February 27, 2009
Professor Romano, English 540
V. Kinsey
Library Assignment
Thursday, 2/19/09
Began this project by browsing through the RMOA, limiting my search to the Center for Southwest Research. I used the following key words:
· Diary
· Woman
· Missionary
I got several “hits” with the word diary (75 hits approx.). I scrolled through these and found many diaries written by men. One or two of these looked intriguing. There was a missionary from Austin, MN who, according to the contents’ summary, devoted some of his diary to gender issues. Of the women’s diaries in the archive, many were kept by “personages” in the Southwest and followed a certain narrative: middle-class woman (typically of German or Scotch descent) moved to New Mexico from “Back East” somewhere and fell in love with the landscape and “people.” These women often collected Indigenous art and educated visitors (and relatives back home) about Native American and Hispanic customs, costumes, spirituality, history, etc. Some of these women went on to be writers and artists and left behind a significant legacy/paper trail. I wanted to avoid these kinds of narratives.
Sophie D. Aberle
Feeling unsatisfied with the above search results, I decided to browse through the entire CSWR archive. I did not get very far until I found two subjects of interest. The first subject who intrigued me was Sophie D. Aberle. Dr. Aberle left behind a voluminous collection of materials. She was a highly educated woman who went to Berkeley, Stanford (where she earned a PhD), and Yale, and worked ultimately as a high-powered government employee with Native Americans in this region. Her association seems to be predominantly with the Pueblo tribes, but she worked on major issues including education, land grant, water, relocation/assimilation, tribal independence, etc. She left photographs and several drafts of an unpublished memoir that foregrounds “disillusion.” She lived to be 100, and published 2 or 3 nonfiction books (at least one children’s book), and appears to have been integrally involved in the most significant policy and legislative decisions of the 20th century involving Native Americans in this region. Her collection provokes many interesting questions.
Sandra Allen
The next subject I stumbled upon felt like a “bingo.” Sandra Allen, a one-time UNM student (1989-1993), left behind boxes of impeccably organized research material about the Mormon Church and the Equal Rights Amendment. In the narrative describing the collection, Allen, a once devout Mormon, was “called” by the church in 1977-79 to infiltrate a pro-ERA women’s group and report the group’s strategies back to the church to assist it in defeating the ERA. Allen left the church, and wound up at UNM studying history and women’s studies. Her goal was to research and write about not only her experiences, but also how her experiences play into the role the Mormon Church exerts in U.S. policy (specifically women’s issues). The personal narrative appealed to me, so I decide to take a closer look.
Friday, 2/20/09
Sandra Allen Collection of Papers on Mormonism, 1852-1993. (Call No. MSS 610BC)
I came to the center and requested the five boxes in the Sandra Allen Collection.
Box 1 includes a neatly organized file of photocopied research includes material about Mormon women in the 19th Century. One article (out of 100 or more in the box) describes the 1895 fight for a women’s suffrage amendment in the State of Utah Constitution. The history of the battle over women’s suffrage in Utah is fascinating, and not at all what one would expect given the virulence of the Mormon Church’s opposition to the ERA. In fact, in the late 1800s, most Mormons supported women’s suffrage as a way of consolidating Mormon power; also, Mormon women, though very much part of a different “sphere” and self-identified “true women” were valued (in some important if specific ways) by the Church. Many non-Mormons, who were already outnumbered, feared that their minority status in the state would grow if women could vote (they assumed that women would vote in tandem with their husbands and the Church’s teachings as women were still thought to be more pious and religiously oriented than men). From this article, I recorded the names of newspapers running stories about the convention. I also took down speakers I was interested in looking up later (Emmeline Wells ran a suffrage paper and was also interviewed by the anti-suffrage Tribune).
Allen was an organized, committed researcher. What moved me most of the materials I saw were the personal notes to the reader/researcher who would one day come across her work. At the end of Box 5 (her two private journals of the years, 1977-79, she spent as an anti-ERA “spy” come at the conclusion of her papers), she addresses her audience in a word-processed, hand-edited three-page document:
In this book there are a lot of references to praying and fasting to become in tune with God’s Will. This is how I was raised, along with many other Mormons and fundamental Christians. Waiting for the ‘God Nod’ is important in ploting one’s daily, as well as eternal, path. […] So, from my religious background, each major choice was on par with life or death, because it effected the closeness I had with my Lord & Savior, for all the rest of my eternities. Each of the original staff members, of the Pro-Family Coalition: Vote No on Question #5, went through this intense process in make their decision to become involved politically. […] My book is not meant to demean the work of the Mormon women who involved themselves as the political arm of the Mormon Church’s Headquarters’ wishes. […]It took an incredible amount of sacrifice for Mormon women to become involved in the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the sacrifice was even greater for those women who headed up the new grass-roots-appearing organizations that became the political muscle that it even being felt today. Many times during and after this political campaign I wondered if the men at the top of the Church hierarchy realized how emotionally ‘bloodied’ and wounded these women became while working on the front lines of this political battle. […] I honor these womens’ courage and commitment, for this was my courage and commitment at one time and I know just how much it demands from you. I want it also to be clearly noted, however, that there is something dishonorable going on that these women were/are not aware of – that being that they are being used…
Included also in the contents of Box 5 is a statement of Allen’s research intentions and methodology. She wrote this statement when she was in her third (junior year) at UNM in 1991. At the time, she would have been 40 years old. While she was clearly a “nontraditional” student with a great deal of passion for her topic and experience (she states in this document that she served as a “Secretary and Research Assistant for Dr. Doris S. Platt, writer for 5 years in Salt Lake City, Utah”), her focus and commitment is moving. It leaps off the page. She articulates a very specific plan for her project, and states her intention to go on and earn a Ph.D. Her work ends abruptly in 1993, and I wonder what became of her. Did she return to the Church? Did she become ill? How and why did UNM receive her papers?
I looked briefly at the first of her two journals 1977-9. Intense religious devotion (including a poem for “the valiant women I have known and to my hopes and desires”), focus on her family, concern over her weight (“I can do 15 sit-ups now without straining so bad”), and self-righteous indignation over a law regarding working on Sunday that she both believed (and was told by the Church) interfered with religious practice dominate the June 20, 1977 entry. I am fascinated to learn of how she became involved as an anti-ERA activist, and her feelings at the time about what she was doing. I wonder how many like her are out there…
Materials/ Genres
The list below is by no means exhaustive or exclusive. I poked through two boxes (Box 1, Box 5) and am listing only some of what these boxes contain and what I was physically able to pull out and examine:
· Two handwritten journals (with photographs)
· Introduction to the journals for the researcher (summarized above)
· An 1852 photocopied book
· A cassette tape
· Meticulously labeled/filed newspaper, magazine, and scholarly articles about the Equal Rights Amendment, the role of women in the Mormon Church and Mormon culture, right-wing politics, and related topics; several files dealt with near-death experiences
· Typed Statement of Research Plan (which included short and long term research goals and methodology/ contained seeds of statement of purpose for graduate and future study; summarized above briefly)
· Handwritten notes about different sources, ideas, call numbers
Wednesday, 2/25/09
I have been thinking a great deal about Sandra Allen and whether she is still here in New Mexico. Because she was involved with the Women’s Studies Department here, I may ask in that department if anyone knows what became of her. I’d like to make a project of her work – if she is done with it – and explore the public, political implications of her personal story.
Today’s plan is to look up a few of the newspaper articles from the State of Utah convention held in 1895 where the issue of women’s suffrage was debated. My initial search topics were The Woman’s Exponent, a Mormon, pro-suffrage paper edited (in this era) by Emmeline Wells. No results were found in the online digital archives. I did find a reference for the paper on microfilm in the Gerritson Collection.
A search of the American Periodicals Database failed to produce any Utah or Salt Lake City newspapers. Therefore, I expanded my search to the subject of “women’s suffrage” and “Utah.” These results yielded articles in various primarily East Coast papers, including the source below.
Christian Index (1831-1899). Philadelphia:Oct 5, 1882. Vol. 60, Iss. 39, p. 8 (1 pp.) <http://libproxy.unm.edu/login?url=http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=818641042&sid=6&Fmt=10&clientId=2877&RQT=309&VName=HNP>
This article discusses the effect the Edmunds act will have on Utah; the first sentence states that 10,000 Mormons will become disenfranchised for practicing plural marriage. The paper espouses a non-Mormon “Christian” stance toward plural marriage, condemning the practice. The paper discusses the Mormon and Gentile voting populations in Utah. The article points out that if women were denied the vote (the article points out that this is certainly the most desirable possibility), the Gentiles would gain the majority in the state. The article encourages Gentile ladies to vote. The author says that under “normal conditions we are forever opposed to woman suffrage; but the present case is exceptional.” The article then takes the position that Christian (Gentile) women must vote to in order “to aid their unhappy sisters from slavery [plural marriage forced upon them by their husbands].”
Additionally, I did a google search on Emmeline Wells and found PBS recently published a transcript of an editorial she wrote and published in her paper, link below. This editorial details a particular, interesting facet of the women’s suffrage movement in Utah, a state where the woman’s right to vote was revoked in an effort to reduce the Mormon Church’s influence in the state (an issue addressed in the column summarized above). The right was later re-instated in the State of Utah Constitution (1885). In the editorial, Wells challenges the “Christian” perceptions about Mormon women.
Emmeline Wells, “Is It Ignorance?” The Woman’s Exponent July 1, 1883 http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/five/wells.htm