I · Wear · My · Heart · on · My · Sleeve

I made Snickerdoodles as a very select few have already discovered.

If you're American, you know and love snickerdoodles. If you're not American, it's time to learn to love.

Snickerdoodles

Preheat oven to 400F/200C.

Cream ¹/₂ cup butter, ¹/₂ cup shortening(copha or more butter for you nonUSians) and 1 ¹/₂ cup sugar together. Blend in 2 eggs. Sift then add to wet mixture, 2 ³/₄ c plain flour, 2 tsp cream of tartar, ¹/₄ tsp salt and 1 tsp baking soda. Mix well.

Roll into little balls and dip into cinnamon sugar. Bake 8-10 minutes or until set. Recipe can be halved or doubled.

The answer to rhia_hilldancer's (and a few other people's) question is 173.

Susa Young Gates

SuperMom


Susa Young Gates, daughter of Brigham Young by his twenty-second wife Lucy Bigelow Young, was a leader, prolific writer, editor, trustee of Brigham Young University, active in the local and national women's organizations, and the mother of thirteen children, world traveler and a general overachiever-type of SuperMom we didn’t think arose until the 1980's. Give her a minivan and a membership in the local PTA and stand back. Her famous quote; "Keep busy in the face of discouragement"^[1] Breathe, woman, breathe!

She had the usual overachiever's accomplishments of a private education, including music and dance and went to university at age 13 in a flurry of Doogie Houser-like precocity. She married young at 16 to Dr. A.B. Dunford. They had two children but the marriage didn't last. Picking up the pieces, she moved to Brigham Young University and started the department of music where she learned to breathe.

Second time to the altar, she married one Jacob F. Gates and enjoyed a rather successful marriage. She devoted herself to her family and her causes. She was yet another of the raving bluestockings that lobbied furiously for women's rights and for equality between the genders. She became press chairman for the National Council of Women, and founded all sorts of magazines and wrote articles, pamphlets and books. Only death could pluck the pen from her fingers.

At the turn of the century, Susa suffered a nervous and physical breakdown. (Are you surprised? I'm not. You know it had to happen eventually.) Lacking a prescription for valium, she toned down her activities and turned more to her spiritual side. "I disciplined my taste, my desires and my impulses—severely disciplining my appetite, my tongue, my acts…and how I prayed!" ^[1] She became addicted to church work and once again, took on a heavy load of genealogy, temple work and research.

But she had already made an impact. This abbreviated bibliography shows that her thoughts turned often to other Uppity Mormon Women of her time. She'd hung out with people like Susan B. Anthony and Queen Victoria. She corresponded regularly with Tolstoy. She is known as one of the most prolific Uppity Mormon Woman writers to take up a pen in support of equality.

I have a feeling she wasn't much of a catwaxer. I only hope she remembered to breathe until 1933 when she stopped.

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^[1]Person, Carolyn W. D. "Susa Young Gates." In Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, ed. Claudia L. Bushman, pp. 198-223. Cambridge, Mass., 1976.

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Next post: Mary Fielding Smith, wife of Hyrum Smith and sister-in-law to the prophet Joseph.

Mary Fielding Smith
She Endured.

Of all the Uppity Mormon Women, Mary Fielding Smith has got to be one of my favourites. I cannot help but admire her inner strength and courage and wish I could have but half her qualities. She stood strong in the face of affliction that would have turned me into a timid little mouse cowering in the corner.

She was one of the members of the John Taylor Society of Toronto, a group of Methodist dissenters whose members later converted to the LDS faith through Parley P Pratt, Samuel Lake and a few missionaries. (I am descended from the Hill family who were also members of the John Taylor Society; just had to share.)

Later, Mary became the second of Hyrum Smith's wives, his first one, Jerusha Barden, having passed on. She found herself step-mother to five children but took on this role with the strength and courage she would later become famous for.

She loved Hyrum very much, and it saddened her greatly when he and his brother Joseph Smith were imprisoned many times. How devastated she must have been when one of those times of imprisonment ended in the martyrdom of her husband.

Unlike her sister-in-law, Emma, for whom the trials of her situation had become too much, Mary stood tall, with an even stronger resolution to not let the Dementors get her. Alas, she fell, forgotten, into Emma's shadow, and was offered little in the way of aid for her and her young family to flee West with the other Saints.

But she was an Uppity Mormon Woman. After her violent widowhood, nothing could shake her now. There were those who tried, those who sought to take advantage of her apparently weakened state, but to many people's surprise, she stood firm.

Susa Young Gates shares this story^[1]:

"One day [Mary's] little son Joseph [Fielding Smith] sat in the upper chamber of her Nauvoo home into which chamber ran the pipe of the sitting-room stove below, thus making it possible to hear distinctly the voices of those below in the sitting room. The boy knew that his brother John had left secretly, or at least quietly, in the company of Brother Heber C. Kimball, with the first company of refugees from Nauvoo who crossed the ice to begin their journey for the unknown West. He knew also that his mother would follow with her little family sooner or later. But he was startled to hear the voice of his uncle William Smith below one day, lifted in angry expostulation with his loved mother for permitting her son John to be "spirited away."

The boy heard his uncle demand the return of the Patriarch's [Hyrum's] son, and as the mother quietly and firmly refused to accede to the angry man's insensate demand, he became so violent and abusive in his language that the boy upstairs longed for age and maturity in order that he might defend his helpless mother from such unwarranted and bitter assaults."

She stood up to her brother-in-law, and continued to stand up to those who thought to take advantage of her weakness.

She chose to cross the plains with her children. To aid her, Heber C Kimball assigned her to a wagon train. The captain of the train took one look at this widowed woman and her children and told her to stay, and perhaps come cross later. He told her it was foolish for her to go with them, for should anything go wrong, he firmly believed she'd be a burden to them. To this, she replied, "I will beat you to the Valley and will ask no help from you either!" ^[2]

Sure enough, she did. Onya, girl!


Once she arrived in Salt Lake Valley, she continued her independence, moving her home to a 40-acre farm several miles out from downtown Salt Lake (about 2700 South and Highland Drive) to live in a one-room adobe home. (Personally, I find the fireplace there too smoky for my comfort.) She rejected offers of protection and vowed to stand on her own two feet. "What about wolves? What about Indians?" they asked her. But she would not be afraid. Instead, her farm prospered, and she lived there until she fell ill and passed away on September 21, 1852

She may not have been an outspoken advocate for Equality, a gifted writer, or distinguished by her accomplishments the way some of the other Uppity Mormon Women have been, but she endured through trials that would leave me faint and that is why I like her so very much.

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^[1] http://jfs.saintswithouthalos.com/Reprints/sygmoths/02.htm
^[2]http://jfs.saintswithouthalos.com/Reprints/sygmoths/03.htm

Next Post: The last in the "Uppity Mormon Women" series. I'm keeping it a surprise.

Swallow your drink and cover your keyboards before watching this.

You may not recognise the name of the song, but you all will recognise the tune.

Gakked from fellow musician solcita.