Review: Ann Chamberlin. Clogs and Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, and the Search for Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019.

Authors

Alison Halford

Keywords

Britain, women, conversion, polygamy, migration

Abstract

Despite the oldest continuous Mormon congregations being in Britain, when recruiting for my study on British Mormon women, I found few British Latter-day Saint families that went beyond fifth-generation members. The institutional Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints may have stopped the systemic dismantling of wards and branches through migration to Utah by the turn of the twentieth century, but the consequences of asset-stripping British congregations were still felt by some of those women who were part of a multi-generational Latter-day Saint family. For them, there was a residual resentment that their female relatives who converted and remained in Britain had been left with little institutional strength, religiously isolated when congregations were abandoned in response to the “call to Zion.” In conjunction with the associated stigma from polygamy practiced in America, they would recount how their grandmothers and great-grandmothers were ostracized and left vulnerable to oppression and persecution. Yet there is limited literature that documents how female convert Latter-day Saints navigate their religion in the British context in the past or present. Even Leonard Arrington noted that in the two hundred or more diaries, personal histories, and autobiographies written by British Latter-day Saint women and deposited in the church archives, little is recorded about their life before they convert and cross the Atlantic.1

BYU ScholarsArchive Citation

Halford, Alison (2022) "Review: Ann Chamberlin. Clogs and Shawls: Mormons, Moorlands, and the Search for Zion. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2019.," Mormon Studies Review: Vol. 9: No. 1, Article 27.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr2/vol9/iss1/27