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Mormonism's First Bad Girl: Lucy Harris and the Gendering of Faith and Doubt in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2023
Abstract
Why has Lucy Harris been blamed for the loss of 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript? Analysis of storytelling about Lucy Harris, Mormonism's first “bad girl,” allows us to see the creation of one element of the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Through the accretion of stories about Lucy Harris, church members came to code doubt as feminine in Mormon memory while viewing the concept of witness as masculine. These understandings of the relationship between gender and religious faith are embedded understandings in the Latter-day Saint chain of memory. Preserving the memory and reputation of Martin Harris, Lucy's husband, scribe for the Book of Mormon, and one of its three witnesses, allowed Latter-day Saints to cement the intersections of masculinity, priesthood, and witness. Church members used stories about Lucy Harris to teach, discipline, and perform gender norms for future generations of Mormons.
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- Copyright © 2023 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture
References
Notes
1 Formally known as Joseph Smith Junior, the founder of the Mormon movement is commonly referred to as “Joseph Smith.” For consistency and ease of reading, we will omit the “Junior” from his name throughout the remainder of this essay.
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9 Lucy Harris's maiden name was Harris.
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19 Lucy Harris does appear twice in B. H. Roberts's magisterial A Comprehensive History of the Church of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret News, 1930), which first appeared in installments in Americana and was later published as a six-volume set. In both cases, she is relegated to the notes, and in both cases Roberts's attention is focused on the lack of evidence to substantiate elements of the standard narrative about Lucy and Martin Harris. The first note concerns the destruction of the 116 pages: “It is charged by some that Mrs. Harris, being unfriendly to the work, burned the manuscript but this she denied.” Roberts, Comprehensive History 1, chapter 9, note 11. The second is about the financial arrangements Martin Harris made for the printing of the Book of Mormon, and includes information about Lucy Harris's refusal to participate:
In Kennedy's Early Days of Mormonism, that writer says that Harris gave his bond and a “mortgage on his farm,” for the $3,000. “As Mrs. Harris refused to be a party to the transaction, an agreement of separation between herself and husband was arranged. She received her share of the estate, some eighty acres of land and the farm house”… There is nothing in our church annals, however, which confirms the statement that a mortgage was taken on the farm, beyond the declaration that Harris became security for the payment of $3,000 to the printer. The farm was sold, or at least Mr. Harris’ part of it, to Mr. Thomas Lackey to raise the money to pay the printer's bill. See statement of Amasa M. Lyman, who worked for Mr. Lackey in 1832.
Roberts, Comprehensive History 1, chapter 13, note 3.
20 We thank Kaela Dunne, Hamilton College class of 2022, who pored over the Young Woman's Journal in search of references to Lucy Harris, for her work in support of our research. We are grateful to Hamilton College for funding Dunne's work as a research assistant through the Emerson Foundation.
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62 Rhett Stephens James, The Man Who Knew: The Early Years: A Play about Martin Harris (1983), 8.
63 James, The Man Who Knew, 32.
64 James, The Man Who Knew, 49–50.
65 James, The Man Who Knew, 49–50.
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71 A professor of theatre at Brigham Young University, Rodger Sorensen also worked in various roles—technical director, associate director, artistic director—for the Hill Cumorah Pageant through 2004. Lynn Larsen and Roger Sorensen, Martin Harris: The Man Who Knew, a Pageant by Rhett James (2009), 10, 41.
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76 This tension had its roots in the 1970s as the LDS Church attempted to reconcile its perspectives on women and their place in the world with the broader culture's shift toward greater egalitarianism. See Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay, 104–39. See also Kline, Caroline, “Saying Goodbye to the Final Say: The Softening and Reimagining of Mormon Male Headship Ideologies” in Out of Obscurity: Mormonism since 1945, eds. Patrick Q. Mason and John G. Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 214–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
77 Larsen and Sorensen, Martin Harris, 61–62.
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79 Benjamin E. Park (@BenjaminEPark), Twitter, February 15, 2021, 8:47 p.m., https://twitter.com/bejaminepark/status/1361492407783686146?s=21.
80 Steve Otteson (@sotteson), Twitter, February 15, 2021, 10:23 p.m., https//twitter.com/sotteson/status/1361516412745830401?s=21.
81 Easton-Flake, Amy and Cope, Rachel, “A Multiplicity of Witnesses: Women and the Translation Process,” in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon: A Marvelous Word and a Wonder, ed. Largey, Dennis L., Hedges, Andrew H., Hilton, John III, and Hull, Kerry (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2015), 133Google Scholar.
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85 Easton-Flake and Cope, “A Multiplicity of Witnesses,” 150n42, emphasis added.
86 Easton-Flake and Cope, “A Multiplicity of Witnesses,” 142–43.
87 Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages, 66–69.