What was it like to be a Mormon woman in a polygamist marriage in 19th-century America? That's what historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explores in her new book "A House Full Of Females: Plural Marriage And Women's Rights In Early Mormonism." She says plural marriage, as it was called, could have been described as an experiment in co-operative housekeeping and an incubator of female activism. The founder of the faith, Joseph Smith, took his first Mormon plural wife in 1841. In 1890, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto that led to the end of plural marriage.
Ulrich's book is based on diaries, letters, minutes of meetings and other day-to-day documents written by Mormons during the period. Ulrich won a Pulitzer Prize for her nonfiction book "A Midwife's Tale" which told the story of a midwife and mother in Maine after the Revolutionary War and was based on the midwife's journal. The book was adapted into a PBS film.
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