Breaking Down Patriarchy and Polygamy - with Shannon Johnson

This week Amy is joined by Shannon Johnson to help us zoom in even further to more fully unpack the practice of polygamous marriage in the LDS church and its impact on individual women. Not only do we learn some surprising and essential history, but Shannon trusts us with the story of her own journey coming-of-age within the church community and wrestling with polygamy on a personal level.

Shannon Olena Hyatt Johnson (she/her) grew up mostly in Utah and went to BYU, where she met her husband, who was also an English major. She has taught conversational English in Japan and Cairo, and now works in admin at Stanford. She is currently writing a master's thesis on race, polygamy, and the Mormon family. Shannon has three daughters and a non-binary child, ranging in age from 11 to 21. Shannon likes hiking, yoga, British tv, and trashy romance novels.

Visit the Episode Page here.

Recommended Reading & Listening

Year of Polygamy (podcast) ~ Lindsay Hansen Park

Sunstone Mormon History Podcast (podcast) ~ Lindsay Hansen Park and Bryan Buchanan

Pioneers (poem read by author) ~ Carol Lynn Pearson

Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, a Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (book) ~ Quincy D. Newell

Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young (book, also Audible) ~ Virginia Kerns

More Wives than One (book) ~ Kathryn Danes

“Heathen in Our Fair Land: Anti-Polygamy and Protestant Women’s Missions to Utah, 1869–1910” (PhD Thesis) ~ Jana Riess

The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (book) ~ Sarah Barringer Gordon

“The family, morality and social science in Anglo-American cooperative thought, 1813-1890” (PhD Thesis) ~ Tara Westover (also, Educated)

The Legacy of Adam-God in the Mormon Theology of Heteropatriarchy (blog post) ~ The Grand Scoobah

Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy―Its Origin, Practice, and Demise (book) ~ B. Carmon Hardy

Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (book) ~ W. Paul Reeve

Race and the Making of the Mormon People (book) ~ Max Perry Mueller