Symposium on Women, Religion, and Records
The Symposium on Women, Religion, and Records was sponsored by the Church History Department. The free one-day event celebrated the “release and publication in recent years of a host of records on Latter-day Saint women's experiences, including sermons, Relief Society records, minutes of the Relief Society general board, and the discourses and diaries, respectively, of Relief Society past presidents Eliza R. Snow and Emmeline B. Wells.”[1]
The publisher of these records, the Church Historian’s Press, hosted the symposium on February 25, 2023.
Presenters included Laurel Thatcher Ulrich (Harvard University), Ann Braude (Harvard University), Emily Clark (Tulane University), Judith Rosenbaum (Jewish Women’s Archive), Elora Shehabuddin (UC Berkeley), Neelima Shukla-Bhatt (Wellesley College), Ula Y. Taylor (UC Berkeley), and Jill Mulvay Derr, Elizabeth Kuehn, Jennifer Reeder, and Lisa Olsen Tait of the Church History Department. These scholars “discussed their historical and archival expertise on records of women’s religious experiences, including Christianity, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, over the past 300 years.”[2]
Lisa Olsen Tait, managing historian in the Church History Department noted, “The work we publish is a great blessing to the Church, and many Latter-day Saints have found meaningful stories and examples in it. But it is also a rich resource for scholars of women’s history and religious history. The symposium helped to bring awareness to these sources. We will be collecting the presentations and publishing a book of the symposium proceedings. This will provide another source for scholars in which Latter-day Saint women’s history is part of the bigger picture.”[3]
Historian Kate Holbrook was “the mastermind” behind the symposium. She identified and invited the participants before her untimely death in August 2022. Holbrook was also honored at the event in a three-person panel who offered “Reflections on the Work of Dr. Kate Holbrook.”
Dr. Braude said that she and Holbrook are members of the same tribe. “It is the tribe of women intellectuals who combine scholarship and administration to amplify the voices of religious women, and to bring them in conversation with each other,” she said. “Members of this tribe must feel the same love toward the work of other scholars that we feel towards our own scholarship. It requires an appreciation that no one voice can say what needs to be said, but expanding our knowledge of the truth requires a panoply of women’s voices. Kate not only understood this intellectually, she felt it in her heart.”[4]
