Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH {[email protected]} began her writing career in 1956 with an essay in Seventeen magazine describing Christmas in Sugar City, Idaho, her hometown. A graduate of the University of Utah, she moved with her husband, Gael Ulrich, to Massachusetts in 1960, and then to New Hampshire, where she completed her PhD in early American history. She is the author of several prize-winning books, including A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870, which was published in 2017. She recently retired from Harvard University and has begun sorting through a disorganized collection of old papers that helped inspire some of the thoughts in the essay in this issue. She and Gael now live in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania near some of their children and grandchildren and are members of the Philadelphia Fourth Ward.

Articles

“For the Power is In Them”: Leonard Arrington and the Founders of Exponent II

And Woe Unto Them That Are With Child In Those Days

Dialogue 6.2 (Summer 1972): 40–47
It isn’t easy these days to be a Momon mother of four. In the university town where I live, fertility is tolerated but not encouraged. Every time I drive to the grocery store, bumper stickers remind me that Overpopulation Begins At Home, and I am admonished to Make Love, Not Babies. At church I have the opposite problem. My youngest is almost two and if I hurry off to Primary without a girdle, somebody’s sure to look suspiciously at my flabby stomach and start imagining things. Everybody else is pregnant, why not I?

Counseling the Brethren

The scent of shaving lotion startled me. It was like finding a “No Trespassing” sign in some familiar patch of woods. I’d walked through that door a hundred times, would teach Sunday School in the…

A Little Bit of Heaven

My Grandpa Thatcher told two kinds of stories—real life tales of the Old West and Bible stories. I sat politely through the latter so as not to hurt his feelings, but what I really wanted…

Poor Mother

We have a new baby in our family. Soon after Amy was born, our oldest son introduced himself to the woman who was building a house behind ours. “And how many children are there in…

Out of the Slot | Marilyn Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman

Mormons who believe feminism is deeply subversive will find confirmation in Marilyn Warenski’s Patriarchs and Politics. Her argument can be simply stated: Feminism and patriarchal religion are incompatible. Mormonism is a patriarchal religion. Therefore, there…

The Pink Dialogue and Beyond

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.

Family Scriptures

For a book of remembrance we have written among us, according to the pattern given by the finger of God; and it is given in our own language (Moses 6:46). Sometimes in my journey through MIA I…

A Writer Reborn | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, Leaving Home: Personal Essays

At the age of seven Mary Bradford imagined herself presenting a story to a New York publisher, the manuscript “rolled into a scroll and tied with a yellow ribbon” (p. 16). Now in midlife she wonders…

Border Crossings

It happened again as I was walking through the New Hampshire woods with a woman I knew only slightly. We had been chatting amiably when the words “Mormon feminist” escaped my mouth. From the expression…

My Short Happy Life with Exponent II

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 191–1933
Claudia Bushman and others reflect back on Exponent II.

Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism

Dialogue 43.2 (Fall 2010): 45–63
Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it.

Dialogue Book of Mormon Gospel Study with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich on Alma 13–16

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is 300th Anniversary University Professor emerita at Harvard University. She is probably best known for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812, which won the Pulitzer… Read more

Dialogue Lectures #34 w/ Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

In the newest Dialogue podcast Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and Harvard University professor, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, discusses her new book A House Full of Females – Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835 -1870. Read more