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Claudia Bushman


Claudia Marian Lauper Bushman (born June 11, 1934) is an American historian specializing in domestic women's history, especially as it relates to the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). She helped found the progressive LDS magazine Exponent II, has written American and LDS history books, and established a Mormon women oral history project at Claremont Graduate University.

Bushman grew up in the Sunset district of San Francisco, where LDS church attendance was a regular part of her family life. She felt aware of gender issues from a young age, noticing that boys received more attention from their leaders in her ward than girls. Still, Bushman said that she felt like everyone in her ward was interested in what she was doing as a young person.

Claudia attended Wellesley College for her undergraduate studies under a full scholarship and described herself as a "lazy student." She met fellow historian Richard Lyman Bushman there while he was on his mission to the Cambridge area, and when he returned to Harvard to study, they renewed their friendship through study dates. They were married on August 19, 1955. Claudia noticed that while she had planned to live as a housewife, she longed to have a life outside of her home and family. She recalls that she learned to work hard from Richard. She attended classes at the Lowell Institute, and encouraged by her enjoyment of those classes, received an MA in American Literature from Brigham Young University while her husband worked there. She received her PhD in New England and American studies from Boston University after more than ten years of part-time study. Bushman attributed her admittance into the English PhD program to her husband's employment there, although she said that the chairman openly scorned her status as part-time student and housewife. She changed her focus to American Studies when she found out they wouldn't require more than one foreign language proficiency.

Bushman is a professor of American Studies emerita at Columbia University. In the summer of 2003, she was the director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History's Summer Scholars program. For the 2007–08 academic year, Bushman was an adjunct professor at Claremont Graduate University while her husband held the Howard W. Hunter chair at that institution. Bushman is the author of many books, most recently Contemporary Mormonism: Latter-day Saints in Modern America (Praeger Publishers, 2006). Her work focuses on the detailed lives of ordinary women


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