Stories are a binding force in families, a fact Mormons have known for a long time. A study at Emory University tried to identify what could strengthen families and help kids be more resilient. Their conclusion: “The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative.”
I am outside running, playing, and dancing to musical beats from our neighbor’s house. It is a bright sunny day, and, just as on other beautiful days, I am on top of the world, where…
I never wanted a son.
I feel the heavy ugliness of those words like rough stones in my hands, taste them like shame on my tongue. Children have always been alien creatures to me, even when I was a child myself, and boy children, especially, have proven foreign and unrelatable.
After presenting my research on 1970s Mormon motherhood at a national rhetoric conference in 2017, a woman in the audience (also a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) called my research “old news” and made some harsh and disparaging remarks about my analysis. I was upset by her comments, but one of my co-panelists defended me, and after the presentation, five people came up to talk with me about my research in positive terms. One master’s student wanted to know how she could do similar research.
Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.
Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 5–32
I cannot help but smile when she calls me hermana, her “sister.” Her reference to me signifies a dual meaning: I am not only like a family member to her, but additionally, the term hermana is used among Spanish-speaking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons) to signify solidarity and integration with one another.
As the editor of Exponent II, I have had innumerable Mormon men—progressive and orthodox—tell me that they would like to listen to women, but women just don’t step up and talk. From President Russell M.…
The stake presidency has asked the high council to address the topic “reduce and simplify our lives to minimize the commotion prophesied by the Lord.” I’ve felt impressed to talk about a different kind of com motion today, one that the Church and its members are facing in our information-saturated world, and a different kind of simplicity, one that is very elusive and that may take a lifetime to find. I hope you’ll forgive me for following a written text fairly closely, but I’m a writer, not a speaker, and because of the sensitive nature of the topic, I want to make sure I am as precise as possible.
In November 1976, seventeen months into his Hamburg mission and 152 pages into his memoir about that mission, Bruder (i.e., Elder) Roger Terry and his companion bicycled into the German countryside, seeking a farmer who…