Feminism, Theology, and the Personal in American Studies

I find it wonderful that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s achievements in early American studies and women’s history are being celebrated by Marion Rust in “Personal History: Martha Ballard, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and the Scholarly Guise in Early American Women’s Studies,” and perhaps even more wonderful to see them celebrated in connection with Ulrich’s identity as a Mormon feminist. It has meant something to our often misunderstood and sometimes embattled Mormon feminist movement to know that the Pulitzer Prize– winning historian of American women’s experience and author of the feminist bumper sticker and tote-bag-adorning phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” was one of us: an affirmation that Mormon feminism was not an oddly improbable splinter group of the real women’s movement to be regarded with curiosity if not suspicion by mainstream feminism, but, as Laurel herself has argued in “Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism,” somewhere decidedly closer to the movement’s living core. Laurel’s graceful and understated but powerful presence and tremendous accomplishments in these multiple worlds have helped affirm to all of us in Mormon feminism that what may seem improbable or even accidental to others is no accident at all. In honoring her work we affirm our sense as women, as feminists, and as Mormon feminists that our lives are rich with meaningful and beautiful connections that reveal themselves if we pay attention and care for them.

That apparent contradictions and accidents in human experience are imbued with the sacred possibility of meaning seems to me an article of faith basic not only to the lives of people of faith in general and Mormons in particular—as Laurel and I both are—but also to the lives of humanities scholars. In tracing out the connections between Laurel’s distinguished scholarly career and her “lifelong quest to reconcile her Mormon faith and her feminist convictions,” Rust does American studies a service by encouraging its practitioners to reflect on “our own ways of conducting scholarship” and perhaps thereby to arrive at a more conscious approach to our own work and its purposes (152). Laurel is gracious enough to credit important scholarly discoveries to “accident,” but this says more about her understated and pragmatic nature than it does about the truth of how work gets done (qtd. in Rust 151). None of us goes to the archive without purpose, no matter whether the outcomes are discovery or disappointment. In a moment when the professional humanities needs to define and redefine its purposes, it seems like a good time for all of us to articulate more clearly what we expect to gain and what we expect others to gain by our work.

What Rust sees in Laurel’s career of scholarly tending to the historic lives of American women is a continuity with the forms of women’s work and women’s handicraft that Laurel has always acknowledged through her scholarship: in Rust’s words, an honoring through care of the “simultaneous immensity and fragmentation” of human experience as it expresses itself in “mundanities” of daily life and “cumbersome states of being” (160, 161). I think this is a profound insight and one that resonates deeply with me. Just last month, at a Mormon feminist retreat in New Hampshire—Laurel is one of the historic retreat’s founding mothers, of course—I compared the work of assembling a scholarly anthology of Mormon feminist writing to needlepoint. That’s the handicraft I know best—I learned it from my Utah-born Mormon grandmother—and that’s what I always think of when I’m doing the curiously physical fine-pointed work that transcription, annotation, and other editorial tasks entail. Honoring through care and bringing coherence to the immensely meaningful fragments of experience suspended in the mundanity of time is a purpose shared by women’s work and humanities scholarship alike.

Rust connects this work to the gendered idea of “roles” that come to us by “circumstance”—as gender itself often does—but which we play with grace and purpose nonetheless. This is one way of understanding the role...