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Candice Wendt's avatar

Thank you so much for doing this. This is a powerful issue. I was struck by Emily's essay. Made me think about ideas from African American history scholar Tiya Miles about how contemporary women in historically oppressed groups have unique authority to reinterpret and retell their dead predecessors' stories-- in a way that is counter to standard historical accounts. She says "because archives do not faithfully reveal or honor the enslaved" (in our case, not enslaved individuals but women coerced into polygamous lives even when they had said no) "tending to this intimacy" (the ways we women today have experienced some of the same oppressive situations, discrimination and harmful teachings, intergenerational trauma, having their pain written in our DNA, etc.) "with the dead necessitates new methods, including a trans-temporal consciousness and use of restrained imagination." In order words, we can use our creativity, personal wisdom and our not so distant cross-generational ties to understand and give voice to these women and the meaning of their stories today. Emily reminded me of how we're often told that the passage of time means there is a barrier between us-- we can't criticize polygamy or really know how people in the past saw it because of the distance. I think the opposite. I think contemporary LDS women can imagine exactly how it feels to be betrayed and to be treated as unequal, and that our pain and anger about it is literally written into our DNA. These women are inside of us. I see all of this in Emily's sharing of her ancestors' stories. It is powerful and it inspires me.

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Heather's avatar

Wow. It struck me that the narrative of polygamy is NEVER told through the eyes of women. We hear stories of the poor men wrongfully imprisoned for their beliefs. But women? Devils or fools is a beautiful and fierce description.

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