Hooray! We get to talk about Ellis Reynolds Shipp in this lesson. She is one of my favorite Mormon she-roes ever: author of one of our sweetest hymns (231, "Father Cheer Our Souls Tonight"), one of the first female physicians in Utah who left family & home to get an Eastern medical education and then started a medical school back home in Utah, mother, plural wife, suffragist, one of those amazing 19th century Mormon women all around. She penned a diary & memoir that should be back in print and promoted to every LDS women's book club (Deseret Book, are you listening to me? Bookcraft, you had your chance when it was on your list in the 1960s) titled While Others Slept, a used copy of which is one of my prize literary possessions.
Ellis Reynolds was born in 1847 & crossed the plains at age 5 with her family. Her mother died when she was 14, so she became the woman of the house & cared for the younger children until her father remarried a year later. She lived part of her older teen years with her grandparents in American Fork. At 18, she met Brigham Young, who offered her a place at Beehive House as an adopted daughter, and she lived there during the time Young was establishing the Mutual Retrenchment Society among his daughters to curb their tendencies toward frivolous clothing - which over time became the Young Womens organization today. She married Milford Bard Shipp, and together they had 10 children (only half of whom lived to adulthood) - he had several other wives, up to 4 at one time. There was a great need for well-trained midwives and obstetricians in Utah at that time. Romania B. Pratt went to the Boston Female Medical College, and Ellis Reynolds Shipp went to Philadelphia Medical College, leaving behind her husband and three surviving children and while pregnant with baby #6 - she delivered a girl the day after her finals in May 1877. She graduated in 1878 at the age of 31, came back to Utah and established a School of Obstetrics and Nursing to train many of the Mormon frontier doctors and midwives - many of whom were mothers like herself. She delivered over 1500 babies without losing a child or a mother in childbirth by the time; she died at the age of 92.
Upon hearing an essay in 1971 by historian Leonard Arrington about Shipp, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote (in her essay "Epiphany in a Broom Closet"):
"Among the 'formidable, intelligent, resourceful, and independent' nineteenth-century women it described was Dr. Ellis Reynolds Shipp, a Mormon polygamous wife and mother who graduated from the Philadelphia Women's Medical College in 1878 (Arrington 1971: 22-23). All of us had grown up hearing about faithful (usually nameless) sisters who had borne children in tents or crushed their best china to make plaster for the temple. Arrington's essay gave us a new kind of heroism.In retrospect the essay is all the more remarkable because there was so little women's history, let alone western women's history, available at the time... Nor did he shrink from the contemporary implications of nineteenth-century stories. In the essay he contributed to our issue [i.e. the famous "pink issue" of Dialogue], he concluded, 'The Mormon tradition of womanly independence and distinction should inspire a later generation of women who are seeking their rightful place in the world' (Arrington, 'Damozels' 31).
Arrington's crisp summary of Ellis Shipp's achievements suggested that somewhere in the not-so-distant past Mormon women had managed to balance obligations that were about to tear our lives apart. Shipp, a mother of seven, had not only become a prominent physician, but a member of the General Boards of two church auxiliaries, and an intimate acquaintance of Susan B. Anthony and other nineteenth-century reformers ('Damozels' 30). Her story was a liberating but no less daunting version of the myth of the pioneer grandmother."
In the lesson, we get a tiny snippet that hints at Ellis's laser-focus on getting an education, and her willingness to sacrifice to achieve it:
“Early in my womanhood I marked out for myself a plan for study which served me well as the years passed on. I could not well concentrate on the lessons in books during the very busy daylight hours, so I decided on the early morning hours for my studies. Therefore I began my studies at four o’clock and put in three solid hours before the household began to stir.” (The Early Autobiography and Diary of Ellis Reynolds Shipp, M.D., comp. Ellis Shipp Musser [Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1962], p. 64).
The quote's a bit misleading, because it makes it sound like she was a teenager at the time, but this was after she was married, had two children, and was running a household alone. Here she is (bottom right) with her three sister-wives Maggie (Margaret Curtis), Lizzie (Elizabeth Hilstead) and Mary (Mary Smith), in a photograph they had taken as a gift for their husband Milford. Source: Shipp, While Others Slept, 117.
There is a bit more on Ellis in the online Utah Historical Encyclopedia, her papers are catalogued at the Utah State Historical Society, and if you can snag a used copy of While Others Slept, it's worth every penny. There are decent articles about her in the Friend from 1984, and the New Era (by Arrington himself, no less) in April 1974 ("Latter-day Saint Women on the Arizona Frontier" - I would love to see articles of this length & depth get published in the New Era these days, but alas).
As for the rest of the lesson, it sounds a lot like Stephen Covey's "Quadrant II"
advice - that is, spend time in doing things which are important but not urgent, to avoid being trapped under a mountain of urgent items causing you unnecessary stress. It's related to the time management part of the "dependability" lesson a few weeks ago - trying to find time each day to plan ahead, break big projects into small steps, and do a little at a time so as not to get overwhelmed. It also sounds a lot like Flylady's anti-procrastination screeds (for her, every Wednesday is anti-procrastination day). I'm seeing some truly Olympic-level procrastinators in the college classes I'm teaching this semester - people who left major projects until the last minute, who vastly underestimated the time that things would take, and who are seeing the consequences in their grades and in their general end-of-semester anxiety level. No fun.
Maybe get the girls in class to do some brainstorming or have some quiet "planning time" for a few minutes to think about pending crises that could be held off or minimized. I don't know... what else will you do besides telling Ellis's inspiring story?
Sunday evening update:
Small epiphany during church today... don't overlook the obvious for this lesson: it would be a perfect opportunity to talk about household preparedness and self-reliance. We had a presentation from someone in our stake that focused on the resources on the Church's providentliving.org website - which goes way beyond food storage. Take a look at the 6 areas of self-reliance. What with fire season in CA, snow & ice storm season in the East coming up, and a lengthy hurricane season just past (didn't we get to the letter "P" this year??) - it's a good reminder that we should do all we can to prepare for what is the most likely disaster event in our own areas and young women can be a big part of their family's preparedness plans and can work towards & set goals towards their own self-reliance in all 6 areas: education & literacy, physical health, social & emotional health, home storage, resource management, and employment. An overview of those would be a good intro to this 3-lesson unit about managing resources.
Just a thought on household preparedness and self-reliance ...
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the Pacific Northwest, thinking about earthquakes and long winters. I now run a home in the South, and have to think about ice storms, drought, and hurricanes. As women, we may not know where we will end up in our future. I believe that as we learn about self-reliance, we are better equipped to handle the variety of challenges that may face us in the future, even those we would not have considered when we were young.