Talking to Myself in Public

Snapshots of Changing Latter-day Saint Teachings on Women

14/2/2021

This post was inspired by my recent feminist awakening and Craig Harline's presentation "What Happened to My Bell-Bottoms? How Things That Were Never Going to Change Have Sometimes Changed Anyway, And How Studying History Can Help Us Make Sense of It All".

The Judeo-Christian God is clearly not big on instigating immediate social change. The Law of Moses was a substantial improvement on the more punitive Code of Hammurabi, but looks absolutely barbaric by today's standards in most countries. In biblical times, slavery was as ubiquitous and crucial to the economy as wheeled vehicles are today, and instead of condemning it altogether, God was just like, "Be nice to your slaves." So Christians defended slavery as a divinely sanctioned institution for hundreds of years but eventually decided it was an obvious unthinkable evil and how could we have ever thought otherwise? When Jesus showed up, He upgraded the Law of Moses and taught principles for self-improvement and eternal life, but disappointed the Jews waiting for a Messiah by declining to do anything about the oppression and atrocities of the Roman government.

And then there are the Apostle Paul's comments about women. He clearly assigned women an inferior position to their husbands, but he did tell men to be nice and love their wives. Maybe he was just speaking his own sexist opinions, as many assume, but I'm willing to consider that maybe it was legitimately good, even inspired advice for the time and maybe it improved women's lives - and yet even then, it's inadequate for the twenty-first century and doesn't need to be defended as if it were written yesterday.

A Muslim couple came and spoke to a class I was in once. Among other things, they said that when Islam began, it was very progressive for the time on women's rights. The problem, they said, is when adherents stick with that origin and refuse to make any further progress. I like that thought and I think it also applies to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was ironically more feminist in the nineteenth century than the twentieth, perhaps as much because of as in spite of polygamy. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that the Church's teachings on gender roles have never changed, or feel compelled to defend wrong or at least obsolete attitudes and ideas as the Lord's will. With that in mind, I want to look at a couple of things that have changed and may need to continue to change. I should note that to my knowledge, the majority of Latter-day Saint women, and certainly the majority I've talked to personally about feminist stuff, feel happy with and empowered by their status in the Church, and I'm not trying to say they're wrong to feel that way or convince them not to feel that way. But I do think they deserve more.

In the nineteenth century, the Utah territory gave women the right to vote before anywhere else in the United States except Wyoming (until the federal government, in the process of persecuting the Church over polygamy, took it away). Throughout most of the country, men argued that women didn't need to vote because they would just vote the same as their husbands or because they had "moral authority" as a counterpart to men's actual authority. The idea that women don't need the same rights and privileges as men because they're special has, unfortunately, polluted our own rhetoric within the Church whenever someone wonders why they can't be ordained to priesthood offices, but at least we let them vote. And it was much easier for women to obtain a divorce in Utah than the rest of the country. And Brigham Young encouraged them to get jobs outside the home - more on that later. Martha Hughes Cannon took that advice to heart, becoming a physician and later defeating her own husband to become the first female state senator in the United States. She famously said, "A plural wife is not half as much a slave as a single wife. If her husband has four wives, she has three weeks of freedom every single month."

Certainly it was still a patriarchal religion and you could point out plenty of misogyny in the nineteenth-century Church as in the nineteenth-century everywhere else, but all things considered I think it did pretty good. The Victorian gender roles associated with it today largely settled in after it abandoned polygamy and tried to prove to everyone else that it subscribed to traditional American values like Victorian gender roles.

On Women in Marriage
1973

For convenience, let's jump all the way to 1973. The February 1973 Ensign carried an article called "Strengthening the Patriarchal Order in the Home". The what now? Brent A. Barlow explained. He was a BYU professor (now retired), so not a member of the church hierarchy, but clearly his ideas weren't entirely foreign or revolutionary or he wouldn't have been allowed to print them in the Church's magazine. To start off, he noted some findings "that in one area of America, only one marriage in five was male-dominant, one was female-dominant, and the remaining three were democratic, with decision making, dominance, and deference either mutually or alternately shared. If the results and statistics of this particular study are representative of American marriages, it would mean that (1) for every male-dominant marriage in the United States, there is a female-dominant marriage, and (2) the female has equal or superior power in many contemporary American marriages. While the statistics may be questioned, the trend seems evident."

So already the implication is pretty obvious: the proper form of marriage is, in his own words, "male-dominated". And in fairness, he quoted some other people to back himself up. He quoted Dr. Edward J. Rydman, who warned in part, "The shift from the authoritarian to a more equalitarian family has profoundly affected the position of the head of the family as women have entered the economic marketplace in ever-increasing numbers and especially as even larger numbers of mothers take their place in offices, assembly lines, and other occupations and professions" and "As woman challenges the authority of man, so youth challenges the authority of the family and all other related social institutions." He quoted the Apostle Paul and the Book of Genesis. He quoted President Joseph F. Smith, who said in part, "The patriarchal order is of divine origin and will continue throughout time and eternity. There is, then, a particular reason why men, women and children should understand this order and this authority in the households of the people of God, and seek to make it what God intended it to be, a qualification and preparation for the highest exaltation of his children."

At this point I ask, if it "will continue throughout time and eternity", how come I've been in the Church for twenty-seven years and literally never heard of it until less than three weeks ago when I watched an interview with historian Taylor Petrie talking about how you never hear about it anymore? Okay, maybe someone was talking about it when I was a baby and I just don't remember. We'll say twenty-two years to be safe. But still. Okay, so maybe the patriarchal order of marriage is still in effect, but we don't use that particular terminology because it will upset the feminists.

Dr. Barlow explained why a democratic or "equalitarian" marriage just won't work: "Imagine, for example, the confusion that would result if two bishops were appointed over your particular ward and the first one got up in sacrament meeting and announced that the following Sunday the sacrament meeting would be held one hour earlier. While he was making his announcement, suppose the second bishop stood up and expressed his desire that the sacrament meeting be held at the original time. With two people presiding, would democratic principles work? Suppose you had two stake presidents, two elders quorum presidents, two Sunday School presidents, two Primary and Relief Society presidents presiding over each of the priesthood quorums, groups, and auxiliaries. How would the Church function? Would 'law and order' prevail? Similarly, should two people preside over each other in a marriage, particularly when one holds the priesthood and has been divinely designated to preside?"

Fun fact: Young Single Adult wards, such as I've been a part of since I was eighteen, often temporarily shrink and consolidate during Christmas break and summer vacation when college students go home. If memory serves correctly, at one time I've had as many as four bishops sitting on the stand in sacrament meeting. I know I've had three. And do you want to know how they surmounted this insurmountable problem? Wait, make sure you sit down for this. It's going to blow your freaking mind. Are you ready? Okay. Ahem. The bishops took turns running church meetings and activities. I'll wait a moment for you to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Of course, Dr. Barlow also quoted plenty of scriptures to explain that just because the man is in charge doesn't mean he gets to be a dick about it (paraphrased). He needs to love and respect his wife. Great. This article still makes me want to throw up. He noted toward the end, "By understanding the patriarchal order of marriage, a young Latter-day Saint man will be selective in choosing a wife who understands the manner in which he is to preside during their marriage. Conversely, a young Latter-day Saint woman will be more selective in choosing a husband who will preside without 'unrighteous dominion.'" Eh... I think I'd rather choose a wife who won't expect me to be her father, but thanks for the advice.

1976-7

I couldn't help but note the contrast when, a few days after the above article, I read about Church Historian Leonard J. Arrington's marriage with Grace Fort Arrington in his diary. He was writing lengthy recollections of various aspects of his life for his biographer to use. Though unshakable in his faith, he was a raging liberal compared to the rest of the church hierarchy at the time because of his intellectual perspectives, willingness to call out bull---- when he saw it, and radical philosophy of being honest about church history instead of only sharing the warm fuzzy parts. He's exactly the kind of guy I admire and want to emulate. So how did this closet apostate incorporate the "patriarchal order of marriage" into his life before, during and after Dr. Barlow's article?

On October 31, 1976, he wrote in his diary, "Let me begin by saying that at every stage of our marriage she has been an integral part of it.... We have taken all our vacations together, have made all our decisions as a team; have talked over every important matter that pertains to either or both of us. I do not think it could be said that ours was anything but a cooperative family in which each of us played an equal role in the decision-making process. Neither dominated the other.

"A second comment is that Grace has and has had a strong personality and character. She has not allwed me to dominate things; she has not 'given in;' she has not been submissive. She stands up for what she believes and has not been hesitant to make decisions in my absence or acquiescence.

"Once she decided to love me, she has been completely loyal, just as, I hope, I have been completely loyal to her. Because we are both sure of the respect and love and admiration of the other, we have not feared to tease, to jest, to speak up, to speak down. We have felt perfectly secure in our position."

Grace confirmed this account in an excerpt from her 1977 memoir I'm Glad My House Burned Down: The Personal Story of Grace Fort Arrington which was also included in her husband's diary: "Whenever decisions were to be made that in any way affected our lives, Leonard always talked over with me the alternative possibilities, and we discussed them thoroughly before any decision was made as to what he would or should do. He wanted me to be in on the decision, and he always respected my judgment and feelings. He has always kept me fully informed about our financial condition and we have always had a joint bank account. He has never been concerned about how much I spent, and I have reciprocated this trust by trying to be a thrifty housewife. I can't imagine life without Leonard."

Sounds ghastly. No wonder their three children became rebellious delinquents and died of drug overdoses in their early twenties. Oh wait, that didn't happen.

1982

So how did the patriarchal order of marriage hold up almost a decade later? In September 1982, the Ensign carried another article on "Marriage and the Patriarchal Order", this one by Elder Dean L. Larsen of the Presidency of the Seventy. Though his position as an author was more authoritative than Dr. Barlow's, his approach was less so, opening with a disclaimer: "These comments on the importance of the patriarchal order in marriage represent my personal views. They are expressed in the hope that they will be helpful to those who are married or who are contemplating marriage." This article doesn't hold up for me either, but it is light-years better than the previous one and Elder Larsen seems like a lot more likeable guy, so I won't spend too much time dissecting it. I will, however, quote a noteworthy excerpt in full:

"We often associate the patriarchal order with the times of Abraham and the Old Testament patriarchs. Perhaps it is inevitable, therefore, that we think of some of the conditions of the patriarchal order as being similar to those that are described in the Old Testament record, particularly as these things relate to relationships between men and women - husbands and wives. One cannot read this record without receiving the impression that women of that time generally played a very submissive and secondary role. They are infrequently mentioned as individuals and personalities and are often not even included in the census of the people. A superficial reading of the Old Testament account can easily leave one with the feeling that women were the property of men, consigned simply to do the bidding of their husbands and masters. There was much about the culture and the customs of ancient Israel that contributed to this general impression, and occasionally we encounter men of our own time who have allowed their knowledge of those ancient customs to influence their view of the patriarchal order.

"Recently I was visited in my office by a young woman at whose forthcoming temple marriage I had been invited to officiate. She was distraught and tearful and disclosed that she had some serious questions about whether she should go ahead with the marriage. As we discussed the reasons for these questions, the young prospective bride told me of a conversation she had had the previous evening with her fiancé. In a fashion uncharacteristic of their relationship, he had, at the insistence of his father, he said, laid down the law and the conditions that would have to prevail in their marriage. He was to be the unquestioned authority. His word would be law. She was to be willing to submit to his rule. It was important, he said, that she understand these conditions which would now be imposed on her by covenant in the temple ceremony.

"It was interesting to me that this young man, who had won the hand and the heart of his sweetheart through a loving and gentle courtship, now was constrained to impose a strict dominion upon her. In so doing he was appealing to his misunderstanding of the patriarchal order, for there could hardly have been a greater distortion or misrepresentation of the actual conditions that must prevail within that order.

"One whose view of the husband-wife relationship is based upon prevailing customs and culture of the Old Testament people is capable of creating much unhappiness for himself, his wife, and his family. To qualify his view, he should give careful consideration to the counsel of prophetic leaders who have taken pains to instruct us correctly in these matters."

Here's where I think we as a people have long made a substantial error. Elder Larsen clearly recognized that the Old Testament version of the principle was inadequate, and even that the 1973 version of the principle was inadequate, yet insisted that the principle itself was good. I think that if a principle looks sexist and can easily be misunderstood or warped to be sexist, the most obvious explanation is that it's just sexist. And in that case, we should recognize it as such and reject it instead of splitting hairs about why it's not really sexist. The most obvious explanation isn't always correct. Maybe Elder Larsen was right and I'm wrong. But the superficial similarity between this ideal of marriage and the subjugation of women to men in virtually every culture in history is a bit too much for me to accept as coincidence.

Now here's a fun fact. If you type "patriarchal order of marriage" into a standard search engine, these two Ensign articles about it will be among the top results, if not the top results as they are for me. If you type "patriarchal order of marriage" into the Church website search engine, they won't even show up. I'm sure this is intentional. I'm sure people behind the scenes made a conscious decision to distance the Church from this teaching that "will continue throughout time and eternity". I do agree that because these articles appeared in the magazine they need to be on the website for the sake of honesty, but not in such a way as to actually influence people's marriages. I think they should just include a disclaimer on each explaining that the contents do not accurately represent the current teachings of the Church. But such a blunt acknowledgement that the Church's teachings have changed would make a few heads explode.

While the phrase "patriarchal order of marriage" was not used, the teaching was, as Elder Larsen hinted, codified into temple rituals during the time of these articles (and up until a couple years ago). In the initiatory, women were anointed to become queens and priestesses unto their husbands. In the endowment, they covenanted to obey the law of their husbands, until 1990 when they started covenanting to obey the law of the Lord, and to hearken to the counsel of their husbands, as their husband hearkened unto the counsel of the Father, which means essentially the same thing but upset the feminists a little bit less. There was no reciprocal promise of men to their wives. They made all their covenants directly with God. In fairness, the covenants were contingent on men being righteous and obedient themselves and could not reasonably be used to justify abuse. And in fairness, the majority of women (but not all) either just didn't care or explained it to themselves in a way that made sense to them. But it still. I see no reason why I should be responsible for a grown woman's salvation, or why she should mediate her relationship with God through me.

1995

On September 23, 1995, in response to ongoing court battles over same-sex marriage in Hawaii, President Gordon B. Hinckley announced "The Family: A Proclamation to the World", which summarized the Church's beliefs on gender, marriage, children and so on. Since then it has been quoted perhaps more often than any other uncanonized document. One paragraph reads in part, "By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed."

This paragraph has caused some heartache, but it's actually a lot more vague and flexible than most other statements that have been made on the division of gender roles, so I can live with it. Taylor Petrie, the guy who introduced me to the "patriarchal order of marriage" (are you sick of that phrase yet?) in the first place, points to it as codifying an awkward transitional stage between that model and the current model that enshrines heterosexuality instead of patriarchy as the heart of the marriage doctrine. Fathers "preside", yet fathers and mothers are "equal partners". That makes no sense unless you assume creative definitions for "preside" and "equal partners" - and even if one argues that the Church uses such definitions, this document is addressed to the world, so they need to be explained and they aren't. If one person has authority over another, however benevolent, they are not equal partners. But even if they are, the entire point of Dr. Barlow's 1973 article was that fathers and mothers should not be equal partners, so the teaching on marriage has changed.

I wonder how these roles are even expected to continue into the next life, as seems implied by the huge emphasis on eternal heterosexual Latter-day Saint temple marriage. Heavenly Father, according to Latter-day Saint theology, has a wife, and is the model for us to aspire to. But what does Heavenly Mother, a literal goddess with co-ownership of everything in the universe, need Her husband to provide Her with? What does She need to be protected from? Right, according to some people we don't talk much about Her because Heavenly Father wants to protect Her from saying mean things about Her. That makes no sense. That would be like if I protected my wife by making her stay home 24/7 with no internet access, but I still told people she existed so they could still say mean things about her if they really wanted to. Or it would be like if we had ten kids, and maybe one or two of them would be rude to her, so she preferred to cut off all contact with all of them. Ridiculous. On the flip side, am I really expected to believe that Heavenly Father is lacking in any quality or skill like nurturing, or lacks the time to do it, and needs a wife to complement Him in that regard? So these roles seem kind of short-sighted to me.

We as a people also frequently ignore the reality that no two men are the same and no two women are the same. No generalization about men's personalities or women's brains holds true 100% of the time, so I'm not sure what are supposed to be the crucial eternal traits of each gender. When I was in LDSSA years ago, the institute teachers rotated through to give us weekly lessons, and one gave a lesson on women and the priesthood. I don't remember anything else he said, but I remember he didn't bring up the fallacious "priesthood = motherhood" equivalency, and he said, "We have these stereotypes in the Church of 'Men are like this and women are like this,' and sometimes they're true and often they're not." Such rare candor made quite an impression on me. Or as Codex told Tinkerballa in "The Guild", "You have the maternal instincts of a wood chipper."

The Family Proclamation is published under the endorsement of the two highest governing bodies of the Church, but nobody knows who actually wrote it. We do know that women weren't consulted. Relief Society general presidency first counselor Chieko Okazaki, another raging liberal remembered and loved for her words of comfort to people who felt marginalized in the Church, said in an interview with Gregory Prince for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought ten years later, "I’m on several community boards, and sometimes I’m the only woman there or one of two or three women. I’m on the YWCA advisory board; I’m on the advisory board for the University of Utah Graduate School of Social Work; and I’m on the Belle Spafford Chair board. If I got the message that I was supposed to just sit there and listen to the men, I’d quit that board. I’d say, 'What am I here for?' I speak up a lot in all of these board meetings.

"In contrast, in 1995 when 'The Family: A Proclamation to the World' was written, the Relief Society presidency was asked to come to a meeting. We did, and they read this proclamation. It was all finished. The only question was whether they should present it at the priesthood meeting or at the Relief Society meeting. It didn’t matter to me where it was presented. What I wanted to know was, 'How come we weren’t consulted?'"

Gregory Prince: "You didn't even know it was in the works?"

Chieko Okazaki: "No. They just asked us which meeting to present it in, and we said, 'Whatever President Hinckley decides is fine with us.' He decided to do it at the Relief Society meeting. The apostle who was our liaison said, 'Isn’t it wonderful that he made the choice to present it at the Relief Society meeting?' Well, that was fine, but as I read it I thought that we could have made a few changes in it.

"Sometimes I think they get so busy that they forget that we are there. It’s different from the time when Belle Spafford was president of the Relief Society. She was her own boss, as I read her life. And so was Florence Jacobsen. There’s a great deal of difference now."

2004

In his April 2004 General Conference talk "Fatherhood, an Eternal Calling", Elder L. Tom Perry of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles said, "Remember, brethren, that in your role as leader in the family, your wife is your companion. As President Gordon B. Hinckley has taught: 'In this Church the man neither walks ahead of his wife nor behind his wife but at her side. They are coequals.' Since the beginning, God has instructed mankind that marriage should unite husband and wife together in unity. Therefore, there is not a president and vice president in a family. We have co-presidents working together eternally for the good of their family. They are united together in word, in deed, and in action as they lead, guide, and direct their family unit. They are on equal footing. They plan and organize the affairs of the family jointly and unanimously as they move forward."

The particular word choice of "co-presidents" was removed from the printed version, but the assertion that "there is not a president and vice president in a family" remained so I don't see what difference that makes. Anyway, the whole idea is that they're equal. He of course quoted from the Family Proclamation and asserted in this same talk that the father is the leader and head of his family, but from this description I'm left to wonder what that even means if everything is, in fact, done "jointly and unanimously" with his wife, including "lead[ing], guid[ing], and direct[ing]". The father is the leader, but the mother leads just as much as he does, but she's not the leader. And he doesn't walk ahead of her, even though that's what "leading" means. I just don't get it.

The co-president business is interesting too. One reason this particular quote caught my attention is that Elder Perry's model of co-presidents in a marriage flatly contradicts Dr. Barlow's rhetorical argument that "two stake presidents, two elders quorum presidents, two Sunday School presidents, two Primary and Relief Society presidents" cannot coexist. And notice anything familiar about the word "president"? I'll give you a hint - cover the last two letters. Yes, a president is, etymologically, one who presides. (I'll grant that some presidents do little more than play golf, say stupid things on Twitter, and incite armed insurrections by spreading lies, but that's not normal.) If the wife is a co-president, then by definition just as much as the husband does. And even if we ditch that particular word, the fact remains that in Elder Perry's model he isn't the president and she the vice president, so I don't see what difference that makes.

I don't say this to mock Elder Perry or anyone else who preaches such laudable ideals which I agree with. But it sure looks to me like we as a people are trying really hard to mesh patriarchy and egalitarianism together and pretend they aren't mutually incompatible, instead of disavowing the former. We quietly discontinued using some of the words that were used in the 1970s or earlier, and kept using others but decided they mean different things than the sexist things they obviously meant to the people who used them before. And we pretend that these principles haven't changed and will continue to not change for eternity. If that were true, the Church wouldn't need to hide older articles on the topic of marriage from its search engine, and it wouldn't have removed all remaining overt patriarchal language from the temple rituals in 2019. I don't think there's intentional dishonesty here from people at any level, but I think we're kidding ourselves and I think it's the wrong approach.

On Women Working Outside the Home
1869

According to the Journal of Discourses, on July 18, 1869 President Brigham Young said, "As I have often told my sisters in the Female Relief societies, we have sisters here who, if they had the privilege of studying, would make just as good mathematicians or accountants as any man; and we think they ought to have the privilege to study these branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. We believe that women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but that they should stand behind the counter, study law or physic [medicine], or become good book-keepers and be able to do the business in any counting house, and all this to enlarge their sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation. These, and many more things of equal utility are incorporated in our religion, and we believe in and try to practice them.”

I'm not suggesting that President Young was an out-and-out feminist - he said some sexist things like "A woman is the dirtiest creature, dirtier than a man" - but he also said things like this, so let's give him credit where it's due. His attitude toward women's employment may have been facilitated by polygamy. I know there were instances of women taking turns looking after the children while their sister-wives went to college back east. But even at its peak, only 20-30% of Latter-day Saint families actually practiced polygamy, and President Young was certainly aware of that when he made his remarks.

Strangely, most of this quote was reprinted in the New Era (the magazine for teenagers) in October 1974 in an article titled "'She Shall Be Praised': Latter-day Prophets Speak to Women", less than two years after Dr. Barlow lamented in another church magazine that women working outside the home were destroying the family unit. And the Church at this time was emphatically more on board with Dr. Barlow's attitude than President Young's. Leonard J. Arrington wrote in his diary on January 23, "Carol Lynn [Pearson] left with me a copy of her original unexpurgated draft of Mormon women of the 1870s which is due to appear in the February issue of the Ensign. A number of things in this were removed by editors of the Ensign for publication purposes. By and large they consisted of items which would seem to encourage women to leave the home and enter professional or business careers." This would have been in the same issue as Dr. Barlow's article (though Sister Pearson's article ended up postponed indefinitely because of her controversial support for the Equal Rights Amendment) and that would have been funny. So how did Brigham Young's quote slip past the New Era editors? Did someone get fired?

1977-1987

At a fireside in San Antonio, Texas on December 3, 1977, President Spencer W. Kimball said, "[Y]ou are to become a career woman in the greatest career on earth - that of homemaker, wife, and mother. It was never intended by the Lord that married women should compete with men in employment. They have a far greater and more important service to render....

"The husband is expected to support his family and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment. Her place is in the home, to build the home into a heaven of delight.

"Numerous divorces can be traced directly to the day when the wife left the home and went out into the world into employment. Two incomes raise the standard of living beyond its norm. Two spouses working prevent the complete and proper home life, break into the family prayers, create an independence which is not cooperative, causes distortion, limits the family and frustrates the children already born....

“I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café.

"No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother - cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children.

"Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home wives, to your children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and unembarrassed help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls who anxiously wait.

"When you have fully complemented your husband in home life and borne the children, growing up full of faith, integrity, responsibility and goodness, then you have achieved your accomplishments supreme, without peer, and you will be the envy through time and eternity.”

On February 22, 1987, in a fireside at BYU entitled "To the Mothers in Zion", his successor President Ezra Taft Benson said, "Now, my dear mothers, knowing of your divine role to bear and rear children and bring them back to Him, how will you accomplish this in the Lord's way? I say the Lord's way, because it is different from the world's way.

"The Lord clearly defined the roles of mothers and fathers in providing for and rearing a righteous posterity. In the beginning, Adam - not Eve - was instructed to earn the bread by the sweat of his brow. Contrary to conventional wisdom, a mother's calling is in the home, not in the market place.

"Again, in the Doctrine and Covenants, we read: 'Women have claim on their husbands for their maintenance, until their husbands are taken' (D&C 83:2). This is the divine right of a wife and mother. She cares for and nourishes her children at home. Her husband earns the living for the family, which makes this nourishing possible. With that claim on their husbands for their financial support, the counsel of the Church has always been for mothers to spend their full time in the home in rearing and caring for their children.

"We realize also that some of our choice sisters are widowed and divorced and that others find themselves in unusual circumstances where, out of necessity, they are required to work for a period of time. But these instances are the exception, not the rule.

"In a home where there is an able-bodied husband, he is expected to be the breadwinner. Sometimes we hear of husbands who, because of economic conditions, have lost their jobs and expect their wives to go out of the home and work even though the husband is still capable of providing for his family. In these cases, we urge the husband to do all in his power to allow his wife to remain in the home caring for the children while he continues to provide for his family the best he can, even though the job be is able secure may not be ideal and family budgeting will have to be tighter.

"Our beloved prophet Spencer W. Kimball had much to say about the role of mothers in the home and their callings and responsibilities. I am impressed tonight to share with you some of his inspired pronouncements. I fear that much of his counsel has gone unheeded, and families have suffered because of it. But I stand this evening as a second witness to the truthfulness of what President Spencer W. Kimball said. He spoke as a true prophet of God."

He quoted extensively from President Kimball's fireside address, which is why I link these two talks together. I could include dozens more quotes along these lines, but this blog post has gotten longer than I intended already. Many such quotes are compiled in the chapter "Mothers' Employment Outside the Home" in the current Eternal Marriage Student Manual. President Benson's talk was distributed as a pamphlet, but the pamphlet is now out of print and the talk is not available from official church sources in any form. Now, of course, just because Brigham Young told women to do one thing and later prophets told them to do something else doesn't mean one or the others were wrong. Circumstances change, and prophetic instructions can also change. If you go to President Benson's talk on YouTube, you can read a couple comments by women testifying that following his counsel blessed their lives. I won't reprint them here because, again, length.

I do have to question, though - do we no longer "believe that women are useful, not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies", as Brigham Young taught? How could "enlarg[ing] their sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large" be part of "the design of their creation" in 1869 but not in 1977 or 1987? If "it was never intended by the Lord that married women should compete with men in employment", why did the Lord give women the same breadth and depth of intellects, talents, and ambitions as men? Intellects, talents, and ambitions which are in no way prerequisites to "cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children"? Some women want to be full-time homemakers, and there's nothing wrong with that. But plenty of others feel a natural yearning to pursue other paths in life. Are they wrong to feel that way? I don't and can't believe that they are. Again, the coincidental similarity of divine gender roles to historical subjugation of women is too much for me to swallow. It's completely one-sided. Men aren't the ones being asked to shelve their natural ambitions to fit into a certain role. They never are.

In "Prophet's Talk Prompts Examination of Role of Women", well worth reading in its entirety, the March 1987 edition of Sunstone chronicled a cross-section of the varied and often polarized responses to President Benson's talk. I'll just requote the final quoted paragraph from the keynote address at the BYU Women's Conference by university president Jeffrey R. Holland's wife Patricia: "Obviously the Lord has created us with different personalities, as well as differing degrees of energy, interest, health, talent, and opportunity. So long as we are committed to righteousness and living a life of faithful devotion, we should celebrate these divine differences, knowing they are a gift from God. We must not feel so frightened; we must not be so threatened and insecure; we must not need to find exact replicas of ourselves in order to feel validated as a woman of worth. There are many things over which we can be divided, but one thing is needful for our unity - the empathy and compassion of the living Son of God."

1995

As noted in the previous section, "The Family: A Proclamation to the World" assigns men the primary responsibility for providing for the family and women the primary responsibility for nurturing the children. Though the obvious spirit of the document is in line with quotes that tell women not to work outside the home, it doesn't state that outright and remains open to a fair amount of individual interpretation and adaptation.

2010

Neylan McBaine is a moderate Latter-day Saint feminist who doesn't push for any doctrinal changes or women's ordination, but seeks changes within the existing church structure to increase women's role and visibility. In an LDS Living interview published September 19, 2020, she reflected on her work as a brand strategist for the Church's "I'm a Mormon" ad campaign: "Yeah, I was really grateful to have that experience at Boncom [Bonneville Communications] and it kind of fell into my lap. I got a call I think the day Mormon.org launched, from one of their brand strategists and he said, 'You know, we're here brainstorming a new campaign for the Church and we're a bunch of dudes sitting around a table and we're trying to figure out how to talk to everybody, not just other dudes.' So, he was familiar with The Mormon Women Project and reached out to me because of that. Ironically, he wasn't familiar with the fact that I had just spent seven years in Silicon Valley doing digital marketing and brand strategy. So, I went in with I think more thorough qualifications than they might have expected initially, which was great...

"So it was absolutely essential for growth that we shed some of that, some of those cultural trappings. And it was a painful transition and the transition is still happening. I remember one of my first days at Boncom after we had launched some of the early video portraits, our managing director sat us down and read us a letter that had been written by a man to us generally, that said, 'My wife has been on the couch in the depression for the last couple of days because the Church's fancy PR agency is showing a woman who has pursued a career, whereas my wife gave up her education and her pursuit so that she could raise a family the way the prophet told her to. And now, you know, you're telling her that she didn't have to do that, she didn't have to make that sacrifice.' And real anger and real confusion. And, you know, I got that, I got that. One of the things that prompted me to start the MWP was this tension that I felt growing up between my mom being a woman who did not have a temple marriage, a single mother who [had a] professional, international career being held up in all the Church videos and singing for President Hinckley's birthday parties, and I was on the fireside circuit, right? And got to meet several of the apostles, which was wonderful for my personal testimony - and again, back to the sort of sense of myself as a woman in the Church. But I did recognize the hypocrisy of that, especially in the 1980's and 90's, when we were not very far from President Benson's call to women to stay home. And so I think women in the Church have always kind of suffered from that tension and the 'I'm a Mormon' campaign and things like the Mormon Women Project have been efforts to alleviate that tension, and to say, again, that balance between what is a cultural practice or what is obedience to a particular cultural expectation or a narrowly prescribed role versus all the rest of life, right? And all these other things that we can do as women, and all the other ways to write our scripts. And I think it's been a really important pendulum swing for all of us who are trying to live in the modern world and still recognize our eternal identities."

Though the "women's place is in the home" rhetoric has far from disappeared, and old quotes are still readily available on the Church's website, it's been a lot quieter in the last two or three decades. The vagueness and flexibility of the Family Proclamation marked a severe tonal shift. Not by coincidence, the "have as many kids as possible" rhetoric and the "birth control is evil" rhetoric have been dialed way back too. There are a couple of obvious reasons for this: a. if a talk like President Benson's were given today, at least half of millennial and Gen Z members would leave the Church, and b. modern economic realities have made it impossible for most couples to support a family on one income. What earlier prophets called exceptional circumstances are now the norm. In my case, God specifically told me to a teacher, which He knows as well as I do is the most underpaid profession in the country, so until I'm on the bestseller list it's all but inevitable that my wife will work outside the home and He has nobody to blame for that but Himself.

The older rhetoric has never been repudiated. It was, however, flatly contradicted and/or superseded by the "I'm a Mormon" campaign showing off women with successful careers outside the home. Of course these women would have been allowed to have careers outside the home at any point in church history, judgment and gossip from their ward members notwithstanding, but holding them up to the world as public examples of Morm- er, Latter-day Saints in good standing was something else altogether. It sent a clear and deliberate message to curious outsiders and prospective converts that the Church considers women with careers outside the home perfectly normal and acceptable, not an unfortunate emergency measure. Was this message an honest one? It wouldn't have been twenty years earlier.

2021

I'm sorry, I promise I'm going to wrap this up soon but I can't help remarking on one more thing before I do. I recently posted in the Facebook group "Doctrine, History and Culture of the Church of Jesus Christ" a question about whether the Church's teachings against women working outside the home were correct and if so, why they're no longer emphasized. Predictably, I got dozens of responses from all over the spectrum, including some scanned pages from BYU professor Rodney Turner's 1972 book Woman and the Priesthood that make Brent A. Barlow look like Gloria Steinem. ("The political and social emancipation of women is due more to their growing economic independence than to any other single factor. In this respect they are not unlike children who, finding themselves gainfully employed, promptly demand greater freedom of action than they previously enjoyed." Really, Dr. Turner? Really? Also, his argument that the business world is bad for men's health and thus even worse for poor delicate women's health is actually an argument against capitalism, but that's none of my business.) Aside from that aside, I'll just focus on one response from Okorie Odege of Ohafia, Nigeria that really struck me.

"1 And it came to pass that after I, the Lord God, had driven them out, that Adam began to till the earth, and to have dominion over all the beasts of the field, and to eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, as I the Lord had commanded him. And Eve, also, his wife, did labor with him. (Moses 5:1)
Therefore,
That teaching is not scriptural, if it has ever been taught. When I newly joined the Church about 25 years ago some members used to tell me that the Church teaches that wives should not work, but since then I haven't encountered such teaching."

Brother Odege quoted the same verse that President Benson alluded to, but included a part that the latter might have missed: "And Eve, also, his wife, did labor with him." In doing so he presented a perspective I'd never heard before. Him being in Nigeria was also significant. Although Nigerians have expressed interest in the Church since 1946, it's only been officially established there since late 1978, after priesthood ordination and temple ordinances were reopened to people of black African descent. The Church is still young there, and growth has been exponential, so it's got a huge proportion of first and second generation members. Not like Utah where a whole toxic culture has evolved around members who can trace their heritage in the Church back to the 18somethings. And most Nigerians, like most Africans, don't bring a lot of intellectual concerns into their faith. For example, while many African-Americans are deeply troubled by the aforementioned priesthood ban and why it happened, Africans tend to have the attitude that it doesn't matter because it's over now. And Nigeria is hardly the worst country in the world with regard to women's rights, but it's not among the most progressive by a long shot either.

These are generalizations, but accurate ones nonetheless. So what I'm getting at here is that if a convert in Nigeria comes by the conclusion that "That teaching is not scriptural, if it has ever been taught" - and in all likelihood comes by it honestly and objectively, not out of an a priori desire to mold teachings to feminist ideals or current secular notions of equality, and not by simply rejecting things that don't rub him the right way - I think that says a lot about what the Church is actually promulgating as it spreads around the world. Speaking of which, European and Canadian members don't have a problem with bikinis or socialism. But that's a topic for another day.

Conclusion (Yes, Finally)

I don't know how to make sense of this mess I've presented, but to give it some semblance of cohesiveness I'll go back to my original thesis with yet another example. Another temple ritual was changed in 2019, but in this case I'm not bothered by the previous form and don't feel like the change undermines anything significant. In this case I think I understand. Originally, during the husband-wife sealing ceremony, the woman "gave" herself to the man, and he "received" her. This ceremony was written/revealed in a culture where women were traditionally given to their husbands by their fathers. They went from being their father's property to being their husband's property, which is why to this day most married women exchange their father's last name for their husband's last name, which is why I will strongly discourage my wife from doing so, but of course I won't forbid her because that would defeat the purpose of feminism. This legal and social status is reflected in the language of Doctrine and Covenants Section 132 as it outlines the principle of eternal marriage, where I find the objectification of women far more disturbing than the polygamy per se. But it's like the Bible's approach to slavery.

In the sealing ceremony, however, women instead gave themselves. In that way it emphasized their autonomy and empowered them. And nowadays the culture of marriage is different, and while the nature of the sealing covenant has not changed, the language has been made more egalitarian. It probably wouldn't have hurt to do that a little sooner, but whatever. We can look at this of an example of a principle or a practice or a teaching that represented a step forward and served a purpose for a time, but eventually became inadequate. At this time it was replaced with something better instead of being defended as the Lord's eternal will. This process has ample scriptural precedent, it fits snugly into the concept of a "true and living church" founded on continuing revelation "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little", and I think we as a people should stop resisting it so often and doing mental gymnastics to pretend it doesn't happen or doesn't need to keep happening. We don't need to construct a false paradigm where our religion is simpler, more perfect, and more consistent than it actually is.

0 Comments