Harvard historian and Pulitzer-winning author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Tangible Things) is also the feminist and Mormon who coined the phrase "Well-behaved women seldom make history." A House Full of Females examines Mormon history from the perspective of the women who made the hard migration west, lived in plural marriages, built grassroots community organizations and achieved women's suffrage in Utah--decades before their daughters and granddaughters would be key in achieving it nationally.
Using the diaries, letters and even quilts of these women, Ulrich tells an impartial, complex story of many strong personalities who struggled to build new forms of private and community life. She writes that traditional versions of the religion's early history often leave out these women or reduce them to props and pawns; including them, however, humanizes the true story of the Mormon expansion and highlights the fundamental dependence of male preachers on the practical support of their wives and non-Mormon relatives. Plural marriage households were often a morass of dramatic emotions, "anger, ambivalence, confusion, instability and anxious acceptance." But when the federal government moved to ban polygamy and remove women's suffrage in Utah, Mormon women rose up in outraged protest, believing they had more choice and autonomy in their system than they would in the mainstream monogamous one. This expert and deeply researched history sheds new light on U.S. history in general as well as feminist and Mormon history in particular. --Sara Catterall