Several times over the years, Kate Holbrook invited her former professor and friend Ann D. Braude of Harvard Divinity School to speak at events sponsored by the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It was only after Braude arrived at each event that she understood the “strategic agenda” Holbrook was pursuing with each invitation.
Holbrook was building a bridge in the two-way conversation between the study of Latter-day Saint history and the field of women’s studies, and beyond that, connections with people, Braude said.
One of Braude’s most memorable visits came in 2017 when she was invited to take part in a conference on women’s religious organizations. As part of the event, Holbrook organized a breakfast where she introduced Braude to several Latter-day Saint leaders, including Elder D. Todd Christofferson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; Sister Bonnie L. Oscarson, former Young Women general president; President Bonnie H. Cordon, who was then a counselor in the Primary general presidency and now serves as the Young Women general president; and Sister Sharon Eubank, who then served as first counselor in the Relief Society general presidency and is director of Humanitarian Services for the Church; and several others.
Braude said the meeting was both informative for her as a scholar devoted to the study of women leaders in religion, and it gave Church leaders a chance to learn from someone outside the faith.
“What a feat of two-way diplomacy Kate had pulled off. I was always happy to be used by Kate in whatever way she saw fit,” Braude said. “There was always a plan, and it was always one of building bridges. ... I hope that others saw this and will take up where she left off.”
Holbrook was the mastermind behind the “Symposium on Women, Religion and Records.” The late writer, historian and champion of Latter-day Saint women’s history conceived the event’s theme, then identified and invited the participants before she died last August of cancer at the age of 50.
As a result, many — including Braude — paid tribute to Holbrook at the one-day symposium on Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Conference Center Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Holbrook’s mother and family were in attendance.
Symposium on women, religion and records
The symposium, sponsored by the Church History Department, featured a group of distinguished scholars who discussed their historical and archival expertise on records of women’s religious experiences, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, over the past 300 years.
The symposium also celebrated the publication of several landmark projects that spotlight Latter-day Saint women’s experiences, such as the writings of past Relief Society Presidents Eliza R. Snow and Emmeline B. Wells.
The symposium served to place the Church’s work on Latter-day Saint women’s history into dialogue with broader themes and approaches in American religious history and women’s history, said Lisa Olsen Tait, managing historian in the Church History Department.
“The work we publish is a great blessing to the Church, and many Latter-day Saints have found meaningful stories and examples in it. But it is also a rich resource for scholars of women’s history and religious history. The symposium helped to bring awareness to these sources,” Tait said. “We will be collecting the presentations and publishing a book of the symposium proceedings. This will provide another source for scholars in which Latter-day Saint women’s history is part of the bigger picture.”
Reflections of Kate Holbrook
Braude was part of a three-person panel who offered “Reflections on the Work of Dr. Kate Holbrook” during the symposium. Samuel Brown, Holbrook’s husband, wrote of the panel on social media: “A memorial panel to Kate in the midst of other marvelous content.”
Holbrook knew how to deploy a conference invitation and when to deploy a recipe, Braude said, and thanks to her vision, creativity, intelligence and tireless efforts over the last 20 years, Latter-day Saint women are less likely to feel they are misrepresented in academic settings.
Braude said she and Holbrook are members of the same tribe.
“It is the tribe of women intellectuals who combine scholarship and administration to amplify the voices of religious women, and to bring them in conversation with each other,” she said. “Members of this tribe must feel the same love toward the work of other scholars that we feel towards our own scholarship. It requires an appreciation that no one voice can say what needs to be said, but expanding our knowledge of the truth requires a panoply of women’s voices. Kate not only understood this intellectually, she felt it in her heart.”
Holbrook was a “transformative teacher” and a “visionary writer,” said Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Harvard University.
Jill Mulvay Derr, of the Church History Department, praised Holbrook’s contributions to “The First Fifty Years of the Relief Society” and “At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women,” and her advocacy for more extensive scholarship on the lives of women. She was fair in telling a person’s story and dedicated herself to recovering the experiences that other historians overlooked as trivial, conventional or insignificant. She was concerned with nurturing people past and present and building relationships that would sustain people for a long time.
“I have been sustained by such nurturing from Kate, and this is her enduring legacy,” Derr said.
Latter-day Saint women’s history
One session of the symposium focused exclusively on the work of women in the Church History Department.
Jennifer Reeder, a 19th-century women’s history specialist, provided background regarding the significance of recent digital projects, such as the discourses of Eliza R. Snow and the diaries of Emmeline B. Wells.
The writings of the two early Latter-day Saint women are among numerous women’s records preserved in the Church History Department, including personal writings, correspondence and autobiographies, as well as needlework, samplers, quilts, hair art and other artifacts.
“Each in their own way is a valuable record of their faith, lived religion, family and local community, culture, politics and economics, both individually and institutionally,” Reeder said.
Reeder highlighted the following records:
- Volumes of minute books for the Relief Society, Young Women, Young Men and Primary organizations from 1842 through the 20th century.
- The Women’s Exponent, a bimonthly newspaper created and operated by the Relief Society. “Latter-day Saint women edited, collected and published over 700 life sketches, obituaries and autobiographical serials within 42 years of publication,” Reeder said. “The reports of local Relief Society minutes and correspondence with national suffrage leaders make the Exponent a veritable treasure trove.”
- Edward W. Tullidge’s 1877 publication of “Women of Mormondom,” a collection of autobiographical writings of Latter-day Saint women.
- The Jubilee Memorial Box. When the Church celebrated its 50th jubilee anniversary in 1880, historians collected entries such as life sketches, histories, genealogies, letters of advice, photographs, pamphlets, newspaper articles, poetry and other items to be stored in a box. The box was opened decades later, and the contents were distributed to the oldest living female descendants. Some found their way back to the Church History Library.
- Augusta Joyce Crocheron’s 1884 book, “Representative Women of Deseret,” featuring more than 20 biographies and photographs of women.
- “The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow.”
- “The Diaries of Emmeline B. Wells.”
- “At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women.”
- “The First Fifty Years of Relief Society.”
- The 1883 prison journal of Belle Harris.
- Future projects include a history of the Young Women, highlighting the history, curriculum, activities, leadership and events from 1870 to the present; the transcription of 19th-century Relief Society minutes; and a project to document midwives in the early Church and create a database.
Eliza R. Snow and Emmeline B. Wells
Derr and Elizabeth Kuehn, a historian in the Church History Department, each presented research on Snow’s writings — Derr on her poetry and Kuehn on her public ministry in 19th-century Utah.
When Snow died in 1887, the New York Times noted the “demise of the Mormon poetess, one of the central figures of the Mormon galaxy,” Derr said.
“Revered as Zion’s poetess by Latter-day Saints of her generation, Snow was without question the foremost woman of letters to emerge from early Mormonism. Her legacy of records includes journals, letters, discourses, essays, children’s recitations, a family biography and a short autobiography, as well as more than 500 poems. Her poems ... document her faith, her thought, her relationships, and not inconsequentially, the history and theology of 19th-century Latter-day Saints.”
Tait presented on “Latter-day Saint Female Networks” in Wells’ diaries, which are virtually unparalleled in the records of Latter-day Saint women. The 47 volumes of Wells’ diaries span from 1844 to 1920 and provide insight not only into her life but for understanding the lived religious experience of Latter-day Saint women in the decades near the turn of the 20th century.
One interesting pattern Tait discovered in studying Wells’ diaries is that a major portion of her spiritual engagements took place in the company of other women and in the context of deep, meaningful relationships with her sisters in the gospel. Tait cited several such examples found in the diaries.
“Recovering the sources and voices of women of the earlier era, such as the Wells’ diaries, has brought these practices back to light and has enriched our understanding of the spiritual lives and networks of earlier generations,” Tait said.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that President Bonnie H. Cordon served as the Church’s Primary general president. Sister Cordon previously served as a counselor in the Primary general presidency and now serves as the Young Women general president.
