Linda King Newell, whose pioneering work on the historical past of ladies within the Mormon religion received her acclaim because the main feminist scholar in her area, but additionally led leaders within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to blacklist her for undermining conventional views concerning the faith’s founding period, died on Feb. 12 at a hospice facility in Salt Lake Metropolis. She was 82.
Her husband, L. Jackson Newell, confirmed the dying.
Mrs. Newell was one in all a number of feminist Mormon students who, starting within the Seventies, questioned the acquired historical past of their religion, asking how and why ladies got here to be seen as second-class members of a patriarchal establishment. Her writings regularly put her at odds with church leaders, however her mastery of the archives and persuasive writing model received her admirers amongst Mormons and non-Mormons alike.
“She was the boldest Mormon feminist historian of the late twentieth century,” Joanna Brooks, a historian at San Diego State College, mentioned in a cellphone interview.
Mrs. Newell was greatest identified for her e book “Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith, Prophet’s Spouse, ‘Elect Woman,’ Polygamy’s Foe,” printed in 1984 and written with Valeen Tippetts Avery, a historian at Northern Arizona College.
Emma Smith, the primary spouse of Joseph Smith, the founding father of Mormonism, had lengthy been demeaned by students and church leaders as both passive and long-suffering or vindictive and shrewish — that’s, in the event that they paid consideration to her in any respect: “Mormon Enigma” was the primary full biography of her in additional than 100 years.
Mrs. Newell and Dr. Avery offered a really totally different Emma Smith: an individual who helped information her husband till his homicide in 1844, and who later suggested their oldest son, Joseph Smith III, as he established his personal department of Mormonism, at the moment often known as the Group of Christ.
“Emma Smith was way over an appendage and helpmate to outstanding males,” the authors wrote. “She was additionally a succesful, articulate and influential particular person in her personal proper who profoundly affected the event of the faith with which she was related.”
In addition they revealed that Joseph Smith, opposite to church teachings on the time, had actually been a prolific polygamist, regardless of Emma’s vocal protestations. After years of denial, the church conceded in 2014 that Mr. Smith had certainly had as many as 40 wives.
“Mormon Enigma” offered some 30,000 copies and received a number of awards, together with the interpretive historical past prize from the Mormon Historical past Affiliation. However church leaders damned it for deviating from the accepted story line, and so they barred both writer from talking about Mormon historical past on church property or at any church-related occasion.
“On the one hand, the e book is inserting Emma Smith as a heroine within the Mormon story, somebody who’s expressing company and is an activist,” Benjamin Park, a historian at Sam Houston State College in Texas, mentioned in a cellphone interview. “And alternatively, it’s taking Joseph Smith down a bit and is presenting him not in the most effective gentle.”
The ban made nationwide information, and, after Mrs. Newell complained, it was quietly lifted. However different components of the blacklist remained, together with a ban on citing the 2 authors’ work in any materials printed underneath church auspices.
Even earlier than “Mormon Enigma” appeared, Mrs. Newell was nicely often known as a fearless feminist, keen to query church orthodoxy with deeply researched, clearly argued historical past.
She was a part of the so-called Wednesday Group, a free assortment of ladies historians that met each Wednesday in Salt Lake Metropolis, not removed from the house of Brigham Younger, the Mormon chief who had succeeded Joseph Smith and led a whole lot of his coreligionists to the Nice Basin within the mid-Nineteenth century.
If there was a single thread operating by way of Mrs. Newell’s work, it was the argument that Mormon ladies had as soon as held vital energy and affect as healers and prayer leaders, however that they’d been sidelined by way of the twentieth century because the church grew to become extra bureaucratic and hierarchical, and the historical past of their contributions had been systematically erased.
“From the Nineteen Fifties to the early Nineteen Eighties, equal citizenship for ladies within the kingdom appears to have been changed with the glorification of manhood,” she wrote in a 1985 essay in Dialogue, a journal of Mormon thought. “Something historically thought-about ‘male’ within the church has come to be connected completely to the priesthood.”
Linda King was born on Jan. 16, 1941, in Richfield, Utah, about 150 miles south of Salt Lake Metropolis, and grew up in close by Fillmore. Her father, Foisy Earl King, was a mechanic for the Bureau of Land Administration, and her mom, Pearl (Davies) King, was a homemaker.
She had a tough childhood — her mother and father had been poor and struggled with alcoholism — however she discovered help and stability inside Fillmore’s Mormon group. She received a scholarship to the Faculty of Southern Utah (now Southern Utah College), the place she graduated in 1963 with a level in artwork and schooling.
A 1962 faculty journey to New York Metropolis and Washington, her first time outdoors Utah, opened her to the broader world. She attended Broadway performs and, in Washington, met President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson.
She married Mr. Newell in 1963. Together with him, she is survived by her daughters, Chris, Jennifer and Heather Newell; her son, Eric; 12 grandchildren; and her sister, Charlene King Kotoku.
Mrs. Newell taught particular schooling and continued her artwork research earlier than changing into a contract historian in 1975.
Her work positioned her outdoors what was then the mainstream of Mormon historic analysis, and that, mixed together with her lack of formal coaching as a historian, meant that she had no actual probability of incomes a tutorial educating place, even after the success of “Mormon Enigma.”
Between 1982 and 1987 she and her husband, a dean and professor on the College of Utah, edited Dialogue, which had been based by progressive-minded Mormons within the Seventies. Below their steering, the journal vastly expanded its subscriber base and editorial scope; it continues to thrive at the moment because the main venue for Mormon thought outdoors the church itself.
She later served because the president of two main Mormon scholarly organizations, the John Whitmer Historic Affiliation and the Mormon Historical past Affiliation. She was an editor on the College of Utah Press and the director of particular tasks at Deep Springs Faculty in California, the place her husband served as president from 1995 to 2004.
The couple returned to Salt Lake Metropolis after that, and Mrs. Newell turned to nonprofit work. She was a founding member of the Gun Violence Prevention Heart of Utah.
She additionally helped discovered Zion Canyon Mesa, a humanities heart close to Zion Nationwide Park. In her honor, one in all its buildings is known as the Linda King Newell Home of Grand Desires.
Supply: NY Times