hans castorp wrote:lulu wrote:There are references to Lucy (a pure women open to impressions?) being the glass looker with Joseph Smith being the digger, the same with Sally (a young women, virgin?) telling Joseph Smith where to dig. It's hard to create a timeline though. But obviously at some point Joseph Smith (pure male youth, except for his minor sins) starts to look too as well as dig. I haven't checked these references in years so I stand open to correction.
On the other hand one can argue that Mormonism began as a magic men's club that spread from the Smith men (with Emma needing chastising) to the Knight men (with Mrs. Knight reluctant) to the Whitmer men (was Mary Whitmer's seeing the plates designed to convince her when she was dragging behind?). In one sense this would make Lucy all the more remarkable. But there may have been some back and forth with Smith family gender roles in the folk practices as there were with the religious issues, if the folk practices and religious issues can even be separated.
Sellers sets Mormon women off against 2nd Great Awakening women.
But alas I have thread hijacked again as I am wont to do.
Let's get back to the temple ritual in the lost 116 pages. Do you think what Lucy might have done was the same or different from what the men might have been doing?
This is fascinating. Can you point me to any literature on gender roles in American or British folk magic?
hc
It's been a long time since I looked at this. When I did, there wasn't any.
The closest you come is women and gender in witchcraft. There the over all theme is women, at the margins, claiming power, which also placed them in vunerable situations.
Someone somewhere said that the end of the witchcraze in America made it safer for women with a folklore bent to surface. I usually don't like this type of question, but sometimes I ask myself if Lucy had been living the 1600s would she have been accused of being a witch? Poor woman, always having to move, always the new woman in town, living outside the village in the township (at times), didn't fit into any church, had her folklore practices?
The last time I looked, the American women's historiography goes something like, women and the witch craze, women and the Great Awakenings. So there's a gap between say 1690 and 1740 where there wasn't anything of note in the secondary literature re women.
But someone somewhere said (not limiting it to women) people were falling on the ground in 1740 and doing things that would have gotten them hung as witches in 1690.
So something was going on with women between roughly 1690 and 1740 (of course, something is always going on with women, they're people) but I don't know what nor do I currently know anyone who does.
Lydia Gates Mack (Mother of Lovisa, Lovina, Lucy and others) was born in 1735 which would have been towards the end of this period. She appears to be a solidly Congregational woman from a solid Congregational family. Her congregation in East Haddam rejected New Lights. Although her daughters were open to them. But by then, Lydia had moved up the river to the "frontier." I have never found any evidence of folk practices in Lydia's life. Where Lucy learned her's I don't known, although Hall warns us to not assume solid Congregationalists didn't have their folk practices. But he's not looking at women.