Ami Fullmer Chopine
LDS Women's History
Recovering the record
My work centers on the history of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, exploring how their labor, authority, and theology shaped Church culture. Their work helped establish settlements and grow community, sometimes despite pressures against them. I read against the grain of institutional records to reconstruct lives that were shaped by, and shaped, the faith.
My training combines archival methods with public history practice: making rigorous scholarship legible and useful outside the academy, for general readers.
Papers & Essays
Agency, Social Networks, and Organization Among Latter-day Saint Midwives: 1847–1900
In 1847, Latter-day Saint women arrived in the Salt Lake Valley carrying decades of experience in social medicine and midwifery. This paper argues that the medical and organizational system they built over the following half-century was not incidental improvisation but an expression of sustained agency — women and men working together, through evolving networks of relief societies, bishops, and centralized councils, to reconcile older traditions of social medicine with the demands first of frontier settlement and later of professionalizing medical science. Drawing on diaries, minute books, and periodical sources, it traces how midwives such as Patty Bartlett Sessions helped shape both the practical medical culture and the institutional structure of early Utah, arguing that Latter-day Saint women's medical authority was actively constructed rather than merely inherited or permitted.
Request the manuscriptStories of Certain Women
Brigham Young's first wife, Miriam Works, died just months after she was baptized, spending her final moments inviting all to praise the Lord. Who was she, and what kind of influence did she have on Brigham Young?
Certain Women is a YouTube series exploring the lives of women who are usually reduced to a footnote in someone else's biography. Beginning with Brigham Young's wives, then following other Latter-day Saint women whose contributions to building the Kingdom of God have gone under examined, it aims for rigorously sourced, faithful, honest history. This is history that enriches our understanding rather than erasing these figures, setting them on pedestals, or weaponizing them.