“I would be happy to talk to you,” she said, “but I don’t do Zoom. You are welcome to come to my condo.”
Fair enough, I thought, for a ninety-year-old woman and Founding Mother of Exponent II. So, in October 2022, Heather Sundahl and I happily made the trip to Grethe Peterson’s condo near the base of Emigration Canyon, overlooking Salt Lake City. Grethe graciously told us about her life and her family’s years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gave us a copy of her hot-off-the-press self-published memoir, Growing Into Myself.
With Grethe’s death last month, I’m thinking about the years that the Petersons opened their home to Exponent II’s production.
Before the digital age, Exponent II was a hand-produced, “kitchen table”-style newspaper. The staff put it all together in quarterly “paste-up” parties that often lasted several evenings. The typewritten copy was literally in pieces—a paragraph here, a single retyped line there. It all had to be meticulously assembled and proofread before being sent for printing.
The first paste-up party was held at Maryann MacMurray’s home in the Boston suburbs in June 1974. Over the years, paste-up and mailing parties changed locations as volunteers moved and life’s demands undulated. Carrel and Garret Sheldon opened their home to the paper’s production many times in its early decades, but between much of 1976 and 1978, Exponent II was produced in the Cambridge home of Grethe and Chase Peterson.
The Petersons lived at 95 Irving Street in the large historic home that prominent American psychologist and philosopher William James built for his wife in 1887. The home provided space for discussion groups in the living room, board meetings in the library, and mailings of the paper prepared on the dining room table. They held quarterly paste-up meetings in the fourth-story, uninsulated attic space, utilizing a large ping-pong table as the central workstation.
In her memoir, Peterson recalls, “We kept the lines straight with the help of graph paper taped to a light board (thanks to Carrel’s husband, Garret, an engineer) so the blue lines wouldn’t show up in the finished product but would help us line everything up. The ping pong table was soon littered with lamps, graph paper, scotch tape, scissors, and glue.” The staff tacked previous issues of the paper up on the walls as a visible template for design continuity. As deadlines approached, Exponent women came and went freely, with the Peterson’s golden retriever, Muffin, taking on the role of eager receptionist.
Perhaps understanding the historical nature of their undertaking, the staff documented their work process in the Winter 1978 issue. From the articles “95 Irving Street,” “From Our House to Yours,” and the photographic essay “Putting it all Together,” we find rich details and the best collection of images of the paper’s production that we have.
Grethe was a matriarch of Mormon Feminism. Beginning in 1970, she participated in the Boston Mormon feminists’ consciousness-raising meetings and contributed to the “Pink Issue” of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. When Claudia Bushman resigned as editor at the end of 1975 due to pressure from LDS general authorities, Grethe joined the paper’s editorial team and later became its managing editor alongside the paper’s second editor-in-chief, Nancy Dredge.
More about her fascinating life, including her role in founding the Children’s Justice Center in Utah, can be found in her obituary here, along with the details of her upcoming memorial service. While I have loved many things about the process of co-writing the forthcoming book, Fifty Years of Exponent II (Signature Books, 2024), the most transformative has been meeting and learning about the lives of the women who founded this paper or carried on its important work.
That’s Sharon Miller in the top photo doing paste-up. Where are you now, Sharon? And the bound copies in the “Back from the Printers” photo show my cover of ink drawings of maple leaves. Fun days!
Treasures! Thank you for this little window into our history.
Katie thank you for documenting all this!
This was such a fun trip through time!
I love this story and the photos. There is so much behind-the-scenes work in feminist organizing and publishing that gets little credit out in the open.
This is so so cool! Thank you, Katie, for sharing about this woman and the founding mothers of Exponent II. I’m amazed and touched by their dedication to Mormon women’s voices.
Now I want a “behind the scenes” of our current magazine crew!
I love this bite of history. Thanks for sharing.
We had had lots of letters from subscribers asking who were these women putting out this newspaper that seemed to be a lifeline to them. So we decided to unveil ourselves and explain the production process of getting the paper into their hands. This photo essay was in about the 3rd or 4th year of the newspaper.