Time: Friday, March 12, 9:00 a.m.
Location: South Assembly room
Moderator: Rachel Cope
Presenters:
- 9:00 Lisa Tait, University of Houston
Susa Young Gates, the ‘Young Woman’s Journal,’ and the Parameters of Female Literary Ambition in 1890s Mormondom
- 9:35 Nancy Gunn, Brigham Young University
‘The Young Women’s Journal’: The Vision and Voice of Susa Young Gates
- 10:05 Jill Mulvay Derr, Church History Library; Karen Lynn Davidson, Joseph Smith Papers; Cherry B. Silver, Brigham Young University
Eliza R Snow: The Complete Poetry
In the nineteenth-century, it was tricky for ambitious women to find a balance between the public sphere and the private sphere.
Many nineteenth-century women wrestled with this dichotomy of longing to please the Lord by expressing their religious convictions while also fearing they should not do so. As noted in these insightful presentations about Susa Young Gates and Eliza R. Snow, a number of women saw literary means as a legitimate way to gain a religious voice, therefore enabling them to grapple with their relationship to the wider world and to engage in self-discovery. By writing, they transcended the notion of separate spheres: they were sisters, daughters, mothers, wives, and friends, but they were also creators of culture, revealers of truth, and emissaries of the gospel.
The first two papers in this session considered the literary ambitions of Susa Young Gates. One examined the manner in which the Young Woman’s Journal reflected the larger literary culture of the era, while the other contended that Gates created the journal to help young women remain free from worldly influences. Consequently, the two papers complemented one other: each made it clear that Gates modeled and wrote about how one could be in the world, but not of it.
Lisa Tait’s presentation focused on Gates’s role in founding the Young Woman’s Journal, a work that proved to be both a “literary enterprise and a personal project.” Tait insightfully connected the development of the Mormon literary culture at the end of the nineteenth century to the emergence of the culture of letters that was occurring nationally. Tait argued that Gates, as an editor and as an author, helped set the tone for cultural conversations in Mormondom. Indeed, she legitimated her personal ambitions by channeling them through her religious commitment.
Nancy Gunn likewise provided an overview of the founding of the Young Woman’s Journal. Gates envisioned a periodical that would highlight and explore four important themes: physical beauty and hygiene, spiritual strength, education and mental awareness, and domestic science skills. By elaborating on these fundamental areas, Gunn contended that Gates reminded Mormon women of the importance of cultivating innocence amid awareness.
The final presentation by Jill Mulvay Derr, Karen Lynn Davidson and Cherry B. Silver provided insight into the life and poetry of Eliza R. Snow, who laid an important foundation for later female authors in Utah, including Gates. Silver asked Derr about the topic of politics in Snow's poetry. From a young age, Snow kept abreast of political topics. Her experiences as a Latter-day Saint also influenced this interest, especially in response to persecutions and the problems with Utah's territorial status. Snow’s poetry repeatedly emphasized her love of liberty and of country, even though she disapproved of many actions by federal and state officials. Davidson then compared and contrasted Snow’s work with that of nineteenth-century sentimental poets, who dealt with home, hearth, children, domestic life, and religion. Snow's work went far beyond the sentimental poetry of her day by explicating theology and discussing the divine roles of men and women. According to Davidson, Snow's best poems were written in iambic pentameter, and these often weren't published until after her death.
