Abstract
Drawing on mediated framing theory, this article considers how the 19th-century Utah Woman’s Press Club used its opportunity to control its public image in the Utah-based suffrage periodical Woman’s Exponent. The Exponent was edited by the club’s founder, Emmeline B. Wells, and was an outlet for many of the area’s women writers. This article demonstrates how the group’s three primary themes—education and professionalization, politics, and faith—developed a gendered framing of 19th-century womanhood. This exploration considers how gender-specific publications can be a powerful outlet for women to challenge mainstream narratives about women’s abilities.
On November 15, 1891, the Woman’s Exponent, a suffrage periodical based in Salt Lake City, Utah, announced the organization of a new woman’s press club: the Utah Woman’s Press Club (UWPC). According to its constitution, “the object of this club shall be to further the literary development and interests of women, and to foster and strengthen individual efforts by means of organization” (“Woman’s Press Club Organized,” 1891, p. 77). The 1880s and 1890s saw a wave of woman’s press clubs organizing across the United States as a professionalized addition to the already vigorous 19th-century woman’s club movement. However, the UWPC makes a unique case study because the membership was composed of mostly—but not all—faithful Mormon women who mixed progressive activism with advocacy for their faith. In addition, they also had a publication that was controlled by their organizer and longtime leader Emmeline B. Wells, the Woman’s Exponent, where they could frame their writings about the club activities. While other work on framing has discussed it as a way to limit or control information, this article uses the women’s writings about their group’s meetings in the pages of the Exponent to discuss the ways that framing is an agentic experience, empowering a group to control its own public self-definition.
This examination shows women challenging the hegemonic historical record by using their own publication to write their history. As Janet Thumim (1995) argued, “there is nothing ‘natural’ about historical evidence any more than there is anything ‘common’ about knowledge, rather both knowledge and evidence are the stuff through which hegemonic struggles are conducted” (p. 63). As will be shown, the suffrage presses, to which the Exponent could be construed as belonging since its pages were used to promote the suffrage causes as much as they were used to promote the Mormon faith, were places of cultural production where women could present their ideas and issues in counter to the hegemonic framing of their work in the mainstream press’s frames of women’s work and spaces. For the women of the UWPC, in particular, the Exponent was a place where they could counter both negative narratives about politically involved women and the women of the Mormon faith.
As noted, many, if not all, of the women who comprised the membership of the UWPC were also writers for the Utah-based suffrage periodical, the Woman’s Exponent. The woman who initially organized the group, Emmeline B. Wells, was the longtime Exponent editor and a well-known leader in the local Mormon community and in the national suffrage movement. As the editor of the Exponent and the founder and so-called Aunt Em of the UWPC, Wells—and by extension, the women of the UWPC—had an opportunity to frame the club’s work through articles that were fully under a supporter’s control from the writing to the publication. The members spoke of the club as an important part of their own development personally and professionally. As member Ruth M. Fox (n.d.) recalled in her memoirs, In my association with the well-educated women of the Press Club and the Reapers’ Club, I became more and more aware of my educational limitations. . . . It has been said that experience is a great teacher, and I place high value on my participation in the Press and Reapers’ Clubs as foundation for whatever success in public life I have achieved. (p. 24)
An exploration of how the clubwomen used their ability to define the private conversations held during meetings shows the way they influenced public perception of their gendered work and activism. Mediated framing of the activities that happened during the private club meetings allowed them to tell a unified story about themselves across work written by individuals. Mediated framing was an important part of their interaction with public conversations about women’s roles and rights.
To examine the club’s use of framing to tell its own story, this article considers all of the minutes run in the Woman’s Exponent from the club’s inception in 1891 until the demise of the Exponent in 1914. The analysis of the published club meeting minutes is informed by archival information, including Emmeline B. Wells’s diaries, the UWPC’s archives, and other members’ reflections as captured in letters, memoirs, and other ephemera. This discussion will begin with an examination of the woman’s press club and its importance both on local and national scales. Next, media framing theory and the ways that mediated framing can influence public perceptions of an issue or event will be discussed. Finally, the article will explore the three main themes that the UWPC used to develop a gendered frame for its reading public: education and professionalization, politics, and faith. Through this gendered framing, the women argued that their club advanced society as a whole, and because of this, women were the equal of men in public as well as private spheres. By studying how the UWPC used a media outlet completely controlled by members to tell its own stories, this article seeks to understand the ways that gender-specific channels have allowed women to present narratives that challenge mainstream accounts of women’s abilities and places in public life.
History
The UWPC was part of a broader movement in women’s professional clubs joining the woman’s club movement. While the woman’s club movement saw White, middle- to upper-class women organizing into civic organizations as early as 1840 in the United States, professional organizations for women were slower to coalesce, researcher Elizabeth V. Burt (2000) claimed, because there simply were not enough working women: It was not until the 1880s, when up to a half-dozen women in a given city might find full-time positions on the staff of daily papers or women working there as correspondents might number twice that, that women journalists banded together to create their own press clubs and associations. (p. xviii)
Women’s press clubs gave women a way to gain education and access to resources and support. They also gave women a way to “transform perplexing issues of their time” through participatory literary practices. “Through their literary practices, clubwomen ‘processed’ new concepts—of nationhood, economy, gender, culture, and professionalism—sometimes resisting and sometimes fostering them, but always contributing to their shape” (Gere, 1997, p. 5). In the same way, the UWPC’s frames show the women processing traditional gendered ideologies by reifying those ideas at the same time as they engaged in transgressive activities that challenged those same ideologies.
Because most of its members wrote for the Exponent, the UWPC members straddled two important organizing and communication tools used by 19th-century women: women’s clubs—both professional and social—and the suffrage presses. As previously noted, the women’s club movement was comprised primarily of middle- to upper-class White women. In spite of the presence of some prominent Black women, including Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells, the exclusion of Black women’s voices from the suffrage movement has been well documented as well (Cohen, 1996; Davis, 1981; DuBois, 1999; Pauley, 2000). Archival evidence shows no evidence of any women of color in the UWPC, although that is not surprising considering the greatest number of 19th-century Mormon immigrants to Utah was from the British Isles and Scandinavia, with fewer immigrants coming from other European countries, including Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands (Jensen, n.d.).
The Exponent was not specifically the voice of the UWPC; however, because of Wells’s position as the driving force behind both the club and the publication, the periodical served as an outlet for most of the clubwomen. From its first issue, the women behind the Exponent framed the publication as a strong voice for Utah’s women: We are the people of Utah, and for them; we are the women of Utah, and proud to be so recognized; and our object is to sustain truth, spread a knowledge or correct principles and labor to do good. We have no rivalry with any, no war to wage, no contest to provoke; yet we will endeavor, at all times, to speak freely on every topic of current interest, and on every subject as it arises in which the women of Utah, and the great sisterhood the world over, are specially interested. (“Salutory,” 1872, p. 4).
As will be shown in the analysis, this early assertion that the publication was there to “speak freely,” and on “every topic of current interest,” was important for the UWPC women later as they used the publication to advance ideas that defined their work.
Wells, who lead the publication from 1877 until 1914 when her declining health prevented her from continuing the work, and the Exponent were leading voices for women in Utah. E. B. Wells (1997) observed, In 1872 the Woman’s Exponent was established, and it is impossible to estimate the advantage this little paper gave to the women of this far western Territory. From its first issue it was the champion of the suffrage cause, and by exchanging with women’s papers of the United States and England it brought news of women in all parts of the world to those of Utah. (p. 34)
In this explanation of the Exponent’s work, Wells’s framing of the publication as a “champion of the suffrage cause” shows her own interest in seeing the publication’s political interests first and foremost in the public’s perception of the periodical. This was consistent with Wells’s own passionate advancement of women’s involvement in political arenas at the state and national levels. In addition to leading the Exponent and launching the UWPC, Wells was a president of the Woman’s Suffrage Association of Utah. She ran for political office multiple times, the first in 1878 when she was nominated for county treasurer in Salt Lake City. She said that she was elected by unanimous vote; however, “the statute including the word ‘male’ was held to debar women from holding political offices” (E. B. Wells, 1997, p. 33). Her suffrage activism made her friends with several leaders of the national movement, including Susan B. Anthony. In addition to political work, Wells was heavily involved in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the LDS or the Mormon church. She also started a second women’s literary club, The Reaper’s Club.
From its first issue, the Exponent was unabashedly a part of the suffrage presses that were rising across the United States. On the first page of the first issue, the newspaper pulled a quote from Rev. James Freeman Clark declaring that women should have the vote, whether it is an advantage or not. The author then wrote, “Speaking from experience we feel safe in affirming that the Rev. gentleman is right, and we hope for a time that this immunity may be universally enjoyed by our pure-minded and light-loving sisters” (“News and Views,” 1872, p. 1). Suffrage presses consistently used terms like “sister,” “sisterhood,” and “sorority” to indicate community among women who were part of the movement (Steiner, 1983, p. 1). “While the claims to represent all women are exaggerated, women’s media do repudiate the language of business in order to embrace the language of sisterhood,” stated Linda Steiner (1992, p. 123). The suffrage presses served an important identity-formation function for women. “Suffrage papers articulated new values, suggested new dreams, and provided new perspectives on women’s experiences, in the effort to evolve a new definition of womanhood and to carve out a new social order” (Steiner, 1983, p. 4). The suffrage presses were important organizing forces for the broader woman’s movement, particularly for women who did not live in urban areas. They provided readers with a way “to see what these new women actually looked like” (Steiner, 1991, p. 183). Perhaps most importantly for the suffrage community, “These publications dramatized what it was like to be a woman’s rights activist and reassured readers they were not alone in taking on this identity. As such, their lives took on significance and purpose” (Steiner, 1991, pp. 183-184).
These woman-organized presses, including the Exponent, faced financial instability and public backlash because they took controversial stances on issues ranging from suffrage to abolition to abortion and dress reform, in addition to being owned by women whose ability to earn money was limited by both 19th-century law and mores (Endres & Lueck, 1996, pp. xii-xiii; “Married Women’s Property Laws,” n.d.). The Exponent, like many 19th-century suffrage publications, grew its subscription list with national and international affiliations within the woman’s movement. Endres and Lueck (1996) noted that early suffrage publications not only “had access to the membership lists of the group with which they were formally affiliated, but they also had access to sympathetic women across the country” (p. xiv). The Woman’s Exponent subscription base was not huge, with perhaps a thousand subscribers at its peak. However, Shirley Thomas (1992) claimed, Its influence within, and sometimes outside, the Church was greater than its circulation figures would suggest. One writer declared that it wielded more power in state politics “than all the newspapers in Utah put together.” If not quite that important, the paper was widely read and much quoted. Without question, it was a forceful voice for women. (p. 1571)
The Exponent was “the first publication owned and published by Latter-day Saint women,” although it was not owned by the church. However, it did have “the approval and encouragement of the General Authorities of the Church” (Thomas, 1992, p. 1571). While it was not an official publication of the church, it was an important way for the editors and writers to “present a favorable picture of Mormon women to the outside world” and to other Mormons (Bennion, 1996, p. 466). In addition to giving the writers a way to frame Mormon women for their reading public, it also helped the women to frame their own self-identity and “maintain a more positive self-image,” as they defined the narrative they told about themselves within their less public conversations (Bennion, 1996, p. 466). As Linda Steiner (1991) wrote, Apparently the Mormons’ grounds for creating and sustaining their paper had . . . more to do with a belief that Mormon women had additional concerns and interests ignored by the secular press, the woman’s press, and by other Mormon communication channels. (p. 195)
The Exponent filled a hole in Mormon women’s public distribution avenues and provided a unifying voice for Mormon women, like the suffrage presses acted as uniting forces for progressive women more broadly.
The publication “provides a rare example of an alliance between traditionalism and women’s rights activism” because of the women’s firm espousal of the precepts of Mormonism and framing that “created images of valorous women who rescued their communities, schools, husbands, and children” (Peterson, 1991, p. 182). This observation is important for analyzing the UWPC’s framing of itself in the Exponent because this vision of women rescuing the community through advancing schools and libraries as part of the social good and as the defenders of the faith was consistently repeated within the club’s published meeting minutes, as well.
Utah’s women writers were swept up in the press club movement because of Wells’s connections within the national suffrage movement. Belva A. Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar and noted suffrage leader, encouraged Wells to launch a Utah-based woman’s press club (Thatcher & Sillito, 1983). Over its tenure, the UWPC boasted some of Utah’s leading women in its membership, including Dr. Ellis Shipp, one of Utah’s earliest women doctors and an instructor in obstetric medicine; Louisa “Lula” Greene Richards, one of Utah’s leading 19th-century women writers and the first editor of the Exponent; Ruth May Fox, who was a noted hymn composer and leader of the LDS church’s Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association; Dr. Romania Pratt Penrose, the first LDS woman to leave Utah to get her medical degree; and Susa Young Gates, a prolific writer and editor who founded the Mormon periodical Young Woman’s Journal, was the first editor of the Mormon church’s Relief Society Magazine, and wrote several other works, including novels, poetry, and a biography of her father, Brigham Young (Black & Woodger, 2011, pp. 219, 273, 250-253; Godfrey, Godfrey, & Derr, 1982, pp. 327, 373).
Wells, whom her fellow club members affectionately called “Aunt Em,” had high hopes for the press club, although those hopes were not always fulfilled. The second meeting of the club on November 30, 1891, only drew three attendees, one of whom was Wells herself. Wells had prepared for 20 potential attendees (Wells, 1891, n.p.). She also found herself disappointed in the meetings themselves. Just a few months after the aforementioned meeting, Wells (1892) remarked in her diary, I have been thinking a great deal about the last evening the way Mrs. Gates [presumably Susa Young Gates] conducted herself and the informality of the whole evening at Mrs. Ruth M. Fox’s residence I want to accomplish some good in the way of improvement in the Press Club—if not there is no use in coming together. (p. 12).
In spite of these early disappointments, the club persisted. Wells was the first president of the club, and eventually club members made her honorary president in perpetuity. On October 31, 1899, the club’s eighth anniversary, she wrote, This is rather an important day there are to be many Halloween parties, and it is the anniversary of the founding of the Utah Woman’s Press Club of which I have the honor of founding and organizing and being its first President and sort of foster Mother ever since. (p. 60)
The UWPC and the Exponent espoused the tenants of suffrage and woman’s education while also taking an active interest in church politics. Most of the women—although not all—were Mormons, and they were heavily involved in church organizations, such as the Relief Society, as well. For example, in addition to leading the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association (also known as the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association), Fox penned the LDS hymn, “Carry On,” which is still sung in meetings today. The UWPC women were highly educated and active in progressive women’s rights conferences throughout the United States. The club itself was a destination for people who were traveling through the West. “Despite its isolation, Salt Lake City was the crossroads of the West. Consequently, the UWPC frequently entertained well-known visitors from outside Utah” (Baker, 2000, p. 218). Visitors included suffrage leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Upham Yates; members of the Woman’s National Press Club; Phoebe Couzins, who was the first female lawyer in the United States and the first woman appointed to the U.S. Marshall Service; and the Countess Constance Georgina Louise Wachtmeister, a prominent follower of the 19th-century religious philosophy, Theosophy. Theosophy is an idea that can be translated as “divine wisdom.” Theosophy holds that people can transcend their own mind to connect directly with a divine being to receive truth and that there is truth in all religions (The Theosophical Society in America, 2014). Fox (n.d.) said, Even royalty did not escape the hospitality of that energetic group. I remember one particular case which happened in Dr. [Ellis] Shipp’s office. It was a very warm evening and many of the ladies were already seated when I entered. As usual, being very informal and sociable, I wielded my fan and walked gaily around the room, fanning every one present, when to my amazement I had fanned a countess to whom I had not even been presented. (p. 24)
The visitors provided the club with fodder for conversation and education at several meetings, as one visit could be preceded by informative essays by the members and then followed by conversations at multiple successive meetings.
To understand the gendered framing employed by the UWPC, readers need to understand both the context of womanhood in 19th-century America and in the West, specifically. Many of the ways that the women presented their private conversations to the public would have contextualized the clubwomen within the Victorian-era framing of womanly behavior for the middle- to upper-class White woman. Her public behavior was supposed to fit the four pillars of “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity” (Welter, 1966, p. 152). This so-called Cult of True Womanhood or Cult of Domesticity ostensibly proscribed a private sphere of the home as the woman’s true place and a public sphere for men. For the women of the Western frontier, these dichotomous images for women and men worked into an idealized image of the civilizing woman. Western women’s image in literature has been that of “the reluctant pioneer, who, while her man tamed the physical world, gently and passively tamed him and brought civilized culture to the frontier” (Jameson, 1984, p. 1).
Western women may have portrayed the Victorian ideal in their writings; however, they were not the ideal of the true woman. As historian Elizabeth Jameson (1984) noted, “By virtue of class or ethnicity, most western women were not viewed as ladies by proponents of True Womanhood” (p. 2). Western women’s own reports of their lives show them actively participating in many parts of public life, from enthusiastically engaging in the cross-country move to working outside the home to engaging in territorial politics. While True Womanhood may have been the public voice presented to the reading public, “we need only to reflect on the prescriptive literature that surrounds us . . . to realize that there is often a difference between what a culture tells us we ought to do and what we in fact do” (Jameson, 1984, p. 2).
Western women received the vote much earlier than their Eastern sisters. In Utah, women were first granted the right to vote in 1870, just 1 year after Wyoming became the first territory or state to allow women the vote. The Edmunds–Tucker anti-polygamy act of 1887 revoked Utah’s women’s voting rights, in addition to disincorporating the Mormon church. 1 The vote was restored to Utah’s women and they were granted the right to hold office when Utah became a state in 1896.
The work of the woman’s press club and all women journalists walked a fine line between demonstrating the public, powerful voices that women could cultivate while also reassuring readers that the newswomen were aware of Victorian ideals for womanhood, even if they did not adhere to them in either their public or private lives.
Framing and the UWPC
While the Exponent and Wells are well known in Utah, there has been little published about the woman’s press club and Exponent outside of Utah. The UWPC is one of the clubs featured in Elizabeth Burt’s collection of essays, Women’s Press Organizations, 1891-1999. There have been other short pieces written on the UWPC and Woman’s Exponent, including an entry in the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, an article in BYU Studies in 1993 on Utah’s women and their publications, an article on the UWPC in Utah Historical Quarterly in 1985, and a 1976 article on the Exponent in Utah Historical Quarterly (Bennion, 1976, 1993; Thatcher & Sillito, 1985; Thomas, 1992). These articles all emphasize a historical overview of the Exponent and the UWPC without delving into the women’s impressions of their group or its broader implications outside of Utah. They also do not consider the ways that the women wielded the power of the Exponent and their group to expand educational and vocational opportunities for women in Utah and in the rest of the United States. In addition, the Exponent has been contextualized within the suffrage presses. Those publications include mentions in Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck’s edited volume Women’s Periodicals in the United States and Martha M. Solomon’s edited volume on the suffrage presses, A Voice of Their Own: The Woman Suffrage Press, 1840-1910.
To understand the ways that the women of the UWPC used their ability to tell their own story, this article employs framing theory. According to Gamson, Croteau, Hoynes, and Sasson (1992), “Frame plays the same role in analyzing media discourse that schema does in cognitive psychology—a central organizing principle that holds together and gives coherence and meaning to a diverse array of symbols” (p. 384). Devitt (2002) said that journalists uses several frames, some of which are conflicting, throughout the development of a story. In this context, Devitt states that framing can be understood as “journalistic descriptions embedded in news stories to create different depictions of news subjects” (p. 447). In other words, journalists employ frames to guide reader interpretation of a person or an event. Frame production is driven by several factors, including gender of the reporter and cultural repertoires (Borah, 2011). The UWPC used frames to guide readers’ perceptions of their organization, contextualizing the organization’s conversations within broader cultural conceptions of contemporary acceptable femininity.
This study emphasizes the ways that rhetorical framing as presented in the media gave the UWPC clubwomen agency. As Suzanne M. Stauffer (2011) wrote, through framing, “Mormon women actively utilized print culture and their own literary work to create, support, and maintain their own utopian social discourse” (p. 139). For the UWPC clubwomen, mediated framing was an agentic exercise that gave the women the power of demarcating their chosen identity to themselves and to the public. The women developed a clear gendered frame of acceptable 19th-century feminine agency through the consistent development and repetition of three themes: an educational and professional theme, a political theme, and a faith theme.
Using Themes to Build a Frame
To do this examination, the club minutes were gathered by perusing Brigham Young University’s digitized archive of the entire run of the Woman’s Exponent; this collection numbers around 130 notices of UWPC meetings. 2 The last announcements about UWPC activities that were found in the Exponent were run in 1913; there was only one issue of the Exponent published in 1914. The author also consulted the available unpublished meeting minutes and records, and some of the members’ diaries, memoirs, and correspondence. There is not a complete set of unpublished meeting minutes. The Utah State Historical Society holds a book of minutes for 1894 and 1895, and the LDS Church History Library has some meeting minutes for the year 1917 and 1918, which is beyond the scope of the Exponent’s run. Comparing a full run of unedited and unfiltered meeting minutes with those run in the Exponent would allow for a more complete examination of the differences between what was presented publicly and what went on behind the scenes. However, as the full unedited minutes are not available, this analysis relies solely on the group’s published minutes as presented in the Exponent.
The themes discussed in this section clearly developed a gendered frame of 19th-century femininity as they simultaneously reinforced stereotypes about women’s place while also challenging them. All three of the themes discussed here worked on two levels: First, they gave the press club members a group identity and mission that they could articulate to a public audience. Second, these themes served to reinforce to the local, national, and international readers that the women played their roles as members of the Cult of True Womanhood, which made their nontraditional work in the political arena an acceptable extension of their work as pious, pure, and submissive working women. The politics theme, in particular, challenges the idea that “woman’s place was firmly in the home and man’s in the public sphere” (Solomon, 1991, p. 6). Politics are inherently public activities devoted to ensuring civic order. As Martha M. Solomon noted, “women . . . were consistently urged to see themselves as emotionally, mentally, and physically unfit for public life. This common identity allegedly provided a foundation for social order” (Solomon, 1991, p. 6). However, this same moral superiority attributed to women also provided them with paths to public participation, particularly on social reform issues, such as education. In terms of religion, “woman’s common piety made her the moral superior of man, and with the rise of evangelical spirit during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, she was called to provide moral leadership in society” (Solomon, 1991, p. 6). The faith and education frames, then, reinforce the women’s leadership on moral topics, placing them firmly in the area of appropriate feminine behavior, while the politics theme challenged those same roles.
Education and Professionalization
The education and professionalization theme highlights the ways that the women formed an informal learning network to train themselves to become professional literary women. This theme includes discussions of the group’s educational and professional literary undertakings. These activities took place in several ways, including through readings and performances, discussions with visitors, the delivery of prepared essays on a variety of topics, and in the encouragement of women to publish their writing.
The education and professionalization theme was particularly important to the women because it allowed them to show their reading public that Utah women were successfully engaging public literary circles. This idea was so important to the group that at the first meeting, member Susa Young Gates suggested that each member needed to present work in the form of “an original article or address, or such a selected article as should further the object for which the club was organized” (“Woman’s Press Club Organized,” 1891, p. 77). Any member who did not present would be subject to a 25-cent fine (“Woman’s Press Club Organized,” 1891, p. 77). In addition to promotion of women’s literary work, this theme also includes a discussion of the ways that the women educated themselves and others through presentations and readings at the meetings.
The clubwomen consistently defined themselves as the arbiters of women’s professionalized literary education in Utah. In a 1918 address to the State Federation of Clubs, an unnamed group representative stated, As this is, we believe, the only Club which concentrates its effort upon original literary compositions, we feel that if we could secure the co-operation of every woman writer in Utah, we could greatly assist one another in the sale of our articles by finding a suitable market for each particular grade of work. (“Report of the Utah Woman’s Press Club,” 1918, n.p.)
While there were other literary clubs, most notably the Reapers’ Club, the UWPC members defined themselves as the only group in Utah actively encouraging its members to produce their own literary work for income. Ellis R. Shipp (1896e) observed, “Our object is to encourage young writers, our president being an adept in bringing out latent talent; and we find that every well-directed effort brings its own reward” (p. 73). While this claim cannot be confirmed, it does indicate that an integral part of the group’s self-image was linked to the idea of professionalization, although professional women were not part of the Cult of True Womanhood. Professionalization, therefore, challenged contemporary framing of 19th-century womanhood.
Through their meeting minutes, they showed themselves advancing women’s public literary work by finding “a suitable market for each particular grade of work,” whether that was a novel, poetry, or a piece of reportage (“Report of the Utah Woman’s Press Club,” 1918). The women were regularly portrayed celebrating and challenging each other’s professional work, including in listening to each other’s work, pointing out which pieces were going to be published, and celebrating each other’s accomplishments. For example, at the January 30, 1896, meeting, “the President appoint[ed] a committee to prepare suitable resolutions congratulating the Utah Woman’s Press Club that one of its members, Mrs. Isabella Cameron Brown, is at present the recipient of Congressional honors” (Shipp, 1896a, p. 115). Even though the award being presented was for an individual member, it was declared as a success for the entire group. The resolutions were to congratulate the UWPC on Brown’s awards, not Brown herself, according to this account.
According to this theme, the women of the press club were using their position to exert a moral influence that would exalt all of society, not just women, through the progress and education of the people. This was in keeping with the view that women were the moral arbiters of society, as mentioned previously. In her review, Ellis R. Shipp (1896e) extolled the virtues of the club’s meetings and reinforced to the reading public that the club’s virtues were rooted in the good that it produced among the broader public: We as an organization have great respect for the general press; we consider it the friend of practice and reason, the best exponent of virtue and a potent subdue of vice. Think of the condition of the world before printing was invented. One writer has said: “From that hour the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings were to rule the world; weapons forged in the mind keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam were to supplant the sword and the battle axe.” (p. 73)
Shipp reinforced that the UWPC women were formidable in terms of education, and she argued that their work was that of the peacemaker and civilizer in society. This theme plays to the idea of Western women as civilizers while it also encourages the press club members to see themselves as a primary driver behind the advancement of society.
In 1899, Aimee C. Schiller (1899a) recorded that the UWPC had received two missives requesting the club take the lead in “calling together the representatives of the Salt Lake clubs to pursue some line of educational work which will benefit the schools of our cities” (p. 8). In this, the UWPC reinforced the idea that other women’s clubs also framed the UWPC as a leader in social reform efforts. The UWPC called a special meeting on Thursday, May 11, 1899, and the members of the various clubs agreed that the city’s clubwomen should take the lead on initiating free kindergarten and sanitation (Schiller, 1899a, p. 8). In November 1900, the minutes reported that the kindergarten that had been proposed at the organizing meeting in 1899 had been opened and “all club members who can are asked to contribute” (Anderson, 1900, p. 51). In addition to the kindergarten, club minutes show members raising money for a free traveling library on behalf of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs and the establishment of a Domestic Science School (Fox, 1900; Schiller, 1899b). The meeting minutes for July 30, 1900, noted, “that the Press Club was the only one of the clubs that took any part in the Domestic Science class recently” (Fox, 1900, p. 19).
The private club meeting minutes were laden with details of the women’s educational attainment and literary accomplishments. These facets included responses to roll call that required the women to either produce their own verse or memorize a verse from a selected famous author. Selected authors included many famous names, such as Lord Alfred Tennyson, Alexander Pope, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Hyde, 1893, 1894a, 1894c; Woodmansee, 1894c). These monthly roll-call responses, which were sometimes carefully recorded and sometimes skimmed over with statements such as “roll call responded to with selections from the poets,” served to show the broader public that not only could the women produce their own verse, they could instantly recite appropriate literature on demand (Woodmansee, 1894a, p. 117). In terms of defining a group identity, opening every meeting with a literary touch proved to each of the members that they were, as a whole, well read and well informed. It also gave the women a store of well-known authors to refer to as examples for their own writing.
Most of the monthly programs were devoted to educational essays and poetry written by the women themselves. These essays gave the women an opportunity to learn about and debate a subject, and it also advanced the image of the group as an organization filled with professional women invested in public life. The essay topics ranged from international affairs, including 1898 readings on the Philippines and discussions of “the late Queen of Denmark and her beautiful daughters” and “the Princess Alexandria who created a revolution among the nobility regarding children” to debate and discussions on the war between Greece and Turkey and the Cuban War in 1897, and a paper on “The Armenians” (Fox, 1898, p. 75; Hyde, 1897, p. 154; Shipp, 1898, p. 62; Wilcox, 1896, p. 5). When suffrage leader Miss E. U. Yates visited the club in 1896, she spoke about women in China. She was recorded as observing that Chinese women were not educated: But what can we say for America when we consider that Harvard had been founded one hundred and fifty years before they would even admit women to their annex; and even now they measure up side by side with women. (Shipp, 1896c, p. 18)
As is reflected in Yate’s topic, the women’s progressive politics were evident in the readings and speeches. The women’s subjects often covered issues relevant to their work for women’s rights. In April 1897, Miss A. M. Beecher, the niece of the noted 19th-century abolitionist and preacher Henry Ward Beecher, visited the club and was prevailed upon to give “an informal talk on topics of interest to all—economics, the influence of women in politics, and the political status of the Eastern women” (Curtis, 1897, p. 135). In addition to talks, there were several papers on women authors and the place of women in 19th-century society. These included a discussion of Margaret Fuller, an original article by Mary A. B. Freeze on “What western women are doing in Literature,” and a speech and poem on “the advancement of woman in the last forty years,” by Mrs. Laura Miner (Shipp, 1896b, p. 107; C. C. R. Wells, 1893, p. 131; Wicox 3 , 1895, p. 269).
This part of the education theme overlaps with the politics theme. To be fully involved in the political life of the territory and state, the women needed to present themselves as knowledgeable of the many facets defining public life. By presenting papers on a range of political topics, the women made an argument for their own involvement in political discussions. Later, when they were allowed to hold political office by the state constitution, those same papers and conversations showed their ability to hold public offices.
Politics
The politics theme highlights the ways that the women involved themselves in the public life of the territory and state. This theme was used in the most complex way by the club, particularly by Wells herself. Because the club itself was ostensibly organized to support professional literary women, and politics were framed as men’s work in the 19th century, Wells tried to advance an apolitical face for the club early in its tenure. In 1892, in response to the poem “Eloquence of Action,” written and read by Lula Green Richards, then-president Wells encouraged the members to leave their politics behind when they came to meetings.
The president said, “These meetings are simply for literary improvement and devoted to the press and similar things, and not for the discussion of religion or politics as we can secure these things in other places. No subject should be presented here upon which we are likely to conflict or that will create unpleasantness.” (Shipp, 1893a, p. 21)
This statement was so striking and dissonant with the club members’ consistent framing of themselves as active political participants throughout the rest of the group’s existence that it was reiterated in the club’s 10-year retrospective, which was published in the Exponent in 1901 and 1902 (Alder, 1901). However, within the context of traditional 19th-century womanhood, which the UWPC members and Wells herself consistently espoused in various ways, the politics theme was the most difficult to navigate. While Wells’s intent is not clear from the meeting minutes, this disavowal of politics and reinforcement that women should not be involved in quarrels or anything that would “create unpleasantness” reinforced the women’s moral superiority. This statement defines the women as existing for literary improvement, an educational pursuit consistent with their womanly moral imperative, rather than as engaging in public political fisticuffs.
Within the context of the club members’ heavy involvement in political issues ranging from Utah’s statehood to suffrage, this comment was not only surprising, but also seemingly discordant with the individual group members’ personas, both public and private. Fox, for example, was a noted political advocate who, like Wells, was active in the Utah State Republican Party. Her stance on women’s voting rights drove her political activism, including her active lobbying on behalf of Utah’s statehood. She noted in her memoirs, We closed the campaign with a rally in the Salt Lake Theatre the night before election. I entered the following note in my journal: “This is election day. I do not know what the result will be and do not care much. I believe that statehood is assured and that means franchise for women.” (Fox, n.d., p. 27)
So many of the women were involved in the politics of the fledgling state that in 1896 the club had to reconsider a rule stating that only women who were in attendance at meetings could be elected to office. Minutes from the October 1896 meeting, which was in the middle of the state’s first official campaign as a state and not a territory, observed, The President [Wells] expressed her pleasure with the evening’s entertainment and said she regretted the motion being made at our business meeting that we should elect no one to office who was not present upon this occasion as so many of the ladies were actively engaged in the political campaign and could not be here to represent themselves. (Shipp, 1896d, p. 67)
The members then voted to reconsider the motion, and the club elections proceeded. This side note within the meeting minutes advances the framing of the clubwomen as political people who were actively involved in public work, so much so that they could not attend the club’s annual elections and anniversary celebration.
The antipolitics comment particularly seems out of character for Wells, who was heavily involved in the politics of the Utah Territory and its incipient statehood. Her diaries and the Exponent itself show her consistently commenting on public affairs and pushing for women’s involvement in politics. In 1896, when Utah achieved statehood, Wells went to inauguration meetings and firmly reminded the male leadership that women were being excluded from their conversations. She reported in her diary, I went up to the meeting of the Inauguration Committee, and after the meeting adjourned, suggested to the Chairman, that it was noticeable women were not considered in the proceedings or in any way recognized as a part of the new state. (Wells, January 1, 1896).
Wells (1896) spent many of her days encouraging women to take an interest in the politics of their state, work that she found exhausting. Wells herself even brought politics into club meetings. The club minute books report that “Mrs. E.B. Wells made a motion that the meeting be resolved into a meeting for the consideration of woman’s suffrage” in April 1895 because the topic was under discussion at Utah’s constitutional convention (Sillito, 1895, “Minute book,” p. 16). The minutes recorded a hearty conversation with Wells declaring that “taxation without representation was an injustice to women as well as men,” and a variety of club members and visiting men declaring their support for suffrage and encouraging those in support of suffrage to “deluge” the convention with letters of support to drown out the voices of the antisuffragists (Sillito, 1895, “Minute book,” p. 16).
Exponent meeting notices show the club consistently supporting national suffrage gatherings by blessing and sending their members to participate, but this political engagement was also part of the women’s moral imperative. In 1895, Shipp and Wells attended the “Council of Women,” presumably the conference of the National Council of Women of the United States (NCWUS; Wilcox, 1895). The NCWUS, which first was lead by well-known woman activists Francis Willard, Susan B. Anthony, and May Wright Seawall, was organized in 1888 at a conference of the National Woman Suffrage Association. The group was organized specifically to support women’s equality campaigns, and it affiliated with a diverse range of women’s organizations, including the Women’s Relief Association of the LDS Church (NCWUS, 2016).
Shipp and Wells’s report on this event again emphasized the idea that women participating in public life were an integral part of the advancement of humankind.
There are thousands of noble women working for the elevation of mankind. It is a great joy to know that woman is so busily engaged in elevating humanity, for if woman improves the influence will extend to all mankind. (Wilcox, 1895, p. 253)
This repeated idea that woman’s education and professionalization elevated the entire society extended throughout the club’s education, politics, and faith themes, and it worked to reinforce their own view of themselves as a necessary part of public life. Couching the political conversations as education defined the conversations as acceptable since the education of the household and broader society was defined as inherently a woman’s duty. The April 15, 1895, meeting notes found Wells framing the NCWUS’s meeting as an educational event, even as it was inherently a political gathering: “Mrs. Wells felt those who had the privilege of attending the National Council had enjoyed an intellectual feast and superior educational advantages and must have made some positive advancement along all lines of thought” (Wilcox, 1895, p. 253). Suffrage conferences and political conversations were “superior educational” opportunities, allowing Utah’s press clubwomen to participate in national conversations and to gather a reputation that brought other women leaders to their doorstep.
Faith
The faith frame theme showed the women as obedient and knowledgeable members of the LDS faith. The women’s discussion of themselves as faithful members of the Mormon church was an important part of their private and public identity. As previously noted, not all clubwomen were involved in the LDS Church; however, several of their meeting reports reinforced the idea that the women were devoted to Mormonism and reinforced the precepts of that faith within the private confines of their club. However, this framing of the faithful clubwoman is problematized by meeting notes that show the women exploring other faiths and philosophical positions, including Theosophy and Buddhism. As previously noted, this faith theme is perhaps closest to the idea of traditional womanhood that was upheld by the Cult of True Womanhood and 19th-century framing of womanhood.
The women’s work was consistently defined as an act of faith. Many of the meeting notes, particularly early in the club’s tenure, note that the gatherings opened with prayer and ended with a benediction pronounced by one of the members. In a write-up of the club’s first decade, Lydia D. Alder (1902) wrote, Still all the beautiful things have not been written, the world of thought opens wider and wider as we advance step by step and behold the wonders contained therein. Then my comrades of that world press on and on, brighter grows the way, companions, crowding to us on all sides the road is onward and upward that leads to our Father God, the fount of all knowledge, inspiration, immortality and eternal life. (p. 35)
The idea of advancement and knowledge is again woven through this statement, reinforcing the idea that all of the women’s work on educational advancement and participating in political causes was going to bring them closer to God. Even the performances rendered at each meeting were portrayed as acts of faith that brought together “the divine arts music and poetry in a manner to lift one’s soul above the stern realities of life to the idealistic of the beyond” (Shipp, 1893b, n.p.).
The women declared themselves defenders of their faith, and their explorations of other ideologies were shown as educational opportunities. At the August 31, 1893, meeting, a paper on the “Deserted Mining-Camp” eventually drove discussion toward “Kate Field’s unjust criticism of the Women of Utah” (Shipp, 1893b, n.p.). Kate Field was a 19th-century journalist and lecturer who spent 8 months in Utah “studying the habits and habitat of the Latter-day Saints,” a process which lead the New York Graphic to report in 1893 that “Kate Field is disgusted with Mormonism” (Sharnhorst, 2008, p. 160). Through a series of articles and lectures on “The Mormon Monster,” Field characterized the LDS church as a treasonous plague or disease, and declared that women engaged in plural marriages were “misguided women who are but accessories to crime” (quoted in Sharnhorst, 2008, p. 162). While there is no available record of what the women said during this meeting, the term “unjust” shows them fighting the Field’s definition of Mormon women as passive, “misguided” women. The clubwomen regularly used references to church leaders to solidify their place as active church members who revered the leaders and espoused their teachings. In just one example, at the April 28, 1894, meeting, Mrs. A. E. Bennion delivered a lecture on “Will” and pointed to church leaders Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in addition to Emmeline B. Wells and Ellis Shipp, as examples of will power moving people to success (Woodmansee, 1894b, p. 135). Polygamy was not an official part of the church at this time, so the “unjust” may also refer to Field’s lack of consideration of the change in church policy that had occurred 3 years prior to Field’s attacks.
This faithful woman theme was complicated by some of the programs where the women explored ideologies that seemed to contrast with or challenge the LDS faith. For their October 1893 anniversary, they explored the “mystical rites of Halloween” with tales about “magic or charm” being practiced and a paper by Wells on the ancient Druids and Druidesses and their observance of the 31st of October; it being the eve on which all fires and lights were extinguished to be rekindled from the sacred fire at the Altar on the payment of the yearly tithes or dues exacted by the priests. (Woodmansee, 1893a, p. 50; Woodmansee, 1893b, p. 59)
These tales and papers were presented as information of “various degrees of interest and weirdness,” though, indicating that the women were not serious about the study of these topics (Woodmansee, 1893b, p. 59).
The philosophy of Theosophy, however, took up several of the women’s conversations, according to the published notes. The topic was first raised as a paper read by Dr. Pratt on May 31, 1894. The June 30, 1894, meeting was occupied by a visit from the Countess Wachtmeister and her companion Mrs. Egbert Roberts. Wachtmeister was a close friend of the leader of 19th-century Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, and she spoke with club about the philosophy. The Countess’s comments were reported without challenge in the club minutes, with the recording secretary Gladys Woodmansee commenting, “The ladies thoroughly enjoyed the presence and courtesy of this great exponent of Theosophy, and consider it a red-letter-day in the history of the club, to have so eminent and distinguished a woman their guest for the evening” (Woodmansee, 1894d, p. 162). The subject of Theosophy was again discussed at the next meeting and was mentioned as a highlight of the club’s year-end review (Alder, 1894; Hyde, 1894b). This consistent discussion of the topic and the club’s hosting of the Countess and her companion could have indicated the clubwoman’s tacit acceptance of the philosophy, although there is no indication in the published club minutes that the women expressed their explicit support of the ideal in their private club conversations. In fact, the women’s identity as defined by their faith theme would have excluded their public declaration of a support for an ideology that found truth in all religions, not Mormonism exclusively.
Conclusion
This unique case study presents an opportunity to consider how a gender-specific group could use media to frame a strong story about itself to the public if the group were in control of the outlet. This case study makes the case that gender-specific publications historically have been important because they allowed women and gender minorities to control their own image and to present a strong countercultural narrative.
The women of the Exponent used three clear themes—education and professionalization, politics, and faith—to develop a gendered frame of themselves as members of the Cult of True Womanhood. However, these themes also complicated that frame with a conflicted idea of women as agentic members of their communities. Using the Exponent, the women of the UWPC created a portrait of feminine leaders who were respected as leaders by other clubwomen, who were political activists, and who were pious supporters of their faith. In fact, men needed women because their work elevated humankind by improving minds and civilizing the West. This gendered framing naturalized women working in all areas of public life, from politics to faith, as a part of their role as 19th-century women. The group’s framing of themselves argued that equality should be woman’s portion. Club member Orielle Curtis made this goal clear in her 1896 poem to the Press Club, which concluded, “Our star shall shine in clearer air/With woman man’s acknowledged peer” (Curtis, 1896, p. 137). Rather than civilizers, the UWPC saw themselves as, and were seen as, bright stars guiding Utah’s women toward equality with men. Framing their work within the pages of a newspaper written and edited by their founder and members gave them a unique opportunity to show a reading public that they were without doubt “man’s acknowledged peer.”
All of the published accounts of the club’s activities were written by different women depending on who was the secretary at the time and who was in attendance at the meeting. However, the consistency of Wells as the editor of the Exponent meant that she exerted control over the content of these meeting notices, in spite of changing authors. Therefore, while the themes identified here were used by the women to guide public perceptions of their work, Wells probably perpetuated and built the themes herself. Wells’s own reflections on faith and politics were mirrored in the frames built by the UWPC in the pages of the Exponent. While the frames analyzed here perpetuated Wells’s belief systems and reinforced ideas of 19th-century womanhood to the reading public, they also helped the clubwomen define the group’s selfhood as an organic whole. Together, these mediated frames showed the UWPC actively negotiating traditionally feminine roles into nontraditional public activism and political involvement that challenged and expanded women’s work. As noted previously, historical records are a site of hegemonic struggle. The Woman’s Exponent provided a space for the women to write their own historical record defined within the gendered framing they chose to portray.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks undergraduate research assistants Erin Cox and Jared Call for their assistance in gathering and organizing the Woman’s Exponent articles used in this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies.