Volume 06, No. 2

I wake up in the morning to the sound of my husband’s voice. But it is not really an awakening, rather it is a continuing. For night as we used to know it no longer…

I often spoke in jest of our “Compound-Complex Family,” but I was firm in my resolution to make this marriage and our family life a success. I well knew that I could never have the…

It has occurred to me that the one element most likely to insure success in marriage is that element most discouraged by dating and courtship norms: honesty. Too many young women who feel themselves capable…

Dialogue 6.2 (Summer 1972): 40–47
It isn’t easy these days to be a Momon mother of four. In the university town where I live, fertility is tolerated but not encouraged. Every time I drive to the grocery store, bumper stickers remind me that Overpopulation Begins At Home, and I am admonished to Make Love, Not Babies. At church I have the opposite problem. My youngest is almost two and if I hurry off to Primary without a girdle, somebody’s sure to look suspiciously at my flabby stomach and start imagining things. Everybody else is pregnant, why not I?

While engaged in some research the other day I ran across a commentary on the Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith” that lies at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. The doctrine was described as…

“I’m sure that you wouldn’t be interested in the only position I have to offer you. We do need a teacher in our Negro school but the problems are insurmountable. The children are undisciplined and can’t learn, the parents are ignorant, and the school’s as dirty as a pigpen.” 

This pronouncement by a school superintendent amazed and challenged me.

In February, 1971, the questionnaire found on the opposite page was mailed to the 175 women who were then serving on the Relief Society, Primary and YWMIA General Boards of the Church. The following explanation…

In 1945, while Belle Spafford was serving as a counselor in the general Relief Society presidency, a rumor circulated that Church auxiliaries would be reorganized and that future presidents would serve a specified term of…

I had always known, or at least hoped, that my role as an adult female would be varied and progressive. I didn’t know it would be as complicated or as conflicting as it has been. …

Dear Mom and Dad, 

Your phone call last night left me feeling strangely orphaned, as if you had placed me on some foreign doorstep. I know you thought that Tom and I would get married, and that you can’t understand why I’ve quit my job. Last year you questioned my going on to graduate school; last night you wanted me to return for more schooling in Utah: is it that you’d rather have me in school there than struggling out here?

The Victorian Ideal of Womanhood doesn’t seem so disadvantageous to girls thrust into a hostile world “on their own.” When you remain single, society takes away the advantages of being a girl and forces upon…

Q. Our readers are interested in knowing more about single professional women in the Church. Tell us about your background. 

A. I’m from a small Utah community. I went to college in Utah and to graduate school in the east.

If singleness is an affliction, I can only conclude that I’m not a good example. I love living alone. I love travelling alone. I love people but not necessarily to live with. I enjoy company…

Housekeeping provides the setting, if not the solution, to many basic and profound philosophical questions.  What housewife has not, in viewing the unending stream of dirty dishes or unmade beds, pondered the categories of reality:…

Brothers and sisters, I find this a bittersweet year for me to be participating in a Mother’s Day program, for my own mother passed away last November and my husband’s mother was buried just two…

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a happy example of a “self-fulfilled” woman. She enjoyed a long and fruitful career as America’s foremost woman photographer, successfully blended her work with that of her husband, historian Paul Taylor,…

I grew up in Snowflake, which lies in desert country in Arizona, altitude 5600 feet. Alof Larson and May Hunt, my parents, were among the early arrivals to this pioneer settlement, named for Erastus Snow…

It was nearly seven. Uncanny the way she could sense that particular hour even without looking and even on days that were not Thursday. The library was quiet as always. The afternoon people had been…

I look around me and I laugh. I am caught by the interplay of light and color upon the chandelier. From long ago I see a child’s triumph. In one dangling crystal I see her…

Dialogue 6.2 (Summer 1972): 40–47
It isn’t easy these days to be a Momon mother of four. In the university town where I live, fertility is tolerated but not encouraged. Every time I drive to the grocery store, bumper stickers remind me that Overpopulation Begins At Home, and I am admonished to Make Love, Not Babies. At church I have the opposite problem. My youngest is almost two and if I hurry off to Primary without a girdle, somebody’s sure to look suspiciously at my flabby stomach and start imagining things. Everybody else is pregnant, why not I?

The bend, sharp thrust, and color 
Of this land abide the centuries 
Unchanged. Earth keeps another time 
Than man, and soon and late inters 
Each vanished traveler in her dust. 

The ocean’s wide, and I can’t step it; 
I love Sam and I can’t help it. 
But there ain’t no mule 
Had a harder life 
Than I 
Tryin’ to be Sam’s wife. 

Those whom I have called friends, 
Whose exchange of thought 
Once brought that blessed relief 

I met my first man in a garden. 
He fell easy; it only took a red apple. 
I laid the blame on a snake— 

My roots are planted in God’s earth. 
My wings extend throughout God’s ether. 
My interior is God’s kingdom. 

STEPHEN 
carries secrets he hasn’t had time 
to decode, 
takes his clues from me 
as I search for signals myself, 

Carol Lynn Pearson, in her delightful musical, The Order is Love, has managed to put her finger on the pulse of Mormon history and discover a vigorous throb of universality which is at times sobering…

Me and Mine ranks with the finest autobiographical accounts of Latter day Saint women. Informative, interesting, and written simply but with a sense of drama, it is a fascinating book. Louise Udall, mother of Stewart…

A Mormon Mother, which Annie Clark Tanner wrote in long hand in 1941 in her 77th year, seems especially valuable to me as an honest, perceptive account of the human problems of living polygamy during…