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She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication

Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 109–123
As an adult, I learned that 1993 represented a kind of death for members of the Mormon studies community. Since the 1970s, Latter-day Saint women had been challenging the limited role the Church provided for female spirituality.

“My Indignation Has Got the Better of My Intention”: A Case Study in Latter-day Saint and “Gentile” Female Family Correspondence in Nineteenth-Century America

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. Although members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared many values with their Christian neighbors, the differences between Mormons and non-Mormons during the…

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2021): 1–50
While much has changed for women in the Church over the last half-­century, much remains the same. Women consistently make up less than 3 percent of quotations in general conference. They are still described in terms of their appearance and relationship status; sermons about how they should live are the domain of male authority; their own representatives in the Church spend much of their time at the pulpit repeating male leaders’ words.

Developing Talents

As a mother of six young children, I was surprised when I received the impression to apply for grad school. I already held a bachelor of music, and though I taught voice lessons and sang…

Missing and Restoring Meaning

Fifty years ago I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shotgun apartment just off Mass. Ave. at Central Square: 22 Magazine Street, Apt. 3. Spring 1971 marked the last months of my master of…

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

Dear Heavenly Mother

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

A Woman Here

Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…

Mothers and Authority

Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…

In Praise of Belly Buttons (four meditations)

Podcast version of this piece. [one] My belly is expanding. It is not as much as I had expected—nothing like the maternity models (who I suspect might not even be pregnant) who now populate my…

Guides to Heavenly Mother: An Interview with McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 135-166
When Dialogue asked us to write a personal article about our process of writing A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother (D Street Press, 2020), we were delighted.

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

The Mask We Must Wear in a Racist Society: Reflections of Black Suffering in the LDS Church Through Art

I reflect upon a work of art by Marlena Wilding, a Black female artist with ties to Utah and Mormonism.[1] Her artwork is a stark representation of the complex nature of living while Black in…

Finding Rebecca: A Eulogy

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The DAILY ENQUIRER—April 24, 1897A Poor Widow Distracted by Life’s Burdens “One of those events occurred this morning which causes the heart to grow sad and go out in…

The Complementarity Principle

In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…

Assuming Power

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 53–57
Some feel that “smashing the patriarchy” is the ultimate goal of what they define as “feminism.” That is not my opinion. Each of us—female and male—have power given us to serve and lead, speak out and nurture, preach doctrine, and clean the bathrooms in the ward building.

The Gebirah and Female Power

Women in Workplace Power

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 143–157
Women’s work has always been multifaceted and applied across all aspects of human experience. Women have filled many roles: queen, mother, inventor, artist, healer, politician, caretaker, prophet. Wom￾en’s voices have been loud and quiet, sometimes invisible but always present, on the vanguard or on the margins, leading, pushing, making change.

Mormon Women in the Ministry

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 129–142
Interview with Brittany Mangelson who is a full-time minister for Community of Christ. She has a master of arts in religion from Graceland University and works as a social media seeker ministry specialist.

Women in Dialogue

While to all outward appearances we had nothing to complain of, the first meeting was an impassioned exchange of frustrations, disappointments and confessions. We had expected some serious confrontations because all attending are not in…

“For the Power is In Them”: Leonard Arrington and the Founders of Exponent II

The Order of Eve: A Matriarchal Priesthood

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 99–107
Elder Oaks clarified that priesthood is the authority and power of God. By extension, that must also be the authority and power of our Heavenly Mother. I decided to give it a name. Not the Order of Aaron, that great Old Testament wingman to Moses, or the Order of Melchizedek, mentor and life coach to Abraham, but the Order of Eve, a matriarchal priesthood, in honor of the mother of all living.

The Stories We Tell—And What They Tell Us

The Power of an Unbroken Woman

Women’s Lived Experience as Authority: Antenarratives and Interactional Power as Tools for Engagement

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

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.

Backwards Pioneers

The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root of Our Ecological Crisis

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.

Condemn Me Not

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
I do not lend the weight of truth to the language of ritual. Such language is symbolic. But even in the context of symbolism, language that is so preferential toward men and dismissive of women—especially when such language more aptly demonstrates the bias of the writers than the purpose of the ritual—needs to be removed.

Heavenly Mother: The Mother of All Women

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.

Remember Me: Discursive Needlework and the Sewing Sampler of Patty Bartlett Sessions

Roundtable: When Feminists Excommunicate

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 183–192
I am concerned about the ways in which I see patriarchy swallow up the demands of feminism and use them against women. Each time we gain som

Roundtable: Mormon Women and the Anatomy of Belonging

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 193–200
n looking at the definition of Mormon womanhood, it seems to me that the boundaries of that community have shifted over the past almost two hundred years from being initially proscribed by the institution, in the early days of the Nauvoo Relief Society, to essentially being defined by the Mormon women themselves in today’s modern global Church.

Roundtable: Shifting Boundaries of Feminist Theology: What Have We Learned?

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 167–180
This tendency to rewrite Relief Society history continued from the
1850s into the 1990s.

A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Mark’s Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30)

The Missing Mrs.

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.

Toward a Mormon Theology of God the Mother

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 15–40
It would seem that Mormons who have believed for over a hundred years in the real existence of the Goddess, the Mother in Heaven, should be far ahead of other Christians in developing a theology of God the Mother. However, our belief in her as a real person puts us at a disadvantage. If the Goddess is merely a symbol of deity, as the male God is also a symbol, then certainly God can be pictured as either male or female with equal validity.

Matricidal Patriarchy: Some Thoughts toward Understanding the Devaluation of Women in the Church

Beautiful Naked Women

A History of Two Stories: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

A Spiritual Map for Singles: A Singular Life: Perspectives for Single Women ; Carol Clark

A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner

Biography of an Indian Latter-day Saint Women: Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa as told to Louise Udall

Lyrics and Love in Orderville: A review of the music of The Orders is Love by Lex de Azevedo

Fiddlin’ Around in Orderville, or, A Mormon on the Roof: The Order is Love by Carol Lynn Pearson

The Mattress

The Courtship

Snowflake Girl

Triad

My Temple

The Perennial Harlot

Friends

Devotion to Sam

Canyon Country

Mormon Country Women: With an Introduction by Gordon Thomasson

Mother’s Day, 1971

Dirt: A Compendium of Household Wisdom

Single Voices: Thoughts on Living Alone

Single Voices: A Candid and Uncensored Interview with a Mormon Career Girl

Single Voices: Journal Jottings

Single Voices: A Letter Home

Somewhere Inbetween

Belle Spafford: A Sketch

A Survey of Women General Board Members

All Children Are Alike Unto Me

The Mormon Woman and Priesthood Authority: The Other Voice

And Woe Unto Them That Are With Child In Those Days

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?

Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too

Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon History

I Married a Family

Full House

On Women

On Women

Women: One Man’s Opinion: Women and the Priesthood by Rodney Turner

Sisters Under the Skin: Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters ; S. George Ellsworth

Three Portraits of Women from the Old Testament

Taking Them Seriously: Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, Claudia L. Bushman, ed.

Generalized Hatred: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

Two Venturesome Women: Not By Bread Alone: The journal of Martha Spence Heywood, 1850-1856

Out of the Slot: Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of Mormon Women by Marilyn Warenski

Women Under the Law

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 82–91
Any constitutional amendment unavoidably casts a shadow of uncertaintyover its future interpretation and implementation. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, has far exceeded the originally perceived purpose—elevating thestatus of blacks—and has come to serve as a tool of justice for many oppressedpersons and groups.

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The Last Project

Birthing

Dialogue 14.4 (Fall 1981): 117–124
So this was birthing, this crazy-quilt of contrasts, of senses and feelingsin chaos, coming occasionally to rest, as now, with a sleeping son in the crookof my arm. Had I won the grand prize?

A Time of Decision

My Personal Rubicon

Mary Fielding Smith: Her Ox Goes Marching On

Getting Unmarried in a Married Church

Women and Ordination: Introduction to the Biblical Context

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 60–69
THE QUESTION of whether worthy women could be or ought to be ordained to the LDS priesthood has not, until recently, been considered seriously in the LDS community.

Women and Priesthood

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 48–59
I smiled wryly at the cartoon on the stationery. The picture showed a woman standing before an all-male ecclesiastical board and asking, “Are you trying to tell me that God is not an equal opportunity employer?” I thought to myself, “Yes, that is precisely what women have been told for centuries.” 

Mormon Women and the Struggle for Definition

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 40–47
I am sensitive to that steadying hand as I attempt to identify and define what for an earlier generation of women identified and defined them as women—their relationship to the Church. 

The Pink Dialogue and Beyond

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.

Nothing New Under the Sun: Mormons and Women by Ann Terry, Marilyn Slaght-Griffin and Elizabeth Terry

Skulduggery, Passion, and Everyday Women: Women of the West by Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol Olwell

Voices from the Dust: Women in Zion: Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900

Ministering Angels: Single Women in Mormon Society

Dialogue 16.3 (Autumn 1983): 68–69
I would like to discuss teh social experience of historical Latter-day Saint single women in the context of five questions: (1) Does she have an acceptable reason for being single? (2) Can she provide for her own economic security? (3) What place does she occupy in her family of origin? (4) Can she contribute to her community in a way that she will be rewarded for? (5) What was the emotinoal life of a single women in past generations? 

Accolades for Good Wives: Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750

Frustration and Fulfillment: Mormon Women Speak by Mary Lythgoe Bradford, ed.

“Strange Fever”: Women West: Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail 1840-1890 Vols. 1 and 2

A Shaded View: Suribonnet Sisters: True Stories of Mormon Women and Frontier Life

Bleaker by the Dozen?: Life in Large Families: View of Mormon Women, by H. M. Bahr, S. J. Condie, and K. Goodman

Crying Change in a Permanent World: Contemporary Mormon Women on Motherhood

Dialogue 18.2 (Summer 1985): 116–127
Women in the Mormon Church are encouraged toward traditional roles and attitudes that discourage personal, familial, and societal change. The ideal female role is that of a non-wage-earning wife and mother in a nuclear family where the husband is the provider and the woman’s energies are directed toward her family, the Church, and perhaps community service.

Exiles for the Principle: LDS Polygamy in Canada

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 108–116
Embry describes the role that polygamy played in the forming of Cardston Canada, both Pre-Manifesto and Post Manifesto.

Mothers and Daughters in Polygamy

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 99–107
An analysis of what the individual wives’ roles are in the 19th century among plural marriages. Embry and Bradley make the argument that the daughters in a polygamous relationship pay attention to how their own mom is doing, which determines whether or not when they are older they enter into a polygamous relationship.

Women’s Response to Plural Marriage

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 84–98
Mehr shares stories of polygamy in late 19th century and early 20th century. He especially focused on LDS women’s opinions of polygamy when they entered into polygamous relationsips.

Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 67–83
Van Wagoner defines polyandry as having two or more husbands at the same time. He identifies women who ended up marrying members of the Twelve or Joseph Smith while they were were already married to their own husband

Government-Sponsored Prayer in the Classroom

LDS Women and Priesthood: An Expanded Definition of Priesthood: Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 35–42
In seeking to predict what might occur in the Church if priesthood were extended to women, it is helpful to focus attention on some of these organizational dynamics.

LDS Women and Priesthood: The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 21–32
While an examination of that history leaves unanswered the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood, the historical overview of LDS women’s relationship to priesthood suggests a more expansive view than many members now hold.

LDS Women and Priesthood: Scriptural Precedents for Priesthood

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 15–20
I have heard many LDS women approach the issue of women and the priesthood by protesting that they do not want to hold the priesthood because they have no interest in passing the sacrament or performing some other ecclesiastical duty. I will venture a guess that many men who have the priesthood do not particularly want to hold it either, and that some of them also have no interest in passing the sacrament. But the reluctance of some men would hardly be a good reason to prevent all men from holding the priesthood.

Depression in Mormon Women

Women Coping: Sideways to the Sun by Linda Sillitoe

A Celebration of Diversity: A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from BYU Women’s Conferences

Polygamy, Patrimony, and Prophecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs.

A Voice from the Past: The Benson Instructions for Parents

I must admit that the immediate reaction to the “Mothers” speech — largely negative in my immediate circle — caught me off guard. I was meeting with a group of women on the night that…

How Do You Spell Relief? A Panel of Relief Society Presidents

What Do Mormon Women Want?: Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective

The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 15–38
Bradley describes how even after the Short Creek Raids happened, the women there still believed in plural marriage.

One of the Women

A Tribute to May Swenson

The Mormon Woman as Writer

Rescue from Home: Some Ins and Outs

Speaking Out on Domestic Violence

Theological Foundations of Patriarchy

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 79–95
MOST RESEARCH BY MORMON FEMINISTS has been historical in nature. Proponents of greater power and privilege for women cite as prece￾dents the lives of Huldah and Deborah of the Old Testament, the treatment of women by Jesus Christ, or the activities of pioneer women in the early restored Church.

Woman as Healer in the Modern Church

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 65–82
Evidence from Mormon women’s journals, diaries, and meeting
minutes tells us that from the 1840s until as recently as the 1930s,
LDS women served their families, each other, and the broader com￾munity, expanding their own spiritual gifts in the process.

Comforting the Motherless Children: The Alice Louise Reynolds Women’s Forum

The Good Woman Syndrome

A Strenuous Business: The Achievement of Helen Candland Stark

Mormon Women and the Right to Wage Work

Dialogue 23.4 (Winter 1990): 47–82
In this essay, I will analyze recent Church discourse against a pattern of constricting employment options for women and will discuss the implications of that pattern.

Bearing Out Crosses Gracefully: Sex and the Single Mormon

In Their Own Behalf: The Politicization of Mormon Women and the 1870 Franchise

Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1991): 75–96
IMMEDIATELY UPON THE PASSAGE of territorial legislation enfranchising Utah’s women in 1870, almost fifty years before the Nineteenth Amend￾ment extended the vote to American women, arguments erupted between the Mormon and non-Mormon community over the reasons behind this legislation.

Song of the Old/Oldsongs: Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women edited by Leatrice Lifshitz

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives

Dialogue 25.2 (Fall 1992): 75–96
The personal essay, unlike personal journals, letters, and oral histo￾ries, is not an artless form. It transforms the raw material of personal experience in the double crucible of carefully chosen language and the light of mature retrospection.

Sexual Hegemony and Mormon Women: Seeing Ourselves in the Bambara Mirror

On Being Female: A Voice of Contentment

Mormon Women and Families: Women, Family, and Utopia

Women Alone: The Economic and Emotional Plight of Early LDS Women

Women’s Place in the Encyclopedia: Encyclopedia of Mormonism

How Common the Principle? Women as Plural Wives in 1860

Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
A study done to see how many polygamous wives there were at the peak of polygamy in the church.

Women’s Rights: Women’s Rights in Old Testament Times by James R. Baker

A Diminished Thing?: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

If Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood since 1843, Why Aren’t They Using It?

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 231–245
In the brief essay
which follows, I do not reassert the arguments supporting women’s right
to priesthood, but focus on certain problems raised by the assumption that
women have priesthood authority.

Familial, Socioeconomic, and Religious Behavior: A Comparison of LDS and Non-LDS Women

In Search of Women’s Language and Feminist Expression Among Nauvoo Wives in A Little Lower Than the Angels

“Seizing Sacred Space”: Women’s Engagement in Early Mormonism

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 69–82
Zina, like many other early converts to Mormonism, was a child of the Second Great Awakening.

Sustained by Faith and Community: In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo edited by Carol Cornwall Madsen

The Woman of Worth: Impressions of Proverbs 31:10-31

Women of Cards

Quilts as Women’s History: Quilts and Women of the Mormon Migrations: Treasures of Transition

More Than Just a Battle for the Ballot: Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896

Joseph Loved His Women

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Preaching the Gospel of Church and Sex: Mormon Women’s Fiction in the Young Woman’s Journal, 1889-1910

Edward Tullidge and the Women of Mormondom

An Expanded Definition of Priesthood? Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 319–325
But the fact that we must look at organizational dynamics before we can begin to understand the issues that would be raised by expanding priesthood to include women is an apt commentary on the complex and sometimes confused role that priesthood authority has come to play in the modern church.

Mormon Women and Priesthood

Life Writings of Frontier Women Series, Vol. 1-5.

First, Mothers and Children: A Postscript to “Moving Zion Southward Parts I & II”

Being a Mormon Woman or “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister? Isn’t That Enough?”

On Being a Mormon Woman

“Dear Brethren” — Claiming a Voice in the Church

Carol Lynn Pearson explains ways she has claimed a voice and encouraged others to do so. 

Pioneers

Midwest Pilgrims: We’re Still Here

Plymouth Rock on the Mississippi

My Short Happy Life with Exponent II

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 191–1933
Claudia Bushman and others reflect back on Exponent II.

Bodies, Babies, and Birth Control

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 159–175
In this paper I will explore official and unofficial messages that theLDS church has sent to girls and women about childbearing during the twentieth century and the effect those messages have had on women’sreproductive choices.

Temporal Love: Singing the Song of Songs

Eternal Love

How My Mission Saved My Membership

Why I Didn’t Serve a Mission

Junior Companion

Sisterhaters

Missions and the Rhetoric of Male Motivation

“Not Invite but Welcome”: The History and Impact of Church Policy on Sister Missionaries

Present at the Beginning: One Woman’s Journey

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 99–193
ON NOVEMBER 17,1985, MANY RLDS (now Community of Christ) congre￾gations witnessed the sacrament of ordination to priesthood office

Ordaining Women and the Transformation from Sect to Denomination

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 61–64
Over the past forty years the top leadership of the Community of Christ church (until recently the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ o f Latter -Day Saints) has gone through significant changes in religious thought. I have contended elsewhere that the decisive changes occurred in the 1960s.

“Kingdom of Priests”: Priesthood Temple and Women in the Old Testament and in the Restoration

Dialogue 36.3 (2003): 53-80
Compton considers priesthood as portrayed in Old Testament texts and how women are underrepresented in today’s discourse.

Saints for All Seasons: Lavina Fielding Anderson and Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc

Does Justice Rob Mercy? Retribution, Punishment, and Loving our Enemies

“Gender Troubles” and Mormon Women’s Voices: Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth Century Mormon Women’s Autobiographical Acts by Laura L. Bush

Women in a Time Warp: Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, Edited by Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe

A Woman of Influence: An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells by Carol Cornwall Madsen

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

Balancing Faith and Honesty : Segullah: Writings by Latter-day Saint Women

A Must-Read on Gender Politics : Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals, Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

The Kind of Woman Future Historians Will Study : Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Meeting Donna Freitas

“A Style of Our Own”: Mormon Women and Modesty

Clothing has been the subject of scriptural injunctions and aperennial topic of Church leaders’ concern. Subtle changes inboth dress standards and rationales for modest dress in the latterhalf of the twentieth century reflect the LDS…

A Price Far above Rubies versus Eight Cows: What’s a Virtuous Woman Worth?

Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism

Dialogue 43.2 (Fall 2010): 45–63
Reading these books in relation to my own life taught me something I should already have known. Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it.

Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon

Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research Conference: To Do the Business of the Church: A Cooperative Paradigm for Examining Gendered Participation within Church Organizational Structure

Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 70–83
I will be talking today about how women fit into the functional structure of LDS church governance; but, unlike many of the oth￾ers speaking today, I do not have advanced degrees in my subject, nor do I consider myself an academic

BYU Women’s Studies Conference: “I Will Sing to the Lord”: Women’s Songs in the Scriptures

Woman: Joint Heiress With Christ

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Celestial Terms, In the Night, Tangled Women

Review: Negotiating the Paradoxes: Neylan McBaine’s Women at Church Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Review: Empowerment at the Local Level Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Standards Night

Pornographic

In Light

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 89–94
The day the missionaries came to our house in 1988, a rainbow fell across the sky in our neighborhood on the hill. I stood on the ledge of the bathtub and curled my fingers on the windowsill to pull my scrawny body up to see.

Mormon Priesthood Against the Meritocracy

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 85–90 Defenses of the male-only LDS priesthood generally pursue a combination of three approaches: ground the practice in ancient scripture, secure it in Restoration history and tradition, or justify it through its sociological effects on gender culture and family formation in the present day.

A Letter to My Mormon Daughter

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 79–84 One day you’ll probably hear the name Kate Kelly. And you’ll probably ask me my thoughts about her and her work with Ordain Women and her subsequent excommunication.

Mormon Feminist Perspectives on the Mormon Digital Awakening: A Study of Identity and Personal Narratives

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 47–83
This study examines online Mormon feminists’ identities and beliefs and their responses to the Mormon Digital Awakening. This is the first published survey of online Mormon feminists, which gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 1,862 self￾identified Mormon feminists.

Mormon Feminism: The Next Forty Years

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 167–180
Brooks talks about the period from 1970s Mormon feminism in Boston to the present and imagines what needs to be part of the future. She identifies five areas for Mormon feminism: theology, institutions, racial inclusion, financial independence, and spiritual independence.

Review: Full Lives but Not Fulfilling Paula Kelly Harline. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women

Issue Art: Page Turner

Complicated Womanhood Julie Debra Neuffer. Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

The Struggle for Female Authority in Biblical and Mormon Tradition

Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.

A Mormon Midrash?: LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1989): 135 – 139
Latter-day Saints, with other groups in the Judeo-Christian tradition, accept as scripture the stories of creation found in Genesis 1-3 but are unique in accepting as scripture three other parallel versions of the same stories. These include chapters in the books of Moses and Abraham brought forth by Joseph Smith, Jr.

She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication

Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 109–123
As an adult, I learned that 1993 represented a kind of death for members of the Mormon studies community. Since the 1970s, Latter-day Saint women had been challenging the limited role the Church provided for female spirituality.

“My Indignation Has Got the Better of My Intention”: A Case Study in Latter-day Saint and “Gentile” Female Family Correspondence in Nineteenth-Century America

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. Although members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared many values with their Christian neighbors, the differences between Mormons and non-Mormons during the…

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2021): 1–50
While much has changed for women in the Church over the last half-­century, much remains the same. Women consistently make up less than 3 percent of quotations in general conference. They are still described in terms of their appearance and relationship status; sermons about how they should live are the domain of male authority; their own representatives in the Church spend much of their time at the pulpit repeating male leaders’ words.

Developing Talents

As a mother of six young children, I was surprised when I received the impression to apply for grad school. I already held a bachelor of music, and though I taught voice lessons and sang…

Missing and Restoring Meaning

Fifty years ago I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shotgun apartment just off Mass. Ave. at Central Square: 22 Magazine Street, Apt. 3. Spring 1971 marked the last months of my master of…

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

Dear Heavenly Mother

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

A Woman Here

Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…

Mothers and Authority

Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…

In Praise of Belly Buttons (four meditations)

Podcast version of this piece. [one] My belly is expanding. It is not as much as I had expected—nothing like the maternity models (who I suspect might not even be pregnant) who now populate my…

Guides to Heavenly Mother: An Interview with McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 135-166
When Dialogue asked us to write a personal article about our process of writing A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother (D Street Press, 2020), we were delighted.

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

The Mask We Must Wear in a Racist Society: Reflections of Black Suffering in the LDS Church Through Art

I reflect upon a work of art by Marlena Wilding, a Black female artist with ties to Utah and Mormonism.[1] Her artwork is a stark representation of the complex nature of living while Black in…

Finding Rebecca: A Eulogy

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The DAILY ENQUIRER—April 24, 1897A Poor Widow Distracted by Life’s Burdens “One of those events occurred this morning which causes the heart to grow sad and go out in…

The Complementarity Principle

In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…

Assuming Power

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 53–57
Some feel that “smashing the patriarchy” is the ultimate goal of what they define as “feminism.” That is not my opinion. Each of us—female and male—have power given us to serve and lead, speak out and nurture, preach doctrine, and clean the bathrooms in the ward building.

The Gebirah and Female Power

Women in Workplace Power

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 143–157
Women’s work has always been multifaceted and applied across all aspects of human experience. Women have filled many roles: queen, mother, inventor, artist, healer, politician, caretaker, prophet. Wom￾en’s voices have been loud and quiet, sometimes invisible but always present, on the vanguard or on the margins, leading, pushing, making change.

Mormon Women in the Ministry

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 129–142
Interview with Brittany Mangelson who is a full-time minister for Community of Christ. She has a master of arts in religion from Graceland University and works as a social media seeker ministry specialist.

Women in Dialogue

While to all outward appearances we had nothing to complain of, the first meeting was an impassioned exchange of frustrations, disappointments and confessions. We had expected some serious confrontations because all attending are not in…

“For the Power is In Them”: Leonard Arrington and the Founders of Exponent II

The Order of Eve: A Matriarchal Priesthood

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 99–107
Elder Oaks clarified that priesthood is the authority and power of God. By extension, that must also be the authority and power of our Heavenly Mother. I decided to give it a name. Not the Order of Aaron, that great Old Testament wingman to Moses, or the Order of Melchizedek, mentor and life coach to Abraham, but the Order of Eve, a matriarchal priesthood, in honor of the mother of all living.

The Stories We Tell—And What They Tell Us

The Power of an Unbroken Woman

Women’s Lived Experience as Authority: Antenarratives and Interactional Power as Tools for Engagement

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

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.

Backwards Pioneers

The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root of Our Ecological Crisis

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.

Condemn Me Not

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
I do not lend the weight of truth to the language of ritual. Such language is symbolic. But even in the context of symbolism, language that is so preferential toward men and dismissive of women—especially when such language more aptly demonstrates the bias of the writers than the purpose of the ritual—needs to be removed.

Heavenly Mother: The Mother of All Women

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.

Remember Me: Discursive Needlework and the Sewing Sampler of Patty Bartlett Sessions

Roundtable: When Feminists Excommunicate

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 183–192
I am concerned about the ways in which I see patriarchy swallow up the demands of feminism and use them against women. Each time we gain som

Roundtable: Mormon Women and the Anatomy of Belonging

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 193–200
n looking at the definition of Mormon womanhood, it seems to me that the boundaries of that community have shifted over the past almost two hundred years from being initially proscribed by the institution, in the early days of the Nauvoo Relief Society, to essentially being defined by the Mormon women themselves in today’s modern global Church.

Roundtable: Shifting Boundaries of Feminist Theology: What Have We Learned?

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 167–180
This tendency to rewrite Relief Society history continued from the
1850s into the 1990s.

A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Mark’s Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30)

The Missing Mrs.

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.

Toward a Mormon Theology of God the Mother

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 15–40
It would seem that Mormons who have believed for over a hundred years in the real existence of the Goddess, the Mother in Heaven, should be far ahead of other Christians in developing a theology of God the Mother. However, our belief in her as a real person puts us at a disadvantage. If the Goddess is merely a symbol of deity, as the male God is also a symbol, then certainly God can be pictured as either male or female with equal validity.

Matricidal Patriarchy: Some Thoughts toward Understanding the Devaluation of Women in the Church

Beautiful Naked Women

A History of Two Stories: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

A Spiritual Map for Singles: A Singular Life: Perspectives for Single Women ; Carol Clark

A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner

Biography of an Indian Latter-day Saint Women: Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa as told to Louise Udall

Lyrics and Love in Orderville: A review of the music of The Orders is Love by Lex de Azevedo

Fiddlin’ Around in Orderville, or, A Mormon on the Roof: The Order is Love by Carol Lynn Pearson

The Mattress

The Courtship

Snowflake Girl

Triad

My Temple

The Perennial Harlot

Friends

Devotion to Sam

Canyon Country

Mormon Country Women: With an Introduction by Gordon Thomasson

Mother’s Day, 1971

Dirt: A Compendium of Household Wisdom

Single Voices: Thoughts on Living Alone

Single Voices: A Candid and Uncensored Interview with a Mormon Career Girl

Single Voices: Journal Jottings

Single Voices: A Letter Home

Somewhere Inbetween

Belle Spafford: A Sketch

A Survey of Women General Board Members

All Children Are Alike Unto Me

The Mormon Woman and Priesthood Authority: The Other Voice

And Woe Unto Them That Are With Child In Those Days

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?

Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too

Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon History

I Married a Family

Full House

On Women

On Women

Women: One Man’s Opinion: Women and the Priesthood by Rodney Turner

Sisters Under the Skin: Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters ; S. George Ellsworth

Three Portraits of Women from the Old Testament

Taking Them Seriously: Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, Claudia L. Bushman, ed.

Generalized Hatred: The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

Two Venturesome Women: Not By Bread Alone: The journal of Martha Spence Heywood, 1850-1856

Out of the Slot: Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of Mormon Women by Marilyn Warenski

Women Under the Law

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 82–91
Any constitutional amendment unavoidably casts a shadow of uncertaintyover its future interpretation and implementation. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, has far exceeded the originally perceived purpose—elevating thestatus of blacks—and has come to serve as a tool of justice for many oppressedpersons and groups.

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

The Last Project

Birthing

Dialogue 14.4 (Fall 1981): 117–124
So this was birthing, this crazy-quilt of contrasts, of senses and feelingsin chaos, coming occasionally to rest, as now, with a sleeping son in the crookof my arm. Had I won the grand prize?

A Time of Decision

My Personal Rubicon

Mary Fielding Smith: Her Ox Goes Marching On

Getting Unmarried in a Married Church

Women and Ordination: Introduction to the Biblical Context

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 60–69
THE QUESTION of whether worthy women could be or ought to be ordained to the LDS priesthood has not, until recently, been considered seriously in the LDS community.

Women and Priesthood

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 48–59
I smiled wryly at the cartoon on the stationery. The picture showed a woman standing before an all-male ecclesiastical board and asking, “Are you trying to tell me that God is not an equal opportunity employer?” I thought to myself, “Yes, that is precisely what women have been told for centuries.” 

Mormon Women and the Struggle for Definition

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 40–47
I am sensitive to that steadying hand as I attempt to identify and define what for an earlier generation of women identified and defined them as women—their relationship to the Church. 

The Pink Dialogue and Beyond

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.

Nothing New Under the Sun: Mormons and Women by Ann Terry, Marilyn Slaght-Griffin and Elizabeth Terry

Skulduggery, Passion, and Everyday Women: Women of the West by Cathy Luchetti in collaboration with Carol Olwell

Voices from the Dust: Women in Zion: Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900

Ministering Angels: Single Women in Mormon Society

Dialogue 16.3 (Autumn 1983): 68–69
I would like to discuss teh social experience of historical Latter-day Saint single women in the context of five questions: (1) Does she have an acceptable reason for being single? (2) Can she provide for her own economic security? (3) What place does she occupy in her family of origin? (4) Can she contribute to her community in a way that she will be rewarded for? (5) What was the emotinoal life of a single women in past generations? 

Accolades for Good Wives: Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750

Frustration and Fulfillment: Mormon Women Speak by Mary Lythgoe Bradford, ed.

“Strange Fever”: Women West: Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail 1840-1890 Vols. 1 and 2

A Shaded View: Suribonnet Sisters: True Stories of Mormon Women and Frontier Life

Bleaker by the Dozen?: Life in Large Families: View of Mormon Women, by H. M. Bahr, S. J. Condie, and K. Goodman

Crying Change in a Permanent World: Contemporary Mormon Women on Motherhood

Dialogue 18.2 (Summer 1985): 116–127
Women in the Mormon Church are encouraged toward traditional roles and attitudes that discourage personal, familial, and societal change. The ideal female role is that of a non-wage-earning wife and mother in a nuclear family where the husband is the provider and the woman’s energies are directed toward her family, the Church, and perhaps community service.

Exiles for the Principle: LDS Polygamy in Canada

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 108–116
Embry describes the role that polygamy played in the forming of Cardston Canada, both Pre-Manifesto and Post Manifesto.

Mothers and Daughters in Polygamy

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 99–107
An analysis of what the individual wives’ roles are in the 19th century among plural marriages. Embry and Bradley make the argument that the daughters in a polygamous relationship pay attention to how their own mom is doing, which determines whether or not when they are older they enter into a polygamous relationship.

Women’s Response to Plural Marriage

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 84–98
Mehr shares stories of polygamy in late 19th century and early 20th century. He especially focused on LDS women’s opinions of polygamy when they entered into polygamous relationsips.

Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 67–83
Van Wagoner defines polyandry as having two or more husbands at the same time. He identifies women who ended up marrying members of the Twelve or Joseph Smith while they were were already married to their own husband

Government-Sponsored Prayer in the Classroom

LDS Women and Priesthood: An Expanded Definition of Priesthood: Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 35–42
In seeking to predict what might occur in the Church if priesthood were extended to women, it is helpful to focus attention on some of these organizational dynamics.

LDS Women and Priesthood: The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 21–32
While an examination of that history leaves unanswered the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood, the historical overview of LDS women’s relationship to priesthood suggests a more expansive view than many members now hold.

LDS Women and Priesthood: Scriptural Precedents for Priesthood

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 15–20
I have heard many LDS women approach the issue of women and the priesthood by protesting that they do not want to hold the priesthood because they have no interest in passing the sacrament or performing some other ecclesiastical duty. I will venture a guess that many men who have the priesthood do not particularly want to hold it either, and that some of them also have no interest in passing the sacrament. But the reluctance of some men would hardly be a good reason to prevent all men from holding the priesthood.

Depression in Mormon Women

Women Coping: Sideways to the Sun by Linda Sillitoe

A Celebration of Diversity: A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from BYU Women’s Conferences

Polygamy, Patrimony, and Prophecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs.

A Voice from the Past: The Benson Instructions for Parents

I must admit that the immediate reaction to the “Mothers” speech — largely negative in my immediate circle — caught me off guard. I was meeting with a group of women on the night that…

How Do You Spell Relief? A Panel of Relief Society Presidents

What Do Mormon Women Want?: Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective

The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 15–38
Bradley describes how even after the Short Creek Raids happened, the women there still believed in plural marriage.

One of the Women

A Tribute to May Swenson

The Mormon Woman as Writer

Rescue from Home: Some Ins and Outs

Speaking Out on Domestic Violence

Theological Foundations of Patriarchy

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 79–95
MOST RESEARCH BY MORMON FEMINISTS has been historical in nature. Proponents of greater power and privilege for women cite as prece￾dents the lives of Huldah and Deborah of the Old Testament, the treatment of women by Jesus Christ, or the activities of pioneer women in the early restored Church.

Woman as Healer in the Modern Church

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 65–82
Evidence from Mormon women’s journals, diaries, and meeting
minutes tells us that from the 1840s until as recently as the 1930s,
LDS women served their families, each other, and the broader com￾munity, expanding their own spiritual gifts in the process.

Comforting the Motherless Children: The Alice Louise Reynolds Women’s Forum

The Good Woman Syndrome

A Strenuous Business: The Achievement of Helen Candland Stark

Mormon Women and the Right to Wage Work

Dialogue 23.4 (Winter 1990): 47–82
In this essay, I will analyze recent Church discourse against a pattern of constricting employment options for women and will discuss the implications of that pattern.

Bearing Out Crosses Gracefully: Sex and the Single Mormon

In Their Own Behalf: The Politicization of Mormon Women and the 1870 Franchise

Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1991): 75–96
IMMEDIATELY UPON THE PASSAGE of territorial legislation enfranchising Utah’s women in 1870, almost fifty years before the Nineteenth Amend￾ment extended the vote to American women, arguments erupted between the Mormon and non-Mormon community over the reasons behind this legislation.

Song of the Old/Oldsongs: Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women edited by Leatrice Lifshitz

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives

Dialogue 25.2 (Fall 1992): 75–96
The personal essay, unlike personal journals, letters, and oral histo￾ries, is not an artless form. It transforms the raw material of personal experience in the double crucible of carefully chosen language and the light of mature retrospection.

Sexual Hegemony and Mormon Women: Seeing Ourselves in the Bambara Mirror

On Being Female: A Voice of Contentment

Mormon Women and Families: Women, Family, and Utopia

Women Alone: The Economic and Emotional Plight of Early LDS Women

Women’s Place in the Encyclopedia: Encyclopedia of Mormonism

How Common the Principle? Women as Plural Wives in 1860

Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
A study done to see how many polygamous wives there were at the peak of polygamy in the church.

Women’s Rights: Women’s Rights in Old Testament Times by James R. Baker

A Diminished Thing?: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

If Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood since 1843, Why Aren’t They Using It?

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 231–245
In the brief essay
which follows, I do not reassert the arguments supporting women’s right
to priesthood, but focus on certain problems raised by the assumption that
women have priesthood authority.

Familial, Socioeconomic, and Religious Behavior: A Comparison of LDS and Non-LDS Women

In Search of Women’s Language and Feminist Expression Among Nauvoo Wives in A Little Lower Than the Angels

“Seizing Sacred Space”: Women’s Engagement in Early Mormonism

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 69–82
Zina, like many other early converts to Mormonism, was a child of the Second Great Awakening.

Sustained by Faith and Community: In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo edited by Carol Cornwall Madsen

The Woman of Worth: Impressions of Proverbs 31:10-31

Women of Cards

Quilts as Women’s History: Quilts and Women of the Mormon Migrations: Treasures of Transition

More Than Just a Battle for the Ballot: Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896

Joseph Loved His Women

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Preaching the Gospel of Church and Sex: Mormon Women’s Fiction in the Young Woman’s Journal, 1889-1910

Edward Tullidge and the Women of Mormondom

An Expanded Definition of Priesthood? Some Present and Future Consequences

Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 319–325
But the fact that we must look at organizational dynamics before we can begin to understand the issues that would be raised by expanding priesthood to include women is an apt commentary on the complex and sometimes confused role that priesthood authority has come to play in the modern church.

Mormon Women and Priesthood

Life Writings of Frontier Women Series, Vol. 1-5.

First, Mothers and Children: A Postscript to “Moving Zion Southward Parts I & II”

Being a Mormon Woman or “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister? Isn’t That Enough?”

On Being a Mormon Woman

“Dear Brethren” — Claiming a Voice in the Church

Carol Lynn Pearson explains ways she has claimed a voice and encouraged others to do so. 

Pioneers

Midwest Pilgrims: We’re Still Here

Plymouth Rock on the Mississippi

My Short Happy Life with Exponent II

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 191–1933
Claudia Bushman and others reflect back on Exponent II.

Bodies, Babies, and Birth Control

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 159–175
In this paper I will explore official and unofficial messages that theLDS church has sent to girls and women about childbearing during the twentieth century and the effect those messages have had on women’sreproductive choices.

Temporal Love: Singing the Song of Songs

Eternal Love

How My Mission Saved My Membership

Why I Didn’t Serve a Mission

Junior Companion

Sisterhaters

Missions and the Rhetoric of Male Motivation

“Not Invite but Welcome”: The History and Impact of Church Policy on Sister Missionaries

Present at the Beginning: One Woman’s Journey

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 99–193
ON NOVEMBER 17,1985, MANY RLDS (now Community of Christ) congre￾gations witnessed the sacrament of ordination to priesthood office

Ordaining Women and the Transformation from Sect to Denomination

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 61–64
Over the past forty years the top leadership of the Community of Christ church (until recently the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ o f Latter -Day Saints) has gone through significant changes in religious thought. I have contended elsewhere that the decisive changes occurred in the 1960s.

“Kingdom of Priests”: Priesthood Temple and Women in the Old Testament and in the Restoration

Dialogue 36.3 (2003): 53-80
Compton considers priesthood as portrayed in Old Testament texts and how women are underrepresented in today’s discourse.

Saints for All Seasons: Lavina Fielding Anderson and Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc

Does Justice Rob Mercy? Retribution, Punishment, and Loving our Enemies

“Gender Troubles” and Mormon Women’s Voices: Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth Century Mormon Women’s Autobiographical Acts by Laura L. Bush

Women in a Time Warp: Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, Edited by Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe

A Woman of Influence: An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells by Carol Cornwall Madsen

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

Balancing Faith and Honesty : Segullah: Writings by Latter-day Saint Women

A Must-Read on Gender Politics : Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals, Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

The Kind of Woman Future Historians Will Study : Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Meeting Donna Freitas

“A Style of Our Own”: Mormon Women and Modesty

Clothing has been the subject of scriptural injunctions and aperennial topic of Church leaders’ concern. Subtle changes inboth dress standards and rationales for modest dress in the latterhalf of the twentieth century reflect the LDS…

A Price Far above Rubies versus Eight Cows: What’s a Virtuous Woman Worth?

Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism

Dialogue 43.2 (Fall 2010): 45–63
Reading these books in relation to my own life taught me something I should already have known. Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it.

Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon

Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research Conference: To Do the Business of the Church: A Cooperative Paradigm for Examining Gendered Participation within Church Organizational Structure

Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 70–83
I will be talking today about how women fit into the functional structure of LDS church governance; but, unlike many of the oth￾ers speaking today, I do not have advanced degrees in my subject, nor do I consider myself an academic

BYU Women’s Studies Conference: “I Will Sing to the Lord”: Women’s Songs in the Scriptures

Woman: Joint Heiress With Christ

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Celestial Terms, In the Night, Tangled Women

Review: Negotiating the Paradoxes: Neylan McBaine’s Women at Church Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Review: Empowerment at the Local Level Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Standards Night

Pornographic

In Light

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 89–94
The day the missionaries came to our house in 1988, a rainbow fell across the sky in our neighborhood on the hill. I stood on the ledge of the bathtub and curled my fingers on the windowsill to pull my scrawny body up to see.

Mormon Priesthood Against the Meritocracy

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 85–90 Defenses of the male-only LDS priesthood generally pursue a combination of three approaches: ground the practice in ancient scripture, secure it in Restoration history and tradition, or justify it through its sociological effects on gender culture and family formation in the present day.

A Letter to My Mormon Daughter

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 79–84 One day you’ll probably hear the name Kate Kelly. And you’ll probably ask me my thoughts about her and her work with Ordain Women and her subsequent excommunication.

Mormon Feminist Perspectives on the Mormon Digital Awakening: A Study of Identity and Personal Narratives

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 47–83
This study examines online Mormon feminists’ identities and beliefs and their responses to the Mormon Digital Awakening. This is the first published survey of online Mormon feminists, which gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 1,862 self￾identified Mormon feminists.

Mormon Feminism: The Next Forty Years

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 167–180
Brooks talks about the period from 1970s Mormon feminism in Boston to the present and imagines what needs to be part of the future. She identifies five areas for Mormon feminism: theology, institutions, racial inclusion, financial independence, and spiritual independence.

Review: Full Lives but Not Fulfilling Paula Kelly Harline. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women

Issue Art: Page Turner

Complicated Womanhood Julie Debra Neuffer. Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

The Struggle for Female Authority in Biblical and Mormon Tradition

Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.

A Mormon Midrash?: LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1989): 135 – 139
Latter-day Saints, with other groups in the Judeo-Christian tradition, accept as scripture the stories of creation found in Genesis 1-3 but are unique in accepting as scripture three other parallel versions of the same stories. These include chapters in the books of Moses and Abraham brought forth by Joseph Smith, Jr.