Ulrich connects women’s organizing in Utah to deep-rooted traditions of female leadership within the church ... As Ulrich is well aware, and as her book demonstrates, none of this evidence for women’s leadership and activism obscures the intensely patriarchal nature of Mormonism ... If the language of rights-based activism was not as central to the lives of mid-19th-century Latter-day Saint women as Ulrich suggests, A House Full of Females nevertheless provides a needed and moving corrective to accounts of Mormon history dominated by men such as Joseph Smith and Brigham Young ... While Ulrich provides a few examples of harmonious families, A House Full of Females leaves little doubt that Mormon polygamy was a colossal mess ... The women of A House Full of Females knew how to wield that weapon, and in stitching their stories together, so does Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.
Ulrich stitches together diaries, poems, meeting minutes, and quilt designs into a fascinating history of women’s lives. Tough doesn’t begin to describe it — they drove wagons across the frozen Midwest, bore and buried children, spoke in tongues, farmed, and organized relief societies while the men traveled on missions ... Anyone else in need of reassurance that family, faith, and intellect can live together need only consult her biography.
...an overlong, equivocating rehash of early Mormon history mainly composed of women’s and men’s diaries. What could have been a spirited tale of domination and defiance too often reads like a bloodless recitation ... One longs for a badly behaved historian calling out the fraudulent iniquities faced by female Saints throughout church history. Readers, and Mormon women, remain the poorer for it.
...a book that movingly portrays believers’ early struggles while leaving certain mysteries frustratingly intact ... Ulrich likens her approach to a patchwork quilt, but while the metaphor is apt, readers may find it hard to keep track of who’s who — and especially of who is married to whom ... She is after fresh insights on how plural marriage arose and was put into practice, but the documents she mines are often maddeningly opaque ... How they remained so devoted to its patriarchal structure, and its demands for submission, is an enigma that perhaps no one can pierce. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has not explained these resourceful women so much as rendered their belief more miraculous.
Despite Ulrich’s emphasis on women’s voices and ideas, A House Full of Females centers its narrative in part on a man named Wilford Woodruff. An apostle of the church and one of Mormonism’s early converts, Woodruff played a significant role in Mormon history. But his most important quality, from Ulrich’s perspective, is that he kept a detailed diary ... In asking readers to enter Wilford and Phebe’s world, Ulrich assumes a certain amount of background knowledge. She takes for granted that her readers know something about the landmark events of early Mormonism ... A House Full of Females is sensitive to the difficulty and confusion that accompanied early plural marriage, with its implied loss of status for women. But the book also tells a more complicated tale about women’s on-the-ground experiences ... yet in the best ways, A House Full of Females remains a work of traditional 'women’s history,' a straightforward exploration of women’s lives and experiences on their own terms.
Her new book reflects a more expansive, pluralistic view of women’s experience ... Ulrich calls her book 'a kind of quilt,' in a nod to a quilt that many of the women made in Salt Lake City. There is indeed a kind of patchwork quality to it, a mix of close reading, careful contextualizing (often in a dry, academic tone), and intimate investigations into the lives of women as they grappled with their challenging lives and even more challenging feelings — and the difficult questions of consent and power that their new arrangements entailed ... Ulrich considers seriously the religious motivation for women’s acceptance of a practice that was considered repugnant by many Americans, but she also tracks the various economic, social, psychological and political ramifications of plural marriage carefully.
