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Making an (in)delible mark: Nineteenth-century mormon girls and their manuscript newspapers
The Brigham City Young Ladies’ Star was one of a couple dozen manuscript newspapers produced by nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint teenagers. Beginning in 1877, the Young Ladies’ and the Young Men’s MIAs created a location for Mormon adolescents to socialize, receive religious instruction, and develop a distinct identity. A close examination of Utah young women’s manuscript newspapers demonstrates first their context and history, followed by insight into the creation of Mormon adolescence, and then the development of agency and authority of young women in Utah. First, information exchange of handwritten newspapers presented a distinct opportunity for Utah young women to participate in and take advantage of communication through cheap and accessible media: pen and paper. Before the 1867 invention of the toy press—a small, mechanized, movable printing press—young people were drawn to the dissemination of information via pen and paper.2 The difficulty in production—actually handwriting each paper— belied the inevitable temporality of the process.
An April 1886 issue of the Advocate, a manuscript newspaper issued by the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association of the LDS Ogden First Ward. Handwritten newspapers provided Utah girls with a space to develop their own agency and authority. —
L DS C hu rch Hist ory L ibra ry
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Kenneth Faig called holograph amateur newspapers “fragile entities,” not only because of the tediousness and difficulty of copying them, but also because of the challenge of preserving them.3 And yet the few that remain extant indicate their value to writers, readers, and those who preserved them. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister Marie Hawthorne handwrote a family newspaper, the Spectator, for two months in 1820.4 Other youth-oriented popular authors produced manuscript newspapers, including Louisa May Alcott and, later, Lucy M. Montgomery. Perhaps the most well-known manuscript newspaper was the fictional Pickwick Portfolio, published by the March sisters and described in the 1868 novel Little Women. Alcott wrote from personal experience with newspapers; she and her sisters organized their own manuscript newspaper. Both the Alcott
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On June 1, 1878, Amelia M. Hansen wrote in the Young Ladies’ Star, “Dear sisters it was quite unexpected to me when my name was called to write a piece for our paper, as we are young, and have not much experience, but we often hear those that are placed over us, say there is a great work for us to do; we have got to work out our own salvation and not wait for somebody else to work it out for us.” Hansen, a member of the Brigham City First Ward Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (MIA), was contributing to the first issue of the organization’s manuscript newspaper. In her short essay, she expressed fears about writing while at the same time she boldly encouraged her adolescent peers to speak up in their community.1
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By Jennifer Reeder
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