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Strategies Of Representation, Relationship, And Resistance: British Women Travelers And Mormon Plural Wives, C. 1870-1890, Karen M. Morin, J.K. Guelke

Karen M. Morin

During the 1870s and 1880s, several British women writers traveled by transcontinental railroad across the American West via Salt Lake City, Utah, the capital of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. These women subsequently wrote books about their travels for a home audience with a taste for adventures in the American West, and particularly for accounts of Mormon plural marriage, which was sanctioned by the Church before 1890. "The plight of the Mormon woman," a prominent social reform and literary theme of the period, situated Mormon women at the center of popular representations of Utah during …