longest 12 days of my life,” adding that the record

of her experiences was “of value to no one but my own self.”78 During this same monotony,

however, Woodmansee provided a colorful narrative of the peoples and places she

interacted with, eager to record every thought and emotion she had. It is this desire to

illuminate and even to characterize those people around her through her writing that lends

so much power to Woodmansee’s written voice and evidences her desire to be heard. In

contrast to at least one woman missionary that came after her, Woodmansee lends greater 77 Maki, “They Can Bear Testimony,” 2.78 Inez Knight, MSS SC 932; Inez Knight Allen diary; 19th Century Western and Mormon Manuscripts; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

43

weight to her more average experiences, supporting my argument that this trip across the

United States and abroad had a profound effect on the way she viewed the everyday

happenings of her life, saturating such moments with religiosity and hope for her uncertain

future at the mercy of her God. Not only were her experiences an indication of the

crossover between leisure travel and missionary work for some of the first women

missionaries in Europe, but they also served as a formative time in her religious

development, reaffirming her faith and her own religious worth as a member of the next

generation of plural wives.

44

Epilogue

By 1894, Woodmansee relocated to Colonia Juárez to live with Bentley, his first wife

Maggie, and Maggie’s three children. One year later, the Mormon mission established in

Mexico was elevated to the status of an official stake, or branch, of the church. And only one

year after that in 1896, the town celebrated nearly a decade of settlement, serving as a safe

haven for Mormon settlers and their families. Describing this celebration in her historic

account of the town, historian and Colonia Juárez resident, Nelle Spilsbury Hatch, captured

the excitement of the day:

Cannonading at daybreak, serenading by the band and hoisting of the Mexican flag at sunrise…set the tone of the day…Floats representative of every industry fostered by the town and dramatizing the development and growth made by each in the ten years since settlement were entered. It was as gratifying to glory in seemingly impossible achievements and to demonstrate what faith, stamina, and determination could accomplish in a barren valley.79

As this celebration and parade made its way through town, it is very likely that

Woodmansee and her family witnessed its procession. Yet despite this time of celebration

that coincided with Independence Day in Mexico, a clear divide remained between this

Mormon settlement and the home many of its residents left in Utah.

Far from being a permeable boundary, the border between the United States and

Mexico signified both freedom and confinement for many polygamous families that made

the crossing. Addressing the migrations that took place between the United States and

Mexico, the church issued a directive in April of 1890 requiring any family that intended to

practice polygamy in Mexico to remain in the country.80 While Woodmansee’s family was

afforded more freedoms and power than others due to her husband’s position as a leader in

79 Nelle Spilsbury Hatch, Colonia Juárez: An Intimate Account of a Mormon Village (Salt Lake City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1954), 131.80 Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 168.

45

the Mexican stake, she did not escape feelings of loneliness and regret at the separation

from both her husband, who traveled around Mexico, and her family back in the United

States. Years after her travel diaries left off, Woodmansee began a new diary in Mexico.

Beginning her diary on July 4th, 1896, she noted the absence of celebration in “old Mexico”

recognizing the United States’ independence.81

Lacking the “firing of canon at day break to remind us of our victory,” she assured

her reader that she would celebrate with a “frontier idea of pleasurey,” and “ha[d] a tea

party without the tea.”82 While an analysis of Mormon nationalism and citizenship in

Mexico would be appropriate in this context, time constraints relegate such topics to future

research. We can, however, see that Woodmansee missed her home in Utah, and like many

plural wives, abroad or otherwise, she had to deal with separation from her husband as he

spent time with his other wives, three in total by 1901. These feelings of loneliness

persisted in her writings, and by the time the second anniversary of her move to Mexico in

January of 1896 came and went, the romantic love that pushed Woodmansee to pursue her

plural marriage to Bentley and the bravery that sent her abroad during such a tumultuous

and pivotal time for the Mormon church, turned to doubt and fear.

Perhaps a product of this Manifesto generation of Mormon women who felt an

undue amount of pressure to decide how and where to move forward with their marriages

and their faith, Woodmansee’s motivation to follow through with her marriage to Bentley

ebbed the longer she remained in Mexico. The engagement she had kept secret throughout

her travels was no longer something to conceal in Mexico. The misconceptions she had

altered concerning the freedoms of Mormon women in their faith were no longer questions

81 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.82 Ibid.

46

to be answered in her current home. In their place, this lack of mobility, empowerment, and

even an access to the Mormon homeland became all the more apparent.

Acknowledging the struggle of Mormon women living as plural wives in the

tumultuous climate present by 1890, one Mormon woman wrote a published letter, “From

a Far Off Sister,” to her fellow saints, questioning the value of the pain and struggle felt by

plural wives as opposed to their monogamous “sisters”:

Many of us say, how thankful we are for every trial we have been called upon to pass through, and especially for the privilege of having lived in the ‘Celestial order or Marriage.’ But were we willing that each member be considered equal with ourselves?83

Though she went on to acknowledge the spiritual reasoning behind plural marriage,

practiced in order to reach a higher level of salvation in the afterlife, the feelings she

expressed of separation from the larger Mormon community are similar to those felt by

Woodmansee.

This shared experience of displacement present among plural wives forced to

relocate during the end of the nineteenth-century can be found in several other

publications inside the Woman’s Exponent. Married with the expectation of an everlasting

family, Woodmansee and other plural wives of the post-Manifesto generation sacrificed

temporal comforts to be reunited with their families in the afterlife. Nevertheless, the

regrets of a lifetime, expressed day-by-day in a diary, reiterate the daily struggles of

Mormon women who may have endured a lifetime of earthly remorse to live lives of faith.

As Woodmansee wrote in her final diary entry, “I almost repent that I went into polygamy…

I have suffered in my brief married life.”84 Such suffering in the absence of friends and

83 M.L.S., “From a Far Off Sister,” Woman’s Exponent, June, 15th, 1889, 1.

84 MSS SC 1882, LTPSC.

47

family made the earliest days and even years of relocation the hardest for divided families

to endure.

Chronicling a Mormon woman’s return to her family, one poem read:

I went back to the dear old homestead, After twenty long years had past,…But I found at length to my sorrow…I was merely a stranger,…And from the dear old place disheartened, I have turned to ramble no more.85

Above all, the biggest difference between Woodmansee’s engagement and her marriage

was the empowerment her temporary displacement provided her with. Traveling with her

fellow Mormons across the United States to Liverpool, among aquaintances and friends she

knew from her childhood, she was rooted, at least through her memories and conversation,

to her home and her community in Salt Lake City. Once married, however, Woodmansee

was tied to the practice of plural marriage and the weight that it place on her freedom to

travel and move freely in and out of United States. Traveling as she did to experience life

outside of Utah, Woodmansee’s biggest hurtle was not the dangers of travel but the

hardships faced by the sedentary, isolated life of a post-Manifesto plural wife.

85 L. M. Hewlings, “Turning Backward,” Woman’s Exponent, March 1st, 1890, 1.

48

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Bentley, Joseph T. Life and Letters of Joseph C. Bentley. Provo, Utah: Joseph T.

Bentley, 1977.

Crocheron, Augusta Joyce. Representative Women of Deseret: A Book of Biographical

Sketches to Accompany the Picture Bearing the Same Title. Salt Lake City, Utah: J.C.

Graham and Co., 1884.

“Forty-Two.” Millennial Star 51, May 13, 1889.

Gladys W. Bentley diaries and reminiscence. 19th Century Western and Mormon

Manuscripts, L. Tom Perry Special Collections. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young

University.

Hatch, Nelle Spilsbury. Colonia Juárez: An Intimate Account of a Mormon Village. Salt Lake

City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1954.

“Hephzibah, XXVIII.” Woman’s Exponent, September 15th, 1890.

Inez Knight Allen diary. 19th Century Western and Mormon Manuscripts, L. Tom Perry

Special Collections. Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

L. M. Hewlings. “Turning Backward.” Woman’s Exponent, March 1st, 1890.

M.L.S. “From a Far Off Sister.” Woman’s Exponent, June, 15th, 1889.

T.E. “The Girls” Woman’s Exponent, April 1, 1889.

49

Secondary Sources

Alexander, Thomas G. “Historiography and the New Mormon History: A Historians

Perspective.” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 19, no. 3, (Fall 1986): 25-49.

Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach and Lavina Fielding Andersen, eds. Sisters in Spirit: Mormon

Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois

Press, 1987.

Bradley, Martha Sonntag. “‘Hide and Seek’: Children on the Underground.” Utah Historical

Quarterly 51, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 133-53.

Brekus, Catherine A. “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency.” In Women

and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Kate Holbrook

and Matthew Bowman by, 15-41. Salt Lake City, Utah: University of Utah Press,

2016.

Brooks, Juanita. The Moutain Meadows Massacre. Tulsa: Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1950.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “Iowa City: 1856; Handcart Beginning.” The

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church History. Last updated on

September 26th, 2013. https://history.lds.org/article/pioneer-story-iowa-city?

lang=eng.

Dormady, Jason H. and Jared M. Tamez, eds. Just South of Zion: The Mormons in Mexico and

Its Borderlands. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2015.

Embry, Jessie L. Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle. Salt Lake City: Greg

Kofford Books, 2008.

50

Francaviglia, Richard V. The Mormon Landscape: Existence, Creation, and Perception of a

Unique Image in the American West. New York: AMS Press Inc., 1978.

Godfrey, Kenneth W., Audrey M. Godfrey, and Jill Mulvay Derr, eds. Women’s Voices: An

Untold History of the Latter-day Saints; 1830-1900. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book

Company, 1982.

Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in

Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,

2002.

Hardy, B. Carmon. Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage. Urbana, Illinois:

University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Harline, Paula Kelly. “Love Triangles: Mormon Polygamous Wives Write About Marriage

Relationships.” Master’s thesis, University of Idaho, 1989.

Hatch, Nelle Spilsbury. Colonia Juárez: An Intimate Account of a Mormon Village. Salt Lake

City, Utah: Deseret Book Company, 1954.

Iversen, Joan. “Feminist Implications of Mormon Polygyny.” Feminist Studies 10 no. 3

(Autumn, 1984): 505-22.

James, Kimberly Jenson. “‘Between Two Fires’: Women on the ‘Underground’ of Mormon

Polygamy.” Journal of Mormon History 8 (1981): 49-61.

Johnson, Walter. “On Agency.” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113-124.

Joseph, Gilbert M. and Jurgen Buchenau. Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution. Durham,

North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013.

Kunz, Calvin Seymour. A History of Female Missionary Activity in the Church of Jesus Christ

of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1898. Thesis, Brigham Young University, 1976.

51

Maki, Elizabeth. ‘They Can Bear Testimony, They Can Teach’: Pioneering Efforts of the First

Single Sister Missionaries.” The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Church

History. Last updated on July 17, 2012. https://history.lds.org/article/inez-knight-

missionary?lang=eng .

Meinig, Donald. “The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of

the American West, 1847-1964.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers

Vol. 55, No. 2 (June, 1965):191-220.

“Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act Law and Legal Definition.” U.S. Legal. Accessed on September 20,

2017. https://definitions.uslegal.com/m/morrill-anti-bigamy-act/.

Quinn, Michael D., ed. The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Past. Salt Lake

City, Utah: Signature Books, 1992.

Remini, Robert V. Joseph Smith. New York: Penguin Books, 2002.

Russel, William D. “Lifetime Achievement Award to Leonard J. Arrington.” The John

Whitmer Historical Association Journal (2002 Nauvoo Conference Special): 1-235.

Scott, Patricia Lyn and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher. “Mormon Women a Bibliography in

Progress, 1977-1985.” Journal of Mormon History 12 (1985): 113-27.

Shipps, Jan. “Review; Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah by Claudia L. Bushman.” The

Journal of American History 66, no.1 (1979): 143-44.

Smith, Jeffrey S. and Benjamin N. White. “Detached from Their Homeland: The Latter-day

Saints of Chihuahua, Mexico.” Journal of Cultural Geography 21, no. 2 (2004): 57-76.

Watt, Ronald G. and Kenneth W. Godfrey. “ ‘Old 42’: The British and European Mission

Headquarters in Liverpool, England, 1855-1904.” Mormon Historical Studies 10, no

1. (2009): 87-99.

52

Yorgason, Ethan R. Transformation of the Mormon Culture Region. Urbana, Illinois:

University of Illinois Press, 2003.

53

Appendix

1.

“An Unsightly Object – Who Will Take the Axe and Hew it Down?,” 1882, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2002713377/.

54

55