The text below is adapted from Exponent II's "Illuminating Ladies: A Coloring Book of Mormon Women" (available for purchase here).

In the 1960s and 70s, Cambridge Massachusetts became a hotbed of Mormon women?s thinking, research, and writing as happenstance brought a group of spirited and intellectually engaged women together in the Cambridge Ward. Among that group was Laurel Thatcher Ulrich who described how ?The [Mormon] church experience put me right at the center of a really dynamic community.? As ward sisters, these women created Boston?s first guidebook, A Beginners Boston, edited by Laurel, as a Relief Society fundraiser in 1966. The book sold out of its first printing before it even came off the presses and went on to become a huge seller in Boston, printing several new editions in the years that followed. 

Also among this cohort were Claudia Lauper Bushman and Judy Dushku, who were invigorated by the way the women?s movement sweeping the United States was beginning to shed more light on women?s history. Interested in how early Mormon women fit into the American story, a group of Cambridge area Mormon women embarked on an effort to research and revive the stories of their foremothers. A collection of essays, edited by Claudia and titled, Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, was published in 1976. It was during this period of research and writing that a member of this group also discovered the Woman?s Exponent, a Mormon suffrage periodical published in Utah between 1872-1910. Bolstered by the words and actions of their Mormon forebearers, Claudia, Judy, Laurel, and many others, envisioned a way to realize the marriage of their Mormon ancestry with their modern feminist thinking and created Exponent II in 1974. Now in its fifth decade, Exponent II publishes the personal essays, poetry, and art of Mormon women today. 

Claudia, Judy and Laurel continued to raise their families while also following academic pursuits. After leaving Cambridge, Claudia became a professor of American Studies at the University of Delaware and later Columbia University and founded the Mormon Women?s Oral History Project at Claremont Graduate University. Judy remained in the Cambridge area where she taught as a Political Science Professor at Suffolk University and founded the non-profit organization, THRIVE-GULU, which supports communities in Northern Uganda recovering from the traumatic effects of conflict. Laurel became a professor of American History, and in 1990 her book, A Midwife?s Tale, won the Pulitzer Prize for History. She is currently the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard University. 

To quote Laurel, may it never be said again that ?well-behaved women seldom make history.?

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