Tell it All": The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism.
A Feminist Mormon Exposé
[Religion]. Stenhouse, Mrs. T.B.H. “Tell It All”: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism. With an Introductory Preface by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Hartford, CT: A.D. Worthington, 1874.
Thick 8vo.; frontispiece portrait of Mrs. Stenhouse; 18 other illustrations throughout; green cloth, elaborately stamped in gilt; slightly edgeworn, else a lovely, fresh, sturdy copy.
First edition. The author provides a lengthy and outraged account of the injustices of Mormonism based upon the twenty-odd years she spent in a polygamous Mormon marriage. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the preface, was drawn to the author’s cause out of an opposition to the institution of polygamy, “a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters—a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, and the family” (p. vi). Stenhouse’s volume ends with an impassioned plea:
...If my humble efforts shall have conduced, even in the smallest degree, to keep one sister from entering into this sinful ‘Order’; if they shall have aroused the Women of Utah to investigate the foundations of their faith, to calmly and impartially consider the iniquities of the system of Polygamy, to renounce the man-made slavery of the ‘Celestial Order’; if I shall be found to have awakened in the minds of thinking men and women a hatred for the licentious doctrine which enslaves the wives and daughters of the Saints; if I have to any extent enlisted active, practical sympathy in their behalf—I shall feel that my endeavors have been abundantly rewarded and that my labors have not been bestowed in vain. (p. 623)
It was not until 1890 that the Mormons formally withdrew sanction of polygamy.
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