The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women
"This book restores an essential chapter in Mormon history. Since the days of our polygamous foremothers, Mormon women have been stereotyped as voiceless victims and dupes. By digging into the 'heart history' of Mormon polygamy through the writings of the women who lived it, Paula Kelly Harline shows that Mormon women have wrestled with the unique demands of our faith with a full range of human motivations and feelings: grace and conflict, acquiescence and resistance, vocal criticism and quiet acceptance, pride and dejection, confidence and frustration. Is polygamy really a core element of Mormon theology? Harline offers both powerful commentary on this unresolved question that still weighs on so many Mormons, as well as a richly detailed history of Mormon women's lives. Intimate and important, this is a Mormon studies must-read." --Joanna Brooks, author ofThe Book of Mormon Girl"Paula Harline's treatment is a revealing if painful look into the profoundly rooted contradictions of Mormon plural marriage: she shows it to be a practice wives publicly defended while privately lamenting; one that fostered solidarity with a sisterhood burdened with 'the principle,' even as it fomented rivalries and sorrows within those marriages; and a practice that left a conflicting legacy of pride in the sacrifice polygamists endured, along with a persisting unease with the teachings and practices themselves." --Terryl L. Givens,  co-author ofThe God Who Weeps: How Mormonism MakesSense of Life"Harline has done a great service in bringing together these narratives linking the high spiritual aims and the excruciating realities of a practice that cut to the core of women's lives. Harline's clear-eyed and tempered analysis contextualizes the very personal voices of the past." --Claudia L. Bushman, co-editor ofMormon Women Have Their Say, Essays from the Claremont Oral History Collection"Harline allows polygamy to not just exist in stereotypes, exoticism, or distortion; she gives it names and faces and real stories." --Publishers Weekly"[C]ompelling, moving, and instructional. Harline has done these women--and us--a great service by calling their written record to our attention, and I am grateful to her for this book." --Feast Upon the Word Blog