Despite being an LDS publication, the first issue of the Woman’s Exponent read mostly like a run-of-the-mill woman’s journal. Eight pages long, it was filled with news (both political and sensational), medical cures, and jokes.
But the Woman’s Exponent didn’t consider itself a normal woman’s journal. As one of its articles read:
A woman’s journal has come to be viewed as exclusively a medium through which woman’s rights and woman’s privileges must be discussed and strenuously advocated, in contradistinction to the rights and privileges of men. [But] that is not our mission.
After all, the article says, women in Utah could already vote. Nor did it feel that there was a need to protect the women of Utah from wrongs inflicted by their husbands or fathers.
Yet there is ample work for us to do. There is truth to be disseminated, errors to be combated, intelligence to be communicated, the right to be vindicated, and misrepresentations to be corrected.
The Exponent pledged to report and comment on all subjects and events of interest to the women of Utah. One of these subjects was plural marriage, which it advocated for until the 1890 Manifesto.
For example, the year the Exponent started, in 1872, it expressed its bafflement that the general public would speak out against polygamy but find no fault with producing children while not marrying at all.
Great outcry is raised against the much marrying of the Latter-day Saints. The tendency of the age is to disregard marriage altogether, but there seems no indication of a desire to have the race die out.
The Exponent reported on Rev. Mr. Peirce, a Methodist clergyman based in Salt Lake City, who lectured often in the east about the evils of plural marriage. One of his solutions to Mormon polygamy was the
introduction of vast quantities of expensive millinery goods, and by inducing “Gentile” women to dress in [such] gorgeous style that “Mormon” women might imitate them and run up such heavy dry goods bills that it would be impossible for a man to support more than one wife, if even one.
His diabolical idea would not have worked on Woman’s Exponent readers, though, who were regularly counseled toward modesty in its “Hints to Careless Wives” column:
How utterly is the peace of mind and comfort of many husbands ruined by the carelessness and untidiness of their wives! Let the wife reflect that upon her conduct and disposition depend the happiness of a man’s home-life. . . . [She] should be a source of peace and sunshine to all around her.
Indeed, in 1872, the Exponent surprised itself by promoting a new trend from Paris:
News comes from France that trailing dresses for street wear are going out of fashion. So many absurd and ridiculous fashions come from Paris that the wonder is thinking American women do not, with honest republican spirit, reject them entirely. This latter one, however, is so sensible that its immediate adoption will be an evidence of good sense wisely directed.
When one thinks of what “trailing dresses” would have trailed through and what they might drag along with them, especially in largely undeveloped Mormon settlements, the advice seems sound.
But the medical advice was often very unsound. To cure bad breath, the Exponent advised its readers to disinfect the stomach by drinking a glass of water to which six to ten drops of a concentrated solution of chloride of soda had been added. It proposed treating asthma by burning equal parts sugar and saltpeter and inhaling the smoke.
But, in the end, some of the content sounds very contemporary. For example, in 1872 the Exponent lamented:
The season of scattering intellectual filth has set in over the country. It occurs quadrennially in the United States, commencing a few months before the Presidential elections.
Ah, yes. The more things change, the more they stay the same.