Going back to our first family conference presentation!

As we were cleaning up some of Arta's old binders of "'Notes", we came across a bunch of papers related to our first academic conference as a group!  What was interesting to us was thinking about what Arta saved, and reflecting back on the work and advocacy she did to try and press the group of us in the direction of academic engagement.  So.... here are the documents there, and our attempts to reconstruct a timeline. 

So, we do all remember that, back in the summer of 1990, Arta harnessed us to participate in the first academic conference on Mormons in Canada. 

In the binder, we found a copy of the preliminary program for that conference.  

We also found a letter Arta wrote to Dr. Perry (probably after she had seen the call for papers, or that preliminary program).  From the letter, you can tell that she had probably noticed the absense of attention to women or gender, and had phoned him, proposing that we do a session for the conference, something on Alberta Mormon Women.  Here is the letter she wrote to him, following up on the conversation (where we imagine he must have told her to put something in writing.

It does not look very much like what a conventional academic proposal looks like.  :-).   And the program was likely already set.  Still.... she must have been somewhat persuasive, as he clearly told her to provide him with an abstract and bios, because we also found those in the binder (three weeks after her first letter).

And here is the abstract of the proposed session:

While we were not on the final printed program (not surprising, since Arta was doing last minute advocacy to try to ensure their were Mormon women's voices present in the conversation), we were definately a part of the conference, though without either Mary or Dad participating.

The four papers we eventually presented [the we being Arta, Rebecca, Bonnie and Catherine] are gathered on the Grandmother Arta blog: 

• https://grandmotherarta.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/looking-at-mormon-womens-history.pdf

You can also see the very lovely comments we got from Dr. Patricia Chuchryk (who gave us the gift of academic engagement with our papers!

• https://grandmotherarta.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/mormon-women-in-canada-patricia-chuchryk-comments-1.pdf

In the binder, Arta also had kept a followup note by her: 

This also led to her proposal that we do another set of papers at the Sunstone Conference that was happening in Salt Lake City at the end of the summer.