Patty Sessions: Mormon Pioneer Midwife & Mormon Polygamist/Polyandrist Wife

The diary of a Mormon pioneer woman is a fascinating record of a paradoxical time. These women participated in the priesthood in ways forbidden to modern Latter-day Saint women. And in many ways, the early church better supported women in their careers than our modern church, which may finally be emerging (fingers crossed) from a many-decade streak of male leaders promoting stay-at-home-motherhood. And yet, they struggled with the same Victorian-era sexism and injustices experienced by most women of their time, compounded by the LDS Church’s experiment with polygamy which, according to most Mormon pioneer diaries I have read, made women miserable.

Patty Sessions was the perfect example of this paradox. As a midwife, she was a careerwoman and a spiritual leader, called on for healing blessings. She supported church policies while privately mourning how polygamy wreaked havoc on her marriages.

To clarify, reading the diaries of a woman like Patty Sessions would be fascinating, if most diaries weren’t so dull and unreadable. Most people don’t write their diaries for public consumption, and it shows. The unedited, scribbled pages of a diary tend to drone on in tangents. Juicy historical and personal details are scattered needles lodged in haystacks of errands and grocery lists. I’ve read many diaries as I’ve researched my Ask a Suffragist book series and I’ve learned so much from them, but the process wasn’t usually a lot of fun.

Luckily, Patty Sessions’s great, great, great, great granddaughter, Melissa Tyler, teaming up with illustrator, Luciana Maruca, has converted the best content of her ancestor’s diary into a more reader-friendly format—a graphic novel.

Some images take quotes from Patty’s diary and paint them out in a fanciful direction, like this one:

Sometimes the imagery points out blindspots in Patty’s perspective, particularly when her words reflect the biases of white settlers encroaching on inhabited indigenous lands.

In addition to chronicling her midwifery career, Patty’s journal recorded her experiences with polygamy and polyandry during the early years of the LDS church. This uncaptioned image summarizes what her experience with polygamy was like.

Patty was also one of several women who practiced polyandry in the early days of the LDS church, becoming a plural wife of Joseph Smith while still married to her legal husband.

While perusing this graphic novel, make sure to read the footnotes! The footnotes add a great deal to the narrative, some with historical context and others with wry commentary. The footnote under this asterisk says, “Patty’s own words.” I laughed out loud when I read that footnote and realized this is what Patty herself literally said about her wedding.

After you’ve read Midwife of The Wild Frontier, you may find yourself hungry for more Patty Sessions. If that happens, go ahead and read her diary. Luckily, you don’t have to read brittle old pages with bad handwriting. Patty’s diary has been published as Mormon Midwife: the 1846-1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions, edited by Donna Smart. Yes, I did say that reading diaries tends to be less than entertaining, but I still do it when I’m researching the Ask a Suffragist books I write, and although reading diaries is not as consistently fun as reading a graphic novel, there’s a certain satisfaction to peering into someone else’s diary, and reading something so private to them they only shared it with themselves. If you loved Midwife of The Wild Frontier, give Patty’s published diary a try. You might not hate it!