Lucy Mack Smith
| Lucy Mack Smith | |
|---|---|
Painting of Lucy Mack Smith located at the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial
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| Personal details | |
| Born |
Lucy Mack July 8, 1775 Gilsum, New Hampshire |
| Died | May 14, 1856 (aged 80) Nauvoo, Illinois |
| Resting place |
Smith Family Cemetery 40°32′25.98″N 91°23′31.06″W / 40.5405500°N 91.3919611°W |
| Title | The History of Joseph Smith by His Mother |
| Spouse(s) | Joseph Smith, Sr. |
| Children |
Alvin Smith Hyrum Smith Sophronia Smith Joseph Smith, Jr. Samuel H. Smith Ephraim Smith William Smith Katharine Smith Don Carlos Smith Lucy Smith |
| Parents | Solomon Mack Lydia Gates |
| Website | www |
Lucy Mack Smith (July 8, 1775 – May 14, 1856) was the mother of Joseph Smith, Jr., founder of the Latter Day Saint movement. She is noted for writing the memoir, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations and was an important leader of the movement during Joseph's life.
Lucy Mack was born on July 8, 1775, in Gilsum, New Hampshire, during an era of political, economic, and social change. The second half of the eighteenth century had seen a slowly evolving shift of responsibilities within the American family. Even though the Revolutionary War would accelerate that shift, the initial impetus came from the changing economic scene. According to women's historian Linda Kerber, the growing market economy and "industrial technology reshaped the contours of domestic labor" (7). This shift toward commercialism pushed the father's work farther away from the home, with the result that the mother now took over the father's former role of final responsibility for the children's education and for their moral and religious training (Bloch, 113). Magazines and educational publications heralded mothers as "the chief transmitters of religious and moral values" (Bloch, 101).
Mack was proud of her father's involvement in the Revolutionary War. Even though Solomon Mack was not committed to any religious belief system, he certainly appreciated the diligence of his wife in attending to the spiritual and educational needs of their children. "All the flowery eloquence of the pulpit," he said, could not match the influence of his wife on their children (chap. 1). Mack's mother, Lydia Gates Mack, was an example of the kind of "moral mother" increasingly celebrated during the last decades of the eighteenth century. Mack's older brother, Jason, became a "seeker" and eventually formed his own religious community; her two older sisters each had a visionary confirmation that their sins were forgiven and that God called them to "witness" to others of the need for repentance. Such gestures of piety were expected in the highly charged revivalist climate of the day. As historians have noted, clergymen "encouraged people to induce 'visions'" (Buel, 11). Mack's father, after a period of acute suffering in body and mind, underwent his own religious conversion in 1810.
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