Amy Easton-Flake
Brigham Young University
Amy Easton-Flake is Assistant Professor of Religion at Brigham Young University. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century women’s reform literature and biblical hermeneutics. Her recent publications include “Biblical Women in the Woman’s Exponent: Nineteenth-Century Mormon Women Interpret the Bible” in The Bible in American Life (Oxford UP 2017) and forthcoming “Masculinity in the Book of Mormon” in The Book of Mormon: Americanist Approaches (Oxford UP 2018). Her work may also be found in the New England Quarterly, Symbiosis, Journal of Mormon History, and multiple edited volumes. She is currently completing a source book on poetry in the Woman’s Exponent.
Amy Easton-Flake, Brigham Young University, "Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Utah Territory 1872-1896"In 1872, Mormon women founded the Woman’s Exponent, and proudly proclaimed it the first journal “owned by,... [ view full abstract ]
Amy Easton-Flake, Brigham Young University, "Poetic Representations of Mormon Women in Utah Territory 1872-1896"
In 1872, Mormon women founded the Woman’s Exponent, and proudly proclaimed it the first journal “owned by, controlled by and edited by Utah ladies.”* The stated impetus of the Exponent was to build one another through the “diffusion of knowledge and information” and to correct the “gross misrepresent[ations]” of Mormon women as simple-minded, ignorant, oppressed, coerced, and enslaved that often appeared in the American popular press of the day by providing them with a means of representing themselves. Living in frontier Utah territory, belonging to a new American religion that held unique religious practices—most strikingly polygamy—Mormon women had a complex and unique understanding of what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century America. Taking my cue from scholars who have offered compelling studies demonstrating poetry’s social and central place in nineteenth-century America, I turn to the poetry in the Exponent to find the ideologies and collective identity Mormon women created and worked within as they negotiated the religious, gender, and socio-political climate of their community.
Through my work, I illustrate the potential of poems to reveal the multi-layered climates that these women worked within as they struggled with death, motherhood, polygamy, and the harsh economic and environmental climates of the American west. I also analyze how the Exponent—and its poetry in particular—created a community for these women who were often sent with their families to establish remote settlements throughout present day Utah, Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, and Mexico. Women throughout these sparsely populated settlements sent letters, poems, and reports into the Exponent; consequently, for these geographically marginalized women, the Exponent became an important medium of indirect and direct communication—as women addressed letters and poems back and forth to one another—and platform for constructing and promoting a community and shared values and identity. When we view poems as our nineteenth-century subjects did, we allow these women to define their own lives and society as well as receive recognition for affecting through their writings the climates in which they existed.
