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BUT, you may say, no other name matters—what has naming got to do with personal salvation? I will try to explain.[1]

Over many years, I’ve made a point to list the names I find in scripture denoting the Savior. I suspect many Christians do this to understand the character of Jesus. So far, I have catalogued forty-nine names for the Lord which describe the substance of His work. Considering each name helps me see Christ’s character as I try to be like Him, literally taking His name as my own. However, I am female; Christ was not female. (This is despite the abundant feminized scriptural language that Christians must be “born” and “begotten of God.”) I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, and a mother; Christ was none of these things. These gendered roles are key features of my female identity, even my “divine nature and destiny.”[2] God the Father and Jesus Christ provide universal godly role models, but I also seek divine female examples by which to pattern my life. I want to know more about my past, my present, and my future.

Longing for feminine representation in the Godhead, in scripture, and in religious praxis spans time and religious traditions, and is visible across Latter-day Saint church history.[3] Knowledge of our Heavenly Mother has been revealed, yet we live below our privileges because of cultural paralysis—we fail to act on this revelation. If Heavenly Mother, the cocreator of worlds and souls, remains inaccessible and relegated to shrouded obscurity in religious praxis, what kind of salvation can her spiritual offspring expect? Her perceived irrelevance and her anonymity are alarming. In liminality Mother in Heaven floats. Knowing God the Mother is a timeless necessity no less essential than knowing God the Father.

My work as a rhetorician includes the recovery of lost names and rhetorical legacies from the long American nineteenth century that, if recovered, may benefit us today. Most of these names belong to women. In this essay, I work to recover women in rhetorical history and their timeless legacy, especially Mother in Heaven. While I am female and the mother of five daughters and six granddaughters, my unease isn’t confined exclusively to women’s concerns. Rather, all the men in my life, including my grandsons, stand to benefit or suffer because of women’s marginalized position.

To better understand our current moment, I offer the three ancient symbols of the feminine divine: Maiden, Mother, Crone. Recovering the name of women in scripture and US history through the lens of these classic archetypes illustrates why naming practice is important to personal salvation and how we might enjoy the power that comes with the privilege to name. Equitable naming practice is a universal concern, responsibility, and privilege.

In recent conversation, I asked a couple friends what motivates them toward their goals. My friend Kerstin offered the German word zuversicht—the reason to get out of bed in the morning. My friend Xiumei shared the Chinese hanzi 危机 (wei-ji), which combines the concepts of crisis and possibility. I see these cross-cultural ideas culminating in the Greek word kairos, which signifies the perfect moment, that enchanted time when a rhetorical situation is ripe for action and the world primed for social change. Our time provides a kairotic moment to recover forgotten names—even a restoration of women’s divine nature and destiny.

Maiden

The first classic female archetype is the Maiden. Maidenhood is often marked by notions of possibility and faith in a positive future propelling youth on their personal missions in life. Young people are famous for believing in such magical moments, recognizing them, inciting them, and acting on them. Joseph Smith Jr. was such a boy, and Virgin Mary was such a maiden. Mary was a prime model of zuversicht and wei-ji when she responded to the preeminent kairotic moment, her unique mission call, saying, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).

Mary is the most common female name in Western human history. In fact, we can get lost in the many Marys spanning time. Virginia Woolf capitalizes on this ubiquity at the beginning of her touchstone feminist treatise A Room of One’s Own. She explores the excuses for and ramifications of woman’s elision from the historical record by asking her audience to call her by one of the many names of Anon (for anonymous), deliberately disrupting the masculine line of authoritative descent. She tells her readers to “call [her] Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please—it is not a matter of any importance.”[4] Woolf is being ironic, proceeding to prove that naming and remembering names matter a lot.

Because Mary is ubiquitous, Mary is universally recognized and relatable. Woolf is Mary. I am Mary. All women are Mary. At the Annunciation, Gabriel said, “Fear not, Mary” (Luke 1:30). What happens when we remove the comma from Gabriel’s reassuring words and instead consider them an injunction? We hear “Fear not Mary.” This small grammatical difference might instigate great social action—supporting and developing female power instead of fearing it.

For example, “The Song of Mary” or “The Magnificat” (Luke 1:46–55) is one of the oldest hymns sung throughout many Christian denominations. It is one of the most glorious testimonies ever recorded in scripture. During her pregnancy Mary confides her belief in God, in His Son, and in her divine mission as His mother to her much-older relative and friend Elizabeth. Mary’s witness is a perspective from one crossing the threshold from maidenhood to motherhood. She rejoices in being seen and elevated by God, declaring that “he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden.” Furthermore, she exults in knowing that “all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48).

However, instead of calling her blessed and celebrating her role in God’s plan, Protestants and Latter-day Saints have all but eliminated her in fear of Mary veneration and deification. There are seven songs revering Joseph Smith Jr. in the LDS hymnal, but none that remember Mary as the first convert to Christianity and Jesus’ most devoted disciple. To enjoy the miracle of God’s condescension (1 Nephi 11:16–17), the union between deity and humanity that made Jesus capable of performing the Atonement, we need to sing “The Song of Mary”!

Among the many biblical Marys is Mary Magdalene, who does not measure up to society’s expectations for women because she is single and childless. Mary Magdalene is suspect in many minds, often associated with moral sin or demonic possession. But she is also an icon of repentance and devoted discipleship. She was an eyewitness to the Savior’s ministry and crucifixion. As the first person to whom the resurrected Savior appeared, she recognized Him when He pronounced her name. Mary Magdalene is mentioned twelve times in the Gospels—more than any other woman and more than most of Christ’s apostles. God, Angel Gabriel, and Christ supersede cultural conventions by seeing Marys and speaking their name, thereby demonstrating the divine pattern of God valuing all people.[5]

Mother

The second classic female archetype is the Mother. While mitochondrial DNA from our mothers charts our biological lineage, cultural tradition dictates that we inherit our surname from our fathers.[6] My last name—my maiden name—hails from the little northern Utah town of Heber. I am proud to be part of the Rasband clan. Today, 567 people have this surname.[7] I am not one of them, anymore.

Many a maiden considers the time of her marriage, when her identity and loyalty may conflict. Will her name change? While more and more women are retaining surnames at marriage, in the past, a name change was expected and caused a woman’s identity to be subsumed by her husband’s—legally known as coverture.[8] This practice—whereby a woman is covered, or shrouded, by her husband, giving up her personhood and fading to the background or becoming invisible—lingers still today as women replace their father’s name with their husband’s.

Many years ago, standing in the courthouse and looking between the clerk and my fiancé, I saw my family name fade like an old sepia print as I practiced my new signature: J. Nanette Hilton.[9] I could have chosen differently, but convention carried sway. It’s this matter of choice I emphasize: We each have agency to name and be named. Given the choice again, I would have added my husband’s family name to my own three. If Jesus can have forty-nine monikers, I can have a few. As my identity expands, I’ve continued to add names like Momma, Nana, and Professor. But just recently, sifting through my mail I encountered a ghost from the past threatening my personhood. It was an envelope addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Paul Hilton. Some cultures believe that when a person dies, they experience three deaths: first, when their spirit leaves their body; second, when the body is interred or cremated; and, finally, when their name is last spoken. Experiencing the omission of my name on the envelope took my breath away—like a micro-death.

Baptism is a symbolic micro-death as covenant-makers (women and men) are buried in the water and reborn, taking upon themselves the name of Christ. For many, it is a rite of passage undertaken without full understanding of its implication—like the young bride surrendering her maidenhood and name. Christian culture draws from the biblical notion that the husband typifies Christ and the wife typifies His kingdom, thus she gives up her own name and is subsumed in His.[10] Idealistically, the wife is protected and provided for by her husband who metaphorically represents Christ; she is cherished so much that he gives her his most valuable possession: his name. Few people today recognize this religious signification or that the woman is likewise an embodied type of Christ, even sacrificing her blood and body for others. But, once fully comprehended, we have opportunities to renew our commitments more meaningfully through ordinances and sacraments wherein names and naming are keys to evolving personal power and salvation.

Not only does scripture offer the Maiden Mary but also Mother Mary—same woman, different phase. While maidenhood is bright with connotations of innocence and possibility, motherhood is credited with the power to shape individuals and societies—a child’s success points to the mother’s success. However, motherhood is also a fraught positionality as women are often blamed for society’s failures. Motherhood is a good example of how women teeter on the scales of social expectation and judgment.

God sidesteps culturally gendered conventions, again and again, to get the job done. For example, Maiden Mary of “low estate” conceived without a husband—consider the social stigma Mary suffered. Elizabeth—a self-declared Crone—stepped forward to name her son John, contrary to custom, when her husband was mute from disbelief (Luke 1:60). Furthermore, in Jesus’ ancestry are Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, who resist perfect-mother stereotypes. These women may be considered social outcasts and are among the few females named in scripture. Our list of feminists begins with Eve, who enacted the divine plan by breaking the rules. Women are often remembered only because they exceed the bounds of social propriety.[11] If not scandalized, women are mostly silent and invisible from the historical record—religious and secular—prompting Woolf’s incandescent prose. In maidenhood, women are sexual commodities and sometimes hypervisible if they thwart convention. In motherhood, women are laborers valued for their procreative and domestic work until they recede into aged obscurity.

The silenced mother and missing-mother motifs are pervasive. Consider the many absent mothers informing fairytales, including Snow White, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast. The hidden mother has often been perpetuated by mothers. A photographic trend in the Victorian era was such an instance when women omitted themselves from the picture. Rather than holding their baby in the portrait or propping up the infant, mothers held the baby while concealing themselves “under a shroud, obscured as another object, their limbs disembodied by the framing of the image, cut out of the frame entirely, or scratched or burned out of the image.”[12] This type of self-effacement conveys a false modesty resulting in woman’s erasure across centuries, not only in photographs, but in legal recognition, public education, the arts, sciences, and in nearly every sphere of influence—even today. This erasure can be seen through the culturally constructed “‘sacred’ censorship” or “holy hush” around Heavenly Mother, impoverishing generations.[13]

Crone

The third classic female archetype is the Crone. After maternity, a woman is often discounted and banished from society, becoming the spectral mother and wife, lurking in the shadows and mad in the attic, and the haunting hag with magic powers hovering at the margins.[14] The Crone is the most mystifying archetype, because of modern negative linguistic connotation and prevalent ageism. Modern usage defines crone as a “feeble and withered old woman” and as a “strong term of abuse.”[15] In the archetypal sense, the Crone may elicit fear because she has supernatural powers and upends expectation. Fear is the barrier to revelation and change. American psychoanalyst and writer Clarissa Pinkola Estés recovers the Crone, reminding us that the word has etymological roots in crown, corona, coronation, and queen.[16] Having experienced maidenhood and motherhood, the Crone is at the apex of development—beyond any commodification, above stereotypes, and rejecting cultural constructs. She is wisdom personified—Leila, Lady Wisdom, Wise Woman, Mary, Baba Yaga, Shekhinah, Befana, Radha, Kuan Yin, Shakti, Badb, Banshee, Fall and Winter after Spring and Summer, Cailleach. She is the mature Athena, Mazu, Artemis, Anu, Persephone, and Eostre. She is perfected Gaia, Pachamama, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Macha, Demeter, Dea Matres, and Isis. As I now am, She once was. She is every woman through Her experience. She is perfect. She is God-dess. I see Her and She sees me. As She now is, I may be.[17]

Years ago, in a graduate seminar charting the history of American feminism, I became aware of first wave American feminists who recognized the fundamental need to know God the Mother. This knowledge liberated me from feeling alone or wrong in my desire for connection to the feminine divine. In fighting for women’s rights, these nineteenth-century women also fought to elucidate Mother in Heaven. Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are prime examples of women who publicly worked to recover the female divine and were consequently stigmatized and generally forgotten.

Many considered Fuller the greatest intellectual of her day. One scholar suggests that Fuller was perhaps the “greatest humanist of her century, one of the greatest America has ever produced.”[18] A key element of Fuller’s legacy is her dedicated excavation of female power. In an 1841 essay, Fuller names this feminine force “Leila.” She describes Leila as having “all the elemental powers of nature, with their regulating powers of conscience and retribution.” Fuller addresses this female divine, writing that “to my restless spirit thou didst bring a kind of peace, for thou wert a bridge between me and the infinite.” Gradually, Fuller imagines herself subsumed in Leila—taking on her name and character. Ultimately, a bold Leila facilitates a unification with God and issues a call to action. Fuller writes that Leila “will give us back to God yet wiser, and worthier, than when clinging to his footstool as now. ‘Have I ever feared,’ said Leila. Never! but the hour is come for still deeper trust. Arise! let us go forth!”[19] In her transcendental essay, Fuller not only illuminates the female divine, but also speaks Her power to enter and bring woman into God’s presence.

In 1845, Fuller published her feminist manifesto Woman in the Nineteenth Century.[20] Her opening lines challenge social constructs of women’s inferiority to men, especially as a supreme ruler. She disputes this idea by flipping the script of Hamlet’s infamous line: “‘Frailty, thy name is WOMAN.’” She rewrites it to read, “Frailty, they name is MAN.” Fuller follows these lines with an obscure quote from a toast at a convention she attended: “‘Earth waits for her Queen,’” which she reinscribed as “Earth waits for its King.” With these juxtaposed lines, Fuller unmasks the logical fallacy of sexist stereotypes limiting female power and demands social gender reform at the highest level. Because Fuller was a thirty-five-year-old spinster at the time of publication, her bestselling polemic questioning conventional marriage and gendered expectations made her a social outcast.

Fuller escaped social scrutiny by going to Europe, eventually living in Rome, where she met the poor aristocratic republican revolutionary Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, with whom she had a son. As war refugees, the family sailed for the United States. Today, few people know or remember that Fuller set women’s suffrage in motion with her Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Her landmark book and revolutionary spirit qualified her to preside over the first National Woman’s Rights Convention. In a May 1850 letter, convention president Paulina Wright Davis “hoped to confide the leadership of [the Women’s Rights] movement” upon Fuller.[21] However, Fuller and her family drown on their voyage home, never receiving Davis’s invitation. Davis remembers the October 1850 Worcester, Massachusetts, audience mourning Fuller in a moment of silence, missing “her guiding hand—her royal presence.”[22] After her death, Fuller’s texts were severely censored by a cadre of male editors who considered her rhetoric and lifestyle socially subversive. Fuller continues to be denigrated, marginalized, and forgotten because she failed to conform to “the cult of true womanhood.”[23] I believe that by recovering Fuller and her rhetoric, we may gain what Davis envisioned as a “radical and universal” plan for actively bridging and eliminating present social boundaries that limit personal and societal potential.[24]

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was another first wave American feminist calling for a recovery of “the feminine element” who suffered stigmatization for her unconventional rhetoric.[25] As she made plans for the Seneca Falls Convention, her father thought her “insane” and tried to “dissuade her from [her] madness.”[26] Contrasting with Fuller’s unconventionality, Stanton performed “true motherhood” via traditional marriage and the bearing of seven children. She is remembered as a historical figure in the longstanding fight for women’s suffrage; she brought “a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote” to the US Senate “fruitlessly” for forty years. By all measures of the modern connotations of “crone,” Stanton qualifies because of her old age, arthritis, obesity, and blindness.[27] In my opinion, and in Stanton’s, she delivered her wisest, most powerful, and most eloquent speech at the end of her life, entitled “Solitude of Self.”[28] Eighteen years after Stanton’s death, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution finally passed into law. Her tenacity in the fight for women’s enfranchisement is astounding—seconded only by the obstinance in forbidding her from seeing the fruit of her labor.

Stanton’s legacy is sometimes thought to be exclusively a secular and political crusade since some are unaware of her effort to recover Mother in Heaven and liberate Her daughters. In 1886, Stanton began her project to critically examine “the Bible to determine what it really said about women.” Stanton’s theological reformation efforts brought together a coalition of female scholars and theologians, “ignit[ing] a firestorm” and making her an outcast amongst the conservative leadership of the National Woman Suffrage Association, the women’s rights organization she began and over which she presided. Stanton first published The Woman’s Bible in 1895 and it was an instant bestseller, yet “arousing widespread controversy” and considered by “some members of the clergy [to be] a work of Satan.”[29] Stanton’s primary effort was to emancipate women from subjugation and to empower her to reach her full potential; for Stanton, restoring a true conception of Heavenly Mother to the Godhead was key.

I am heartened to know about these courageous and faithful women. Their biographies and legacies fuel my belief that we must continue the work to recover Mother in Heaven. By naming Her, She becomes real and able to empower us as exemplar and teacher, able to offer and elicit a response. Exploring Her positionality may help us reconceptualize God the Mother: By recognizing Her multifaceted nature, not only as Mother, but also as Maiden and Crone, we complete the portrait of our Heavenly Matriarch in Her seat in the Godhead. I feel differently about my own potential and daily grind when I reflect on my Divine Mother’s journey through the various stages of womanhood, not assuming Her to be stuck in one idealized or romanticized phase. I feel less fear. I feel hope.

BUT I maintain that She would come if we worked for Her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while.[30]

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^[1] These lines are drawn from Virginia Woolf’s opening lines: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain.” A Room of One’s Own (1928; repr., Harcourt, 2005), 3.

^[2] “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” 1995, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world/the-family-a-proclamation-to-the-world?lang=eng.

^[3] David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, “A Mother There: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven,” BYU Studies 50, no. 1 (2011): 1–28.

^[4] Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 5.

^[5] Romans 2:11; Acts 10:34.

^[6] Laurel Hamers, “Scientists Find Clue to Why Mitochondrial DNA Comes Only from Mom,” Science News, June 23, 2016.

^[7] Search “Rasband,” at forebears.io., https://forebears.io/surnames/rasband, accessed Aug. 28, 2024.

^[8] For a definition and discussion of historical and modern coverture laws, see Allison Anna Tait, “The Return of Coverture” Michigan Law Review First Impressions 114 (2015): 99.

^[9] This dilemma is a “Hobson’s choice” wherein a woman “is faced with the choice of the name of one man (her father), or of another man (her husband).” See Omi Morgenstern Leissner, “The Name of the Maiden,” Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal 12 (Fall 1997): 253.

^[10] See Eze 16:8–14; Isa. 54:5; Hos. 2:7; and Jer. 3:20.

^[11] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (Vintage Books, 2007). The uptake of this idea stems from her academic essay “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668–1735,” American Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1976): 20–40.

^[12] Susan E. Cook, “Hidden Mothers: Forms of Absence in Victorian Photography and Fiction,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 17, no. 3 (2021): 1–25.

^[13] Paulsen and Pulido, “Mother There.”

^[14] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University Press, 1979).

^[15] Online Etymological Dictionary, s.v. “crone,” https://www.etymonline.com/word/crone.

^[16] Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Dangerous Old Woman Series: Myths and Stories of the Wise Woman Archetype, 5 vols (Sounds True Recordings, 2010).

^[17] Lorenzo Snow: “As Man Now Is, God Once Was; as God Now Is, Man May Be,” Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow (Deseret News, 1884), 46, available on the Internet Archive, accessed Aug. 28, 2024, https://archive.org/details/biographyfamilyr00snowrich/page/46/mode/2up.

^[18] Susan J. Rosowski, “Margaret Fuller, an Engendered West, and Summer on the Lakes,” Western American Literature 25, no. 2 (1990): 125–144, https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1990.09139.

^[19] Margaret Fuller, “Leila,” The Dial, Apr. 1841, available at The Walden Woods Project, accessed Aug. 28, 2024, https://www.walden.org/what-we-do/library/thoreau/leila/.

^[20] S. Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Greeley and ­McElrath, 1845).

^[21] Quoted in Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 388.

^[22] Quoted in Marshall, Margaret Fuller, 387–388.

^[23] Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, part 1 (1966): 151–174.

^[24] Quoted in Marshall, Margaret Fuller, 388.

^[25] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (1895; repr. Dover, 2002), 14.

^[26] Stanton, Woman’s Bible, vi.

^[27] Stanton, Woman’s Bible, xi.

^[28] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “Solitude of Self,” delivered before the Committee of the Judiciary of the United States Congress, Jan. 18, 1892, available at National Park Service, accessed Aug. 28, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/solitude-of-self.htm.

^[29] Stanton, “Solitude of Self,” x.

^[30] Last line appropriated from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. By beginning and ending our essays with the word But, Woolf and I invite contemplation, collaboration, and negotiation on our common topic of women’s visibility and recognition. Capitalizations mine.