by Kay Gaisford

(When I was at lunch with Kay I mentioned that we were looking for posts for the HOPE blog that demonstrate success with gender equality in the church. Here is a short story she sent me about her experience).

When we lived in Valley Forge Ward in the 1980s, I attended a New Beginnings evening with my teenaged daughters. Our bishop had been called to be bishop a short time before and was giving what I believe was his first talk to the young women. He was a thoughtful, reflective person with a teenaged daughter of his own, and I was surprised that he spoke to the girls in a way that portrayed them mostly in terms of having a secondary position to men in the church. He described their spiritual life in terms of preparing themselves to be married in the temple and support a husband in his priesthood. In fact, his talk sounded exactly like the talk I had heard Carol Lynn Pearson parody at Sunstone that summer in her presentation, “A Walk in Pink Moccasins.”

Although he was not a close friend of mine and I didn’t know him well, I perceived the bishop to be a “teachable” person, willing to consider new ideas and perspectives. Within a few days I gave him the audio tape of Carol Lynn Pearson’s Sunstone presentation, “A Walk in Pink Moccasins,” cueing it to the start of the parody. It was a transformative experience for him. He told me it gave him a new perspective on the young women he had been interviewing. He had been surprised to have a number of the girls tell him that they were feeling depressed. He made the connection that perhaps the YW organization should devote efforts to helping the girls realize their personal potential. Within a few weeks, he called Lou Chandler, a professional working woman, as YW president—definitely a new kind of role model for the girls!

Lou adds:

“I can’t claim to have been a model YW president back then, but this bishop was, indeed, a model of “righteous dominion.” He exhibited kind and caring service, intelligent leadership, good humor in all things, the zeal and humility for continued learning, and tremendous spiritual strength. His example was inspiring. Alas, his tenure ended all too soon as his work required moving is family to DC. But, to this day, I still consider his example when I find myself in leadership positions.”

We are looking for more stories like this about experiences where women find ways to advocate for equality in the church. Please submit yours to info@ldswave.org.

by Kiskilili*

What Mormonism purports to offer is a unique relationship to deity (of a quality said to surpass what’s available in other denominations), the authorization to act on God’s behalf, and a personal self-understanding as inchoately and potentially divine.

I would argue these are some of the most breathtaking aspects of the faith. God values, validates, trusts, and acknowledges us, even in our weakness and inability, and he provides us the means for constructing a self-concept as a subject in relation to deity, both personally and existentially. This is what, for a Mormon, it means to be human.

Or, stated more precisely, this is what it means to be male and human.

For some of us the Church offers the stupefying prospect of becoming an eternal nothing, insignificant or nonexistent, cut off from the possiblity of relationships and from the raison d’être of the eternities: nurturing human progeny. Some of us are asked, as a religious act, not to accept the authority to act in God’s name but to defer it, to construe ourselves as objects rather than subjects and our value as contingent rather than inherent. We’re given scant institutional means for constructing a religious self-concept as beings in communion with the divine. Instead, our personal relation to deity is compromised by the presence of male intermediaries, and our existential relation to deity is nullified by Heavenly Mother’s profound absence.

Female Mormonism is a sort of negative space, an irreligion, not an opportunity for acknowledgment from God but a denial of it. If religion matters, and if women matter, this is a travesty.

[Some] raise the possibility that patriarchy (and correspondingly, I assume, androcentrism) may represent God’s will.

This could well be the case. It’s also why I left the Church. Not because of doubt, but because of faith: in God, temple, scripture, and priesthood. This is the searing irony: that my faith led me to give up on God. In the Church’s holiest spaces and most sacred texts I failed to find compelling evidence women are people in any meaningful sense. It’s the Church itself—not just disgruntled feminists—that insists gender matters. If the Church is right about what it fundamentally means to be female, I have no reason to stay; what I do hardly matters. If the Church is wrong, I have no reason not to leave.

Of course, the clear gendered implications of liturgy, scripture, and policy—that God endorses the blatant marginalization of females at every level and in every age—is simply unsayable in today’s political climate, and the Church has obligingly thrown us a barrage of palliative sops about women’s superlative value (often in reference to men), statements with painfully little reference to practice, rituals, or sacred texts and even less awareness of women’s experience.

I concede that many—maybe most—women are happy with the situation. I would argue it’s in spite of, not because of, these theological implications. Women are happy because they’ve trained themselves not to notice or they’ve found a way they’re comfortable rejecting it.

For those of us who can’t not notice and who can’t find an easy way out from under it, it matters because religion is about who and what we are and can be. And what some of us are is apparently appendages, afterthoughts, and auxiliaries.

And, quite likely, this will never really change in any way deeper than the cosmetic. Because the people with the power to change it—maybe human men, maybe a male Godhead—are, exactly because of that power, the very people who will never understand why it matters.

*This post is reproduced with the author’s permission. It originally appeared here.

by Chelsea, WAVE board member

The Hope Blog is a place of sharing and a place of action.

We encourage LDS women to share their personal experiences—successes and challenges—with church, faith, priesthood, patriarchy, womanhood, and feminism in a spirit of trust, openness, and faith.

We also encourage LDS women to promote action toward change by sharing stories of hope.  These can be best practices in creating local change or hopeful possibilities for changes in the future.

We intend this to be a place of non-judgment and inspiration.  We intend to focus on what is and what could be the best in LDS church.  We hope this will be a place where participants are striving for solutions that allow all to maintain faith and hope.

We realize these are tender topics and we encourage women to write about their discouraging and painful moments around these topics as well encouraging and hopeful moments.  We want to hear stories of things that feel broken and stories of things that feel whole.  Readers are encouraged to share ideas about how to make changes in our lives, our homes, and in our local congregations.

Please submit experiences and ideas to HOPEideas@ldswave.org and be respectful of others’ experiences in your correspondence.