Those of us who grew up with Personal Progress shaping our Young Women’s experience will recognize the injunctions to ponder, reflect and journal. The Beehive Girl is not nearly so passive! Thatcher’s delightful account of time traveling into forgotten skills reveals how active, challenged and ambitious our foremothers were in their vision. At once amusing and reflective, Beehive Girl prompts deep admiration for the practices and people that shaped generations of Saints.
—Neylan McBaine, author of Women at Church and Pioneering the Vote
Kayla Thatcher’s Beehive Girl is an exceptionally smart, funny, and full-hearted peek into a forgotten Young Women’s program in use from 1915 to 1970. Part memoir, part project book (think Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood, Jana Riess’ Flunking Sainthood, and Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project), we follow along with Thatcher as she documents her personal journey fulfilling the original Beehive Girls’ requirements as a modern adult. She works on skills like making a piece of furniture; caring for a hive of actual bees (which enthralled me and had me scrambling to learn more); milking a goat, ‘doing at least one good turn daily,’ and writing essays about Latter-day Saint women. As part of the program she wrote her own hymn! (Bonus: she includes an additional hymn she co-wrote with her husband that is in all sincerity my favorite hymn of all time.)
Because Thatcher didn’t automatically know how to do these skills, we also get to meet the mentors and friends who helped her, and those relationships were so tender to witness. Through the lens of the project we watch as she finishes her science PhD, moves away from her homeland, and cares for her young daughter in a new place.
Thatcher’s writing is so warm and poignant. I often found myself laughing at an aside before tearing up at the beautiful language, experiences, and memories in the next lines that pulled out memories of my own. Beehive Girl is so, so special. I want everyone with any relationship to Mormonism to read it. And the backmatter! It deserves ALL of the heart eyes and more.
—Rachel Hunt Steenblik, author of Mother’s Milk and I Gave Her a Name
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.