The girl who has been properly trained to seek the Lord for her future companion in life, will not be found walking upon the street winking at strange men nor trying to attract their attention in any way.

That paints a fantastic mental image. Aren’t we counseled against that same sort of permissiveness in For The Strength of Youth and in General Conference? Don’t wink online to skeevy strangers.

Like Researcher says, there are too many things where I could comment. However, I would never be able to be an example of the way to walk:

The pace should never be too rapid nor too slow. ‘The ball of the foot, and not the heel, should strike the ground first.

I have always been a very fast walker. I guess that if I put the ball of my foot down first, instead of my heel, I could learn how to slow down.

The first is that missionaries from before and after this period were encouraged to take photographs of their families with them to show to contacts in their missions as evidence that they were family men, not men on the prowl for girls to capture and take back to Utah harems, as the charges so frequently ran. Bruce Crow at Amateur Mormon Historian recently posted an example of just such a photo with a granddaughter’s explanation as to why Elder Hickenlooper carried that photo. Human nature — and homesickness — being the same then as now, I suspect that there were a lot of comments from the missionaries about how beautiful their sisters and wives and mothers were whenever those photos came out.

The second class of activity would be references in missionary letters published in the Millennial Star and Liahona, and in the Church News, to public lectures elders had given concerning the women of Utah, designed to counteract reports that women were enslaved, downtrodden, and ignorant. Such lectures referenced (depending on era) the Relief Society program, women doctors, the nurses’ training program, the “indignation meetings” of a generation before this 1902 deportment lesson where women gathered by the hundreds and sometimes thousands to defend their way of family life. Again, human nature being what it is, I’m sure there were many references in those lectures to the fine qualities of the Latter-day Saint girls.

I’ll have to watch for and collect some of those statements for a possible future post. I’m sorry that I can’t point you to any particular source at the moment.

Better be a lady than to be comfortable

I’m more glad than ever before that I was born in the 20th century after reading that statement!

The explanation of “cutting” is new to me, and certainly illuminates some of the books I read as a child, such as the Susan Coolidge ones. Fascinating stuff, Ardis, an excellent insight into a bygone age.

There’s almost too much in this essay to choose one or two things to comment upon. But the thing which really caught my eye was the statement:

By the way – do not expect everything on earth simply because you are a woman.

This was in the days before women’s suffrage, before equitable laws on women’s property, before equitable laws on employment and family rights. Women in Utah tended to be more politically progressive than other groups in the United States, so is it too much of a stretch to read this as an anti-suffrage statement?