“Like the Utah and the ‘Mormon Problem,’
[home] is a subject that may be reflected upon,
talked of and written about, every day and by everybody,
and still be never lacking in general interest.”
—G.,
“Home,” The Woman’s Exponent,
vol. 1, no. 1, 1 June 1872, 8.
Concerns about “home”—what it should look like, what roles individuals should play within the home—occupy many pages of early issues of the Woman’s Exponent, a magazine published by and for LDS women from 1872–1914 (and the first magazine for and by women to be published west of the Mississippi). In fact, the question of “home” is, as anonymous writer G. notes in the first issue, a subject that may be discussed constantly without losing “general interest” (8). Although rhetoric about domestic spaces tends to be overlooked for explorations of public spaces that are deemed more important, domestic spaces—and the way writers talk about such spaces—can be illuminating: the way we talk about places shapes the way we understand them, and how we understand our roles in these places and in relationship to one another. Home, with its cultural and emotional resonances, is one of the most powerful spatial symbols we have, particularly for Western women who have defined themselves in relationship to this space.
In this essay, I look at how nineteenth-century members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons)1 understood home and how writers used the Woman’s Exponent to shape the material manifestations of home, imbue those spaces with meaning, and define women’s relationships within the home. More specifically, this paper examines these ideals of home in the first three years of the Woman’s Exponent (from 1872–1875). These early issues illuminate not only the first public efforts by LDS women to shape their domestic and public image, but also occur during the rise of home industry (a movement that began in the 1850s promoting the creation of commonly used products at home) and retrenchment. By the 1870s, many LDS women had moved beyond the first stage of survival homes—dugouts and log cabins—to a second stage incorporating the Eastern ideal of a kitchen separate from sleeping areas with a parlor (Beecher 279).
The Material Mormon Home
Mormon women, like their middle-class, white peers across the United States, were tasked with making a home. Though women were not responsible for the physical construction of such buildings, making a home included attention to the material aspects of the home and garden, as well as the emotional management of family members and the creation of routines that sustained the purpose of a home: the comfortable heart of domestic life and the source of repose for (primarily) the male breadwinner. As the incarnation of middle-class, American taste, the home was both a reflection of social class and an exhortation for women to assimilate to these ideals of class, gender, and national identity.
Drawing from popular domestic home manuals by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Sarah Josepha Hale, Jessica Enoch explains that nineteenth-century American women (mostly white) were “expected to conduct the home with gentleness, order, modesty, cheerfulness, selflessness, and peace” (39) and were responsible for the emotional and physical management of their homes. White, native-born, middle-class women were cautioned that leaving their homes to work would result in overall social moral decay in conversations that betray anxieties about policing the boundaries of gender, race, culture, class (Enoch 26). The home was a space where women performed their work, but also a place where gender was learned and reproduced (Massey 179).
The Physical Shape of the Home: House and Garden
A primary concern for LDS women in making a home was what the home should look like—the physical proportions and decorations, color schemes, and more. Perhaps the best illustration of the material aspects of a nineteenth-century middle-class home comes from “A Home of Our Own,” by Eliza S. Turner, a national Christian writer whose essay was reprinted from The Christian Union in the November 15 and December 1 issues of the Exponent in 1874. The Exponent editor, Louisa Greene Richards,2 adds a note encouraging readers to pay particular attention to this piece (93). Like many nineteenth-century domestic writers, Turner separates a home from a house: if the house is the external structure, home is those details that transform a mere shelter into a sanctuary (90). For Turner, ideal homes are economical, built to meet ordinary needs not extraordinary occasions, and should reflect the distinct tastes “of the civilized American of the nineteenth century” (90). The furnishings should be beautiful and natural, with “attention to forms and colors” rather than to “costliness of texture” (99) and chosen with an eye to the owner’s personality. Similarly, anonymous writer “G” suggests in the first issue of the Exponent the dire consequences for women who do not attend to the design of the home: “if taste and order be not carefully cultivated and observed, there will be no appearance of ease or comfort, and no enjoyment to be realized” (“Home,” 1 June 1872, 8). Accordingly, the Woman’s Exponent periodically offers advice on color harmony and flower arrangement (see 15 June 1874, 15, and 15 July 1874, 31 for examples).
Outdoor gardens were also seen as an extension of the ideal home: as Enoch notes, the mid- to late-Nineteenth Century witnessed a growing middle-class interest in “cottages,” a separate dwelling surrounded by a garden (37). Nineteenth-century Mormon women, like their non-Mormon contemporaries, saw gardens as a source of beauty, as well as a place for women to recharge and regain their good humor (“Gardens for Women,” 15 Aug. 1872, 46), and a wholesome source of exercise and discipline for women and children (“The Influence of Flowers,” 1 Mar. 1874, 147). The pseudonymous “Flora” (in reality Joseph R. Johnson3) writes that gardens help produce “that chastity of ideas, and that pleasing refinement of feeling, that gentleness of demeanor, that tenderness and love, which so much endears the child to its mother and friends” and recommends that mothers plant gardens with flowers and fruit “if [they] would rear [their] children uncontaminated with the vices and crimes learned in the street.” For Flora, gardens are an inextricable part of the ideal domestic life, apparently distinct from agricultural pursuits with a more masculine purview (“Home and Flowers,” 1 Dec. 1872, 102).
This concern with physical beauty extended from the house and gardens to women themselves: in an early “Household Hints,” the author (presumably editor Greene Richards) links woman’s appreciation of domestic beauty to her own dress:
The love of beauty and refinement belongs to every true woman. She ought to desire, in moderation, pretty dresses, and delight in beautiful colors and graceful fabrics; she ought to take a certain, not too excessive, pride in herself, and be solicitous to have all belonging to her well-chosen and in good taste . . . she ought to make herself conspicuous only by the perfection of her taste, by the grace and harmony of her dress, and unobtrusive good-breeding of her manners. (1 Mar. 1874, 150)
These notions of taste not only reflected middle-class ideals, but they also reflected the late nineteenth-century concern of the LDS church with “Retrenchment”—retrenching from excess in everything from table manners to dress to spiritual concerns (See 1 Sept. 1872, 54; 1 Mar. 1873, 147 for accounts of typical Retrenchment meetings).
The physical design of the home was also meant to promote healthy living. Turner writes that houses should have natural light in every room along with good ventilation (91; see also “Air,” 1 Nov. 1874, 84-85). For Exponent readers, health is explicitly linked to beauty: “Without health and happiness, beauty cannot exist” (“Household Hints,” 15 Dec. 1872, 107). Not surprisingly, then, women are encouraged in their domestic duties by the belief that “There is no exercise better calculated to assist in finely developing the female form than the various duties of housekeeping moderately and judiciously engaged in” (“Household Hints,” 15 Dec. 1872, 107). Housekeeping can make both the home and the body beautiful.
The physical design of the home was also viewed as aiding the emotional structuring of the home. Homes that were physically bright were more emotionally and spiritually illuminated as well: “Many a child goes astray not because there is want of prayer or virtue at home, but simply because home lacks sunshine” (“Flowers,” 15 May, 1874, 189). The dangers of a literally and figuratively cold and gloomy home were clear: “Make home attractive and pleasant and children will not desire to wander off to find enjoyment elsewhere” (G. “Home,” 1 June 1872, 8; see also Tanner, “A Christmas Dialogue,” 15 Dec. 1874, 105; P. A. M. “Love at Home,” 15. Jan 1874, 126; and “Home Feelings,” 15 Jan. 1874, 125).
The Emotional Shape of Home: Good Cheer and Routines
The burden of the cheerful home rested on the wife and was designed primarily for the comfort of other inhabitants, especially the husband. Women were to present “[a] smile, a gentle word of kindness, a tidy room and baby with a face clean enough to be kissed” to their tired husbands upon their return home from work (G, “To Make a Home Happy,” 15 Sept. 1872, 62). One weekly “Household Hints” goes farther, suggesting that nothing can compensate for the lack of cheer: “Whatever her other attainments may be, if a woman does not possess an even, well-governed temper, and agreeable disposition, she will not make a happy wife; for all other powers of mind and body . . . would fail to create the requisite sunshine for the rendering of a home cheerful and pleasant” (1 Nov. 1872, 82).
Proper routines supported the physical and emotional structure of the home. Women were encouraged to develop a system of organization to keep from becoming overwhelmed, and to assign chores to children (“Household Hints,” 15 Oct. 1872, 67). Turner encourages pairing routines with labor-saving devices, to make a home “easy to manage” (“A Home of Our Own,” 1 Dec. 1874, 98). Minimizing the drudgery of housekeeping was critical to creating a home, as it allowed a woman “time to labor as the true housewife, instead of the mere house slave; to use her forces in the higher kind of service for which she is, or ought to make herself competent” (98). Here, again, ideas of class shape homemaking and social roles by pitting the elevated “true housewife” against the “house slave,” suggesting that the real work of homemaking comes in managing the labor, not performing it.
But even as the domestic rhetoric in the Exponent seems to advocate a particular material and emotional dimension to the home, there are signs of resistance too. One “Household Hints” encourages husbands to help at home, noting that overwhelming housework can “throw a shade of anxiety over [a woman’s] countenance, and a secret depression will weigh upon her spirits” (1 Oct. 1872, 67). In “Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens,” Emmeline B. Wells, writing as Blanche Beechwood, encourages women to assist one another in their work, making the singular responsibility of a housewife a shared work, in what may also be an implicit reference to the work of sister-wives.
Still other authors argue for exercise, even play, outside of domestic routines. Lucinda “Lu” Dalton claims that housework alone provides insufficient exercise for girls (“Exercise for Girls,” 1 Mar. 1873, 131). In a later article, Dalton argues that too narrow a focus on the home is also a dereliction of a mother’s duty. Although her first duty is at home, a woman should balance work with other activities, including visiting the sick, socializing with others, attending concerts and lectures “and whatever means is within her reach to inform her mind, relax her nerves, and quicken her relish of life; for by these means she gives her children happy tempers, quick understandings, and healthy bodies” (“A Talk with the Sisters,” 15 May 1874, 191). The anonymous author of “Educate Yourself” (presumably editor Louisa Greene Richards) similarly argues that it would be “cruel to require of a child or a servant, all the time to be spent in work, with no chance for mental improvement. But working women, have, somehow, so arranged, or disarranged their work that, generally speaking, it is never done” (1 Oct. 1872, 69). These subtle challenges to domestic routines help set the stage for the cultural discourses of home that inform the work women do.
Cultural Discourses of Home: Zion, Home Industries, and Education
If the material and emotional shape of the 1870s LDS home looked much like their Gentile neighbors, the rhetoric that women used to understand those spaces differed in some significant ways: LDS women saw their home-building as part of a larger pursuit to build Zion, the spiritual and material kingdom of God on earth. For LDS women, connecting domestic work to Zion imbued that work with divine meaning and purpose. In “An Address,” Eliza R. Snow, then president of the Relief Society, frames women’s work as part of kingdom building: “We are here to perform duties, and to do our part towards establishing God’s kingdom. We, my sisters, have as much to do as our brethren have. We are to work in unison with them. . . . There is no sister so isolated, and her sphere so narrow, but what she can do a great deal towards establishing the Kingdom of God upon the earth” (15 Sept. 1873, 62).
Future Exponent editor Emmeline B. Wells makes this divine connection to home even more explicit: “Zion is our home, as well as our own fireside; we are brothers and sisters all; then let us be coworkers in our labor of love at home, and though we are not called upon to preach the Gospel to the nations, let us diligently and faithfully fill our home-sphere, using all the talents God has given us for the dissemination of truth and light” (“Home Work,” 15 Nov. 1873, 98). This analogy does two interesting things: it frames Zion, for women, as a larger scaled home (with the same duties of bearing and raising children and keeping house incumbent upon them) and it makes the work of home part of the broader work of building Zion.
Building Zion through Home Industries
Women were encouraged to build Zion through home industries that mixed the public and private spheres by encouraging financial independence through the sale and production of home-made goods. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher notes that the encouragement of home industries began in the 1850s but rose to increased prominence following the advent of the railroad in 1869, raising fears of dependence on foreign goods (283). Kari Main argues that despite the initial enthusiasm in resisting outside influences, many home industry cooperatives were still influenced by Eastern trends (199).
Multiple Exponent articles and speakers extolled the virtues of home industry, including straw manufacture, silk and honey production, and more. Snow links this work explicitly to the building of Zion: “We have no interests outside of the kingdom of God, and, as individuals, how much so ever we may accumulate of this world’s goods, we are only prosperous in proportion as Zion prospers. . . . [I] appeal to my sisters of the Relief Society . . . to call your mental and physical powers into action and lead out in establishing Home Industries” (“To Every Branch of the Relief Society in Zion,” 1 Apr. 1875, 164). Subsequent Relief Society Reports (see especially the April and May 1875 issues) reported on the success with various home industries, with one sister exulting, “Let us work for the good of the world, for the building up of the kingdom of righteousness” (Richards, “What are We Living For?” 15 Apr. 1875, 169).
Expanding Women’s Sphere through Education
To build Zion and cultivate home industries, women needed to expand their traditional roles through education. This rhetoric not only dignifies their work, but it helps extend the scope of women’s work was well. The first issue of the Woman’s Exponent argues that “There is a true dignity in labor” and describes the act of homemaking as an art (1 June 1872, 3). By moving away from women’s domestic work as intuitive (and untaught) labor, both LDS women and their middle-class contemporaries outside of Utah were able to claim a greater degree of education and professionalism for the work they performed; similarly, education was presumed to add interest to housework and reduce drudgery (Enoch, chapter 3).
This education unfolded on two fronts: first, women learned more about the science behind domestic work, including chemistry, physiology, and nursing. For instance, at a General Retrenchment Meeting in Salt Lake City in December of 1872, Sarah M. Kimball, the president of the Physiological class, educated women about physiology and encouraged women to undertake more study as it would help them become better nurses and mothers (15 Dec. 1872, 106; see also “Nursing the Sick,” 15 June 1873, 12). An 1875 article on “Cooking” argues for the professionalization of cooking and suggests that waste and ill health could be avoided if schools were put together to train women in housekeeping: “Cooking belongs to the sciences. Our girls . . . should study chemistry, physiology &c. And when they have thus learned how to properly compound the proper materials for a loaf of bread, cheerfully will they perform the task. But how can it be expected that a woman who is ignorant of these first principles shall cook intelligently?” (1 Mar. 1875, 149). Education was thus framed as an avenue for preparing better wives and mothers, whose work would be more interesting by virtue of their understanding.
Second, LDS women were also encouraged to pursue education beyond things that strictly applied to housework. In “Educate Yourself,” an anonymous writer (presumably Green Richards) writes, “Woman was designed to be something more than a domestic drudge; and it is not right for her to confine herself exclusively, to that monotonous calling, having no thoughts, no interests, hopes or prospects above and beyond so humble a sphere” (15 Oct. 1872, 69). Snow, in speaking to her fellow sisters, goes still farther in advocating for women’s education and linking that education specifically to her role in building Zion:
Here, outside the boundary of her domestic routine, woman has many sacred, important duties to perform, and a holy, purifying influence to wield. . . . How necessary, then, that the Latter-day Saint women—being called to act in a wider sphere, and with higher and more responsible duties devolving upon them, than all others—should be well informed on all subjects affecting the interests of humanity. (“Position and Duties,” 15 July 1874, 28)
This expansive role would require education, and LDS women were increasingly demanding the right to study not only at home, but at college.
The article “Education of Women” argues that there should be no bar to a woman attending college if she desires—or to aspiring to something beyond a wife and mother:
If there are branches of knowledge improper for women to learn or duties unfit to perform, they will know it a thousand times better than men, so give them their choice. If there be some women in whom the love of learning extinguishes all other love, then the heaven-appointed sphere of that woman is not the nursery. It may be the library, the laboratory, the observatory. . . . Does such a woman prove that perfect liberty of education unspheres woman? On the contrary it has enabled that woman to perceive exactly what God meant her to do. (1 Apr. 1873, 163)
Throughout the pages of the Exponent, women used this expansion of women’s traditional role to argue for education, interesting work, and equal pay for men and women (see also “Woman on Woman’s Needs,” May 1873, 180, and “Working Men and Working Women,” 14 May 1873, 187). And for those readers who worried that pursuing education (even vocations) would unfit women for their home duties, the Exponent records, “It has been the popular cry that no woman could be a good, true, loving wife and at the same time successfully follow any profession. If so, neither can a man do justice to any professional calling and prove a kind, affectionate, and considerate husband” (“Head versus Heart,” 15 Nov. 1874, 92).
The expansion of women’s roles and dignification of women’s work served to enhance the authority from which women spoke, especially from and about home. For the LDS women writing and reading the Woman’s Exponent, discourses about home helped them identify what characterized a “good” domestic woman and authorized them to expand their understanding and enactment of a good Mormon woman, as one who not only cared for her home and family, but who cared for her mind and spirit as well.
Relationships of Home: Wives and Mothers
Both the material shape and LDS discourses of home influenced LDS women’s understanding of their roles as women and as members of a family, and hence, their relationships to those around them. Their primary roles, in a domestic context, were as wives and mothers. While much of the understanding of these roles comes from nineteenth-century understandings of family roles, the polygamous practices of nineteenth-century Mormons necessarily challenged and shaped some of these understandings, though often in ways that were not explicitly stated in the pages of the Woman’s Exponent.
Like their counterparts in the Eastern United States, Mormon women largely understood their role as wives to be helpmeets for their husbands—while men provided financially for their family, women were to support their husband’s work, keep a comfortable home, and raise their children (“Household Hints” 15 May 1873, 171; see also Embry and Kelley). Emmeline Wells wrote that “Our fathers, husbands, and brothers, who are faithful, need all the help we can give them to buoy them up and cheer them onward in the path of duty” (“Self Improvement,” 15 Jan. 1875, 123). In this vision, a woman’s needs and goals are subordinate to those of her husband; she is to care for him emotionally and physically so he can provide for the family and “build up the kingdom.” This domestic comfort was sometimes painted as the most important thing a wife can offer a husband. In the essay “For Wives,” the author (possibly Greene Richards) writes, “Men grow sated of beauty, tired of music, and are often wearied of conversation, however intellectual; but they can always appreciate a well-swept hearth and smiling comfort” (15 Nov. 1874, 95).
Curiously, the Woman’s Exponent is largely silent about the role of wives in relationship to their sister wives or to their husband’s other children, despite the abundant defenses of polygamy (see Robbyn Thompson Scribner’s thesis). Mormon women were well-aware of national views about them and polygamy, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s pronouncement that polygamy was “a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and family” (qtd. Embry and Kelley 1). In the pages of the Exponent, LDS women passionately defend their integrity and their purity, with Wells, for example arguing that no unfaithful woman could handle the demands of polygamy (“Why, ah Why,” 1 Oct. 1874). But not much is said about the relationship to sister wives, except perhaps obliquely, as when Wells encourages women to support one another (“Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens,” 1 Mar. 1874, 146). Some of this may stem from the fact that most polygamous Mormon women had their own household (Embry and Kelley). Some of this may have been from a reluctance to expose the specifics of their lifestyles for prurient readers.
One of the frequently given rationales for polygamy was that it offered all women who wished it the opportunity to be a wife and mother (Ulrich). The Exponent occasionally pointed to the unbalanced numbers of men and women, and offered polygamy as a solution (see, for example, Nicolson, “A Statistical View of the Woman Question,” 15 Mar. 1875, 155). As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes, “Mormons still believed that every woman had not only the right but the obligation to choose her own husband” (131). Thus, while women’s roles were still subordinate, Mormon women believed that polygamy gave them some agency.
Even as the Exponent often confirms the role of women as wives, it occasionally pushes back on this as the primary relationship that defines women. Some essays reframed women’s primary relationships as friends and sisters. Ulrich suggests that some polygamous marriages were held together because of the commitment between women (234). Emmeline Wells, whose own experience with polygamy was sometimes painful (Madsen 5), encouraged women to be self-reliant and to depend more on one another:
Is there then nothing worth living for, but to be petted, humored and caressed, by a man? That is all very well as far as it goes, but that man is the only thing in existence worth living for I fail to see. All honor and reverence to good men; but they and their attentions are not the only sources of happiness on the earth, and need not fill up every thought of woman. And when men see that women can exist without their being constantly at hand, that they can learn to be self-reliant or depend upon each other for more or less happiness, it will perhaps take a little of the conceit out of some of them” (“Why, ah Why,” 1 Oct. 1874, 67).
This essay reframes the subordinate relationship of women, suggesting that they can (as Wells herself did) support themselves and stand independent from—if not equal to—their male partners.
Other Exponent authors argued more forcefully that even as wives women did not need to be subordinate to their husbands. One author, writing under the initials ENB, asks, “what is there in man that he should consider himself so much better than his better half! If he sprang from the Deity, did not woman also? If he is made of mettle like that the Gods are made of, is not woman made from the same? If he came from his Father’s loins, and was nurtured upon his Mother’s lap, what other place did his sister come from that she should be accounted so inferior to him?” (“Woman’s Rights,” 15 Jan. 1875, 122). Thus, even while confirming the subordinate relationship of women to men, domestic rhetoric in the Woman’s Exponent also opened up small spaces for resistance to that relationship.
The presence of children was an important defining element in women’s domestic role, because, as “The Childless Home” argued, no home was complete without children (15 Jan. 1875, 127). As with their husbands, women were responsible for the emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being of their children. The Exponent includes prolific advice to mothers, from everything from the nutritional needs of their children to the amount and kinds of exercise and sleep they should receive (“Play,” 15 Oct. 1873, 79; “Hints for Young Mothers,” 15 Sept. 1872, 63).4
But the primary relationship that women occupied in relationship to their children (and occasionally, toward one another), was that of teacher—a role that became increasingly feminized during the Nineteenth Century (Enoch 58). Women were to teach their children, particularly their daughters, about household chores (“Household Hints,” 15 June 1873, 11). But more importantly, women were to raise their children in the gospel and right morals (Wells “Home Work,” 1 Feb. 1874, 131, and “Our Daughters,” 1 Feb. 1874, 131; “The Duties of a Mother,” 15 Sept. 1872, 64; “Safeguards to Purity,” 15 Mar. 1874, 154). The failure of women as teachers was directly linked to increasing criminality among their communities (“And Murders Increase in the Land,” 1 May 1873, 184). Unsurprisingly, then, Eliza R. Snow, uses the teacher role to explain the role of women broadly among their communities: “All should feel the responsibility of being teachers, and seek to elevate the minds of all with whom they came in contact, teaching charity in its broadest sense; chastity, purity of thought, and economy” (1 Oct. 1873, 66).
In keeping with the idea that domestic rhetorics help reproduce a particular gender and class identity among women, women were also explicitly encouraged to teach others the art of homemaking. Wells writes that many of the convert women gathering to Utah “have never known what a real genuine home is. They have been compelled to work early and late in order to obtain even the common necessities of life; consequently, they know nothing about instructing their children at home. Here in Zion, if they are industrious, they will get homes of their own . . . and is it not our duty to assist them in this work of improvement?” (“Home Work,” 15 Nov. 1873, 99). As Enoch points out about similar efforts of upper-middle class white women to educate immigrant women in domestic sciences, this belief that immigrant mothers “know nothing” relies on classist assumptions about what makes a good home and a good mother (76).
Domesticating the West
Just as discourses about home helped women understand (and expand) their place in nineteenth-century Mormon communities, these discourses also operated on a larger scale to help them understand their role in the nineteenth-century American West. As literary scholar Amy Kaplan (among others) has noted, nineteenth-century discourses of domesticity paralleled nationalist discourses of Manifest Destiny to suggest the important role of women in civilizing and domesticating not just their home, but the nation. Westward expansion was largely justified because it would enable men and women to settle new regions and bring with them civilized and Christianized values. While men were crucial to the physical conquest of these regions, it was women who were to enact the moral and spiritual conquest, in large part by building homes and gardens and bringing with them “civilized” (i.e., upper and middle-class Western European/American) values.
Much of the discussion of home in the Exponent focuses on narrow domestic concerns, but the rhetoric of domesticity is also used to provide Mormon women with a narrative to understand their role in settling the American West. For nineteenth-century Mormon women, their vision of Zion was rooted in a particular place, “the valleys of the Rocky Mountains of America” (Snow, “Salutation to the ladies of Utah,” 1 Aug. 1873, 36). This place was understood as a divinely mandated “promised land” and a spiritual refuge/retreat from the outside world. The landscape was made habitable not only by the physical efforts of the saints to build comfortable homes and cultivate fields, but by the rhetorical figuration of that landscape as a “mountain home.”
Understood purely as a sublime and sacred space, these mountains were not necessarily inviting or habitable for women. Despite a long religious and literary tradition depicting prophets and visionary men at home in the wilderness, the rugged nature of the mountain West has often been seen as inimical to women (Comer). For men, this sublime landscape becomes a site for communion with God and/or nature—but for women, parallel divine communion most often has to come in domesticated and enclosed spaces. Annette Kolodny’s study of women’s literary representations of the West demonstrates the way women found their place in strange landscapes by figuring the landscape in domestic terms, most often as a garden. For Mormon women to inhabit their own spiritually-endowed landscape, they had to first domesticate it.
This concept of Utah as a “mountain home” appears as a common refrain, particularly in the poetry in the Women’s Exponent. For example, Lucinda “Lu” Dalton, published her poem “Our Mountain Home” in 1874:
We came into the mountain land all travel-stained and worn
But thankful to our fathers’ God who gave us thus a home;
And here we dwelt, contented well, from all the world apart,
In a land once thought a barren wild, completely desolate.
But Labor has a potent charm to make the desert smile,
Change desolation into bloom and barrenness beguile.
Neat little villages spring up beneath its magic sway,
Contentment and prosperity attend its happy way.
(CHORUS): Then cheer again for Utah! the land we love so well;
Thanksgiving for our Mountain Home in truthful numbers swell;
It is the home our God has given where we in peace may dwell. (15 Sept. 1874, 58)
While it can be illuminating to study what discourses of home reveal about nineteenth-century Mormon women, it can be just as illuminating to look at what is not said. For all that Utah was still considered a frontier territory in the 1870s, readers would never know that from the Exponent pages—references to early settlements, rough lodgings, encounters with Native Americans (the typical trappings of frontier narratives) are almost entirely missing, except as part of a narrative about the past. Here, in Dalton’s poem, Utah is figured as a refuge, a desert redeemed by labor and God’s blessing, and, finally, a home. In this passage, LDS readers are reminded of their founding narrative of persecution followed by redemption, a narrative rooted in (and manifested by) the landscape itself. By thus domesticating the landscape, Dalton (and others) helped render it habitable by Mormons, particularly the women. (There is little to no acknowledgement of the way this habitation displaced Native Americans, making them essentially homeless).
The discourse of a “mountain home” unites the spiritual significance of the mountains with the domestic terrain that formed the distinct purview of nineteenth-century women. Discourses of home allow nineteenth-century LDS women to suggest that women are crucial to the project of domesticating the West and kingdom building. Similarly, the domestic refrains of a “mountain home” suggest that women’s unique spiritual gifts can contribute to the building of a spiritual kingdom.
Conclusion
Women’s writing in the first three years of the Woman’s Exponent creates a shared understanding of home—material, spiritual and emotional, and relational—based on a broader white, middle-class American conception of home. Such homes were to be light, attractively decorated, and filled with cheerful, industrious bodies. But the guides to homemaking were not just about the material shape of the home; the discourses surrounding the home endowed home-work with meaning and served an exhortative function—asking women to identify with the ideal housewife described in the pages and following the directives of homemaking. For LDS women, these discourses placed the making of homes as part of kingdom building, and the spiritual significance of that work also allowed them to advocate for women’s education.
Most feminist rhetorical and historical studies focus on women’s civic participation (Enoch 178), and while it can be helpful to understand the ways that women challenged and changed public forums, we also need to understand the ways in which women challenged and changed private spaces. For most LDS women, the home was the well-spring of their spiritual identity, and the physical and emotional demands of the home structured their days. Without attending to these discourses, we risk missing some of the challenges and richness that inflected their lives. More than that, these rhetorics of home still inflect and shape the expectations of Mormon women in the twenty-first century, and understanding how women both supported and resisted those ideals can inform the ways women both support and resist those ideals today.
Rosalyn Eves is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women’s rhetoric, spatial rhetorics, and public memory. In addition to articles in Rhetoric Review, Legacy, and various edited anthologies, she has published several young adult novels with Knopf/Random House, including Beyond the Mapped Stars, a historical coming-of-age story about a young Mormon woman on the eve of the 1878 eclipse.
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Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. “Women’s Work on the Mormon Frontier.” Utah Historical Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3, Summer 1981, 276-290.
Bennion, Sherilyn Cox. “Lula Greene Richards: Utah’s First Woman Editor.” BYU Studies, no. 21, vol. 2, 1981, 1-16. https://byustudies.byu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/21.2BennionLula-935701e0-8522-42b9-bc5f-324a71e3933a.pdf
Comer, Krista. Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1999.
“Cooking.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 19, 1 Mar. 1875, 149
Dalton, Lucinda Lu. “A Talk with the Sisters.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 24, 15 May 1874, 191.
—. “Exercise for Girls.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 17, 1 Feb. 1873, 131.
—. “Our Mountain Home.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 8, 15 Sept. 1874, 58.
“Education of Women.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 21, 1 Apr. 1873, 163.
“Educate Yourself.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 9, 1 Oct. 1872, 69.
Embry, Jessie L., and Lois Kelley. “Polygamous and Monogamous Mormon Women: A Comparison.” In Women in Utah: Paradigm or Paradox? Edited by Patricia Lyn Scott and Lynda Thatcher. Utah State UP, 2005. 1-35.
ENB, “Woman’s Rights.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 16, 15 Jan. 1875, 122.
Enoch, Jessica. Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work. Southern Illinois UP, 2019.
Flora (Joseph R. Johnson). “Address on Behalf of the Twenty-Four Young Ladies,” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 6, 15 Aug. 1872, 45.
—. “Home and Flowers.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 13, 1 Dec. 1872, 102.
“Flowers.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 24, 15 May 1874, 189.
“For Wives.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1874, 95.
“Gardens for Women.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 6, 15 Aug. 1872, 46.
“Home.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 1, 1 June 1872, 8.
—. “To Make a Home Happy.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 8, 15 Sept. 1872, 62.
“Head versus Heart.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1874, 92.
“Hints for Young Mothers.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 8, 15 Sept. 1872, 63.
“Home Feelings.” (Attributed to RNY). Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 16, 15 Jan. 1874, 125.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 2, 15 June 1872, 15.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 9, 15 Oct. 1872, 67.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 11, 1 Nov. 1872, 82.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1872, 91.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 14, 15 Dec. 1872, 107.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 22, 15 May 1872, 171.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 2, 15 June 1873, 11.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 19, 1 Mar. 1874, 150.
“Household Hints.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 1, 1 June 1874, 6.
Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” No More Separate Spheres! Spec. issue of American Literature, vol. 70, no. 3, 1998, 581-606.
Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. U of North Carolina P, 1984.
Main, Kari, “Pursuing ‘The Things of This World’: Mormon Resistance and Assimilation as Seen in the Furniture of the Brigham City Cooperative, 1874-88.” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter 2001, 191-212.
Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
Nicolson, Clara. “A Statistical View of the Woman Question.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 20, 15 Mar. 1875, 155.
“Nursing the Sick.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 2, 15 June 1873, 12.
A. M. “Love at Home.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 16, 15 Jan. 1874, 126.
“Play.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 10, 15 Oct. 1873, 79.
Richards, Rhoda, “What are We Living For?” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 22, 15 Apr. 1875, 169.
“Safeguards to Purity.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 20, 15 Mar. 1874, 154.
Scribner, Robbyn Thompson, “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Formation of Collective Identity: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Women in Praise of Polygamy,” Brigham Young University, master’s thesis, 1998. Theses and Dissertations. 5097. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/5097
Snow, Eliza R. “An Address.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 8, 15 Sept. 1873, 61.
—. “To Every Branch of the Relief Society in Zion.” The Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 21, 1 Apr. 1875, 164-5.
—. “Positions and Duties.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 4, 15 July 1874, 28.
—. “Salutations to the Ladies of Utah.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 5, 1 Aug. 1873, 36-7.
Tanner, Mary J. “A Christmas Dialogue.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 14, 15 Dec. 1874, 105.
Turner, Eliza S. “A Home of Our Own.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1874, 90-91; also no. 3, vol. 13, 1 Dec. 1874, 98-99.
“The Childless Home.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 16, 15 Jan. 1875, 127.
“The Duties of a Mother.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 8, 15 Sept. 1872, 64.
“The Influence of Flowers.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 19, 1 Mar. 1874, 147.
Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870. Vintage, 2017.
Wells, Emmeline B. (writing as Blanche Beechwood). “Bear Ye One Another’s Burdens.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 19, 1 Mar. 1874, 146.
—. “Home Work.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1873, 98-99.
—. “Our Daughters.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 17, 1 Feb. 1874, 131.
—. “Self Improvement.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 16, 15 Jan. 1875, 123.
—. “Take Care of the Boys.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 2, no. 12, 15 Nov. 1873, 94.
—. “Why, ah Why.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 3, no. 9, 1 Oct. 1874, 67.
“Woman on Woman’s Needs.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 23, 1 May 1873, 180.
“Working Men and Working Women.” Woman’s Exponent, vol. 1, no. 24, 14 May 1873, 187.