Educated

Winter was long that year, the dreariness punctuated only by my weekly
counseling sessions and the odd sense of loss, almost bereavement, I felt
whenever I finished one TV series and had to find another.
Then it was spring, then summer, and finally as summer turned to fall, I
found I could read with focus. I could hold thoughts in my head besides anger
and self-accusation. I returned to the chapter I had written nearly two years
before at Harvard. Again I read Hume, Rousseau, Smith, Godwin,
Wollstonecraft and Mill. Again I thought about the family. There was a
puzzle in it, something unresolved. What is a person to do, I asked, when
their obligations to their family conflict with other obligations—to friends, to
society, to themselves?
I began the research. I narrowed the question, made it academic, specific.
In the end, I chose four intellectual movements from the nineteenth century
and examined how they had struggled with the question of family obligation.
One of the movements I chose was nineteenth-century Mormonism. I worked
for a solid year, and at the end of it I had a draft of my thesis: “The Family,
Morality, and Social Science in Anglo-American Cooperative Thought,
1813–1890.”
The chapter on Mormonism was my favorite. As a child in Sunday school,
I’d been taught that all history was a preparation for Mormonism: that every
event since the death of Christ had been fashioned by God to make possible
the moment when Joseph Smith would kneel in the Sacred Grove and God
would restore the one true church. Wars, migrations, natural disasters—these
were mere preludes to the Mormon story. On the other hand, secular histories
tended to overlook spiritual movements like Mormonism altogether.
My dissertation gave a different shape to history, one that was neither
Mormon nor anti-Mormon, neither spiritual nor profane. It didn’t treat
Mormonism as the objective of human history, but neither did it discount the
contribution Mormonism had made in grappling with the questions of the
age. Instead, it treated the Mormon ideology as a chapter in the larger human
story. In my account, history did not set Mormons apart from the rest of the
human family; it bound them to it.
I sent Dr. Runciman the draft, and a few days later we met in his office. He
sat across from me and, with a look of astonishment, said it was good. “Some
parts of it are very good,” he said. He was smiling now. “I’ll be surprised if it
doesn’t earn a doctorate.”