Bartholomew is a believing and rigorous LDS historian. Those wondering about the tone of her women's history will find her interested in reviving the lives of these women rather than criticizing male hierarchy; in general, she finds that "women's disappointments usually centered on dead-beat husbands rather than on church leaders" (249). I was impressed with her research expertise and her obvious familiarity with source archives. Although Bartholomew had hoped to have "quality" records for all one hundred women ("contemporary documents created by a directly-involved party"), she had to settle for thirty-four--the remaining sixty-six women come alive through autobiographies or biographies written later in life by the woman, her husband, or another relative (xiii). She excluded from her study women whose lives had already been explored well in other places.

The first chapter investigates nineteenth-century anti-Mormon writing that characterized British Mormon women immigrants as "ignorant," "naive," and "fools" (15). Stereotypes such as Maria Ward's portrayal of "the [British] shopgirl now ensconced in a Mormon harem" and other polygamy-inspired fantasies are recounted here (18). Bartholomew finds evidence of sexism on the part of anti-Mormon writers who primarily emphasized the "degraded status" of Mormon women and who "allowed comprehensible if not admirable motives" for Mormon men (15). Although I admired Bartholomew's far-reaching samples of anti-Mormon literature and realized tthat she intended to set them as fantasy against her reality, still I found myself anxious to get to the British women themselves because I already knew the stereotypes, generally if not specifically.

The second chapter, which will be of particular interest to descendants of British converts, explores the demographics and origins of these one hundred women. As it turns out, "Mormonism was three-quarters urban" (28), the majority of converts came from blue-collar families, most women had "some formal schooling" (143), and one woman might have sixteen to twenty-one pregnancies. The women in Bartholomew's study often came from "large, landless families acquainted with grief" (38), and their grief may have been a catalyst to their conversion. Mormonism satisfied the spiritual needs as well as conventional mores of these women, especially before they knew about polygamy.

The third, fourth, and fifth chapters cover the women's conversion experiences and life in a British branch of the Church. Their reactions to the message of the Church are some of the most memorable portions of the book—the women's voices sounds rather "old world," yet full of spirit. Bartholomew finds that converts expected more persecution from outsiders than they actually received and that "the persecution motif has . . . been overdone in pro-Mormon history" (79). Curiously, much of their "suffering was due to Church responsibilities rather than outside opposition" (77). These chapters are refreshing in their gynocentric view of life in the Church; we find that many uncelebrated women kept early branches alive, even though they ha trouble sustaining Relief Societies. Branches would grow only to be depleted by members leaving for America.

The second half of the book proceeds chronologically as we learn more about the women's emigration, marriages, and lives in a new land. Many of the women's names, and thus their lives, start to become familiar, especially since Bartholomew highlights some of them at length. The variety of their lives defies finding "one pattern" that would easily explain thei combined experience (xii). Their trials were often excruciating, leading one woman to conclude that it was all "a bubble that [had] burst in [her] grasp" (193). Of the one hundred women in Bartholomew's study, one-third became polygamous wives in Utah Territory (a polygamous marriage in Britain was rare), and this life-style tried their souls. Some left and returned to Britain. Those who stayed in Utah still often longed for their homeland; one woman wrote to her family in the British Isles, "I seldom go to sleep but I am dreaming about all of you and that I am back there but I am glad I am here" (197).

One complaint I have about the book is the presentation of statistical material. I would have preferred some charts and graphs, or at least numerals rather than numbers written out. For example, I found myself drowning in the following information:

One typically sees the birth of the first child seven to twelve months after marriage, three or four subsequent children born in close succession (sixteen to twenty-four months apart), then later children born at 2.5 to four-year intervals. Women married between ages sixteen and twenty-three and, if not widowed, bore children for the next sixteen to twenty-eight years. (38)

Although her prose could occasionally be smoother, I enjoyed Bartholomew's personality and the way she puts herself into the book. In the end, the reader has the sense of living the excitement of the research process with her. I felt lucky to find so much previously neglected Mormon history.

Church History, Susan Curtis
One of the most persistent questions addressed in scholarshiop on Mormonism is: What was the appeal of this indigenous American religion? In recent years, scholars have looked for answers in the socioeconomic condition of early converts, Joseph Smith's use of republican language in the new nation, the "democratization" of Christianity in the years following the Revolution, and the pervasiveness of a magic worldview in upstate New York where the movement began. These explanations go a long way toward explaining the power of Mormonism to attract members in the American setting.

In Audacious Women, Rebecca Bartholomew asks us to consider two even more difficult issues: the appeal of Mormonism outside the American context and the experience of women drawn to a religion which after 1852 openly defied Victorian family ideals with polygamy. In a fascinating study of one hundred women who left the British Isles between the 1840s and 1880s to become part of the Mormon experiment, Bartholomew confronts both issues squarely, challenges the stereotypes of British Mormon women as either dupes or slatterns, and provides ample evidence of a rich and varied experience within an unquestionably patriarchal religious community.

Bartholomew bases her study on the lives of women whose experience from youth to adulthood could be fairly well reconstructed from biographies, autobiographies, censuses, and hcurch genealogical records. She shows that British women who joined the Mormon church came from shops, farms, and cities. Most were of modest means, and the vast majority made tremendous sacrifices as they journeyed to Nauvoo, Illinois, and later to Utah. Some defied family and friends to join the church, but many others were converted to Mormonism along with their parents, siblings, sweethearts, or spouses. The twin appeals of Mormonism in Britain were spiritually and opportunity. Mormon missionaries impressed audiences and converts in Britain with their sincerity, discipline, and demanding belief system, and they told of the thriving community of Mormons in North America.

In the early chapters Bartholomew presents detailed demographic information on emigrant women, which is based on careful sifting through scattered primary sources and which sheds light on the reasons for conversion to an American religion. In later chapters, she focuses more on the tension between Victorian cultural expectations and the experience of Mormon women. Citing other studies, she notes that a tiny minority of Mormons actually engaged in polygamy; by contrast, about one-third of the immigrants in her sample were in polygamous marriages, a finding that probably owes a great deal to the youth, lack of resources, and dependence on others of many of the women who emigrated. But Bartholomew resists the easy interpretation of simple patriarchal oppression by noting that divorce was an option available to women unwilling to share husband and home—and one to which a surprisingly large number resorted. Many women agreed to their husbands' taking additional wives because of their faith and sense of duty. Ironically, many polygamous marriages gave women greater autonomy than conventional marriages because wives were often left to manage farm and home in the absence of a full-time spouse.

Bartholomew is at her best when she is telling the stories of women's lives. Biographical sketches punctuate the analysis and provide rich details of the "audacious women" who traveled to North America because of Mormonism. As she puts it at the end of her penultimate chapter, the experience of many Mormon women "reminds us that to a great extent Zion prospered on the backs of its women whose voices have yet to be heard" (p. 248). Thanks to Bartholomew, at least one hundred women have added their voices to the Mormon chorus.

International Migration Review, Timothy Walch
Some books should be read from the very first word to the last. There is no question that Rebecca Bartholomew's Audacious Women fits in this category. In an insightful introduction, Bartholomew not only summarizes what is to follow, she also details how she came to the topic and the limitations of her source materials. It is not too much to say that the introduction is the key to understanding the rest of the book.

This insightful introduction foreshadows a series of chapters that squeeze every ounce of information from her rather limited source materials. Readers cannot be impressed with how much can be fairly concluded from such a small body of documents.

And yet, for Bartholomew, this study was a labor of love; it is the sotry of her own family writ large. Several of the women she discusses at length are her own ancestors. Within that context, Bartholomew was in search of herself and in the process left no box of documents unopened.

At its best, Audacious Women provides basic information on the small group of British women who chose not only to covert to Mormonism, but also to leave their native land for the American West. It is in that specific context that these women might be considered "audacious."

Bartholomew follows her introduction with a chapter on the many different stereotypes about Mormons in general and Mormon women in particular. "One feels sheepish attempting to catalog and analyze ideas which were not logical," she writes. "But since so much of the fanciful in [popular] literature came to be accepted as fact, the content ought to be approached methodically" (pp. 2-3).

The majority of the book provides the basic factual information on British Mormon immigrant women and shows the conflicts between the stereotypes and reality. The two best chapters are the one devoted to the Mormon conversion experience and the one devoted to the emigration process. Most important in these chapters is the clear evidence that these women converted to Mormonism of their own volition and that they left Britain willingly for a new life in Zion. Contrary to the common nineteenth century stereotype, these women were not unwilling prisoners of polygamous marriages.

Bartholomew is to be applauded for not overstating the impact of these women on American society. She notes that although one out of four immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century was British, only one out of 150 of those British immigrants was Mormon. To be sure, these immigrants represented a quarter of the population of Utah, but they had little impact outside that territory.

Audacious Women will be of great interest to readers concerned with the history of Mormons, women, the American West, or any combination of these three topics. However, the book will serve as little more than a footnote in the historiography of American immigration.

Journal of American History, Kathryn M. Daynes
Nineteenth-century Mormon women have been much written about, although coverage in the 1800s was usually disparaging. As Rebecca Bartholomew shows, they were portrayed as gullible, degraded foreigners with disagreeable countenances. Twentieth-century historians' work has dispelled this nineteenth-century view. Bartholomew's use of these old stereotypes as a foil is thus more an organizational device than a revisionist account. Her purpose is to explore the types of women hwo in fact joined the Mormon Church in Britain and what their experiences in this new religion were. The women she describes were audacious, whether in disregarding public opinion in Britain by joining an unpopular religion or in braving Mormon society in Utah by leaving the church.

To explicate the experience of approximately twenty-five thousand British women who emigrated to Utah, Bartholomew located accounts of one hundred women, many teased from documents written by husbands or children. How representative these hundred women are is unclear. Of those whose accounts provide sufficient socioeconomic information, one-third belonged to the middle class, greater than the proportion in other studies. These hundred women, however, were predominantly from urban areas and emigrated with their families, as was typical generally of British Mormons.

One-third of the women in her study entered plural marriage, again higher than the percentage found in most other studies. This may indicate, however, that a disproportionate number came during the first years of Utah's settlement, when plural marriage was at its peak. She also surmises that many of their daughters may have become plural wives, because 66 percent of daughters of polygamous marriages married into polygamy. My research is cited for that percentage (Sunstone Symposium, 1991), but it should read 23 percent—a considerable difference. Although Bartholomew analyzes the one hundred women statistically, she correctly assesses her work when she states, "Numbers and facts often do not tell the story."

In this book they do not, for its strength lies in using various individuals' experiences to convey the backgrounds of British emigrants, their motivations for becoming Mormons, their roles in the newly founded church, their reasons for emigrating, their trials in crossing the ocean and the plains, and their reactions to life in Utah. To explore these topics, Bartholomew effectively uses several women's experiences as harmony to support the melody of one or two longer, well-told narratives. While she critically assesses and draws meaning from these stories, she often accepts the women's own judgments rather than fitting her conclusions into an overarching interpretation. Her sympathies are clearly with the devoted women who supported their church in Britain and sacrificed to emigrate to Utah, but they are equally with the reluctant non-Mormon husband who followed his wife to Utah and the few disillusioned women who found the sacrifices greater than the rewards. But however compelling these individuals stories, they are subordinated to her larger purpose of explicating British women's overall experience in the nineteenth-century Mormon Church. This general story is also well told.

Provo Daily Herald, Jared Oates
Jean Rio Baker stood on the deck of a steamship bound up the Missouri River. All around her were the emaciated shapes of immigrants dying of cholera. The cramped quarters, occasional sickness, and monotony of a transatlantic voyage did not compare to the slow misery of this steamship up the Missouri. Ahead of her was the prospect of a dirty and tedious trek across the plains, and somewhere in the distance, Zion. What did she think as she surveyed the dying around her? Why did she immigrate? What was her life like when she finally did reach Utah? Audacious Women seeks to answer questions like these.

Baker was one of many women who left their native England to come to Utah. Over the last several years Rebecca Bartholomew has scoured genealogical, historical and family records for information about the lives of women like Baker, the women of the first 50 years of the British LDS Mission (1838-1888). Audacious Women is a compilation of the fruit of that research. Whenever possible, Bartholomew has used the words of the women themselves to represent their lives.

Bartholomew approaches this representation by themes: polygamy, their conversion experience, the life of the British LDS branches, the nature of immigration and many others. One theme of particular interest to me was the stereotypical Mormon woman present in the minds of most of their Victorian contemporaries. Victorian literature as a whole painted Mormon women to be dull-witted, ugly, naive dolts who flocked to Utah from the bottom of the social barrel. As with most stereotypes, this one contained a kernel of truth but only that. Many of the Mormon women converts were poor, uneducated, and well, how many of us actually model for Vogue magazine? And yet, Bartholomew is succinct. "It is a pleasant thing to discover that these women were after all much like ourselves . . . if the women were not angels, neither were they fools. They are likable. They're worthy of emulation. Their lives had meaning." Come and meet these women through the research and pen of Bartholomew.

The Salt Lake Tribune, Paul Swenson
Ignored in official histories as irrelevant to the central Mormon drama or stereotyped by both anti-Mormon sources and LDS Church apologists, early female converts remain lost in mystery. What attracted women to a new religion that urged them to leave their countries of origin and often their closest friends and relatives for a distant desert Zion where countless hardships and (for many) lives in polygamy, awaited them?

For those contemporary Mormon women not wholly comforted by male leaders' assurances of the value of women while church leadership positions are withheld, the question of how their female antecedents felt more than a century ago becomes crucially important. Audacious Women is a search for female roots. Frustrated by the few scraps of information available about her own British grandmothers and insulted by popular historians' condescending descriptions of their contemporaries, Salt Lake technical editor and part-time historian Rebecca Bartholomew went looking for answers.

"The less I found, the hungrier I got," writes Bartholomew in the book's introduction. "Were these women the fish wives portrayed by [novelist John] Winthrop? Were they, as depicted in other works, even worse, dupes, low lifes?" Twentieth-century literature, just as in the 1800s, Bartholomew notes, "has favored extremes: either we Mormon women are repressed, depressed and demeaned—brainwashed sacrifices to an outmoded patriarchal system—or we must be the last of the fortunates, protected, honored and fulfilled by men raised to more virtuous manhood through the doctrines of the priesthood."

The author's original goal was to locate 100 "Type A, quality records" of women converted to Mormonism in the British Isles between 1838-88—diaries, letters, birth or marriage certificates, newspaper reports, etc. She eventually had to settle for 34 "Type A" records. "Type B" sources (autobiographies or biographies by a spouse or another contemporary after the fact) proved scarcer still, at 16.

The stray and interlocking puzzle pieces that emerged from Bartholomew's research in some ways raise as many questions as they answer. If Britain's early female converts to Mormonism could be described as audacious, their audacity was often rooted in their stubborn spiritual commitment. If they spoke up boldly, it was often in support of a male-controlled system that parceled out promises of happiness in this life and the next on the basis of obedience to patriarchs who proclaimed their spiritual callings to take multiple wives.

Utah Historical Quarterly, Lynne Watkins Jorgensen
One of the best things about this book is the title which immediately promises enlightenment concerning three of my favorite subjects: Mormon women, anything Anglophile, and audacious human beings. It reminded me of a special British ancestor, spunky Laura Peters. Laura's conversion story states that ". . . upon hearing the message of the missionaries while working in his woolen mill at Ffestiniog, Wales, her husband, David Peters, became curious. Laura was convinced the message was true. On 21 June 1846, Elder Able Evans accompanied the couple to the river to be baptized. David hesitated for a brief moment and Laura boldly stepped forth. Therefore David, believing a man should always be first, jumped into the water clothes and all. Laura was chagrined and out-manoeuvered, but she was also the first woman in Northern Wales to be baptized a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."

Bartholomew's book begins with a collection of stereotypes about depraved and mindless Mormon women abstracted from cycles of anti-Mormon literature published between 1838 and 1899 by hostile writers in reports which became increasingly virulent. Against these stereotypes, the author compared what one hundred British women converts (who somehow left a record) actually said about themselves. She learned that, with some exceptions, Mormon women were independent, creative, and stalwart, viewing obstacles with eyes of faith. For each woman who expressed disillusionment, there were two who saw things favorably.

"I found new sources continually presented themselves," Bartholomew explained. "[In addition to diaries and journals] a whole body of private histories exist, written by family genealogists (many of them women), with as many life stories of matriarchs as of patriarchs. Most were thoroughly researched, some even documented . . ." (ix).

The author exposes the treatment of women within British branches, their emigration ordeal, and their life experience in Zion. Included are thoughtful chapters on conversion, education, organizations, polygamy, monogamy, and family life. Bartholomew also introduces some fascinating new players into the early Mormon scene. Finally, this study suggests why vestiges of Victorian culture still exist in church leadership by looking at the circumstances which caused British women to become attracted to Mormonism. For this reviewer, the biggest problem with the book is its fragmentation. There is too little information about an individual woman before a second or third sister is featured. It might have been better to introduce fewer women and include more background material. Also, in spite of hopes for a major Anglophile experience, this is not necessarily a "British only" story, nor a "women only" story.

Bartholomew admits that not all the sources for each audacious woman are equally valid, and she expresses a wish to contact descendants of women for whom she had to depend on a secondary source. Nevertheless, her clues to sources can become the first step for the researcher who utilizes her material. As an example, the source for Angelina Hawkins Piercy (wife of artist Frederick Piercy) provided her name only, no imformation. Piercy is not an example of an audacious Mormon woman. In fact, Angelina did not even stay with the Mormon church in England. However, by looking carefully into the branch records in London as directed by Bartholomew, a researcher will recognize Angelina's mother, Charlotte Hawkins, who singlehandedly led her large family (except Angelina) to Zion after the death of her husband from cholera in St. Louis. This source also identifies Angelina's sister, Lavinia Hawkins, who became a leading lady in the Salt Lake Theatre before she was abandoned and divorced by apostate John Hyde, Jr. This most audacious lady stayed strong in the church, ending up as a plural wife of Joseph Woodmansee and the sister-wife of Emily. Actually, there is so much good, solid information and so many clues to quality resources that this book is bound to become a major reference tool for historians and writers.

Western Historical Quarterly, Martha S. Bradley
Perhaps the greatest fear a historian has about her work is that she has missed the mark. Based on the sources one can find, the best one can do is make an educated, well-studied guess. What was life like for those who lived in the past? In Audacious Women, Bartholomew considers the distance between fact and fiction by examining the gap between the nineteenth century literary representation of female life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the actual experience among British women who converted to the church. Assuming that this literary image was what most women first knew about the church, one must ask what the images' impact was on perception and experience among nineteenth-century Mormons.

Anti-Mormonism was the popular subject of journalists and fiction writers alike. Given the Victorian obsession with sexuality, the Mormon practice of polygamy begged for attention. Hundreds of newspaper articles, short stories, novels, "schilling schockers," and essays took on the Mormons. This literature portrayed the author's perception (mostly from the armchair and not through contact with Mormons) and society's stereotypes. It assumed to know why women joined the church, how they were treated once they did, and their situation in the Great Basin. Consistent with the predominant stereotypes, these women were portrayed as victims—weak, ignorant fools duped by male Mormon missionaries.

To compare these perceptions with the lives of the Mormon women "depicted," Bartholomew gathered source materials about two hundred women who were connected to Mormonism from 1838-1888, the first fifty years of the British Mission. These documents included diaries, letters, birth and marriage certificates, newspaper reports, and other written sources. With these materials she created a profile of the likely female British convert.

Nineteenth-century women felt driven to give verbal and written accounts of their conversion experience. Over time, these became routinized and took on a particular narrative form. An English woman was likely to originate her religious awakening in some sort of baser life, describing her previously unenlightened self as drifting, searching for a new sense of meaning in her life. Some admitted to licentious living, though it conflicted with their sense of what was proper or moral in Victorian England. Many said that conversion felt like being fired-up by the spirit, a literal physical manifestation of a new, unsettling force.

Bartholomew tracks the converts who chose to gather to Zion, compelled by a call to join the Saints, but also driven by the undesirable circumstances at home. She responds to the stereotypes about the social and economic status of this immigrant group, which suggest that these women were landless, working-class, urban poor for whom life in the American West promised a certain mobility. The story of those who chose, for whatever reason, not to go is perhaps even more interesting, and certainly less familiar. The British Saints felt the same periodic surges in commitment and rededication to the Lord as did Mormons in Utah. The pitch of missionary work and church activity ebbed and flowed. It was difficult to remain energetic and maintain active branches. During these decades women searched for a meaningful way to contribute to congregational activities. The author suggests that this was encouraged by the organization of local relief societies (which were not organized in Utah until 1867 or in England until 1872-1873). Success varied dramatically between the Utah and British units.

Audacious Women is yet another reminder of the power of religious conviction. In the author's chapters on plural marriage, emigration, and difficult or challenging doctrines, she suggests that women who were truly converted to Mormonism found ways to deal with the peculiar, unsettling theology or social practices. What mattered most was neither logic, nor morality but the level of personal commitment. For the majority of these women, Mormonism provided an answer or at least worked well enough because of their sense of spiritual things. Furthermore, it seemed impossible to make generalizations about their experiences; in searching the sources the author could find examples to substantiate stereotypes—every possible type of woman was represented. But most importantly, she found no one who looked like the nineteenth-century literary stereotype—the "rude, mean, thieving, superstitious, perverted, abused, abandoned, verminal subhuman" Mormon woman (p. 254). In fact, she concludes that it was their variety that made them like "us." Accusing herself of perhaps being too idealistic, Bartholomew reminds us: "If the women were not angels, neither were they fools. They are likeable. They're worthy of emulation. Their lives had meaning" (p. 254). Perhaps this is why, regardless of how far from the mark the historian's effort might land, it is certainly worth the effort.