SOURCE: “Poetry and the Private Lives: Newspaper Verse on the Mormon Frontier,” in Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 25, No. 3, Summer, 1985, pp. 55-65.

In the following essay, Beecher reflects on the women who contributed poetry to the Woman's Exponent newspaper, arguing that part of their motivation to write stemmed from their intense need to express their feelings of self-identity and self-worth.

A handful of verses eventually led to the founding in 1872 of the Woman's Exponent and the choosing of Louisa Lula Greene as its first editor. A student in the first class of the University of Utah, the twenty-year-old northern Utah girl needed train fare back home to Smithfield and so offered the poems to an editor on the Salt Lake Herald in exchange for the exact price of a ticket. Quite taken with the verses, and with their writer, the editor later persuaded her to return to Salt...