Ardis Parshall, who you probably know as the author of the Mormon history blog Keepapitchinin, is planning to write a history of the Church told through the lives of women. She is asking for support through a Kickstarter campaign. I believe this is important work because I think the book will serve as a great counterweight to the overwhelmingly male-narrated and male-focused histories we currently tell in the Church. I hope it will help both women and men to have a broader vision of what women have done in the Church, and as consequence a broader vision of what women might be doing now and in the future. I have made a pledge, and I’m posting to ask you to also consider pledging. For a pledge of $10 or more, you’ll get a copy of the ebook version of the book, and for a pledge of $25 or more, you’ll get a hard copy.
The following is an excerpt from Ardis’s post describing the project. (Read the entire post here. You can also read more about the project on her Kickstarter page.)
Women have been actively involved in building Zion, and we have a wealth of published material telling us their stories. Much of that takes the form of biography, books and articles focused on the lives of individual women, or collected biography like Women of Faith or Mothers of the Prophets. We have histories of the Relief Society, like Women of Covenant and Daughters in My Kingdom. We have articles in our Church magazines, and papers in our scholarly conferences and journals. We have a growing collection of new stories, historical and contemporary, in the “Women of Conviction” series at history.lds.org.
What we don’t have is a history of the Church itself that incorporates the contributions of Latter-day Saint women to any significant extent. The active, achieving, contributions of women are largely reported as the history of women, segregated from the history of the Church itself.
It’s time to change that.
I want to write a one-volume narrative history of the Church that paints, in an unmistakable way, the constant influence of Latter-day Saint women on the course of Church history. To reflect the feminine element of Zion, the history bears the title She Shall Be an Ensign.
This is not a history of women in the Church – it is a history of the Church, told through the lives of women. As far as possible, every character in the book will be a woman, or will be a man viewed through the eyes of a woman.