Art History through the Camera's Lens - Helene E. Roberts - Hardcover Book

This book was good for me to read. I have often setereo-typed the women of early mormon history. I learned from this book that I was extremely uninformed. Many of these women were early feminists and extrememly independant. I also learned about polygamy in early Utah history and was suprised that for all its fame it was never that common. The most generous estimates are rough showing at its peak that only 15-20 percent of mormon women practiced polygamy. I also learned that it was not a commandment for women, but it was always an option. It allowed women to team up, and if they desired leave home. Suprisingly it enabled the first woman doctors to leave home and attend medical school. These women were also the first in the country to vote and many were educated. While many were not and poverty was rampant I have come to realize that I didn't have a complete picture of their families.

The book also includes essays about immigrant women around the time that Utah became a state. It was suprising to see the population explosion among people who were not mormon. Many came for work in the mines... however I was still suprised seeing as Utah's landscape was so harsh. I still don't feel that I truly understand how people not of the mormon community deicided that Utah was a land of oportunity. I really admire the women who were widows on the fronteir. Thier lives were impossibly hard and lonely. I found this particulary facinating because my ancestors were Serbians who went to Utah to work in the mine.

While I cringe at the idea of polygamy and am relieved that it is not practiced in the Mormon reliegion today after reading this book I have decided that I am not in a place to judge the women who chose it for themselves. Had I lived at that time I can say I would never ever have considered it. I would have been among the majority of Utah women.

Further, polygamy in the Mormon church was NEVER practiced the way that it has been in the Texas, Utah and Arizona today. To compare history and what modern polygamist sects are doing would be a gross misjudgement.