The chief goal of this book is to integrate Utah women of all ethnic and religious backgrounds into the broader field of women’s studies. Readers will find that these historical essays show women in Utah as sharing much with other American women, particularly in the West—in other words, as not unique. But they are also diverse and distinctive—in other words, not as expected.

The title Utah Women’s History: Paradigm or Paradox? recognizes the stereotypes normally associated with Utah’s largest group of women: Mormon, polygamous, Caucasian, under-educated, male-dominated, etc. On the one hand, Utah women are seen as a...

For many people throughout the world, the words Utah and Mormons automatically bring associations of polygamy even though members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have not officially practiced plural marriage for at least a century. I¹ realized this when I knocked on a door as a Mormon missionary in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1974. The man who answered the door asked, “Isn’t that the Church where you can have more than one wife? Would both of you be available?” Utah historian Thomas G. Alexander frequently reminds me that I should not be surprised by such comments,...

The story of the legal status of women in territorial Utah (1850–96) weaves together three historical strands: the expansion of women’s legal rights nationally, the liberalizing tendencies of frontier development, and most important, the necessity of protecting Mormon control and practices, including plural marriage, and ultimately defending them against the counter measures of the federal government. While influenced to varying degrees by the first two developments in American history, the third most clearly defined the focus of early Utah territorial law with respect to women.

Creating territorial law to support Mormon ideology and practice, particularly by providing a legal...

From the very beginning of its existence as a territory, Utah’s political, social, and economic life has been characterized by division along religious lines. Both perceived wrongs and real injustices exacerbated tensions between Mormons and Gentiles. Throughout the nineteenth century, the fledgling Mormon Church was targeted by preachers in the pulpit and politicians on the platform for its “un-American and un-Christian” beliefs. While Mormon communalism and theocracy was at the root of the antipathy toward the Saints, the most determined, strident—and public—opposition focused on the doctrine of plural marriage, or polygamy.¹

For women active in religious denominations, both...

Forty years after the Mormons entered the Salt Lake Valley and many centuries after the Anasazi Indians left traces in Utah’s varied terrain, immigrant women from the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and Asia began long fearful journeys that led them to Utah. They would not see Native Americans on far-off reservations, but perhaps they would pass an occasional African American woman on the streets. These newcomers were impelled forward by ancient needs to go beyond their current arduous existence in search of a brighter destiny. They were among a legion of women throughout the ages who left their homelands, willingly or...

“Household manager, cook, laundress, seamstress, dressmaker, nurse and teacher, to say nothing of the sacred duties of wife and mother: are these duties not sufficiently varied and important to require special preparation for their performance? In what other profession would an individual be allowed to practice without experience, without training or knowledge?”¹

The eighty-five farm women who heard Dalinda Cotey speak those words at the Farmers’ Institute held December 12, 1905, in Mount Pleasant, Sanpete County, no doubt appreciated this formal recognition of their many responsibilities as homemakers. It would be interesting to know their response to the rest of...

In the seventeenth century, women wage earners were primarily domestic servants. Following European traditions, American women did not usually hold land or have access to apprenticeships that could have provided skills leading to economic independence. Nevertheless, the idea of a man supporting his wife was not commonly accepted, for “husband and wife were … mutually dependent and together supported the children.” The colonial wife used her physical stamina to produce “household necessities and ply … her crafts and her plow beside a yeoman husband.”¹

In the change from an agrarian economy to a balance of farming and manufacturing in the...

“Come children, come. We will begin now.” With these words, tradition holds, sixteen-year-old Mary Jane Dilworth opened Utah’s first school with nine pupils on October 24, 1847, three months to the day after the first Mormon pioneers entered the valley of the Great Salt Lake. This event and the public exhortations of church leaders have been used to illustrate Mormon commitment to education. While Mormons valued education, territorial schools were not necessarily the “firm foundation upon which is built the present day system of education” in Utah.¹ Educational historian Frederick Buchanan found that Utah’s present public school system “cannot be...

In a Different Voice, Carol Giligan’s landmark study of psychological theory and women’s development, concludes that male voices typically speak “of the role of separation as it defines and empowers the self,” while female voices speak “of the ongoing process of attachment that creates and sustains the human community.”¹ Certainly the Utah community has been shaped in part by the networks women have built and maintained. Clubs and associations have enabled women to assume an important role in public life, at the same time providing them a means to educate and sustain each other. Surveying a century of Utah women’s...

All writers, no matter how imaginative their work, are affected to some degree by their environment; but defining those effects, positive or negative, creative or destructive, is always difficult and often impossible. Environmental effects can be paradoxical. Readily available patronage, for example, may result only in the proliferation of mediocrity, while thoroughly oppressive circumstances can produce a Dostoevski or a Dickens. Thus, while Utah’s unique cultural circumstances have produced a unique literary tradition, it is possible to define that gestative process only partially and dimly.¹

The harshness of frontier life, though poignantly present in early Utah, seems to have been...

While it has been true that Utah women have created art throughout the region’s history, the value that society has placed on their work has ranged dramatically. Navajo women fashioned some of Utah’s earliest and most beautiful blankets and baskets. During the nineteenth century, this work was conducted privately, away from the “public” world of commerce; and the work women produced in the private sphere of the home was not considered “real” work but part of a woman’s calling or role. Society considered artistic expression an appropriate female pursuit, in part because it enriched family life.

In the twentieth century,...

In November 2003, Olene Walker, Utah’s first woman lieutenant governor, made history again by becoming Utah’s first woman governor. She took over that position after Governor Michael Leavitt left the job to head the Environmental Protection Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Very popular with Utah voters, Walker intended to run for the position of the state’s chief executive in 2004, but she was ousted from the race by Republican delegates at their state convention—this after more than twenty years of public service.

Walker, like many women, entered politics through leading PTAs and women’s community organizations and through...

In the twentieth-first century, Utah women can see many examples that they can “have it all.” In public life, such examples include a woman governor, women who have served in the state and federal legislature, and women judges. Women are also successful business leaders, educators, entrepreneurs, and blue-collar workers. Professions that belong exclusively to women or men have apparently disappeared. As the chapters in this book have pointed out, there have always been outstanding women in many fields; but until recently, there was a pattern, or life script, that women were expected to follow and many Utah women accepted it....