Last summer, I belatedly spent my first term at BYU, as a Summer Fellow at the Smith Institute for Church History. There were eight of us, working under the direction of Claudia Bushman. Our topic was the history of Mormon women in the 20th century.
We didn’t make any attempt at being exhaustive; instead, we spent some time talking about major forces shaping women’s lives across the century and then Claudia turned us loose to pursue our own research interests. The final papers ended up being about
1) Courtship stories among the first post-Manifesto generation of Mormon women
2) Participation of RS and YW Presidencies in the National Women’s Council
3) The history of the idea of modesty in dress for young women in the church
4) Primary songs as the locus of women’s contributions to doctrine formation (this was my contribution **shameless self-promotion**: I’ll be discussing it this Sunday at the Cambridge 2nd Ward bldg. 7:00 pm–an abbreviated version of the paper is online here )
5) The effects of Correlation on Relief Society, weighing the benefits of Correlation for international members against the losses many North American women felt (the RS Magazine, annual RS conference, etc.)
6) Bodies, Babies and Birth Control
7) a re-examination of Mormon women’s participation in the debate over the ERA
8) Patriarchy and Contentment–an informal survey trying to document the truth of President Hinckley’s repeated claim that “our women are content” in the face of media skepticism, and an examination of how and why Mormon women are content within a patriarchal structure
I have lots to say about several of these topics, and about the experience of doing women’s history at BYU, but I’ll wait to see which, if any, of these themes is interesting enough for you to comment/ask questions about.