| Women's Studies Open Reading Group Women's Studies Open Reading Group was started in the Summer of 2006. It continued through the 2007 student year. On a weekly or bi-weekly basis, young people came together for discussions and study of a wide variety of subjects branching out from feminism and women's studies. As of now, the group is no longer meeting nor has any future plans. Some of the materials that were used are reproduced below. Readings for Tuesday, March 20, 2007 Hi everyone. I think this is the easiest way to do this, since I am culling these excerpts from a variety of online sources (many of which are accompanied with dozens and dozens of pages of comments). Please note: I have edited portions (usually full paragraphs) from some of the pieces. I have done this only for the sake of limiting the length. I have tried to keep the meaning intact. For the length reason as well, I am not including footnotes or further readings or bibliographies. If you would like sources, please let me know and I will supply. Please note that I am not the author of any of these pieces and have tried to include the name of the author so proper credit can be given **Please bring a copy of the readings with you, if at all possible. Hard copy, your laptop with these on screen, whatever. I have found that discussions are much more fruitful when people can reference what they've read. ** Reading #1: This is a piece written by Carol Lynn Pearson. It's meant to be a talk given to young men in the Church in an alternate reality: “My dear young brethren, it is such a delight to be able to speak to you today. Your faces and your clothing look so clean and fresh. I know that our Mother in Heaven is pleased as she looks down on you this day. And I want, first of all, to convey to you the fact that our Mother loves you. I am persuaded that She loves you just as much as she loves her daughters, and I hope you can believe that. “And what a marvelous plan She has laid out for you! What a glorious role you are called to fill! How you must have rejoiced in spirit as She created the earth and placed there her crowning creation, Eve, the first and perfect woman. But of course our Mother could see that Eve was not complete, that she needed a worthy helpmeet to assist her in the great work she was called to do. And so this is where you come in, dear brethren. A rib from Eve’s own body was fashioned into the body of Adam, and he was given her as a friend and helpmeet. What a glorious and noble calling! So important was he to Eve, and so important the commandment her Mother had given, that even when Adam sinned because he was deceived, Eve knowingly sinned with him so they could remain together. “And over the centuries how you must have rejoiced as the plan unfolded further–through the great Matriarchs, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel–as our Mother’s holy prophetesses continued to reveal her word to us, as woman after woman was sent to do important work, making us all better people so that we could bless the lives of our husbands and children. “Keep yourselves clean and pure, dear brethren, that one day one of our Mother’s choice daughters might look with favor upon you, claim you as her own, and give to you the glorious privilege of serving as her helpmeet, adding glory unto her as she adds glory unto the Mother. “And do not listen to the voices that cry out to you from the world. We are living in dark and evil times. Satan herself desires you. Do not listen to the voices that tell you you are suppressed, that entice you to a thing called full personhood and freedom. The role of man has always been made clear by God Herself. The place he occupies in our Mother’s plan is not in question–it is now, always has been, and always will be to stand by the side of woman, assisting her in the great work she has been given to do. “It is true that new doors are opening for man to contribute in many fields besides his primary one, and we are glad when a man shows talents and abilities in a wider range of service. We encourage this. We are proud of the achievements of our fine young men. “And as the light of our Mother grows brighter in this world we learn even more of the glorious truths concerning manhood, that it is intended indeed to be a partnership with woman. In fact, one of the truths of our age, and I believe with all my heart this is a truth even though we don’t want to talk about it and even though the words were written by a man–somewhere we’ve a Father there! Imagine! Somewhere we’ve a Father there!” Reading #2: This is also by Carol Lynn Pearson (an excerpt from a chapter she wrote). […] We live in a Motherless house. In our worship we are Motherless. In our hymns, our prayers, our scriptures, our temples, our religious discourse, we are Motherless. In the symbols that connect our minds and our hearts with our origin, we are Motherless. The double picture frame on our mantle that has space for divine parents has only one picture in it—the face of a male. There is nothing trivial about this near total exclusion of the female from our religious processes. Balance is enormously important to our well-being. The Jewish Cabala tells us that “Only the togetherness of male and female is a state of blessedness” and that “when a man sins he thereby causes a separation between the male and female aspects of the deity, which, in turn, leads to a transcendental and universal disaster.”1 Is there any simpler way of putting it? We have sinned. We have created a separation of maleness and femaleness—in our deity, our culture, our world view, and in ourselves. And we are suffering and have suffered for a long time the effects of a transcendental and universal disaster. My mother died when I was fifteen, and I learned what it was to live in a motherless house. In my longings for God, […] I believe that God does not intend that we live in a Motherless house. There is a wonderful line from a song in the musical Les Miserables: “When you love another person you have seen the face of God.” I believe that as we love one another, female and male, we see the face of God, Mother as well as Father. I believe that God as Father and God as Mother are constant as the sun and that we as children receive what we can at certain times in our history and according to our agency. Feminist research especially during the past decade has yielded new evidence about the worship of a female deity. For the first 25,000 years of known human existence, during the Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods, the human family conceived of God as the Mother. The earliest civilizations seem universally to have worshipped the ancient goddess, who I believe was their understanding of the deity we call Mother in Heaven. The earliest written creation story, the Babylonian “Enuma Elish,” tells that “When the heavens had not been formed, When the earth beneath had no name, Tiamat brought forth them both . . . Tiamat, the Mother of the Gods, Creator of All.”2 The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler, provides ample evidence from archaeology that a partnership society existed prior to the dominator society that followed and that this partnership society was characterized by worship of the Mother. But beginning around 4300 B.C.E., this knowledge gradually began to be lost. In order to replace worship of the female with worship of the male, the idea had to be “imprinted in the mind of every single man, woman and child until their ideas of reality had been completely transformed to fit the requirements of a dominator society.”3 Interestingly, the book Sarah the Priestess, the First Matriarch of Genesis presents a reevaluation of Sarah and Abraham as figures in transition from a female-centered society to a male-centered society.4 On 30 October 1983 the LDS Church News ran an article with the headline, “Scholars Expose a `Cover-up'”: A cover-up was exposed at BYU's J. Rueben Clark Law School recently. Several speakers at the 32nd Annual Symposium on the Archaeology of the Scriptures . . . pointed accusing fingers back through time. They held two groups of people responsible for “covering up” valuable information about ancient Hebrew goddess worship. . . . Dr. Raphael Patai, renowned Hebraist and anthropologist, said “Goddesses were worshipped most of the time by most Jewish people, even in the temple . . . but the Bible writers . . . only refer to it as idolatry and condemn it as utter abomination” (p. 7). The article points out that goddess worship was a respected part of worship among Hebrews in their homes and that in the temple “feminine deities were worshipped for 236 of the 370 years prior to the destruction of the temple in 586 B.C.” The article concludes that early Hebrews may have been responding to their understanding of the concept of a Mother in Heaven. Of course they were. And they held tenaciously to that concept, as witnessed by the incredible violence required to stamp it out. According to Eisler, this process “went on for millennia and is still going on in our own time: the process whereby the human mind was, sometimes brutally and sometimes subtly, sometimes deliberately and sometimes unwittingly, remolded.”5 Images of the powerful, divine female were turned upside down to become dark and negative images, including “the mother of harlots,” “the Abomination,” “the mother of abominations,” and “the whore of all the earth” in the Bible and Book of Mormon. Negative female images we have. But where are the images of our powerful and magnificent Mother who bore and sustains us all? Where are the female images which girls and women can relate to, which validate rather than belittle our femaleness? Having a wonderful father does not preclude the need for a mother. The absence of the Mother inevitably demeans the daughters and deprives the sons. No matter how many good men are kind to their wives or how many women say they have never felt less important than a man, in a Motherless house we are all wounded children. I grew up in Utah. The first memory I have of a little explosion within me that said “something is wrong here” was a day in my seminary class at Brigham Young High School. My seminary teacher bore his testimony that God our Father practiced polygamy, and that we had many heavenly mothers. I felt the blood drain from my face. My seminary teacher would not lie to me. I confided in my journal. “Oct. 3, 1956: `All day today I was very distraught about the idea of polygamy in heaven.'” “Oct. 6, 1957: `In Sunday School they discussed what a wife has to do to make a happy home. It indeed painted a dark picture. . . . I doubt if I shall ever find the type of man I want or who shall want me as an equal.'” “July 12, 1960: `I've read every scripture regarding woman that is mentioned in the standard works. Each one only upsets me more; I don't mean casually bothers me, I mean upsets the very core of my nature.'” I was so hungry for information, something that would tell me things were not as bad as they looked. I spent many hours as a student at BYU, going to the shelves in the library, looking at the church books, I became adept at looking in the index under two letters, “W” for women, “M” for Mother in Heaven. Any time I found even a crumb of information, I devoured it. But often I would go home hungry. I knew that something felt wrong. For a long time I assumed that the wrong was not in the system, the wrong was in myself. But gradually I moved beyond that position, and gaining a little courage, I began to question some of the things I saw and heard. Questioning leads, of course, to tension with the system. But tension and even pain, as women know, is the only way new life is brought forth. I questioned a lot. And I heard mixed messages everywhere. For instance, as I listened to LDS general conference sessions, they began with a greeting to the governor of the state, presidents of universities, general authorities, and stake presidents. Then somewhere in the session would be a talk with the statement, “There is no greater calling than that of a mother,” and I would think, “Really? If they really believe that, why didn't they start this session saying, `We are so grateful to have the presence of all the mothers here; we also welcome the governor, the president of BYU, and presidents of universities.'” It is not right to say to women, “You shouldn't have been feeling that.” Feelings are authentic and do not respond to “shouldn'ts.” They must be expressed and respected. Each woman has her own experience, which is true for her own life. My experience is personal, not universal, but it is also not unique. I know, because I have talked to hundreds of Mormon women. So many women are exhausted from having to work hard to validate femaleness. It is not right that we should have to. It is not right that our history, our theology, our present, and our future be given us solely in masculine terminology and from a male point of view. The injury to the female psyche is incalculable. But we have lived with it for so long we have come to accept it as natural. We have come to accept the absence of the female as just the way it is. I want our children to have something better than a twisted version or complete void of femaleness. I want them to know why history has excluded women and to know a history that includes women rather than having to search and scrape for tiny crumbs. I want them to read the Old Testament knowing it is not direct quotes from the mouth of God but often a reflection of a society struggling to discover what was godly. To know why in those times people prayed for male children but never for a girl; why a woman was unclean seven days after bearing a boy but fourteen after bearing a girl; why the woman was listed with the other property of her husband. I want our children to know that these were characteristics of a fallen society, not an ideal pattern for our lives. I also want them to know that in a day in which the orthodox Jew prayed “Praised be God that he has not created me a woman” came the revolutionary figure of Jesus, who seemed to value women as much as men and invited them to follow him, spoke to them in public, allowed a woman with the blood taboo to touch him, made women witnesses of the most important events in his life, and all in a day when woman's word was not valid in a court of law. I want children to know that the writings of the Christian gnostics and other apocryphal texts tell even of Christ speaking not only of God the Father but of God the Mother. I wish I had learned those things on the nights I went home empty-handed after reading church books at the BYU library. I want our children to know of the great lack of esteem for woman in the centuries after Christ, when Saint Clement said, “Every woman should be overwhelmed with shame at the very thought that she is a woman.”6 To know that Saint Augustine denied women had souls and that this issue was debated at church councils. That Martin Luther said, “Woman, though a stupid vessel, is essential. But man must always hold power over her, for he is higher and better than she.”7 I want them to be sad and angry for Saint Teresa of Avila who said, “The very thought that I am a woman is enough to make my wings droop.”8 Our children need to know that 85 percent of those executed for witchcraft—hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions—were women whose sins were a show of rebellion or an evidence of spiritual power, seen as a threat to the male-dominated church and society. They should know that an ancient Moslem mosque still bears the inscription, “women and dogs and other impure animals are not permitted to enter.” That in Morocco for centuries the custom was that the man rode the donkey and the woman walked six feet behind—until WW II left many dangerous unexploded mines in the ground, after which the woman walked six feet in front of the donkey. That Chinese girl babies' feet were bound to keep them close to home and under complete male domination. That the phrase “rule of thumb” comes from old English law that dictates that a husband cannot beat his wife with a rod larger than his thumb. Our children need to know this sad history. And they need to know about brave women and men who struggled to change it. Our children need to know the history and contributions of women in our own church, women I had never heard of. To know that women such as Elizabeth Ann Whitney were, as the women themselves described it, “ordained and set apart under the hand of Joseph Smith to administer to the sick and comfort the sorrowful.”9 Until I researched my book Daughters of Light, I had never heard of Mormon women healing the sick, casting out evil spirits, receiving revelation, and prophesying. I had never heard of Louisa Pratt laying her hands on her children's heads and healing them from smallpox in Nauvoo or Heber J. Grant's wife giving him a prophetic blessing in tongues, for which he expressed gratitude until the end of his life. Knowing about these women would have comforted me as a teenager. I remember the first day that I read Woman's Exponent in the BYU library, how I walked home both elated and furious—thrilled that I had found these magnificent women and outraged that no one had ever told me they existed. No one told me about Emmeline B. Wells, who said of a woman running for president of the United States in 1884, “A new era is being ushered in and women are born with hearts as large, and aims as lofty, and courage as undaunted as men. . . . They may be called innovators and extremists, but, nevertheless, they will stand out grandly in the future and be applauded as benefactors of the human race.”10 It has been a long journey from my first naive questioning, and I am not at the end of it. My work shows some of what I have learned along the way. In my poems, such as “Millie's Mother Red Dress” and “The Steward,” I expressed the feelings of women who have given up too much. In Daughters of Light (1973) I compiled stories, experiences, and reports of Mormon pioneer women exercising spiritual gifts, such as healing, blessing and prophesying. In The Flight and The Nest (1975) I published photographs and descriptions of Mormon women of one hundred years ago and detailed how they responded to the women's issues of their day, politically, educationally, professionally. In Goodbye, I Love You (1986) I traced how I discovered that seemingly God, obviously my church, and evidently my husband—all preferred men. In One on the Seesaw (1988) I talked about trying to raise children with a heightened consciousness about women and men, using one of my favorite quotes, “Dear God, are boys really better than girls? I know you are one, but try to be fair.” I want our children to know that progress has been made on behalf of women but to know too that we still have a long way to go. History will show us in transition from a dark day to a brighter day, but there are plenty of dark spots in America and in Utah. Historians will see that in our day maleness was still valued more than femaleness. They will see a headline that reads “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing,” referring to a 1990 world census study. It estimates that extraordinary numbers of girls and women are missing in various countries due to female infanticide and lack of health care.11 In China some of these missing girl babies can be found at the bottom of the river. They will see records of the World Health Organization showing a struggle to give adequate aid to at least 74 million women in Africa who have been subjected to the crude surgery of genital mutilation, keeping them more easily under male domination. They will see news articles showing that in India in one year, 610 new brides died of burns after their husbands soaked them with kerosene and set them afire because they were displeased with the lack of dowry. They will see in the records of American clinics that determine the sex of a fetus, far more requests for a boy than a girl, and records that show far more abortions of females than males. Historians will see in the September 1988 issue of BYU Today alumni magazine, a letter to the editor telling of a man who prays daily that his wife will be a better wife so he will not have to hit her anymore. In my diary they could read about a husband who would raise his hand “to the square” and command his wife to obey him when she disagreed with him. Or the woman who told me she watched her son's Scout Court of Honor with pride and sorrow that her daughter did not have a moment of equal recognition. They could read about the psychiatrist in San Diego who told me that a large percentage of his work with sexual abuse of children involves Mormon families. He said, “It seems to me that your church does not listen to its women. When a woman tells me she has reported terrible abuse to the church, and her husband goes in and tells a different story, his is believed; by the time the truth comes out, the damage can be irreparable.” They could read about the woman whose husband severely abused all of their six children and who after she forced him to meet with the bishop, slammed his fist into the church wall and said, “I am the god of my home; no one can tell me what to do or not to do with my family.” They could find in my diary the statement made by the husband of a friend in Utah, who asked him in great frustration, “What would you do if you were the one in this relationship born a woman?” “Well,” he said, “I think I'd just make the best of a bad deal.” I noticed something important in 1988 when Gordon B. Hinckley, first counselor to the president of the church, said, I have an anxious concern for the young women of the Church. . . . [T]he faithfulness of the young men as evidenced in the Church activities has moved forward, but that of the young women generally has not. In fact, in some areas it has slipped. We are prone to put emphasis on programs for the boys. We speak much of the Aaronic Priests and of Scouting. They are tremendously important, I do not minimize their importance. . . . But I am greatly concerned over what is happening with the young women of the Church. Elder Hinckley noted a problem and expressed concern for our girls. But we need to be asking, “Is there something wrong with what we are giving our girls?” Future historians might find an interesting relationship between his statement and another one he made three years later, I consider it inappropriate for anyone in the Church to pray to our Mother in Heaven. . . . I find no where in the Standard Works an account where Jesus prayed other than to His Father in Heaven. . . . I have looked in vain for any instance where any President of the Church . . . has offered a prayer to “our Mother in Heaven.” . . . I suppose those who use this expression and who try to further its use are well-meaning, but they are misguided.13 Men must come to understand that their esteem for their maleness comes easily, automatically. In our scriptures, in our prayers, in our temples, in our church organization, in the index to the Book of Mormon, where we look in vain for friendly female names, esteem for maleness comes automatically. And femaleness is absent. Nevertheless, in our theology we have both a Mother in Heaven and a Father in Heaven; our creator is both male and female. Should we include the Mother in Heaven in our worship? My answer is an unequivocal yes. As a child of God, I claim my Mother without apology. She is in my heart and my mind and I need her in my worship. I wish that our daughters and sons might raise their hands and say, “I request that we acknowledge this doctrine and allow it to nourish us.” […] Since 1989 I have been performing a play, “Mother Wove the Morning,” which is an historical and personal search for the Divine Mother. I have performed to people of all religions as well as to non-religious people. And what I have learned from this experience as I have met the audiences in the lobby after more than two hundred performances is that thousands of people have a hunger as deep as mine and a commitment as firm to the proposition that we will no longer be content to be without our Mother.16 The Mormon church could have been a leader in giving to the modern world the concept of God as Mother: for 150 years we have been sitting on this doctrine. Many other churches have moved ahead, making strides in this direction. Currently the reintegration of the feminine divine into our religious experience is happening almost universally. I am sorry to say that Mormons are now almost of the last wagon. However, within the LDS church there are thousands of women and men who are hungry and ready for this step. My former stake Relief Society president said in her closing prayer at stake conference, “And we are thankful for our Heavenly Mother, who bore and nurtured us, and we pray that soon she will be revealed to us, and that we can worship her just as we worship thee.” A dear friend who is a stake patriarch in the Midwest told me that in every one of more than 700 blessings he has given, he has spoken of that person's Heavenly Father and Mother and that he routinely speaks to new bishops on our need to speak more openly of our Mother. He finds the bishops to be completely receptive to this suggestion. Years ago a dear friend of mine in Provo, Stella Oaks, sent me a copy of a treasured song her father had written, a song yearning for the Heavenly Mother and apologizing for the “oversight that veiled Her from our view.” We are seeing a miracle. It is the emergence of the feminine from over 4,000 years of suppression. It is the rediscovery of the knowledge of our divine Mother. It is the emergence of an era of partnership between male and female. It will take time, but this process will teach us to value femaleness. It will make our vision of God more whole and therefore more holy. It will make us better people than we have ever been, men as well as women. I do not believe the notion so prevalent in the church—-that everything is set and will not change, that there are no surprises. I think we are going to have amazing surprises. Every Mormon child has memorized, “We believe that there are yet to be revealed many great and important things pertaining to the kingdom of God.” The church is a history of response to demonstrated need. Emma Smith criticized the brethren for spitting tobacco on the floor.18 Did she have the right to do that? She did. The result was the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom. We have the Primary because Aurelia Rogers complained to Brigham Young about the unruly boys. As members we have the right and responsibility to demonstrate the needs of the church. The church is in need of the Mother. So many of us are demonstrating that need and the need is profound. We can wait for a world that includes the female or work for it. I am committed to work for it. What that world will be I do not exactly know. But I do know that the valuing of femaleness and maleness will be equal. Our language will reflect that equality. Maleness will not be a premium commodity. Femaleness will be central, not auxiliary. God the Mother will be no more foreign to us than God the Father. The journey to that world is not an easy one. As with all important things, it is challenging and unsettling with the possibility of error. But I think we are up to it. After all we are pioneers. Reading #3: This is an excerpt from a chapter written by Doris Williams Elliott. I believe that the most urgent change needed in LDS women's church experience is simply that men should stop preempting women's voices—that they stop speaking for and to women, and let women speak for themselves. Although this might (and I hope would) eventually lead to more radical institutional and attitudinal changes, it would not necessarily fundamentally alter the existing priesthood organization nor would it alter church teachings about men and women. It would, however, bring the church's practice closer to what it preaches—that men and women are equal before God. … How might these changes be instituted? To overcome the nagging and pernicious sense of their own inferiority which still persists among women in the church, whether they acknowledge it openly or exert great emotional energy (individually and collectively) to repress it, it is critical that women speak out. A variety of female voices must be discovered and employed. Women must be heard and listened to if they are ever to achieve full personhood in all church settings, with their capabilities and powers fully recognized, accepted, and utilized. Women will never even be separate but equal, as is currently preached, until their voices—their opinions, their experiences, their needs, their counsel, advice, and wisdom—are, first, acknowledged, then sought and acted upon. I mean here the voices of all women: single women, mothers, educated women, women without education, feminists, conventional women, old and young women—simply women. Women must speak and be listened to just as men speak and are (usually) listened to. This church still holds too closely to Paul's dictum that women should be silent in church (1 Cor. 14:34). There are many ways, besides those I have already mentioned, that women could gain more voice in the church. Some, such as having women pray and speak in meetings at every level, including general conference, have already been instituted. I would like to see more women speaking in all these meetings, but they also deserve equal time and equal importance when they speak. Women could be featured more often as the main speakers in meetings. It is especially important for women to have equal importance as speakers in the church general conference, where members receive current images of authority and instruction. Women might speak in priesthood meetings, as men already do in women's meetings. Women should be heard in ward, stake, and regional decision-making councils, as advisors and as full-vote members. Currently, for instance, women are represented in correlation and welfare meetings, but not in bishopric or Priesthood Executive Committee meetings. Why couldn't Relief Society presidents attend these meetings where most of the real decisions are made for the ward level? Why couldn't female auxiliary heads attend high council meetings, as do male auxiliary heads? Why couldn't female leaders participate in calling members to positions in the organizations they head? These are all changes that could have far-reaching effects for women and for the church. Another way that women's voices could be heard in the church would be to have more lessons in church manuals written by and attributed to women, especially in those for the Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary organizations, where female role models are so essential. More women should be quoted in manuals, talks, and church magazines, addressed to men as well as women. We should all be careful to mentally and orally add the word “women” as we read scriptures, instead of accepting male-gendered words as universal. We cannot allow our sacred texts to make women feel as if they don't exist or that they don't matter to God or the church. And certainly, all current printed materials should be carefully screened for sexist language and for stereotyping. Women should also have a more prominent voice in the church's dealings with the public. We could send more women on missions, and call women to more visible positions. For instance, more women are now being called as Public Communications directors, and some have taken a very prominent role in church public relations and diplomacy. Several women also fill important positions in the Public Affairs department of the church. In addition, the practice of women giving blessings to other women should be reinstituted, and the priesthood powers that are bestowed on both men and women in the endowment ceremony could be further defined and practiced. And, of course, the church could authorize women to hold offices in the priesthood—the simplest and most effective way of ensuring that women are given equal voice and equal weight in God's kingdom. But, and I want to stress this, even short of priesthood for women, which seems to be threatening to many men and women alike, many major changes could be made within the existing church structure which would work toward women's increased spiritual growth and their sense of worth. If women are heard more in church settings, they will develop more confidence in their right and their ability to speak. This will be good not only for them, but also for the organization. If women spoke with more confidence, men would begin to listen—and to realize that they do not always know what is best for women. Men might begin asking more questions, of women, of themselves, and of God. And then we might see a lot of other changes—who knows what God has in store for his daughters, when he is finally asked? And what would women say, if they had an acknowledged voice to say it in? I suspect it wouldn't be all that threatening. I suspect that the first thing many women would say is that they'd like fathers and husbands to be more engaged with their families. I sat in a meeting recently where fathers were urged to help their wives out by babysitting the children sometimes. A woman sitting next to me whispered angrily, “A father doesn't `babysit.' He's their father.” Women say this to each other and to their husbands, and it is even occasionally preached from the pulpit, but it still doesn't seem to be heard. I think many women would also like to tell their leaders that they don't like to cook, sew, do crafts, and make homemade marshmallows out of their food storage—nor do they all have a special sensitivity to the arts. Women are as different in their talents, interests, needs, and emotional qualities as are men. Women are not all suited to exactly the same job—staying at home full-time with a (preferably large) family of children. In fact, recent studies indicate that insistence on mandatory full-time mothering may hurt families. A growing volume of research, reports one medical institution, “indicates that in simple terms, a happy mother—whether she is employed or not—enjoys better health and a more well-adjusted family than a woman who feels overwhelmed by pressure to either stay home or return to work.”12 Mormon women are victims of this pressure, and, increasingly, many do feel “overwhelmed” by it. That message especially needs to be heard, in women's own voices. As things currently stand in the LDS church, however, the question Freud once raised—“What do women want?”—is still asked as a rhetorical question. The question is not phrased “what do women want?” but “what should women want?” The question of what women want needs to become a real question, asked of women and answered by women, without having the words taken out of their mouths by men. Mormon women, however, need not wait to be asked. They should assert their questions, feelings, opinions, desires, and answers in all the various bodies and texts of the church. Otherwise, women's perspectives may never find equal footing in the church. After all, if Emma Smith had not questioned and complained, but instead remained silent, women would have no revelations in the Doctrine and Covenants instead of one (D&C 25). If women keep asking, who knows? There may be more revelations to women. I have faith that progress will be made. All around me, I see women, in and out of the church, gaining confidence in their right to speak, write and be heard. I also see the changes the church is gradually making: women pray in meetings, women speak more often, the temple ceremony is evolving, there is more sensitivity to single women's concerns from some leaders (though not by any means all).13 These changes are not enough, but they are positive signs. The scriptures urge us: “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (James 1:5). As we ask and seek, speak and knock, God will listen, eventually God's church will listen, and doors will open to God's daughters. |