Ulrich notes that the practice of plural marriage did not descend fully formed from the heavens. It was a social experiment that had to be negotiated and developed by all concerned. The church founder, Joseph Smith, introduced the idea approximately two decades after he supposedly uncovered the sacred golden plates of the Book of Mormon on a hillside in upstate New York. His sudden insight that God wanted men to take multiple wives coincided with rumors about his own extramarital affairs, but Ulrich sidesteps the question of whether Smith encouraged the practice “in order to justify illicit relations with vulnerable young women” (as other biographers have suggested).

Her main interest is in what plural marriage meant for Mormon women in the 19th century, forced to adapt on the fly to a situation they could never have anticipated. This is in some ways a personal question for Ulrich, herself a mother of five and a practicing Mormon as well as a Harvard history professor. All eight of her great-grandparents settled in Utah before the Civil War, members of the faith’s pioneer generation. To ask what it was like for the women who made that journey is also to ask how the modern Mormon Church developed its tight-knit social world, and to think about who mattered within it.

Despite Ulrich’s emphasis on women’s voices and ideas, “A House Full of Females” centers its narrative in part on a man named Wilford Woodruff. An apostle of the church and one of Mormonism’s early converts, Woodruff played a significant role in Mormon history. But his most important quality, from Ulrich’s perspective, is that he kept a detailed diary. That diary paid attention to women, noting on one occasion that the local ward meeting house “was full of females quilting sewing etc.” (thus providing Ulrich with her title). Woodruff married his wife Phebe Carter in 1837 and by all accounts loved her deeply, despite long sojourns apart for missionary work and the difficult deaths of several children. In the mid-1840s, he nonetheless “sealed” himself to two teenage girls, the beginning of a decades-long adventure in polygamy.

In asking readers to enter Wilford and Phebe’s world, Ulrich assumes a certain amount of background knowledge. She takes for granted that her readers know something about the landmark events of early Mormonism, including the mob attacks on Mormon communities in Missouri and Illinois, Smith’s murder and Brigham Young’s ascendancy, and the dismal wagon train journey to the promised land of Utah. She assumes, too, that readers understand the basic tenets of Mormon theology and the controversies that the church inspired in the rest of the United States.

Ulrich focuses instead on the confusion and excitement that accompanied the “glorious” revelation sanctioning plural marriage within the Mormon community, especially among its most elite members. She remains unsure about whether the first plural relationships necessarily involved sex, noting the “scarcity of babies” produced. What does seem clear is that many Mormon women were less than thrilled with the development. Smith’s wife Emma objected from the first and never let up, eventually helping to found a dissident anti-polygamist branch of the church after her husband’s death.