Woman's Exponent

Woman's Exponent

Forty-two years of a paper written, edited and largely paid for by Latter-day Saint women — arguing for the vote, defending plural marriage, and reporting a public life the rest of the record barely mentions.

What it is

The Woman's Exponent was published in Salt Lake City from 1872 to 1914. It was not an official church publication; it was produced by Latter-day Saint women, edited by them — Louisa Lula Greene Richards and then, for most of its life, Emmeline B. Wells — and written largely by them.

It is the principal record of Latter-day Saint women speaking for themselves in the nineteenth century, and there is nothing else that does the same job. The sermons are by men. The periodicals are edited by men. The histories are written by men. The Exponent is where the other half of the church wrote down what it thought.

What it argued

Two things at once, which is what makes it consistently surprising to modern readers.

It was a suffrage paper. Utah women voted from 1870, decades before the Nineteenth Amendment, and the Exponent campaigned for the franchise, reported the national suffrage movement, and corresponded with its leaders. Its masthead motto committed it to the rights of the women of Zion and the women of all nations.

It also defended plural marriage — vigorously, in public, against a national campaign to end it, and in the voices of women living in plural households. Readers who expect those two positions to be incompatible find the Exponent difficult, and that difficulty is the most useful thing about it.

What we hold

Twenty-one years of the paper, held as complete annual volumes — every column, editorial, letter, poem and report across those years, running to some thirteen million characters of text. It is indexed whole rather than in extracts, so a question can reach a single paragraph buried in a September 1890 issue.