Sacred Pens and Public Voices

About the Book

In the view of many Latter-day Saint women, the religious restoration propounded by Joseph Smith unleashed forces important to female progress. Lori Motzkus Wilkinson examines how LDS women used their agency and sought women’s rights filtered through their religious lens.

Though intellectually connected to figures outside the Church, the LDS women saw them less as
women's rights activists to emulate and more as speakers of truths that, regardless of the origin, should be embraced and harnessed. Wilkinson reveals how Emmeline B. Wells, Susa Young Gates, and other Latter-day Saint women supported and upheld institutional LDS authority and utilized the importance of women’s roles in the home and society, as mechanisms for women’s advancement. Even as LDS women continued to engage with prominent national thinkers, their writings and lives demonstrated that they connected with the larger sphere of women’s rights activism before drawing on the LDS concept of women’s divine nature to reshape those ideals to uniquely religious ends.

Original and eye-opening, Sacred Pens and Public Voices revises established narratives about how LDS women interacted with and used ideas taken from national women’s movements.