A Few More Days to See the 50 Years of Exponent II Exhibit at BYU!

The BYU L. Tom Perry Special Collections has a 50 Years of Exponent II Exhibit for Women’s History Month! The exhibit is up for the month of March in the Special Collections lobby and was curated by Karen Glenn, John Murphy, and Bethany Budge.

Exponent II staff began sending material to the BYU archive in 1977. As described by Katie Rich, co-author of Fifty Years of Exponent II, “the exhibit captures the full sweep of Exponent II’s work — from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and the Cambridge Relief Society producing A Beginner’s Boston, to Susan Kohler uncovering the original The Woman’s Exponent in a Harvard library, to Woman’s Exponent Day Dinners in Grethe Peterson’s backyard, to Carolyn Person’s hand-drawn art. Every stage of their process — mailing personalized requests for submissions, editing essays, advertising discussion groups at Judy Dushku’s house, collecting fan mail — has been preserved and a beautiful snippet is on display.”

Rich said, “It was an honor to see this collection in person…This archive was essential to find the sources to write Fifty Years of Exponent II. We are so grateful to Karen Glenn, John Murphy, and Bethany Budge at the library for curating this exhibit and organizing the Exponent II Records to make them even better for future researchers.”

Curator Karen Glenn said in a correspondence to Exponent II, “Thank you for the wonderful opportunity to work with these records. It was a sacred experience to preserve all of these stories from Latter-day Saint women.”

Check out the collection’s newly updated Finding Guide as well as the archive of digitized issues of Exponent II.

Photos by Katie Rich featuring Nancy Dredge and Judy Dushku as well as Katie Rich and Heather Sundahl and the exhibit’s curatorial team.