Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s keynote address at conference on Claudia Lauper Bushman renews the Sterling M. McMurrin Lectures on Religion and Culture

In a culminating keynote to a festschrift conference on March 15 honoring the work of Claudia Lauper Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discussed the institutional and biographical contexts for Bushman’s career as a scholar of American history, including women’s social history and the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Bushman is Professor emerita of American Studies at Columbia University. 

As the Sterling M. McMurrin Lecture on Religion and Culture, Ulrich’s presentation marks the renewed partnership between Mormon Studies and the Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah. The festschrift for Bushman will mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, edited by Bushman and considered a founding statement of the scholarship of Mormon women’s history. 

Ulrich traced connections between Bushman’s academic career and personal circumstances. Both women pursued graduate education while raising children in the 1960s and 70s, a time when women scholars faced significant institutional barriers. Ulrich quoted Bushman’s explanation for persisting with her studies: “I had to do it. I had to have some life of the mind... When I didn't, I confronted the abyss and was marooned, in a balloon, disconnected from other people and from ideas, in a meaningless kind of chaos.”

Central to Ulrich’s analysis was Bushman’s intellectual relationship with Harriet Hanson Robinson, a nineteenth-century mill worker-turned-suffragist who was the subject of two of Bushman’s books: “A Good Poor Man’s Wife”: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England (University of Chicago Press, 1981), and later, Going to Boston: Harriet Robinson’s Journey to New Womanhood (University Press of New England, 2017). Importantly, both Ulrich and Bushman turned to individual women’s extensive diaries, which were previously neglected, to learn the history of their society. 

Ulrich especially detailed the economic realities that constrained women’s academic ambitions during in their careers. When Bushman began her master’s program at Brigham Young University, she benefited from free tuition for faculty’s wives. However, when becoming pregnant, she faced open discrimination. Ulrich quoted Bushman: “I knew there was no more opportunity for me at BYU.” The lecture highlighted Bushman’s adaptability throughout her career, as she found new archives and intellectual ambitions at each relocation with her supportive husband, historian Richard Bushman. 

Ulrich, 300th Anniversary Professor emerita at Harvard University, is a prominent historian of women in 18th- and 19th-century America. She is the author of A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870, published in 2017 by Knopf. In her article on early New England funeral sermons is found the famous slogan of modern feminism: “Well-behaved women seldom make history.”

About Sterling M. McMurrin (1914–1996) 

Sterling M. McMurrin’s career spanned roles as teacher, scholar, administrator, and advisor to major corporations, foundations, and federal agencies. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Utah and PhD at the University of Southern California, he joined the University of Utah as Professor of Philosophy in 1948.

McMurrin served as United States Commissioner of Education in the Kennedy Administration before returning to the University of Utah. There, he held faculty appointments in Philosophy, History, and Educational Administration, along with administrative positions including Dean of the College of Letters and Science, and Provost. He was the university’s first Distinguished Professor and the first recipient of the prestigious Rosenblatt Prize. He was also a founding member of the Tanner Lectures on Human Values.

Throughout his career, McMurrin received numerous honorary degrees from institutions nationwide. He was known for his extensive lectures and writings on the history and philosophy of religion until his death in 1996.

The Sterling M. McMurrin Lectures on Religion and Culture were founded by Dr. McMurrin, Lowell M. Durham Jr. (Director of the Tanner Humanities Center from 1992–1997), and friends Richard Smoot, Peter Appleby, Jack Newell, Brigham Madsen, and Boyer Jarvis.