A House Full of Females

November 14, 2016
Pulitzer-winner Ulrich (A Midwife’s Tale) gives readers a day-to-day look at the hardships early Mormons endured as pioneers and religious outlaws but also takes a broader view of longer-term changes in the religion. The book opens dramatically with Mormon women being granted the right to vote, joining Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony’s crusade for women’s suffrage, and protesting an 1870 law ending polygamy. They acted out of patriotism, religious zealousness, and the belief that their church offered more equality than in the Gentile world—even though Brigham Young’s leadership was less inclusive than Joseph Smith’s and plural marriage had become a de facto requirement for the powerful. Still, women maintained the right to choose their spouses, and could also choose whether to be sealed to them for eternity. Impeccable scholarship and a fascinating topic suffer somewhat from the book’s organization. Each chapter moves ahead chronologically, but Ulrich also frequently jumps out of sequence, and because she writes about a fair number of people, many of whom have similar names, the problem multiplies. The author takes no view herself on the practice of plural marriage and simply presents history as it occurred, although in her acknowledgments she writes, “I did not find it odd that my father had both a grandmother... and a ‘Grandma on the hill.’ ”