Four Zinas
Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier
Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward
Mother, daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter—an impressive line of prominent women all named Zina. One converted to Mormonism in New York in 1835. The next married Joseph Smith and Brigham Young successively and served as the church’s general Relief Society president. The third assisted her husband, Charles Ora Card, in founding Cardston, Alberta. The fourth married future church apostle Hugh B. Brown.Collectively this extended family had a significant impact on a large region of the American West. Individually each helped shape her particular era. Zina Young and Zina Card worked tirelessly for woman’s suffrage, and they encouraged women to study nursing and to become involved in industry. The two promoted drama and literature, and they inspired others through their speeches and expressions of spirituality, including speaking in tongues. They helped Mormon women feel good about themselves, and in the process they made the territory not only habitable but livable.
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Martha Sonntag Bradley is a University of Utah Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture. Her numerous honors include the university’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Student Choice Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Bennion Center Service Learning Professorship, and the title, “1999-2000 University Professor.” She taught previously at Brigham Young University where she received a Teaching Excellence Award. She has served as coeditor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, has published often in professional journals, and is the author of six books on Utah history, including Kidnapped from that Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists, A History of Kane County, and A History of Beaver County. She has six children and three grandchildren.
Mary Brown Firmage Woodward is the daughter of Zina Card and Hugh B. Brown, and inheritor of her mother’s heirlooms–letters, memorabilia–which in 1976 she removed from boxes, barrels, and trunks to catalogue, as the genesis of this book. She attended Brigham Young University in the 1930s, married Edwin R. Firmage, who died in 1986, and later Ralph Woodward. With her husbands she served two Latter-day Saint missions to London, England, and Nauvoo, Illinois. She has published in the Ensign and Improvement Era.
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