Comments on: Interview: Terryl Givens and Richard Bushman, Part II

By: Times & Seasons » Scholarship versus dissemination

Times & Seasons » Scholarship versus dissemination — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 18:35:56 +0000

[...] at the great and spacious blog, Richard Bushman writes that “what I would hope for [in blogging] is more serious and focused [...]

By: J. Stapley

J. Stapley — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:52:21 +0000

Exactly what Kris said.

By: J. Nelson-Seawright

J. Nelson-Seawright — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:16:54 +0000

Ben, if we’re doing a general biography of Brigham Young, how can we think about not putting a central focus on his marriages? His teaching and practical leadership was fundamentally about plural marriage. Wouldn’t his marital experience be relevant to that? There is further work that needs to be done here; Brigham’s story is the story of America’s most famously polygamous man. Can we understand him without understanding his wives?

By: Matt B

Matt B — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:13:48 +0000

Ben – I think that what this means is that history should be less institutional, less focused upon the formal exercise of political power. These are spheres in which women have been traditionally marginalized, and to the extent that American history has been about presidents and generals it has been about men. Rather the history we write could more interested in the social, the cultural, the exercise of soft rather than hard power. If we think about slavery in terms of the Dred Scott decision and the Civil War, women are often absent; if we open our history and think about it in terms of a cultural and social debate as well as a political one, suddenly the Grimke sisters and Harriet Beecher Stowe become more central. Given that even presidents (such as McKay or Young) do not only exist in terms of the hard power of their office, thinking about their history as a gestalt requires us to think about people like Middlemass or Snow.

By: kris

kris — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 17:13:06 +0000

The challenge of creating an integrated LDS history lies partly in the structure of the church itself. Due to the fact that men are the conduit of revelation for the church and the idea that men hold all the important policy making positions, historians have been inclined to create a male interpretation of Mormon history. As Nate has noted, we are about 20 years behind in our intellectual framing of ideas. I have said elsewhere that the whole idea of the separate spheres paradigm was called into question in the late 80s/early 90s and I imagine we will slowly catch up. Such integrated history will percieve what happened to men and what happened to women as part of one larger picture, and "women's history" will be seen as one essential but not primary part of "doing history." Then historians will see both the men and women and the roles of each will be acknowledged and analyzed as part of a larger whole. One concrete way of thinking of this from my own perspective ... I've been thinking for the last week or so about the manifesto and men and women's reactions to it. Much is made of the role of Wilford Woodruff (as is appropriate) but what about Zina D.H. Young who was the General RS President of the time. She must have played a huge role in counselling women as to what they should do, and how to handle this huge transition in thought and practice. An integrated history of the manifesto would include both these perspectives. I have yet to see one, but then again, I've just started looking ...

By: Ben H

Ben H — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:56:22 +0000

Hm. I am in favor of paying more attention to the place of women in our "regular" history. I am wondering, though, would this in practice mean that we have to get accustomed to spending a lot more attention on what we would usually think of as people's personal lives, which we usually prefer to be discreetly reticent about? I mean, it is one thing to write about Brigham Young, or about one of his wives, and quite another thing to write about Brigham Young's wives as a part of your writing about Brigham Young. Don't you then find yourself writing about his marriages? and is that what we want to be saying--that our history should be much more personal?

By: Nate Oman

Nate Oman — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:54:06 +0000

“But feel free to absorb this ciscerally, if that works better for you(!)”

That is where I live…

By: Kristine

Kristine — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:24:20 +0000

Hmmm–that wasn’t quite fair; I don’t know if the seminars were merry, or if people were, in fact, giving a great deal of thought to how to include women in the story. I’m sure that at least Claudia was thinking about it :) !

By: Kristine

Kristine — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:20:11 +0000

Nate, I can think of a couple of examples (besides the obvious one of the church history summer seminars that went merrily along for a decade or so before anyone thought to give a nod to “women’s issues”).

One really good example, I think, is the way Greg Prince includes Claire Middlemiss in his McKay bio.–leaving her out because she was “just” a secretary, not related or married to any of the important men around her, would have been a huge mistake.

On the less good side, I think there have been plenty of things written about Joseph that neglect or trivialize Lucy Mack’s contributions to his character, plenty of articles about the succession crisis that make the mistake of viewing Emma as a tangent. And have you ever read anything about Brigham Young that does more than note in passing that he was married to 38 women, at least some of whom must have been interesting??!

Women’s histories can make the same mistake–for example, it’s got to matter that Eliza R. Snow was married to both Joseph and Brigham, but most treatments of ERS focus on her work in Relief Society without paying attention to her involvement with men. (We call her Eliza R. Snow, without noting that she referred to herself as ERSS (Eliza R. Snow SMITH) most of the time–there’s a pile of historical work to be done on that one initial!)

But feel free to absorb this viscerally, if that works better for you(!)

By: Nate Oman

Nate Oman — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:18:55 +0000

JNS: I don’t disagree. I am just trying to figure out what the kind of history that Kristine hankers after would look like in actual practice.