Claudia Marian Lauper Bushman (born June 11, 1934) [1] is an American historian specializing in domestic women's history, especially as it relates to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). She helped found, and was the first editor of, the progressive LDS magazine Exponent II , has written American and LDS history books, and established a Mormon women oral history project at Claremont Graduate University.
Bushman grew up in the Sunset District of San Francisco, where LDS church attendance was a regular part of her family life. [2] : 94 She felt aware of gender issues from a young age, noticing that boys received more attention from their leaders in her ward than girls. [2] : 95 Still, Bushman said that she felt like everyone in her ward was interested in what she was doing as a young person. [2]
Claudia attended Wellesley College for her undergraduate studies under a full scholarship and described herself as a "lazy student." [2] She met fellow historian Richard Lyman Bushman there while he was on his mission to the Cambridge area, and when he returned to Harvard to study, they renewed their friendship through study dates. They were married on August 19, 1955. [2] Claudia noticed that while she had planned to live as a housewife, she longed to have a life outside of her home and family. She recalls that she learned to work hard from Richard. She attended classes at the Lowell Institute, and encouraged by her enjoyment of those classes, received an MA in American Literature from Brigham Young University while her husband worked there. [2] She received her PhD in New England and American studies from Boston University after more than ten years of part-time study. [1] [2] Bushman attributed her admittance into the English PhD program to her husband's employment there, although she said that the chairman openly scorned her status as part-time student and housewife. She changed her focus to American Studies when she found out they wouldn't require more than one foreign language proficiency. [2] [3]
Bushman is a professor of American Studies emerita [4] at Columbia University. [1] In the summer of 2003, she was the director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History's Summer Scholars program. For the 2007–08 academic year, Bushman was an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University while her husband held the Howard W. Hunter chair at that institution. [5] Bushman is the author of many books, most recently Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (Praeger Publishers, 2006). Her work focuses on the detailed lives of ordinary women. [2]
In the 1970s, Bushman was part of a group of LDS women in Boston who would get together and discuss women's issues, especially as they pertained to the LDS church. [3] When Eugene England was visiting Boston, Bushman suggested that Dialogue should do a women's issue, and he agreed. By the time all the articles were written, England had given up the editorial position to Robert Rees, who believed that polygamy and the priesthood were more important issues for Mormon women than birth control and church service. The issue went forward anyway, and this first issue of Dialogue devoted to women's issues is often called the "pink" Dialogue. [3] Inspired by Susan Kohler's discovery of the Woman's Exponent in the Harvard Widener library, Bushman and her friends wrote a series of institute courses on the topic of LDS women's history, which they taught to an audience of about fifty institute students. [3] [6] To celebrate their work on the institute course, Bushman and her group held an Exponent dinner, where Jill Mulvay (Derr) met Maureen, a worker in the church history department under Leonard Arrington.
In 1974 Bushman was involved in the founding of Exponent II . [7] The group of about twelve women pasted pages together in their homes, often with children underfoot. Using money Leonard Arrington gave the group for research purposes, they printed their first issue, which they gave out for free to solicit subscriptions. [3] Bushman helped edit the institute courses and published them in Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, which originally Bushman and her friends self-published and sold to their friends and subscribers. [3] Hoping to excite interest in others, they sent copies of the Exponent II to all the wives of general authorities, but found that some of the wives would prefer not to receive the magazine. They gained attention from some influential people in Salt Lake City, and the group of women wrote letters defending their involvement with the magazine, although at this point Bushman had decided to resign from working on Exponent II. [3]
When Claudia Bushman was publishing Exponent II, her husband Richard was a stake president in the LDS church and writing for Dialogue. According to Richard, the church was afraid that his position in church leadership would make Exponent II seem like an official church publication when it was not, and Claudia resigned as editor. [7] When L. Tom Perry flew down to talk with Bushman and her friends, he said that while he found nothing objectionable in the magazine, he said it was not suitable for the wife of a stake president to help in the writing of a magazine with such "negative potential." [3] Claudia saw this as a double standard, as Dialogue was not a church publication either, but no one had a problem with her husband writing for it. [7]
In Newark, Delaware, Bushman started the Newark Historical Society with some of the students in her Newark history class at the University of Delaware. Bushman later was in charge of the Delaware historical commission for five years. [7] In celebration of the anniversary of the Constitution and Delaware's statehood, she and her staff reenacted colonial balls, staged a parade, and released a million ladybugs, Delaware's state insect. [2]
The women's studies program committee at the University of Delaware refused to cross-list her honors history course on women because she was a Mormon. [2] [8]
Bushman has been heavily involved in cultural activities and public relations in New York City. She was the producer of the youth celebration that coincided with the dedication of the Manhattan New York Temple.
From 2008–2011 [9] Claremont University appointed Richard Bushman to start a Mormon studies program, and Claudia taught classes as an adjunct professor. [10] During her time at Claremont, Claudia established an oral history project to document the lives of Mormon women. [8] The oral history project created more primary documents for students to study, and the book Mormon Women Have Their Say compiles some of the experiences gathered. [4] The Mormon women oral history project is still ongoing. [9]
Bushman's feminism in 1971 was one of acceptance. She felt that a woman who chose to be a housewife shouldn't be demeaned: "If some women find themselves in prison at home, others consider it heaven on earth and make it that for their little angels." [11] She found that her children constantly developed in interesting ways, while "a book just sits on a table, never improving by itself at all." [2] : 116 Bushman found that when she was a part-time student, "school made housework a pleasure," and noted that "there is lots of space between being a devoted stay-at-home mom and being an executive in a Fortune 500 company." [12]
Bushman's attitude to teaching is to put students "in a position where they can learn things." [4] Bushman fostered student enthusiasm by editing their writing, encouraging them to present and publish, and participating on exam committees. [9] In giving advice to young women, Bushman advises them to choose something reasonable and make it the right thing, rather than zealously pursuing an impossible goal. [2] : 114 She advocates a type of flexible ambitiousness and to always do "something," whether it be volunteering or writing a book proposal. [2] : 116
Bushman is still a faithful member of the LDS church. In an interview with Yahoo! News, she said "They would have to kick me out [of the church]." [8] At a Sunstone panel, she said that she loves having a church community wherever she goes and that the church needs women who aren't afraid to speak out. [13]
Claudia Bushman is married to historian Richard Lyman Bushman. The Bushmans are the parents of six children. Claudia was recognized as mother of the year for the state of New York in 2000. [14] She is the sister of Bonnie Goodliffe, one of the organists for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. [15]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, the principal branch of the Latter Day Saint movement started by Joseph Smith in upstate New York during the 1820s. After Smith's death in 1844, the movement split into several groups following different leaders; the majority followed Brigham Young, while smaller groups followed Joseph Smith III, Sidney Rigdon, and James Strang. Most of these smaller groups eventually merged into the Community of Christ, and the term Mormon typically refers to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as today, this branch is far larger than all the others combined. People who identify as Mormons may also be independently religious, secular, and non-practicing or belong to other denominations. Since 2018, the LDS Church has emphasized a desire for its members be referred to as "members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", or more simply as "Latter-day Saints".
The status of women in Mormonism has been a source of public debate since before the death of Joseph Smith in 1844. Various denominations within the Latter Day Saint movement have taken different paths on the subject of women and their role in the church and in society. Views range from the full equal status and ordination of women to the priesthood, as practiced by the Community of Christ, to a patriarchal system practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to the ultra-patriarchal plural marriage system practiced by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and other Mormon fundamentalist groups.
The Woman's Exponent was a semi-official publication of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that began in 1872. It published articles advocating for women's suffrage and plural marriage, in addition to poetry and other writings. Lula Greene Richards and Emmeline B. Wells were its editors until 1914, when the Exponent was dissolved. It was "the first long-lived feminist periodical in the western United States." While it had no direct successor, the Relief Society did launch its own magazine, the Relief Society Magazine, in 1915.
Richard Lyman Bushman is an American historian and Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, having previously taught at Brigham Young University, Harvard University, Boston University, and the University of Delaware. Bushman is the author of Joseph Smith:Rough Stone Rolling, a biography of Joseph Smith, progenitor of the Latter Day Saint movement. Bushman also was an editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and now serves on the national advisory board. Bushman has been called "one of the most important scholars of American religious history" of the late-20th century. In 2012, a $3-million donation to the University of Virginia established the Richard Lyman Bushman Chair of Mormon Studies in his honor.
Historians of the Latter Day Saint movement are a diverse group of historians writing about Mormonism. Historians devoted to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement may be members of a Latter Day Saint faith or non-members with an academic interest. They range from faith-promoting historians to anti-Mormon historians, but also include scholars who make an honest effort at objectivity.
No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith is a 1945 book by Fawn M. Brodie that was one of the first significant non-hagiographic biographies of Joseph Smith, the progenitor of the Latter Day Saint movement. No Man Knows My History was influential in the development of Mormon history as a scholarly field.
Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought is an independent quarterly journal that addresses a wide range of issues on Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint Movement.
Philip Layton Barlow is a Harvard-trained scholar who specializes in American religious history, religious geography, and Mormonism. In 2019, Barlow was appointed associate director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Barlow was the first full-time professor of Mormon studies at a secular university as the inaugural Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University (USU), from 2007 to 2018.
New Mormon history refers to a style of reporting the history of Mormonism by both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars which departs from earlier more polemical or faith-based styles of history. Rather than presenting material selectively to either prove or disprove Mormonism, the focus of new Mormon history is to present history in a more humanistic and dispassionate way, and to situate Mormon history in a fuller historical context. Because it is a break from past historical narratives, new Mormon history tends to be revisionist. In many cases, the new Mormon history follows the perspectives and techniques of new history, including cultural history. The Mormon historian Richard Bushman described it as "a quest for identity rather than a quest for authority." New Mormon historians include a wide range of both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars, the most prominent of which include Bushman, Jan Shipps, D. Michael Quinn, Terryl Givens, Leonard J. Arrington, Richard P. Howard, Fawn Brodie, and Juanita Brooks.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been subject to criticism and sometimes discrimination since its inception.
Exponent II is a quarterly periodical that publishes essays, poetry, and art created by women and gender minorities on the Latter-day Saint spectrum. Exponent II was founded in 1974, "poised on the dual platforms of Mormonism and Feminism ...to strengthen The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to encourage and develop the talents of Mormon women." It has been described as the longest-running independent publication for Mormon women.
Mormon studies is the interdisciplinary academic study of the beliefs, practices, history and culture of individuals and denominations belonging to the Latter Day Saint movement, a religious movement associated with the Book of Mormon, though not all churches and members of the Latter Day Saint movement identify with the terms Mormon or Mormonism. Denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement include the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, by far the largest, as well as the Community of Christ (CoC) and other smaller groups, include some categorized under the umbrella term Mormon fundamentalism.
Patrick Q. Mason is an American historian specializing in the study of the Latter-day Saint movement. Since 2019, he has held the Leonard J. Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University.
Kathleen Flake is an American historian, writer, and attorney. She was the inaugural Richard Lyman Bushman chair of Mormon studies at the University of Virginia from 2013 until her retirement in 2024.
The John Whitmer Historical Association (JWHA) is an independent, nonprofit organization promoting study, research, and publishing about the history and culture of the Latter Day Saint movement. It is especially focused on the Community of Christ, other midwestern Restoration traditions, and early Mormonism. The Community of Christ's approach to its own history was influenced, in part, by historical problems raised and explored through JWHA publications and conferences, and those of its sister organization, the Mormon History Association. JWHA membership numbers around 400 and is open to all, fostering cooperation with LDS and non-Mormon scholars.
Mormon feminism is a feminist religious social movement concerned with the role of women within Mormonism. Mormon feminists commonly advocate for a more significant recognition of Heavenly Mother, the ordination of women, gender equality, and social justice grounded in Mormon theology and history. Mormon feminism advocates for more representation and presence of women as well as more leadership roles for women within the hierarchical structure of the church. It also promotes fostering healthy cultural attitudes concerning women and girls.
This is a bibliography of works on the Latter Day Saint movement.
Judith Ann Rasmussen Dushku is an American academic political scientist, journalist, writer, and humanitarian. An active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and well known as a Mormon feminist, Dushku cofounded the Mormon women's journal Exponent II, was the Relief Society president for the Boston stake of the LDS Church, became lead founder of a humanitarian agency in Uganda, and is a professor of government at Suffolk University, specializing in comparative politics and the interaction of policy and gender since the 1970s. Dushku has been dean of a satellite campus, has won two major awards at Suffolk, and has been a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Dushku was extensively quoted by Mitt Romney when he was running for a US presidential candidacy. Her daughter, Eliza Dushku, is a successful television and film actress.
