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"Redeemed From The Curse Placed Upon Her": Dialogic Discourse On Eve In The Woman's Exponent, Boyd J. Petersen

Boyd J Petersen

Some fifty years before Virginia Woolf published A Room of One's Own, many Mormon women not only had a room of their own, but they also had their own printing press, acting as proprietors, editors, and sub-editors. Within the pages of the Woman's Exponent, an independent Mormon periodical published between 1872 and 1914, Mormon women engaged in a spirited defense of two seemingly contradictory issues: women's suffrage and polygamy. Yet for these early Mormon suffragists, polygamy was a key to their liberation; and Eve, seen as the prototypical woman, was a central symbol in this debate. Despite the fact that …