This radicalism has long been a part of the Thatcher family, and it has informed many of Laurel’s writings about her experiences in the Church, including her 1995 co-authored book (with Utah poet Emma Lou Thayne), All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir. Although it is sometimes forgotten, the Church was founded as a religion of rebels. They were also brought up in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as generations of their ancestors had been. Laurel’s two brothers, Conley and Gordon, and sister Layle are all professionals. Laurel’s parents encouraged all their children to pursue an education.

Her mother, Alice Siddoway Thatcher, was a homemaker with an abundance of housewifely skills (from whom Laurel learned to jar the piccalilli she still makes). Her father, John Kenneth Thatcher, was a schoolteacher and superintendent, a state legislator and a farmer. Laurel Thatcher was born on July 11, 1938, the descendant of some of the earliest and the most prominent pioneer settlers in Utah and Idaho. 2Īlthough they lived in Sugar City, the Thatchers were closer to the salt of the earth. Laurel thus learned early on and vividly the ways that writers and editors alike re-fashion stories and even homely details to suit particular purposes: a valuable lesson for someone who ended up being a historian, as well as a writer. In an effort to evoke pastoral ideals, they converted an episode in which a sheep farmer brought lamb chops to Laurel’s family for Christmas breakfast (itself somewhat embroidered) into one in which a dairy farmer carried a pail of cream to them (though no dairy farmer in Idaho in the 1950s would have put cream in a pail). This first venture into print was a fanciful account of the Christmas season in her small Idaho hometown, made even more fanciful by the magazine’s New York editors. Her first publication, “Sugar City Magic,” appeared in Seventeen in 1957, when she was a sophomore studying English and journalism at the University of Utah. 1 Even before this epiphany-indeed, by the time she was in the fifth grade-Laurel knew she wanted to be a writer.

“I was raised to be an industrious housewife and a self-sacrificing and charitable neighbor, but sometime in my thirties I discovered that writing about women’s work was a lot more fun than doing it.” So declared Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in her most recent book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

Original text From the General Meeting Booklet, 2010 AHA Annual Meeting Updated and Edited by Emily Farnsworth, Harvard Divinity School. By Sarah Pearsall, Oxford Brookes University, and Kirsten Sword, Indiana University

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