The Enduring Value & Big Arguments of Laurel T. Ulrich's Book "A House Full of Females" (2017) (Season 4, Ep. 4)

**Brad Westwood** (0:08)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history produced by the Utah Department of Culture and Community Engagement.
I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. I hope if there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place. In today's episode, we're speaking about Mormon and Utah women's history in the 19th century. My guest today is Dr. Cassie Clark, who is a public historian who works for the Utah Division of State History.
In this role, Cassie works on the history of women and other underrepresented voices in Utah. Hello, Cassie. Thank you for joining me today.

**Cassandra Clark** (0:54)
Hi, Brad. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (0:57)
I am too. I'm very pleased to have you back again.
Some of you may remember that Cassie has spoken to us in the past, specifically about health, mental illness in Utah. She is a historian who has a good deal of focus on medical and women's health issues, or really health issues in general. Is that right?

**Cassandra Clark** (1:20)
That's correct. My main focus is environmental history, but then race and the history of insane asylums and just mental health in general.

**Brad Westwood** (1:31)
Some really interesting areas of expertise.
We're really pleased to have Cassie on again. Cassie joined the Division of State History in November of 2021 as a full-time public historian. She's also an adjunct instructor for the Salt Lake Community College. She completed her doctorate in American history at the University of Utah in July of 2020 Dr. Clark's research researches the history of the American West, mental health, as we just talked about, environment, race, and science.
In today's episode, Cassie and I are going to discuss in something of a seminar setting the ideas offered by early American historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her 2017 book A House Full of Females, Plural Marriage, and Women's Right in Early Mormonism.
Cassie will be joining Speak Your Piece as a co-producer and a guest host as we discuss the history of women and other underrepresented voices in Utah.

**Cassandra Clark** (2:39)
Well, thank you for inviting me to chat with you regularly about the history of women and other underrepresented voices in Utah's history. There are so many stories that are often overlooked, buried, or silenced, and my goal is to bring to light as many as I can.
For those of you listening, do you have a story, document, diary, artifact, or about Utah history that you'd like to share? If so, please do not hesitate to reach out to me. The story of every Utahan matters.

**Brad Westwood** (3:04)
And in saying that, you are really in a wonderful position because even though we have wonderful historians at the Division of State History, the kind of focus you're offering is speaking about the future of Utah, wouldn't you say?

**Cassandra Clark** (3:20)
I think so. Yeah, I really think that in the past, a lot of times history is dominated by political narratives. There's a lot of political history or very leadership type history and looking at it from a social history aspect, which is from the ground up, what did average everyday people and voices do really helps to diversify but as well as make it very complex of what that past is and how people interacted with one another.

**Brad Westwood** (3:50)
Well, I think we're in a wonderful position in the Division of State History of focusing on so many diverse voices in women's history. So I'm very pleased about those developments. The conversation today is somewhat different in the previous episodes where I interviewed authors and chatted with them about their works. Instead, we have both read Dr. Ulrich's book and we want to chat about our thoughts and ideas what we found most compelling about this tremendously influential work on Utah and Mormon history. I also urge you to go to the Public Library or buy a copy and read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's book, A House Full of Females.
Our purpose in this conversation is to incite further research and interest in the general public. So we do recommend highly that you go and read this book.
Here's our first question, Dr. Clark. Will you distill and express what you think Dr. Ulrich's main arguments are in this book?

**Cassandra Clark** (4:57)
I will try. I will try. Not because Laurel was not clear in what she said, but perhaps I'm inadequate, but I will do my best.

**Brad Westwood** (5:07)