Should Mormon Women Speak Out? Thoughts on Our Place in the World

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Note: This following article is based on the annual lecture honoring Eugene England, delivered March 22, 2007, at Utah Valley State University, in Orem. 

Editor’s Note: This article has footnotes. To review them, please see the PDF below.

I am happy to pay tribute to Gene England, a vivid and significant twentieth-century intellectual of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Gene influenced many Mormons with his rigorous ethics, his lived religion, his human interactions, and his ability to record his life and get it all down. He certainly influenced me. 

One of my most significant memories of Gene has to do with Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the periodical that he and Wesley John son co-founded some forty years ago. One mild evening in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gene, my husband, Richard, and I were walking through Harvard Yard. I planned to make a nervy suggestion. I wanted to ask Gene if our Boston LDS consciousness-raising group could edit a woman’s issue of Dialogue. Our group had been meeting monthly for a year, furiously discussing Mormon experience. I thought that energy might be turned toward a project. 

This was a long time ago—in the late 1960s. The world was turning upside down as groups demonstrated against the Vietnam War, as the civil rights movement brought exposure and new respect for black citizens, as college students turned insurgent and occupied their campuses, and as women showed surprising spunk and backbone. Our group of LDS women began to discover their history and to discuss authority, birth control, housework, and additional possibilities for their lives. Most of this group had student husbands, straitened incomes, and young children. We didn’t expect to be taken seriously. 

But Gene gravely listened to my modest proposal that our women’s collective plan a theme, write and solicit articles and artwork, edit the materials, and present them ready for publication in Dialogue. Gene immediately said, “Yes, go ahead.” He was always open to new possibilities. This was an important milestone for our Boston publishing empire still busily churning out materials some forty years later. Speaking up made a big difference for us. 

We reinforced some valuable lessons in the process of working on that pink issue of Dialogue, which appeared in the summer of 1971 (Vol. 6, no. 2). Trust and encourage each other. Steadily gather others into our enterprises. Build on the rich cooperative Mormon tradition. In doing so, we repeatedly learned that we could so do it. 

Gene always appreciated and encouraged women in the Church. In his essay “We Need to Liberate Mormon Men,” printed in his collection Dialogues with Myself, he praised Mormon women writers as “more free, more daring, inventive, original in thought and unique in voice than Mormon men.” He thought quantity and quality of women’s literary production were more liberated than those of men and he encouraged us all, men and women, to observe and think about our lives and to describe them in essays. There is no question that his welcoming and encouraging voice in the LDS press liberated many of us to write history and literature, the distilled essence of our lives. 

My topic today, “Should Mormon Women Speak Out?” is inspired by Gene. It is a purposely provocative title, the sort that Gene frequently used. 

When we issued a call for articles for our pink issue, we noted that this was an issue by and for women in the Church, definitely the silent majority. Any group asked whether Mormon women should speak out would come up with a number of strong negative and positive opinions. I could give both kinds of answers myself. But what is interesting is the question. Most Mormons will immediately recognize the situation. Women do not speak out. They can quote chapter and verse on women who have spoken out and rued the day. For women themselves the question becomes: Should I speak out? And if I do, will I be silenced? Will I be shunned? Will I say things that should be heard? Will I give encouragement to others?

This statement recalls Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s now widely adopted sentiment and the title of her new book, Well Behaved Women Seldom Make History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). Does behaving properly mean that we forfeit all chances to be well known and to make contributions in our society? As Susan B. Anthony wondered in 1859: “Why is it that the pages of all history glow with the names of illustrious men, while only here and there a lone woman appears, who, like the eccentric camel, marks the centuries?” Is speaking out bad behavior? Does having a voice negate the essential nature of women? In this dilemma do we pit the ambitions of our bright young women against being respectable? What does all this say about us as a people? 

This says that the Church is conservative. That it had its American roots in a time before the Nineteenth Amendment granting woman suffrage. Women did not vote and most did not speak out, a wife was considered her husband’s property, and a single woman did not count for much at all. At this time women were valued, according to the rhetoric, for their purity and innocence, their removal from the realities of the world. We still have people in the Church who think that, because this situation was once so, it should always be so. Women had limited positions in the Bible, in the Book of Mormon, and in LDS Church history; and because that was the condition then, it should be our model for the present and future. But we live in another world now, and we have quotations from our authorities that are very different. 

As President Hinckley counseled the young women of the Church in 2001, “Become the woman of whom you dream. . . . You are creatures of divinity, for you are daughters of the Almighty. Limitless is your potential. Magnificent is your future, if you will take control of it.” He encouraged the girls to “find purpose in your life. Choose the things you would like to do and educate yourselves to be effective in their pursuit.” Girls should become “qualified to serve society and make a significant contribution to the world.” As a model of success, President Hinckley presented a working woman, a skilled nurse he had met, a mother of three who “works as little or as much as she wishes,” and was the “kind of woman of whom you might dream, an educated, expert, loyal woman.” President Hinckley told the girls that, “for you, the sky is the limit.”

But old ideas die hard. We still live with the residue of past teachings. What else does this say about our people? Joseph Smith seldom mentioned women until the end of his short life. Church doctrine was only gradually revealed and implemented. Until 1842, two years before Joseph’s death, women were invisible in the Church organization and absent from ritual events. They exercised their spiritual gifts in small groups, but they had no place in Church structure. 

An interesting exception to this general situation is Emma Smith who in 1830, the year the Church was organized, was given a revelation, now Doctrine and Covenants 25. Emma had then been married for three years. Her first child had not survived. This revelation names her an “elect lady” (v. 3), an elevated person chosen for eternal life through divine mercy. She is greeted as a daughter in the kingdom of God; her sins are forgiven; she will receive an inheritance in Zion depending on her faithfulness and virtue. She receives specific instruction to do serious church work. One job is to prepare a hymnal for the new church, organized that year. She is not told to write hymns, but to “make a selection of sacred hymns” (v. 11). Emma undertook this chore and, with the help of W. W. Phelps, created a small volume that is the basis of our hymnal today. She was also told to take dictation from her husband in his translation of the Book of Mormon “while there is no one [else] to be a scribe for him” (v. 6). 

The section speaks of her relationship to her husband and by extension to the relationship of all wives to their husbands. She is told to “be a comfort unto . . . thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness” (v. 5). And this word is repeated. “Continue in the spirit of meekness, and beware of pride” (v. 14). Did she offend and belittle her husband, speaking sharply to him? She is clearly told to discontinue any such behavior. “Let thy soul delight in thy husband,” the revelation continues, “and the glory which shall come upon him” (v. 14). That’s a pretty good prescription for a modest, unassuming, and silent wife. 

But when I reread this scripture recently, I was struck by something else, something unexpected, an admonition to Emma to speak out. The Lord also tells Emma Smith: “And thou shalt be ordained under his [Joseph’s] hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit” (v. 7). This quotation struck me with great force. She was to be ordained by the Lord’s servant to “expound scriptures and to exhort the church” (v. 8). She would get direct understanding from the Spirit. She was to speak out. 

Did she ever act on these instructions? As far as I know, Emma did not expound the scriptures and exhort the Church or speak out until she was president of the Relief Society some twelve years later. But she could have. She was to be ordained to take part in teaching and preaching. Just imagine what the Church would look like now if Emma had exercised this opportunity. And she is told: “Thy time shall be given to writing, and to learning much,” just the injunction we need to make something of our lives, to go to school, to study, and to write. It’s all there in the Doctrine and Covenants, a revelation from 1830, at the very foundation of the Church. And do please note that, in this list of instructions for Emma, there is nothing about cooking nourishing meals, keeping her house in order, or even raising children. Emma, even in 1830, is treated as a Church worker, a leader, an adult, and as a companion-wife, not a housekeeper or even a homemaker. 

Twelve years later in Nauvoo, in 1842, at a time when there were plenty of other problems and when Joseph had just a couple of years to live, he responded to an impulse toward organization among the women supporting temple laborers and founded the Relief Society, giving women a role in Church government. Activity concerning women continued. Joseph outlined the operations and theology of celestial and plural marriage in Doctrine and Covenants 132. Procreation was exalted and the family magnified. Baptisms for the dead bound family members together through eternity. Women were central to all these activities. As the new Nauvoo Temple rose, additional rituals were added that required the participation of women. By 1843, women were present in the ordinances, superintending as well as participating in temple rituals. Joseph Smith also supposedly referred to Mother in Heaven. Although no original source of that teaching remains, mentions of Mother in Heaven are found in hymn texts by W. W. Phelps and Eliza R. Snow, two people very close to Joseph. All this happened in the last two years of his life. We can only speculate what he would have revealed had he lived longer. We might have learned many other interesting things. And many things yet to be revealed may have to do with the importance and contribution of women in building God’s kingdom. 

But the importance of women is not always reflected in the Church’s day-to-day life. In the film First Wives Club, actress Goldie Hawn, playing an aging movie star, says that there are only three ages for women in the movies: Babe, D.A., and Driving Miss Daisy. Taking a lead from Hawn, I tried to think what the roles for men and women in the Church would be. For boys I determined that the roles would be Eagle Scout, student body president, elder, bishop, and mission president. All public achievements. For women, I had beauty queen, young mother, Relief Society president, then—hmm, how to represent the women of a certain age, those often solitary, old ladies on the edges of things? Grandmothers. People like me. I finally came up with this: recipient of the Christmas basket. You can imagine the conversation in bishopric meeting: “We have to do something for poor old Sister So-and-so.” 

Many of us have visited the Nauvoo statuary garden where there are sculptures of women at various stages of their lives: Little girls, students, brides, mothers. I thought that this was all very nice until I came to the end of the line. The last statue shows an elderly woman, frail, alone. She sits in a rocking chair sewing on a quilt. The title of this sculpture, which haunts me, is Fulfillment. I like to rock. I like to quilt, and it is true that the quilt pattern she is stitching is called “Eternal Marriage,” but she is still quiet and alone. That sculpture is not my idea of fulfillment. Surely there is something more for the wise, experienced, creative women of the Church to do than sit, rock, and stitch. My conclusion from this little exercise is that, in general, women in the Church live much more passive, isolated, and silent lives than men. 

Another observation is that, in the Church, we tend to consider the basic unit the family rather than the individual, harkening back to that old idea that the married man and woman were one, and that one was the husband. This assumption suppresses woman, frequently erasing her individuality, her imagination, her will, and certainly her ambitions. She is to go along with the views of others. We make much of the concept that our basic unit is the family, but the evidence against it is strong. We come alone into this world. We leave it alone. We are generally alone at some time. Women are abandoned either purposely or accidentally. We make our own way and build our own salvation. We forge our own relationships with our Heavenly Father. We wish we could really depend on someone else in this world other than our own individual selves, but we cannot. We believe we will reconnect with our loved ones, but we have no idea of what it will be like or how it can be done. A recent story in The New York Times noted that 51 percent of women in the United States, more than ever be fore, now live without husbands.

Another development has been the simplification of the Church for ease in exporting it to the growing international Church. The manuals have been rewritten at elementary school levels and many programs have been curtailed. Training sessions have been eliminated. Complex and challenging positions for women in our wards have disappeared. The organizations that women used to head and manage, the ones that were as demanding as small businesses, are now under priesthood stewardship. Women used to have more opportunities to serve and develop their talents in Church work than they do now. 

These observations raise a question: What is the authentic nature of women, and how should that nature be developed for the benefit of themselves, their families, and their communities? What is it that women are supposed to learn in our sojourn on the earth? Is it to be good and quiet, to be always obedient to our superiors? Are we never to try out this famed free agency that we have been given? Is not our responsibility as the children of our Heavenly Father to range widely and learn many things? Can’t we use our skills as President Hinckley advised the young women to do? Should we not increase our abilities so that we can take greater leadership responsibilities down the line? Should we not be able to maneuver our way through the world? Do women lose their value as women if they speak out? What will happen if all our very competent women are just good, quiet girls? The result of that dynamic is that they sit and wait for something to happen to them. They cheerfully acquiesce to society’s and the Church’s dismissal of them. When women do not speak, they are either silenced and sit, or they carp. They have been taught and have learned helplessness. This does not glorify God or the talents we have been given to multiply. The alternative is to build lives of our own. 

We know that within limits our women are extremely competent. As one convert observed: “I’ve never seen such active, liberated women as in the church. I’ve never been to any other church where women spoke equally with the men. I think it is good that the men have a separate priest hood and the women aren’t permitted to participate in it. . . . Look how the women run Relief Society. Can you imagine if they ran the church? The men would be totally out of a job.” We know that women can speak, but can they or should they speak out? 

Back in 1859, 150 years ago, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an abolitionist and reformer, wrote about the treatment of women. His essay, “Women and the Alphabet,” published in the Atlantic Monthly, asked whether women should learn their ABC’s. He traveled through much of the gender history of the world, the wisdom of the ages, quoting such juicy tidbits as this sage old Chinese proverb. “For men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge is virtue.” He quotes Molière who says that any female who has actually learned anything would do well to feign ignorance, because knowledge rarely makes men attractive, and females never. The playing field of the past was pretty badly tipped. 

Higginson says that these attitudes had one simple basis: “sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth teaching.” And while this contempt did not cause failure, it did perpetuate it, discouraging women from birth to death from trying anything much. This limitation has certainly been true of women and, to some extent, remains true. And when a woman surmounted the problems and discouragements ahead of her and actually did accomplish something, did she get more glory? She certainly did not. She was often considered some sort of freak, a thinking, talking woman—the “eccentric camel” described by Susan B. Anthony. Remnants of this thinking can be seen in our own day. Girls in the Church are sometimes told that their educational achievements have unfitted them for marriage with promising young men who will be intimidated by their abilities and their earning power. You would think that these young men would be looking ahead to their own smart children. 

Back to Higginson. Women need preparation to do the things that men do. The few women of accomplishment in the old days were accidentally “educated like boys” by home tutors who were teaching their brothers, or by fond fathers, or clergymen who gave them access to bounteous libraries. Few women had this opportunity. Higginson explains all this by saying that, in the old epochs, physical strength ruled and woman was the weaker. But in his own enlightened day, a new epoch was dawning, one of higher reason, of arts, affections, aspirations, and for that epoch the genius of woman had been reserved. Well, maybe. We’ve had 150 years of waiting for this flowering, and it still hasn’t really happened. Instead the old brute force of warfare dominates, now sucking our young women into it. 

But as he said, “There is the plain fact: woman must be either a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground.” Once the rulers had yielded the alphabet to women, once women were allowed to read and write, all subjection must be abandoned. 

Higginson noted that the final adjustment was in the hands of women themselves. And this is the point I want to make. Men cannot be expected to concede either rights or privileges to women more rapidly than they are claimed. They cannot be expected to be truer to women than women are to each other. And here is the core of the problem. Women must speak out, showing ability and assuming equal status, taking other women along with them, or they will not get the responsible role they are qualified to fill, the central role that Emma Smith was offered 170 years ago. 

I grew up in the Church but knew nothing of LDS women’s history. I did not know that the Relief Society operated cooperative stores, spun and wove silk fabric (including hatching the silkworms from eggs and feeding them on mulberry leaves that they gathered by hand), gleaned the fields to save grain for bad times, and trained as midwives and doctors. I didn’t know that they were the first women in the United States to vote, even though Wyoming’s women were first to receive the right to vote. I didn’t know that they edited their own excellent newspaper or that they had large meetings when they spoke up for their rights and beliefs as citizens and as Mormons. Finding all this out was part of our Boston women’s study. One of our women discovered bound volumes of the Woman’s Exponent, the newspaper edited by Lula Greene Richards and Emmeline B. Wells (1872–1914) in the Harvard library. She copied out sections; and we found in our foremothers who spoke out the models we were searching for in our own lives. 

A new book by Mary Kelley takes up Higginson’s story. Kelley shows how women created for themselves a public presence in an age when they were still denied significant access to church, government, and business positions because of their gender. As Kelley says, many girls, and not just rich, elite ones, took advantage of loopholes in public thinking that made it possible for girls to gain advanced schooling to fulfill their “womanly obligations”: to assist their husbands in important positions, to train their sons to be worthy men. They were then acquiring education not for themselves but for the benefit of the men in their lives and for the general culture. This is very much what Mormon women were doing. Their cooperative efforts were to build the greater society. 

According to Mary Kelley, after the Revolutionary War, girls in the eastern United States attended academies and seminaries for girls only, taught largely by women. The curricula of these academies, not unlike those for boys, included algebra, chemistry, astronomy, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. This education bestowed “cultural capital” on young women, enabling them to take their places in leadership roles in a civilized society. Whereas in the past parents had provided for their children by giving the boys farms and the girls dowries, they began to give them education instead, setting children up in the world. An educated daughter with a knowledge of literature, French, and music, as well as rhetoric and mathematics, became a status symbol, as well as a contribution to society. Still, education was expensive and the majority of girls were not expected nor encouraged to go to college. And when they did, they were expected to serve the greater society, “Educate the Mothers and you educate the people,” one school’s motto read. 

Kelley describes how girls without access to elite academies also found training in voluntary associations. They read and taught and spoke to each other in reading circles, literary societies, mutual improvement associations, and voluntary associations of all sorts. They assembled libraries. They wrote and read their works to other women. They encouraged their sisters toward the publication of poetry or essays or toward public recitations. In these meetings they learned to stand and speak. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a good record on these self-help groups, having even borrowed the names of other associations to identify the Relief Society and the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association. The Church also began an impressive string of elite, coeducational academies that provided education for Mormon boys and girls from Canada to Mexico. 

Much of the education that Kelley describes prepared women to continue in the same self-effacing, service realm that they believed was their position in the world, organized benevolence—teaching others, ministering to the sick, and in general aiming at distinguished usefulness. The women provided support for the masculine state. That is, like the Mor mons, these girls stopped short of equality. So the young female graduates taught other young women and served as missionaries for their churches in the “heathen” lands of India, Persia, or Africa, or for that matter, in uncivilized communities like Utah. Others embarked on writing careers. They wrote novels, biographies, and poetry, and began to edit periodicals for women and children. They generally chose not to challenge the social and political systems that still kept them subordinate to men. In fact they proclaimed their loyalty to deference as a fundamental principle of gender relations. Catharine Beecher said: “Woman was bound to honor and obey those on whom she depended for protection and support.” But behind this rhetoric of subordination was a larger reality as women steadily enlarged their place in civil society. As women stood and spoke, they found themselves fit for organized politics. These women embraced an education wrapped in their contemporary values that still allowed them some space for activities of their own. They moved back and forth between personal aspiration and social constraint. 

Education was a thrilling experience for them. Kelley quotes one as saying, “It makes me proud for it shows what our sex is capable of doing and encourages us to go on improving.” This was a heady time for newly educated young women. Mormon women were among the first and best at learning to stand and speak. 

But where have we gone since then? Somehow in our liberated society, we have remained as dutiful and quiet daughters and wives. In our Church society where women are valued as daughters of God, as noble followers in the pathway of Eve, we still do not speak out. We know that there are dangers. People don’t always understand. Some take umbrage. Instead of being embraced as sisters, we can be shut out. So I propose a practical program of action for Mormon women to encourage them to speak up and out. 

What do Mormon women want and how should they get it? What I say they want is respect, acknowledgment, useful positions, and space to make their own way in the Church and the world. They want an equal voice in their families, the Church, and the community. They want to exist outside the confines of the ward or the household. So here is my practical list of ways to manage the system while continuing as members of the Church in good standing. We do not want to sacrifice our membership in the Church or our reputations as reasonable people in a quest to assert ourselves. 

1. Get to know the leaders and be sure they know you. Introduce yourself to your bishop and stake president and also Relief Society president. Do this before they seek you out. You want to be known as a person of spirit and independence. You want to talk to them from a position of strength rather than of need. You want to share your ideas and inspiration and offer to help in ways that interest you. 

2. Require that you are treated with respect. Our male hierarchy sometimes treats grown women as children. I experienced a striking example of this attitude a couple of years ago. I work in public affairs in our stake, and we received an invitation to send representatives to a meeting of women from many faiths to discuss our religions and experiences. I was assigned to go and invited a couple of other mature women in our stake to come, too. Several days before the event, I was very surprised to get a long letter from a young high councilor with detailed instructions on what we should or should not say, suggesting answers to potential questions, and giving examples of suitable and unsuitable language. This missive was several pages long, obviously the result of great thought and labor. I am sure that he was proud of it. It was written in simple language, just as if Mormonism was something new to us. This young man was just out of graduate school and he is younger than my youngest son. He felt he was doing his job by sending his instructions in a fatherly way. But he was actually insulting women who knew much more about these situations than he ever would. Didn’t he have a mother? I sent him a brief note thanking him for his concern but said we had all had a great deal of experience and could take care of ourselves. Then I copied the whole exchange to the stake presidency and various other sources of power. I got a few apologies down the line. 

We should speak up for other women, too. Long ago when my husband was stake president, he and his counselors made a practice, during their talks at stake conferences, of relating charming and amusing tales about their wives and children who sat in the congregation in mute discomfort. They got a few laughs out of these stories. I was more militant about things then than I am now, and so I went to them individually after meetings and said that I didn’t think they should tell those demeaning and belittling stories about their families. And they stopped. There are many cases when speaking out makes a real difference. 

In fact, it makes a lot of difference. My daughter Margaret is a lawyer, and she is handling a case where a client will negotiate with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management about some serious concessions. The client was concerned about being represented by a woman lawyer and said that he would like to have a man at the table. Margaret discussed this situation with the partners at her firm; they determined that there was no disadvantage in having a woman represent a client—as long as she spoke out. A silent women is a minus. A speaking woman is a plus. 

Back to the plan. 

3. Present your own ideas to your bishop or stake president in us usable form. Don’t just throw them off. Be ready to carry them out. We all know that we are open to our own revelation and that female revelation is certainly the equal of the male variety. Get your own good ideas on the table. Realize, of course, that to do something your way means you may have to do all the work, give someone else all the credit, and pay for it both in labor and cash. But work in the Church on your own terms. I see more and more cases where women make up their own Church jobs. They suggest attractive or useful programs and are often encouraged to go ahead. Our Church life is so rich and complex that there are lots of niches where we can do things that are interesting to us and beneficial to the congregation. We don’t need to be commanded in all things. We have lots of very competent female talent and not enough good jobs to go around. We can do something about this situation. 

4. Be sure to have a life outside the Church. A life outside the Church gives you experience and credibility. Women can find satisfaction by working in the community in ways that we can import into the Church. Unfortunately, as I have said, much of the opportunity for women to do meaningful and extensive Church work has been discontinued. Finding plenty of opportunities outside the Church is not enough. We need to find such opportunities in the Church, even if we have to create them ourselves. We have to have lives outside the Church to validate our abilities, but we have to create jobs in the Church to represent ourselves. 

Of course, there is always lots of space in service and public affairs. And there is endless room to be a friend and love your neighbor and then to come up with joint projects. I think it is always preferable to do things with people rather than for them, to be equal rather than condescending. We need to take action, like the girls who are taking control of their destinies by going on missions. Like Mother Eve. She took action. She had to pay for what she did, but she did not remain an idle princess in paradise. She took action. 

In conclusion, I would say the following to all females. Think about something you would like to say to someone who has authority. This may be your bishop, the mayor, a professor, your boss, a friend, a sibling, even your parents. Think about how to couch your ideas and suggestions in a way best suited to informing people and for accomplishing your objective. You want to persuade and convince, not assault. You want to present yourself as an adult. Be charming and assured. No diffidence or apologies are allowed here. Practice your approach and presentation, plan your occasion, put on a smile, and then go and speak out! You will be moving ahead the great cause of women in the family, the Church, the community, the nation, for now and for the eternities.