A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870

At times when you read a book you think it will be one thing based on what you read on the dust jacket, but once you start reading it, it then turns into something else. That is what happened with this book, and I was a bit disappointed. When I read the summary of this book, I thought it would cover women in the early years of a Mormon movement and how they worked and struggled to earn rights and how plural marriage affected those rights. While at times the author, Laurel Ulrich, does focus on women and how they organized themselves, it happens not that often and in bits and pieces, almost reproducing in the book how women are not always in the historical record. Instead, we get a study of early Mormon history, mostly through the eyes of the men as missionaries, with women mostly filling in the background through letters, journals, etc.

I just felt this could have been done better. I felt as if the author realized that there would not be enough information about women to fill a thick hardback book and that the focused then shifted to the point of view of the men, while the women got relegated to the background.