Mormon Masculinity: Changing Gender Expectations in the Era of Transition from Polygamy to Monogamy, 1890-1920

Abstract

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter‐day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. Like their Protestant contemporaries, Latter‐day Saints spent much time attempting to find a solution. At the same time, the LDS church was experiencing its own unique set of upheavals. In 1890, one of the central tenets of Mormonism – polygamy – had to be replaced with sexual practices that aligned the LDS with wider American society. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasising the morality and value systems they shared with their middle‐class Protestant contemporaries. As Mormons restructured marriage around the practice of monogamy, they placed the burden of the refashioned religious identity almost exclusively upon men and their bodies. The new Mormon man ushered the LDS church into the American mainstream while maintaining an acceptable difference from that mainstream culture.

“Come for the Memes, Stay for Defending the Faith”: Far-Right and Anti-Feminist Red Pill Influences in the #DezNat Twitter Hashtag

“…A separate series of tweets similarly emphasized health and fitness as part of ideal masculinity. DezNat participants discussed their workouts (document 1335) and reported attempts to go without soda (document 1420), perhaps recalling ties between the Word of Wisdom and Mormon masculinity (see, e.g., Hoyt and Patterson 2011;Tos-cano 2020). In another conversation (document 1357), one DezNat participant summarized a General Conference sermon by Church president Russell Nelson as encouraging men to lose weight and dress better, suggesting that this was harder and more important than any social media fast.…”

Trash Transformations: Litter, Volunteer Labour, and Care in Philadelphia

“…While Ray identifies Scientology as a tool helping him to imagine a reality in which a clean landscape is possible, for the Elders, the landscape is a tool which enables them to perform, practise, and sharpen their faith. The difficulty of their work is significant within Mormon constructions of masculinity, as missionary work transforms the Elders physically and spiritually, thus confirming their transition from boys to men upon their return (Hoyt and Patterson 2011). Crucially, the same late 20 th century political economy that inflicted trauma on the landscape and individual Philadelphians, including Ray, creates the opportunity for this entangled spiritual and physical labour.…”

Mormonism's First Bad Girl: Lucy Harris and the Gendering of Faith and Doubt in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

“…21 Latter-day Saint women and men likewise strove to become more like their Protestant American counterparts, choosing to align themselves more closely with broader gender expectations. 22 Lessons in the Young Woman's Journal that discussed Lucy Harris sometimes explicitly instructed readers about gender performance. For example, an 1892 lesson on "The Translation of the Book of Mormon" instructed teachers how to teach a class of girls to be good wives by suppressing curiosity about things their husbands ought not share with them.…”

“…Women were to follow their husbands' lead, trusting the men to share what they could and not succumbing to the temptation of manipulating their husbands to satisfy their own selfish curiosity. 28 By passing along the story of how the 116 pages were lost, Latter-day Saints preserved the chain of memory that acted as the backbone of their tradition while conveying lessons for the current generation about how to properly perform their gender identities. Those lessons were not incidental to the chain of memory, but constitutive of it: as Latter-day Saints conveyed the stories of their tradition, they also taught the following generations how to be men and women within that tradition.…”