BYU Studies

Volume 59:3 (2020) - My father, Ted Bushman, was an artist. He worked his way through BYU in the 1920s painting signs and drawing cartoons. Before he graduated, he worked as a fashion artist in Los Angeles for a short time. After he married my mother, he made his living as a freelance artist for Salt Lake department stores, especially Auerbach’s. When work dried up during the Depression, he took a position at Meier & Frank in Portland, Oregon, as a fashion artist for the store’s multipage newspaper ads. Gradually, he migrated to the management side and eventually took a position with an ad agency in Portland where he handled the Pendleton Woolen Mills account. In 1950, our family moved back to Salt Lake City for Dad to work at ZCMI as head of their advertising and public relations department.

His real life in art began after he retired from ZCMI. He almost immediately took lessons and began to paint. It was as if a dam had broken. He painted continually, first oils and acrylics and then watercolors. Wherever he went, he took pictures and then painted in his studio—a few still lifes, but mostly landscapes and seascapes. He was always working on two or three canvases. We have more than a dozen of his paintings on our walls, and my brother and sister even more. Our grandchildren have Ted Bushmans too, sharing in the extensive legacy of his art. As I write, I look up at a New England fishing vessel coming out of blue mist and above it a brown-toned watercolor sketch of a Western cabin against a clouded sky. He may not have finished the cabin—it has no signature on it, which he added only when a work was complete. But I like his unfinished work as well as the signed pieces.

Volume 59:3 (2020) - Economically, politically, socially, and theologically, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were known for being insular and cohesive at a time when the United States was stretching its boundaries and developing unifying communication and transportation networks across the continent. The concept of Manifest Destiny was imbibed by the young republic, and rugged individualism became a symbol of the adventurous entrepreneurs who saw a bounteous future in the great American West, especially with the addition of Mexican territory in 1848 and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. The Church was clearly out of sync with the path the nation followed, instead wrapping itself in the encircling “wagons” of distance and cohesion that promised security and sanctuary against the barbs and threats and abuse by those who drove them to the western frontier of the United States and then followed them there. But when polygamy was introduced in 1852 as another “peculiar Mormon practice,” the limits of religious, social, and political tolerance were reached. Polygamy was an affront to Victorian sensibilities, irrespective of its religious foundation, and every effort was exerted to stamp it out. Several congressional antipolygamy acts, a U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring polygamy unconstitutional, and nearly thirty years of effort were required, however, to force the Church to capitulate. In 1890, Church President Wilford Woodruff issued a “Manifesto” suspending the practice of plural marriage, and with it went a primary obstacle to statehood, which seven attempts and nearly half a century had failed to achieve. When statehood was granted in 1896, Utah in many respects joined the mainstream of American life.

Against this well-known background of Utah history, the Woman’s Exponent emerged in 1872 to speak for Mormon women, who were often the target of antipolygamy diatribes. Several factors contributed to the birth of this semimonthly journal for LDS women. Prior to the June publication of the Woman’s Exponent’s first issue, the newly founded Salt Lake Herald (whose editor, Edward L. Sloan, had originated the idea of a woman’s paper) announced that “the women of Utah are today unquestionably more the subject of comment than those of any other portion of the country, or indeed of the world. As they have long exercised the right to think and act for themselves, so they claim the right to speak for themselves through the potent medium of the types.”

Volume 59:3 (2020) - People ask from time to time how Richard and I met. I have told the story in various ways for different occasions. It all began in 1952, some sixty-eight years ago at this writing. I call the man I eventually married Dick in this account. He later, about 1992, became Richard.

After Dick Bushman had been at Harvard for two years, he was called on a Latter-day Saint mission to the New England states. At that time, the mission home was immediately adjacent to the Latter-day Saint ­chapel in Cambridge on Brattle Street, both located in old houses built by the Longfellow family. Dick was very active in that small church group and acquainted with the mission personnel who had offices next door. He knew the mission president, J. Howard Maughan, well. Sister Hattie Maughan always called him Dick, even as a missionary.

Dick was serving his second year in the mission when I came from San Francisco to Boston to attend Wellesley College. He had begun college three years before me, and so after his two-year mission, he would be only a year ahead. I began to hear about him from young people at church as soon as I arrived. He was a fabled figure, spoken of with awe. The two most memorable stories were that in running for the student council as a freshman at Harvard, then an all-male university, he had knocked at the door of every classmate and asked for his support. Could I imagine such a driven person? The other story was that after election to the student council, he had been asked by another, older Mormon member to nominate him for the council’s presidency. This Dick refused to do, telling his friend that he preferred to support the other candidate. I thought that Dick must be a hard man, a frightening person, one to avoid.

Our actual fateful meeting that year is a blur. A group of Latter-day Saint students gathered one Sunday evening in a Harvard room. Elder Bushman arrived, alone. Why, we can never remember or determine. He must have had a reason. He was not one to break rules. He turned up in this forbidden place, and we met. He says it was passionate love at first sight. I have suspected that he had heard about me, as I had heard about him, and that he knew that my father was a Latter-day Saint stake president and that I had a scholarship to Wellesley, suggesting that I was a more serious student of religion and academics than I actually was. The meeting was soon over. I don’t remember any conversation on that occasion. Later, I wrote, “During the first month of school back in 1952 I met a young elder named Richard Bushman. The group I was with had spoken more than highly of him and I was not disappointed. He was both thoughtful and articulate. However, his reddish hair grew down over one eye in the manner of a romantic poet and my impression was, ‘What a lovely boy; I wish he’d cut his hair.’”

Volume 59:3 (2020) - On a snowy April morning in 1895, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles gathered within the walls of the Salt Lake Temple and unanimously declared themselves committed to women’s suffrage.1 That same day, a large group of Relief Society women gathered nearby in the Salt Lake Assembly Hall and unanimously stood in favor of including women’s suffrage in Utah’s newly designed state constitution.2 In that defining moment, such unified support for the most pressing women’s rights issue of the day by both the governing body and the official women’s organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was noteworthy. Anomalous circumstances years earlier had stimulated broad support for women’s suffrage among both leaders and lay members of the notoriously patriarchal Church of Jesus Christ. Widespread cooperation between men and women—and the endorsement of the territory’s predominant church—made the suffrage experience of Utah women unique within the national suffrage movement. While this support inevitably varied among individuals in both intensity and motivation, the blending of those distinct voices during Utah’s fifty years of suffrage activism reveals an instructive alliance among Latter-day Saints.

Volume 59:3 (2020) - Although it is a bit disconcerting to admit it, I am most widely known today not for my books, but for a single sentence. You’ve probably seen it: Well-behaved women seldom make history. I don’t get royalties when somebody prints my words on mugs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, greeting cards, or any of the other paraphernalia sold in gift shops or on the internet, but I sometimes get thank-you notes or snapshots of fans carrying hand-lettered signs in marches. One of my favorite examples of the latter shows a bright pink poster in a crowd near Wellington Arch in London. On the right, a traffic light registers yellow for caution. Above the fray, the winged goddess of victory appears in silhouette, holding aloft a wreath of laurel.

I don’t know why so many people find my words appealing. Perhaps it is the ambiguity of the term well-behaved. Without a fixed definition, it evokes whatever anxiety a woman might feel about behavioral codes that constrain her power to act. The slogan works because it simultaneously acknowledges and defends misbehavior as a necessary consequence of making history. Yes, well-behaved women can make history. But when they do, they often lose their reputation for being well-behaved. I am thinking of the words of Anne Bradstreet, colonial New England’s first published poet.