Think how often the scriptures describe Zion – the land and the people – in feminine terms: “For Zion must increase in beauty and in holiness; her borders must be enlarged; her stakes must be strengthened,” ((Doctrine and Covenants 82:14.)) “For the Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord,” ((Isaiah 51:3.)) “And the Lord will create upon every dwelling-place of mount Zion, and upon her assemblies, a cloud and smoke by day and the shining of a flaming fire by night,” ((2 Nephi 14:5.)) and “I say unto you that Zion shall flourish, and the glory of the Lord shall be upon her; and she shall be an ensign unto the people, and there shall come unto her out of every nation under heaven.” ((Doctrine and Covenants 64:41-42.))
Women have been actively involved in building Zion, and we have a wealth of published material telling us their stories. Much of that takes the form of biography, books and articles focused on the lives of individual women, or collected biography like Women of Faith or Mothers of the Prophets. We have histories of the Relief Society, like Women of Covenant and Daughters in My Kingdom. We have articles in our Church magazines, and papers in our scholarly conferences and journals. We have a growing collection of new stories, historical and contemporary, in the “Women of Conviction” series at history.lds.org.
What we don’t have is a history of the Church itself that incorporates the contributions of Latter-day Saint women to any significant extent. The active, achieving, contributions of women are largely reported as the history of women, segregated from the history of the Church itself.
It’s time to change that.
I want to write a one-volume narrative history of the Church that paints, in an unmistakable way, the constant influence of Latter-day Saint women on the course of Church history. To reflect the feminine element of Zion, the history bears the title She Shall Be an Ensign.
This is not a history of women in the Church – it is a history of the Church, told through the lives of women. As far as possible, every character in the book will be a woman, or will be a man viewed through the eyes of a woman.
She Shall Be an Ensign will not denigrate men, or remove prophets and apostles from their necessary and revered place in directing the Church. What it will do is give a new focus on the overlooked or underappreciated contributions of women.
Sometimes that will mean merely shifting the point of view: In the Kirtland era, I’ll show Elsa Johnson asking and receiving a healing blessing from Joseph Smith. He’ll do the healing, but Elsa will be an active agent in seeking that healing.
Sometimes that will mean selecting a woman’s story when the story of either a man or a woman would do: To personalize the overland trek of the pioneers, we’ll follow the experiences of a woman.
Sometimes that will mean recognizing that alternative narratives are just as valid as the traditional ones. When we tell the story of the Utah War, for instance, the traditional telling follows the soldiers into the hills to harass the federal troops. That was an important element of the story, certainly … but when you’re telling the story of Zion, the story of the women who were chiefly responsible for going into the fields and bringing in the crucial crop of 1857 is at least as important. The men’s contribution will still be there, but muted; women and their work will take center stage.
Sometimes that will mean filling in the gaps of familiar stories. When a wife or mother made it possible for a man to fill an active role in Church history, we’ll give some indication – beyond “standing by” her man – of what that woman did to support her prophet-husband or missionary-son.
A 1:04-minute video, made with the assistance of friends, will give you a little better sense of what I have in mind. (Right now, that link takes you to a Google drive; as soon as I can conquer a technical problem or three, hopefully today, I’ll embed that video in this post.) As you’ll probably discern, the tone for She Shall Be an Ensign will be the same tone used here on Keepa: a friendly, accessible style, one that takes seriously the faith of the Latter-day Saints, without being overly preachy.
And yes, it’s artificial to present the history of the Church with such a sharp focus on women. Most of us don’t think twice when a Church history is told overwhelmingly from the masculine point of view, though, and we don’t call that a gimmick. She Shall Be an Ensign will show how the stories of women can be incorporated into the broader Church history, paving the way for other writers to acknowledge women’s presence in a more natural way.
Some of the women who will appear in She Shall Be an Ensign will be familiar to anyone generally familiar with Church history. Others will be known only to Keepa readers – you will have seen their stories here before. But even more, I suspect, will be unfamiliar to virtually everyone – these women may make only a brief appearance on the stage of Church history, but their actions at that one moment were either crucial ones, or were typical of the broader experiences we usually tell through stories of more easily found men.
She Shall Be an Ensign will be privately published in both e-book and print versions, with professional editing, page design, and artwork. To pay for those professional services and the costs of book production, shipping, and other expenses, and to make it possible for me to focus nearly full-time on writing for a few months, I am launching a Kickstarter – going live tomorrow – which has been planned in consultation with supporters who have helped me refine the project and estimate expenses. I’ll post that link as soon as it goes live.
I hope you’ll support the Kickstarter. A pledge of even $10 will secure you a copy of the e-book, and there will be other “thank you” gifts for other pledges. As you may know, a Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing proposition: if I fall short of the goal by ever so small an amount, none of the pledges will be charged, and I won’t be able to write the book. If funded, the book will be available before Mother’s Day 2016.
I will necessarily need to make occasional announcements, here on Keepa, on the new She Shall Be an Ensign Facebook page (it’s live now – you can “like” and follow it immediately), and on other social media platforms that will roll out this week. I promise you, though, to keep the groveling-for-dollars to a minimum: If you follow that Facebook page (please do!) or any of the other media, the updates will serve mainly to bring you inside the project: I’ll post pictures, quotations, and brief stories to give you some of the flavor of the book. When you see something you like, it will be easy for you to support the project by sharing that tidbit with your own networks – that will be a huge contribution of support, by introducing She Shall Be an Ensign to audiences beyond those I can easily reach myself.
Gentlemen Keepa’ninnies: This book and project are not only for women, you know. A history like this one will make it easier for you to incorporate new stories into your own knowledge, and into your teaching at home and in Church: When the contributions of women are incorporated naturally and fully into the broad history of the Church, not walled off in some sort of women’s history ghetto, you will be able to tell these stories as the history of the Latter-day Saints, not as something borrowed from the Relief Society cupboard.
She Shall Be an Ensign will be the book I would have liked to have read as a young woman, one that showed me the kind of woman I wanted to be, with an active role in history, making a positive contribution to the Church, not just standing by and waiting for something to happen. Let’s give that kind of history to the rising generation of girls and young women – and enjoy it ourselves, too.
The “She Shall Be an Ensign” series:
Women as Actors in Church History
Addendum
Wicked Witches
Damsels in Distress
The Princess in the Tower
The Heroine’s Journey
The History of the Church Told through the Lives of Its Women
Oooh! I really hope this works, because I want to read that.
Thanks, JeannineL!
I think this could be a huge game-changer. Not only would it be a wonderful book, it would be a really helpful resource for every history that comes after it. I have a feeling that once there’s a popular history where women outnumber men in the index, it will be hard for future writers to go back to the old days when it was okay to just call Alice Elsa Johnson “Mrs. John Johnson” and move on. The book would challenge other books to do better, and give their writers a quick crash course in how to manage it.
So exciting.
Absolutely Fantastic!
Ardis, I am so glad that YOU are writing this book. I know that it will be wonderful.
Great idea! I look forward to seeing it, Ardis.
Thank you, James and andrew and David and Alan, and for all the enthusiasm for this project on Facebook, too. It took Keepa’s Facebook page months to build the following that this project has won in just four and a half hours.
Your reassurance that this is a wanted project means more than you know.
This is wonderful! I’m so happy that you’re doing this, Ardis!
Wonderful!
I’m really excited for this, Ardis, and can’t think of anyone better suited to pull it off.
I’m already making a list of people I would give the book to starting with my own children. LOVE this idea Ardis!
Thank you, Edje and Christopher. I’ve already told JJohnson that her post at JI a couple of years ago first started me thinking about women in the context of a general Church history.
Ziff, you’ve supported me in more ways than one. Thank you.
Montserrat, I’m glad! One of the Kickstarter rewards for pledging at a certain left is a “gift pack” of five copies (with a bonus that will show up on the Kickstarter page tomorrow) just to make it easier to give copies. Your comment gives me hope that that will be a popular idea.
Revolutionary! So exciting!
Waiting anxiously for the Kickstarter to start tomorrow!
This is very important. I’ll proudly support you all I can.
Looking forward to it. And, yes, I’ll contribute.
So glad to see this get started. And who better than you to do it. Now that I am back from the holiday weekend, I will like the Facebook page, and make a contribution.
I’m really looking forward to this, Ardis.
A thousand times “like”!!!!
What an important step in exactly the right direction! Kudos for starting a new movement!
At last! Now I don’t have to keep this to myself any longer. Congratulations and carry on. You can do it.
This sounds like an ambitious and worthwhile project, with an extremely ambitious timeline!
(Maybe this will be successful enough it will prompt a second book focusing on the Relief Society, perhaps what “Daughters in My Kingdom” should have been.)
Can’t wait to read it!
can there be a 3-book reward level for $75? That way I’m buying one for myself and for my mother and MIL next year for mother’s day?
Kristine, I’ve had a couple of similar inquiries. I can’t alter the reward system that is in place right now — against Kickstarter rules — but perhaps when we start adding “stretch goals” (I really hadn’t planned on those, not expecting such marvelous support from so many), the option of increasing an existing pledge for one copy to a new pledge for less-than-five copies could be part of that. Not yet having talked to my advisers or planned for stretch goals, though, I don’t know what I can promise today.
Ardis,
This is a truly great idea. I’ve long enjoyed your writing for many reasons but most especially for its clarity, humor, and insight. I am excited to see you undertake such an opus. These women’s voices are in good hands. Going to pledge now.
I love this. Years ago I wrote a novel about Abish, from the Book of Mormon, and took they whole middle section of Alma from a woman’s perspective. It was a fascinating exercise in deeply understanding the Book of Mormon, but considering new ideas as well. I remember thinking about how vulnerable and terrified the women would have felt when their men laid down their weapons and then many, ultimately, their lives. Even in their faith, were they angry? Bitter? Accepting? Challenged? These wives and daughters then fled and became refugees in a strange land, giving up everything they had known. Their husbands having the (perhaps) easy decision to die for the gospel, but the wives then having to make the hard decision, every day, to live for the gospel and raise their children in righteousness, as single mothers. I’m so grateful that Mormon included Abish, for the thread of her story follows straight through to the mothers of the sons of Helaman.
Godspeed in your endeavor. It is worthy. It is our history too. It is time that we stand up and be counted.
What a great project, ScienceTeacherMommy! Such an interesting thought experiment.
Is your novel published? I’d love to read it.
How are you planning to cover controversial topics like polygamy? If you include it, will you represent womens’ opinions on all sides – such as Emma who fought it as pres. of the R.S., those who chose to live it and those who chose not to live it? Will you share the stories of prominent women like Zina Huntington Jacobs, 1st counselor in the Relief Society Presidency, who married two prophets while still being married to a faithful Mormon man? Will you tell the true story of how the most prominent leaders in the church such as Joseph Smith and Parley Pratt and others married wives behind their wives’ backs and the devastating consequences that followed, eventually leading to their deaths?
On the other hand, will you show the liberating side of polygamy, as women were free to become doctors, lawyers, poets, businesswomen, newspaper publishers while sister wives cared for their children and how Mormon women were able to vote before women in other states? Or how Brigham Young made it easy for unhappy wives to divorce husbands and choose other men they felt more compatible to?
Will you cover the wrenching aftermath of giving up polygamy, as families were abandoned and neglected or moved to other countries in order to stay together? Or the men who went through a series of divorces and remarriages in order to make all their children legitimate and how that impacted those families?
This is the history I want to read – the truth with all its ugliness, but also with its beauty. Yes, there is the “faith promoting” side to Mormon history, but it is not a true history when you purposefully keep out anything that might bother the reader. Both sides need to be included to get an accurate picture of the history. Otherwise don’t call it history, call it faith-promoting stories that don’t accurately reflect the whole of what happened.
We don’t need one more white-washed history such as “Daughters in my Kingdom” that devotes about a paragraph to polygamy in the early days of the church when it actually played such a crucial role. Men and women sacrificed so much for it and so much after the principle was abandoned.
Polygamy is by no means the only piece to the story, but because it was a way of life, it affected the Mormon people on a day to day basis. A true history would reflect that, not pretend a history can somehow be whole without it simply because we don’t live it today.
If you are looking to create such a “wholistic” approach to your history, I would be extremely interested because there is a void for it.
Lisa —
Great questions.
First, please understand that this is a general history of the Church, not specifically an exploration of the issues that most affect(ed) women, or even a history of women in the Church. It is a history of the Church that draws all of its illustrations from the lives of women, as a counterbalance to the usual histories of the Church that draw nearly all of their illustrations from the lives of men.
Even so, I’m trying to represent the varied experiences of women within the Church — and you certainly can’t have a fair history of the Church without looking at the part plural marriage played. So in talking about that part of our history, I have drawn from as wide a variety of experiences as there is room for (with 200 years of history in 350 pages, that can sometimes mean running at breakneck pace). I have included women whose plural marriages were happy and successful, and some whose marriages were anything but happy. I tell about one mother who died giving birth in hiding — died perhaps *because* she was in hiding — and the midwifery programs that addressed that risk. I talk about plural wives of church leaders, and women who didn’t understand what they were getting into, or who were anything but “the elite.” When it comes to the Manifesto, I illustrate its complexity with stories of couples who remained together despite the Manifesto, some who married after the Manifesto, some who separated at the time of the Manifesto, and one woman who was so confused by the Manifesto and what was expected of her that she didn’t know whether she was still married or whether her plural marriage had been dissolved by it. In other words, I talk as frankly as I can, limited by space and my general target audience, with as wide a variety of illustrations as I can squeeze in. I don’t try to sugarcoat polygamy; I don’t try to paint it as the worst thing that ever happened, either, but acknowledge its longstanding practice and tell about the women who lived it.
Last week I posted some material (not a clip from the book, but related material) about a woman, Anna Lamb Jorgensen, who is my illustration of the confusion over the meaning of the Manifesto. It’s the best illustration I’ve found to bring to life the ambiguity of that era, and I think telling her story is much more effective than editorializing or analyzing.
When I address other controversial topics — race, say — I try to do the same thing: present stories that represent a variety of experiences, all drawn from women’s lives. I editorialize as little as possible (that is, I don’t wring my hands over how awful we were, nor do I try to rationalize away our historical prejudice as nothing to be upset by) — my own attitudes are probably inescapably present in the way I tell the stories, without shying away from the difficulties but also without unduly judging the past by modern standards.
What do you think of that technique?
By the way, Lisa, you might want to read my review of Daughters in My Kingdom to see how nearly my response aligns with yours.
I fear that in some ways She Shall Be an Ensign will not fully satisfy some hopes, including my own, largely because it has to move so fast and because it is a history of the Church, not exclusively a history of women. My hope is that never again will there be any excuse for a history of the Church that ignores women’s lives or that treats our experiences as a minor variation of the “real” history. But even within the 350-page limit, I’m trying to make every story count, to tell the kind of history that *I* want to read, and not the flat all-is-well no-nuance history that I think you’re tired of, too.
Thanks so much for your response Ardis. I can imagine it would be quite the undertaking. Yes, I think I very much like your approach here. I just read your post about Anna Jorgensen and enjoyed it. This is the way I prefer to receive my history, as direct to the source as possible without a lot of editorializing. The experiences speak for themselves and allow us to form our own conclusions. I will definitely be picking up your book when it comes out.
Ardis,
I just ran across this, and was wondering what happened to the book. A Google search turns up a lot of info from 2015, including showing that you reached (and surpassed) the $30,000 Kickstarter campaign.
It sounds very interesting, and I would like to read it, but can’t find it anywhere (I do not use Facebook).
Thanks for the reply.
I’m grossly behind, but am still working on the book, Wayne.
I can believe that with all that you do on the blog. Remember, keepapitchinin. 😀
I know this isn’t the absolutely correct spot for this, but I don’t know where that is. I was wondering if you had ever heard of the book The Women of Mormondom by Edward W. Tullidge, published in New York in 1877. I haven’t read the entire book (it is vveerrryyyy long), but if you haven’t heard of/read it, I think you might find it interesting. It seems like it would be right up your alley.
Just a thought.
Ardis, I meant to add this to the above comment. This is the Preface of the above mentioned book:
Long enough, O women of America, have your Mormon sisters been blasphemed!
From the day that they, in the name and fear of the Lord their God, undertook to “build up Zion,” they have been persecuted for righteousness sake: “A people scattered and peeled from the beginning.”
The record of their lives is now sent unto you, that you may have an opportunity to judge them in the spirit of righteousness. So shall you be judged by Him whom they have honored, whose glory they have sought, and whose name they have magnified.
Ardis, is there a way for those of us who didn’t back the Kickstarter project to get a copy of your book? Any idea when it will be published? Thanks for any info you can give.
I’m sorry, Tracy, at the gross delay in publication. I *am* still working on it, although I hesitate to give a projected publication date when I’ve missed earlier estimates. When it is published, it will certainly be available to any who want to purchase it — I’ll trumpet its completion all over Keepa, because it will be such a relief.