She Subscribed to a Bird-Brained Manner of Thinking, a digital photo collage that won best in show and Exponent ll’s feature artist award at the the 2019 Certain Women Invitational, an exhibition showcasing Mormon women’s artwork.
Corinne GeertsenKATIE LUDLOW RICH AND HEATHER Sundahl had prizes to give away. “Which founding mother from Exponent II
was banned from speaking at Brigham Young University?” Rich quizzed a small, mostly female audience gathered inside a conference room at the University of Utah.
Hands flew up.
“Laurel Thatcher Ulrich!” one woman shouted, naming the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian who famously observed that “well-behaved women seldom make history.”
“Yes,” Rich smiled, awarding her a tall prayer candle emblazoned with an illustration of a Mormon feminist. “1993. The shadowy ban,” she said, pointing to an important moment in Ulrich’s history.
Rich and Sundahl were speaking about the 50-year history of Exponent II, a Mormon feminist magazine, at the annual Sunstone Symposium, a conference dedicated to progressive Mormon scholarship. (Full disclosure: The author received an honorarium for giving the keynote lecture at the In this room, everyone seemed familiar with the magazine, rattling off the names of former editors as if they were rock stars.
