Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH {[email protected]} began her writing career in 1956 with an essay in Seventeen magazine describing Christmas in Sugar City, Idaho, her hometown. A graduate of the University of Utah, she moved with her husband, Gael Ulrich, to Massachusetts in 1960, and then to New Hampshire, where she completed her PhD in early American history. She is the author of several prize-winning books, including A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835–1870, which was published in 2017. She recently retired from Harvard University and has begun sorting through a disorganized collection of old papers that helped inspire some of the thoughts in the essay in this issue. She and Gael now live in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania near some of their children and grandchildren and are members of the Philadelphia Fourth Ward.

“For the Power is In Them”: Leonard Arrington and the Founders of Exponent II

Articles/Essays – Volume 53, No. 1

And Woe Unto Them That Are With Child In Those Days

Articles/Essays – Volume 6, No. 2

Dialogue 6.2 (Summer 1972): 40–47
It isn’t easy these days to be a Momon mother of four. In the university town where I live, fertility is tolerated but not encouraged. Every time I drive to the grocery store, bumper stickers remind me that Overpopulation Begins At Home, and I am admonished to Make Love, Not Babies. At church I have the opposite problem. My youngest is almost two and if I hurry off to Primary without a girdle, somebody’s sure to look suspiciously at my flabby stomach and start imagining things. Everybody else is pregnant, why not I?

Counseling the Brethren

Articles/Essays – Volume 9, No. 2

A Little Bit of Heaven

Articles/Essays – Volume 9, No. 3

Poor Mother

Articles/Essays – Volume 10, No. 1

Out of the Slot: Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of Mormon Women by Marilyn Warenski

Articles/Essays – Volume 12, No. 2

The Pink Dialogue and Beyond

Articles/Essays – Volume 14, No. 4

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.

Family Scriptures

Articles/Essays – Volume 20, No. 2

A Writer Reborn: Leaving Home: Personal Essays by Mary Lythgoe Bradford

Articles/Essays – Volume 21, No. 3

Border Crossings

Articles/Essays – Volume 27, No. 2

It happened again as I was walking through the New Hampshire woods with a woman I knew only slightly. We had been chatting amiably when the words “Mormon feminist” escaped my mouth. From the expression…

My Short Happy Life with Exponent II

Articles/Essays – Volume 36, No. 3

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 191–1933
Claudia Bushman and others reflect back on Exponent II.

Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism

Articles/Essays – Volume 43, No. 2

Dialogue 43.2 (Fall 2010): 45–63
Reading these books in relation to my own life taught me something I should already have known. Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it.