My senior year at BYU was pretty darn lame.  But, you know, it was only lame because I made it lame with my panic.  You see, it was the first time I actually realized that I was going to be graduating…with a humanities degree…and I was still single…

The irony of the whole thing was that I was totally blindsided.  I was that girl who would shake her head sadly at those other girls in MFHD/ElementaryEd** who came to college to “get married.”

“You go to college to…GO TO COLLEGE,” I would intone philosophically at BBQ’s.

But, ya know what?  Come September 2005, I was in full scale panic.

Suddenly, and horribly, I realized that I was in denial.  That I was, and had always been, that girl.  I realized that, regardless of all my pontificating, I truly thought that I would meet a dude, get married my senior year, get my degree, and start a jet-set life as a lawyer/professor/doctor’s wife (like a flippin’ TAMN!).  And…that wasn’t happening.

Like I said, full-scale panic.  PANIC PANIC PANIC!  I was completely unprepared to think about what I actually wanted to do.  What I wanted.  I knew what I had always told people I wanted, but I realized that I had always told people knowing full well that I didn’t expect it to actually happen.

So, there I was, not knowing what in the world to do with myself, essentially pleading, “Please!  Someone!  Give my life a purpose!”  And no one came.

And I’m so grateful.

Because then I had to take myself seriously for the first time in my life.  I couldn’t just give lip service to those grad school dreams–I had to make them come true.  And I did–even as I desperately went through five quick-fire boyfriends in six months.  I was even hoping for a light-speed proposal the day before I left for Boston.  Clearly, I still had internalized the disturbing concept that, after college, anything I did without a husband was just marking time…wasting time…

You may want me to now say that moving to Boston, beginning a PhD, was the best decision I’d ever made in my life–that I felt validated and strong and happy.   Well, nope.  Boston was so hard.  It was so hard.  I’ve never felt so isolated in my life.  I spent over eight hours a day reading and writing.  On Sunday (even with LDS roommates), I found myself left behind and riding the T 45 minutes by myself to and from church in Harvard Square.  When I got there, I didn’t find a family of members, but rather a bloodthirsty and frighteningly smiley to-the-death competition for any male attention.  I had thought BYU was competitive…but it was the little leagues.

After a year, I had few friends.  But at least I had those few.  And one night, as we sat around the kitchen table, we talked about one of the few things we fell back on–dating and the impossibility of experiencing it in an LDS context.  You may think that that’s a pitiful thing, but I ask you to consider the power of loneliness.  We few women, ages 23 to 32, had our secular dreams.  We were in medical school, library school, law, and academia.  But, we were women too and wanted romance, love, a best friend to hold at night.  We knew, perhaps better than most ever realize, how the odds were stacked against us.  We knew that, if you wanted an LDS marriage or even a part-LDS marriage, your chances of finding a guy who you loved and who loved you back who also respected your beliefs…well…

I remember a few line-items from that conversation.  I still think about them a lot.

First, we all admitted feeling the same frustrations about an inability to control this aspect of our lives.  We were women who knew how to get what we wanted–through hard work.  But this…but love…no.  That is one thing no one can control through hard work or will or practice.  You can’t make someone love you.  You have to just hope they love you…and they usually won’t.  Yes, yes, “it just takes one.”  But how many others do you have to hope for before that?

Second,  and the title of my post, this was also the night I stopped using the word “blessed.”

I remember how it began.  Someone brought up a recently shared testimony–-a PhD student at MIT who had recently gotten engaged to an undergrad from BYU he had known for two weeks.  The narrative essentially went:

“I really wanted to get married, but I couldn’t find anyone [This was an especially nice thing for the 100+ single-women sitting with me in the congregation to hear].  So I thought, ‘What am I doing wrong?’   I realized that I needed to magnify my calling by spending more time doing family history/studying the scriptures another hour a day/home teaching three times a month/etc.  The day after I made this promise, I met_____________ and I knew she was the one.  Now we’re engaged and getting married this summer.  I’m so grateful for this blessing.”

Now, I don’t want to disparage this man’s story or experience.  I can never know if that is exactly what happened or not.  I’m not God, after all.  But, the thing is, this wasn’t an isolated experience.  After that retelling, everyone around the table could repeat another version.  Either they heard it from a friend, or a bishop had suggested that if they work harder in x then they would find a boyfriend.  I myself even had a bishop who, in an endorsement interview, advised me to find a boy I liked, smile a lot, and “touch his elbow.”  If I did this, then I would surely be married within a year.

Perhaps it’s human nature to try to explain events in a cause-effect way.  I can understand that.  A man makes a goal to try harder for God, he meets a girl, and they get married.  Therefore, the girl was a blessing from God (which was a super gross sentence for me to even write).

But, here’s the thing, what about all those people who make those goals, try for years and years…and never get that blessing?  You can’t assume that because you sneezed three times and then it started raining, that the same thing will happen for another person.  And what’s more, how dare you try to tell that person that, when the rain doesn’t come, it’s because they need to try harder.

You see, love is just a freak of nature, an accident.  Finding a loving spouse is just sheer, dumb luck.  No one “deserves” it more than someone else.  No one “earns” the right to have it.  The problem with these testimony stories is that they implant the assumption that those who are engaged have done something good and those who aren’t have not.

That is an inexcusable lie.

When I got engaged, two months before I left Boston, I didn’t walk into Relief Society like so many others–flashing my ring and bubbling over with loudly-squealing glee–because I had been there that night around the table, and I knew how it felt to see those rings and smiles.  I knew the thoughts of the lonely, “What’s wrong with me?  What am I not doing right?”

And I knew that the answer was:

“Absolutely nothing’s wrong with you.  We’re all just trying our best.  There’s no formula for getting this.  There’s no universal answer.  It’s not your clothes, your smile, your laugh.  It’s not that you’re “too smart” or “too intimidating.”  It’s not that you just need to pray just a little bit harder.  It’s not that you’re picky, or chubby, or that your hair isn’t cute enough.

It’s just sheer, dumb luck.

No one “deserves” this.  I don’t “deserve” this.  I know so many more who are kinder, lonelier, smarter, better than me.  I didn’t earn this by checking off a list.

It just happened.  I don’t know how.  And I don’t think there’s a reason why.  But I’m so happy.  And it hurts me that I am happy…because I don’t understand why I’m wearing this ring and not you–my beautiful friends with breaking hearts.

I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse…but this whole love thing is just a giant crap shoot.”

Being in Boston, single and 23, burned the word “blessing” out of me when it comes to love.  And sometimes, when I remember my time there, I pull Atticus to me, pressing him in my arms in the middle of the night and my eyes well up with grateful tears.  But he’s never heard me whisper that I feel “blessed.”  No.  I’ve only ever been able to bring myself to say, “I’m so lucky.  How am I so lucky?  I don’t know why I’ve been so lucky.”

And I feel that same indescribable joy and dull ache.

** This is, of course, a terrible stereotype that I would have gone to the grave insisting I never believed…but really, in my soul, I’m sad to say I actually did.

So sacred is Wombat in God’s plan that it may not even be mentioned in scripture, lest we sully its gentle name. Knowing the coarse insults to which his own name would be put, God has seen fit to limit the amount of light and knowledge we may garner about the sacred role and divine potential of the wombats around us. We do not speak often of a Heavenly Wombat in the Sky, but we are sure that there is one, as sure as we are that God keeps a well-appointed menagerie of dinosaurs, mastodons, and other extinct species, and that in heaven, kittens are kittens forever and never grow up into cats. We feel these things are true in the whisperings of the marsupial heart which beats in all of us who will nurture such better-evolved instincts.

You who are so fortunate to have a wombat which has deigned to grace your life with its presence, remember always the celestial responsibility afforded you by the privilege of associating with this sweet and sage marsupial. Treat it always with gentleness and respect; reverence its impressive claws for burrowing, its backwards-facing pouch, its nocturnal habits (though watching out especially for those claws; also keep in mind that wombats can use their hind legs to crush the skulls of predators).

Remember, the world would have wombats believe they are less than people because they are not allowed to vote, hold public office, own property, or work in most occupations, but we, through the restored gospel, know better. We recognize in wombats the divine role that is theirs, not to win prestige in human society, but to love and support the people around them; to provide an entertaining diversion, be super cute in YouTube videos, and adorn the internet (and the occasional zoo) with the kind of sweet, delightful presence that Wombat alone truly embodies. Shower love and affection on the wombats in your life. Feed them a variety of mixed wild grasses, give them rocks to sharpen their claws on, and sometimes scratch them just over the nose; they seem to like that. Do all these things, and when the final day of reckoning comes and you stand at the eternal bar with your Father, your Mother, and your Wombat-in-Heaven, you will not need to dig an extensive burrow-like system of tunnels to hide, in shame.

The Anglo-Saxons called the three days at the end of Holy Week swigdagas, the Still Days, when the church bells were silent and no Mass could be said. Ælfric of Eynsham wrote that Ne mot nan man secgan spell on þam þrim swigdagum (“Nor may any man say a sermon on the three still days”)¹, suggesting that not only Mass, but preaching in general was forbidden. I imagine that devotion during these days, at the apogee of Lent, became an intensely personal thing, a retrospective and symbolic time of mourning for one’s God as well as one’s own sin. I imagined, in the Lutheran parking lot, looking up to the stars behind the silhouettes of the trees, that this was how the Anglo-Saxons felt as the swigdagas set in.

Lent this year was tumultuous, in a good way. For months and months (and months), from last spring to this, I had found myself struggling for a reason to get out of bed on Sunday mornings; church had become an ordeal of anxiety and melancholy, and eventually, rage. I persevered for a long time, trying to go every week even if I was late or couldn’t stand to stay. I made a New Years resolution not to raise my hand in Sunday School or Relief Society, in the hopes that my staying quiet would ease my way in a singles branch that no longer wanted me.  And after a Sacrament Meeting talk that was clearly and smugly directed at me and my pride and my liberalism and overeducation and philosophies-of-women, something in me snapped. I realized that just walking into the church parking lot was enough to send me spinning into a miserable fury; I was angry all the time, whether I was at church or not, whether there was something Mormon in front of me or not.

So I decided to give up Mormonism for Lent. The week before Ash Wednesday, in a moment of either clarity or reckless abandon, I ordered a mocha at the coffee shop on campus where I hold office hours. Sipping my sin and reading Alice in Wonderland, I realized I was feeling something I had not felt in nearly a year – eagerness, a desire for religious exploration, excitement at the prospect of finding God again, in places where I hadn’t been looking, in books, music, hiking, meditation, other churches; eagerness to let all this anger and isolation go, start over, find my faith again, and come back to church after Easter a whole new cheery and committed Mormon.

The first half of the plan worked beautifully. I reread Augustine’s Confessions, attended an Episcopal discussion group on Julian of Norwich, went to concerts of medieval and Renaissance liturgical music, slept in deliciously on Sunday mornings and spent Sunday afternoons writing in my journal, listening to Bach, and exploring the local high-church scene. I went to Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Catholic services. I had long, casual talks with God, instead of my usual intense and demanding shouting matches. Also I drank a lot of coffee, and a little mead. And I thought through it all, when Easter comes, and I give up Starbucks, and go to church again, starting over in a whole new ward with people who barely know me, it will be clear to me how to be Mormon again. How could a plan this good possibly go wrong?

Tenebrae is balanced and reversed by the Easter Vigil, when the candles are lit again and the light in the church grows as Saturday night turns into Easter morning. I went to a Vigil this year with one of my closest friends, who was being baptized into the Catholic church; it was a full three-and-a-half-hour service that in fact ended just at midnight. Early on Sunday Morning I went to a Rite I Episcopal service, where I was the youngest person by about three decades, but the language was rich and the church was full of flowers and I felt generally peaceful. And then I went to Sacrament Meeting at the Mormon ward I’m now attending, where a youth speaker gave a talk about how much she wanted an iPhone. And it came crashing down on me that nothing, after all my Lenten recuperation, had really changed.

Going to church still makes me feel angry and alone. I am a non-entity in my new ward just as I was a person of concern in my last one; in a ward dominated by transitory young families, no one really has the time or inclination to be friends with anyone they can’t babysit-swap with. Doubtless I can and should fight for a place for myself, and I’m usually extraverted enough and (I like to think) assertively cheerful enough to be able to navigate situations like this more gracefully, but I’m not convinced it would be worth it this time. I am finding myself slipping quietly into inactivity, and it seems that both the branch I left and the ward I’m going to would just as soon I did. I feel utterly peripheral, liminal in both the church and in my own religious life; I can’t go back to the pummeling of a religious life that wore me out and gave me nothing back, but there is nothing, yet, to go forward too. And yet last night, driving home from a party in the near-dark, looking up to the enormous moon rising above the silhouettes of the trees,  I felt a breath of peace, of quiet that still feels a little like faith. It is as if I am still in Tenebrae — waiting in the dark, and trying to be still.

I’m not sure what shifted, but in December of that year, I decided to start commenting on FMH. I picked the handle “Lynnette” because it’s my middle name. And I was quickly hooked. My sister Eve was commenting as well, which made it even more fun. But while I loved FMH, it didn’t take me long to realize that I was going to want to have a blog of my own. I emailed Eve, “You know, I keep thinking that it would be fun to start a blog . . . But I’m worried that a) it would be too hard to keep up with it or b) it would be too easy to keep up with it, to the detriment of other areas of my life.” (As it turns out, both A and B have been challenges.) But we kept talking about the idea. And at one point I wrote, “So what’s the OT story about the tribe in which there are only daughters, so they go to Moses and ask to inherit? I can’t remember where to find it, but maybe we could name ourselves after them.”

We started ZD in January of 2006. We were originally thinking that we wanted it to be Mormon women in academia, with an initial group which included several of my sisters, as well as my close friend Seraphine. But we quickly decided to broaden it so that we could include more family members (which in retrospect was a really good decision).

It’s hard to overstate the impact blogging has had on my relationship to Mormon feminism, and even on my life more generally. I have to admit that I was nervous when we started, even though we were using pseudonyms, about possible ecclesiastical repercussions for blogging about feminism. But I figured that there were too many feminist bloggers for the church to go after everyone, and that’s only gotten more true over the years. I’ve especially enjoyed blogging in that it’s given me a space to write out a lot of frustrations, and to become more comfortable articulating my views on various issues. Sometimes it’s admittedly made me crazy. But, contra my fears of never being accepted in the LDS blogging world, I’ve met so, so many fabulous people through blogging. Especially because of that aspect, I think it’s actually on the whole made me feel more positive about the church, and more at peace with being an LDS feminist.

Nonetheless, church attendance has continued to be a challenge. After dropping out for a while during my first year in California, I decided once again to give it another try, and I’ve followed my usual pattern of having periods of going regularly, and periods of going once in a while. I’ve had teaching callings in the last two wards I’ve been in, and that’s been good both because I enjoy teaching, and it’s been a way to stay at least somewhat connected to the community.

At this point in my life, the things that make church difficult don’t have a lot to do with belief (or the lack thereof). I consider myself a believer in some basic way that I can’t always articulate, even if I’m agnostic about a lot of particular questions. And while I certainly get worked up about feminist (and other) issues at times, I also have periods of feeling fairly mellow. There are things about the church that I deeply disagree with, but on the whole, I’m okay with disagreeing. Sometimes I hope for change; sometimes I’m more discouraged. (Prop 8 was really, really hard.) But what makes church the most difficult on a week-to-week basis, at least at this point in my life, has to do with what I said in my last post about the challenges of feeling like I don’t really belong. I actually quite like my current ward, and that helps a lot. But church, especially if I’m depressed, can still be brutal in its ability to make me feel like a failure.

Navigating both the worlds of academia and of Mormonism has also continued to be a challenge. As I posted to my siblings years ago, early on in my work in theology:

You go to school and it seems like everyone is bending over backward to accommodate diversity, to the point of watering down their own beliefs until there is nothing left, or you see this insane feminist theology, or whatever, and you start thinking, this is nuts, and feeling conservative.  Then you go to church, and hear that all other faiths are bad or a bunch of patriarchal hooey, and think, wait, I do believe in diversity and feminism after all!  It’s weird to be on the boundary of two worlds like that.

I thought I’d somewhat worked through my concerns about fairly representing the church, but the issue became more acute for me again when I taught a course on Mormonism a couple of years ago. I agonized over what it meant to be balanced, and how best to structure the course and my approach. How, for example, should I talk about feminist issues in a way that was fair to the diversity of views among Mormon women? It was one of the more challenging things I’d done. But it was also a lot of fun to have a place where I could bring my worlds together like that.

People have sometimes asked me if it’s gotten better, if I’ve found answers that have helped with negotiating those dual commitments to the academy and the church, or just with my questions more generally. I think the best response I have is that I haven’t really resolved the issues—but the questions have become more familiar. I’ve become more accustomed to living with them.

And something else that’s been helpful for me has been the rise of Mormon Studies in the last decade. Suddenly there are Mormon-related conferences everywhere, which have given me numerous offline spaces to grapple with various aspects of Mormonism, including feminism, in an academic way. And as with blogging, I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of great people who’ve been asking similar questions. A conference that was particularly influential for me as a feminist was one titled “Mormonism Through the Eyes of Women,” which took place at Claremont a couple of years ago. (I blogged about it here.) I did a paper on the problem of female salvation in LDS theology. This was one of the first times I’d publicly presented on Mormon feminism, and that was a little scary. But as it turned out, the conference was fantastic, and energizing, and it felt good to have a voice in it.

Looking back over the last few years, I see a theme—the thing that’s made the biggest difference in my relationship to the church has been meeting so many other people who have wrestled with similar questions. I’ve come to doubt that we can really resolve each other’s concerns, whatever they may be, by coming up with neat answers, but I do think we can accompany each other on our various journeys. For me, at least, that’s been tremendously important, that I’ve had sympathetic listeners and spaces where I can talk about the things that are hard for me.

My views on various feminist issues are still a work in progress. When I first encountered other Mormon feminists, when I first went to Sunstone all those years ago, I remember that I was uneasy with the idea of women getting the priesthood. I didn’t want to be one of “those women.” I was also a little suspicious of discussion of Heavenly Mother, which often seemed to veer in a direction that was more New Age-y than I was comfortable with. Those topics in particular are ones about which my views have changed over time. I can matter-of-factly say that I’m okay with the idea of female ordination, and I’ve become a lot more interested in Heavenly Mother. This shift hasn’t been because of some dramatic turning point, but has simply arisen from years of conversations about these topics, and a variety of personal experiences. (For some of my earlier thoughts on these subjects, see here, here, and here.)

So those are some of the pieces of my history with feminism, and with the church. (This was only supposed to be one post, but evidently I enjoy talking about myself.) I don’t really know where I’m going next. But I’ll probably blog about it.

(perhaps to be continued in a few years)

In looking back at old email and journal entries for this series, I ran across something striking. From an email to Eve (at the time I was still in my grad history program):

The people I work with are all pretty strong feminists, which is fine, but if they want to know how Mormons feel about women that’s a hard thing for me, because of course I feel enough loyalty to the Church that I don’t want to start bashing it and saying that I think it’s sexist (although I don’t have a problem saying that to you or other fellow Mormons—you know how it is!) Someone had read Secret Ceremonies or whatever that book is—do you know which one I’m talking about—the woman who married some guy that told her he had a revelation that she was the one, so then when she left the Church (and divorced the guy) she wrote this exposé? So anyway, the woman who read it asked me if it was true that a woman needed a man to get to heaven, so I basically explained that yes, but it would probably be important to also know that a man couldn’t get to heaven without a woman.

That question of how to represent the church to others was one which would haunt me for a long time. On the one hand, I felt the pressure to talk in faith-promoting ways. On the other, I wanted to be honest. And this issue became more acute when I started doing academic work in religion, because it wasn’t a subject that came up occasionally—it was my life. The question of how best to engage in interfaith dialogue wasn’t a hypothetical one; it was something I confronted every day. And I realized that I couldn’t whitewash things, that to have authentic conversations with others, I needed to talk about things that frustrated me, including sexism.

Especially early on, this caused me a lot of anxiety. But I gradually came to find that people appreciated my honesty, that they didn’t want to hear the party line—they wanted to hear what I actually thought, and they actually had more respect for Mormonism when I talked about the complexities of the tradition. I did my MTS (Master of Theological Studies) at a Catholic school, and I found that many Catholics were quite sympathetic to the situation of belonging to a church that was a core part of your identity and beliefs, while at the same time wrestling with deep disagreements. It was always intriguing to compare notes with Catholic feminists. I loved that I felt like there was room to process those issues.

I also got exposed to a lot of feminist theology, and while of course I had my disagreements, I loved reading it, and thinking about whether it would apply to my own tradition. We had a family email group by this time, which was a great place for me to hash out religious issues:

Today we talked in my Catholicism class about how God is beyond gender, and how using the label “he” for God only reinforces sexist notions and causes males to think that they should be in charge. It really causes mixed feelings for me to hear that kind of conversation. On the one hand, I’m not opposed to the fact that we as Mormons have embodied God—I think it can be a very positive element of our theology. But I do think other Christians have a point about sexist language. If God is a “he,” it privileges the male—there’s no two ways about it. And I have to admit that I like in some ways that my classes in general won’t talk about God using gendered language—there is something liberating about that.

. . . Which is not to say that there aren’t answers, at least potentially, in LDS theology. They just aren’t very actualized at the moment, because Heavenly Father is protecting Heavenly Mother from her children. Which is why we tell all women that they are mothers and they should thus spend their lives hiding from children, so they don’t get contaminated.

I also wrote a lot about the disjunct between my experiences at school and my experiences at church:

It’s also nice, I must say, to be in an environment of religious people who take for granted that sexism in religion is a bad thing. I often don’t feel like my own religious community is anywhere close to even making that admission.

For me, another telling point is actually that other churches even talk about problems of sexism, whereas in Mormonism it seems that we don’t talk about it because it isn’t a problem. That’s something I really hunger for; even acknowledgement that there is a problem. And yet it goes back to this issue of whether I should even have a problem  in a church which claims to have the ideal for women.

One of the questions I periodically came back to was that of methodology:

Well, sometimes it seems like the issue of taking writing seriously leads to a lot of very difficult questions in religion, as I’m sure all of us have encountered as we’ve tried to make sense of our own scriptural texts. What do you do with sexist passages in the Bible? You can throw them out and decide to instead focus on the more egalitarian ones, but what justifies the practice of privileging the stuff you like? Some contemporary feminists will set as their norm the full humanity and equality of women and men, and judge scripture through that light. That certainly sounds good, and yet I am fundamentally uneasy with it, because I do not think theology should be based on current political trends, no matter how appealing; if theology is simply our ideas about what it means to be human, it isn’t theology anymore. But it’s a knotty question, because I’m not about to swallow the sexist stuff, either.

When it came to church attendance during this time, I alternated between being fairly active, and being more erratic in my attendance. Church was hard in ways that I found difficult to articulate. I felt like I was inevitably on the margins, but I also felt guilty for not trying harder. I wrote in my journal, “how can you explain what it is to feel alienated and excluded, not by people’s conscious intent, but by the social structure itself, by doctrine you aren’t sure you can swallow, by all of that? And then I feel bad, because I don’t make an effort to fit in, because I hide.” When Sheri Dew gave her famous “Are We Not All Mothers?” talk in the General Relief Society Meeting in the fall of 2001, I walked out. (I don’t think I’ve been to a General RS meeting since then.)

I moved back to Utah after finishing my degree, and attended the local singles ward. This could have been much worse, but some of the people in the ward were old friends, and I had some great ecclesiastical leaders who were very supportive with some of the life challenges I was dealing with at the time. My calling was to work in the library, and the other librarian and I spent a lot of time goofing off. As long as I didn’t bring up feminism and other questions, things were okay. (When I did occasionally say what I really thought to someone in the ward, it usually ended with the other person giving canned answers, and me in tears. I hated that I still cried so easily when this stuff came up.)

I also struggled with how to address the variety of female experience in the church. I wrote in our email group:

I’m thinking about why this issue is so hard and why we don’t seem to be able to talk about it. It’s the kind of thing that can make me crazy, because to me it’s so utterly obvious that the church is pervaded with sexism that someone shouldn’t even have to point it out, you know? So I find it unbelievable that others honestly might not see it. But this becomes a really sticky issue—if other women honestly don’t feel oppressed, who am I to tell them that they are? Do you know what I mean? I think the problem is maybe that, even though I am not out to turn all Mormon women into feminists and convert them into my point of view (really!), the implications of my experience and my views of the church are serious. Honestly, all I want is for people to acknowledge my experience as valid, my concerns as real, but as I’m thinking about this, I’m wondering whether . . . even that acknowledgement could be getting into murky waters—if I really have experienced the church as oppressive, what does that say about the church, and so forth.

In 2003, Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote an article in the SL Trib titled “Where Have All the Mormon Feminists Gone?” The apparent decline of Mormon feminism was both depressing and perplexing:

I’m not sure what to think about the disappearance of Mormon feminism. Is it because women aren’t as bothered, or is it because the bothered ones are more likely to just leave than to stay and try to change things?

What’s weird to me about the disappearance of Mormon feminism is that I know so many feminists in other Christian traditions where (from my point of view) you might think that feminism might not be as necessary anymore. (They would probably point out, however, that any Christian female has to deal with a legacy of sexism that is embedded in our canonical texts.) But it seems that a church like ours, especially in the cultural context of America where egalitarianism is highly valued, would keep on producing feminists.

But while I brought up these issues frequently in informal conversation, I was still careful. I was somewhat hesitant to do academic work in Mormon feminism, and I wouldn’t have even considered doing something like presenting at Sunstone. The climate of fear which resulted from the September Six and other excommunications had definitely left its mark on me, and I had no desire to get into ecclesiastical trouble.

I moved to Northern California in the fall of 2003, to start a PhD program in theology. This time, getting out of Utah didn’t help much; I still found church incredibly difficult, and I continued to alternate between going regularly and taking long breaks. It was less an issue of disagreeing with a lot of things–though of course, that was always there. But even more, I simply struggled with the sense that I would never fit into a Mormon context. I was older and single (already a strike against me), and in some basic way I felt like I just didn’t have a Mormon personality.

But in 2005, I encountered something that would change my life in ways I never would have initially anticipated. In March of that year, I read about FMH in the New York Times, and passed the link along to my siblings with the comment, “This is a blog by ‘Mormon feminist housewives’ that some of you might find interesting. I  looked it over the other day, and it seems to be made up of committed Mormons who nonetheless aren’t happy about the Church and gender.”

(to be continued)

We know Abraham has become a god. Not sure what status Keturah has.

All known angels are male. So is the devil.

We know Peter James and John served our world before birth. They have no female equivalents.

If Eve existed before the creation of the world, we know nothing about it. If she participated in the creation, unlike that of Michael/Adam, her role is apparently too unimportant to mention.

Section 76, our most detailed outline of the afterlife, includes no mention of women in any kingdom, and gives clear indication that women are not in evidence in the celestial realm (“They [in the celestial kingdom] are they who are priests and kings, who have received of his fullness, and of his glory; / And are priests of the Most High, after the order of Melchizedek, which was after the order of Enoch, which was after the order of the Only Begotten Son”).

Thanks to a single slender verse, we have evidence Eve and her daughters participate in the Great Beyond (see here; naturally in detail and attention, even here, they’re dwarfed by their brothers).

Relying on a recipe of one part extrapolation and two parts wishful thinking, we’ve concluded from this promising panoply of attestations that women are Very Important in both the pre- and post-mortal existence, although, unlike their male counterparts, it’s not clear they have any authority or any contact with us. Our canon and liturgy portray them as absent or barely marginal.

In the other monotheistic traditions, the universal God transcends gender. In polytheism, goddesses abound. Not so Mormonism! We believe both that gender is eternally significant and that the eternities are significantly masculine.

Here’s my challenge to you, gentle reader. Point me to a religious tradition whose cosmology marginalizes women more than that of Mormonism.

I have ambivalent feelings about the experience I had there. On the one hand, I feel like I got a good education. I double majored in history and psychology, and found good faculty in both departments. But the religion classes, which in general were not at all academic but were instead reminiscent of seminary (of the variety taught by the CES), made me crazy.

I started at BYU in the fall of 1993. This was a tough year to be a feminist. The excommunications of the September Six took place that fall. And BYU itself was embroiled in issues involving the firings of feminist teachers. It was painful to watch. It raised a lot of hard questions for me about my place in the church. I also remember reading about totalitarian states, and seeing sinister parallels to the church. If you disagreed with anything, the rhetoric suggested, it meant that something was wrong with you–there was no possibility that the institution could have flaws.

However, my anxieties about these issues didn’t prevent me from expressing my opinions. My freshman roommates once observed that while overall I tended to be quiet and reserved, and tentative about speaking up, I was a whole different person when the subject of feminism came up. I had strong views on the subject, and I felt surprisingly confident in sharing them.

One of the religion classes I took was Teachings of the Living Prophets. It was in essence a primer on prophetic infallibility (though of course it wasn’t described in those terms). We were required to memorize Ezra Taft Benson’s 14 Fundamentals. And we were assigned to write papers which consisted of nothing but lists of GA quotes. (I am not making this up). I chose “women” for one of my topics, and put together a collection of fairly blatantly sexist quotes. The professor responded that he didn’t think they were representative of the church’s real view of women.

In the last religion class I took at BYU, the professor told us that women were eternally subordinate to men because of Eve’s transgression. (I asked whether if Adam had taken the fruit, men would be eternally subordinate to women. My teacher replied that this was a meaningless question, because God had known in advance that this was how it would happen and had arranged things accordingly.) I walked out of class crying in frustration, and I decided to go see the professor privately. We talked for quite a while.  But although he was kind enough and tried to listen, I do not think he heard me, and perhaps I did not hear him, either. He could not understand why I felt his views were sexist and demeaning to women, and I could not understand how he could see this as a fair situation. It was as though we were speaking entirely different languages.

On a more positive note, I did encounter some fellow feminists. I worked as a research assistant for a history professor one summer, and one of the other people who frequented the computer lab was writing a paper on the history of VOICE (the BYU feminist organization). It was great to find someone that I could talk to about this stuff.

I also had some amazing professors, who managed to create classroom environments which didn’t shy away from hard questions. As a history student, I was particularly interested in intellectual and religious history, and I inevitably ran into issues that were also relevant in the LDS church. One year, for a class I particularly enjoyed, I wrote a rather cynical paper arguing that the BYU administration used Machiavellian tactics in suppressing dissent. I also wrote a more personal piece grappling with problem of “faithful criticism,” in which I talked about my sympathy for Erasmus, who remained loyal to the Catholic church even as he criticized it—and was accused of being an enemy of the church and facilitating the Reformation. The issues at stake were familiar to me:

This issue is relevant to me on a more personal level as well, because I have seriously struggled with certain aspects of the LDS church.  Doubtless my biggest objection has been related to its position about gender roles.  The problem of sexism disturbed me before I was old enough to get out of Primary, and I am still troubled by how the church discriminates against women. This problem more than any other has bothered me enough that I have seriously considered many times leaving the church over it.  And there are other characteristics of the church which trouble me as well.  One is the extreme emphasis on obedience, even to the point of blind obedience.  I do not like that the church at times seems determined to quash independent thought, and I do not agree with platitudes such as “when the prophet speaks, the debate is over.”  I have also had a difficult time with recent excommunications and a seeming crackdown on intellectuals.  In addition, there are political positions the church has taken which I do not agree with.

Given problems like these, I have often questioned whether I can really be a loyal Mormon.  The conflict has created a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance for me, as I have tried to reconcile my voluntary membership in the church with the things I have a very hard time accepting.  If I am to have any integrity at all, I sometimes wonder, shouldn’t I either get with it or get out of the church?  But when it all comes down, there are many, many positive aspects about the church, and I doubt whether the negative things are enough to make me leave.  I know the feeling of being caught in the middle, as I have caught flak from both my liberal friends, many of whom have left the church and wonder why I stay, as well as more conservative ones who consider me to be somewhat of a heretic.  The whole issue of faithful criticism is thus one that greatly resonates with me, because I have struggled a great deal with it in my own life, and I have yet to resolve my own feelings on the matter.

Professors who were open to this kind of conversation were fabulous. But overall, BYU wore me down. In addition to the ridiculousness of the religion classes, I found that the attitudes of the other students were the most difficult aspect of being there. I remember in particular a home teacher who told me flat out that my feminist concerns were petty and unimportant. I also remember reading a comment from the president of the Dittohead club (Rush Limbaugh followers) saying that liberals and feminists didn’t belong at BYU, and should move to Berkeley. I unexpectedly found myself crying. It wasn’t that much of a surprise that this person would say such a thing, but it still felt like a slap in the face.

And when I left BYU, I was burned out enough that I decided I was done with the church. Why stay, I asked myself, in an organization that acted totalitarian and promoted patriarchy, one that didn’t seem to have room for people like me?

I’d been planning on grad school, but I decided that I wanted a break first, so I took a year off before applying to grad programs. I got a job doing data processing. And since I was still in Utah County, most everyone I worked with was Mormon. I quickly fell into my usual pattern of having long conversations about the church and feminism, and was happy to find an ally in one of the other women who worked there.

I went to Counterpoint that year, the conference sponsored by the Mormon Women’s Forum. I wrote in my journal, “It gave me a lot to think about, and I enjoyed meeting some other feminists. There was a lot I didn’t agree with. I think I’m basically just not a mystic, and I have a hard time taking some of the mystical stuff very seriously. Sometimes feminism actually drives me crazy. And, like Sunstone (or Education Week), there was a lot of pretty out-there doctrine . . . But I still enjoyed the conference tremendously.”

It turned out that I was one of those people who could leave the church, but not leave it alone. I took a class from Eugene England, who by then had moved to Utah Valley State College (back in the day when it was still called that), and found that it was a place where I could seriously talk about feminist questions. I got Women and Authority for Christmas that year, and felt more hopeful about feminist ideas making a difference. I still read my scriptures on occasion, listened to conference, and talked obsessively about religion. And after about a year and a half of inactivity, I decided to come back.

Shortly thereafter, I finally left Utah, and moved to the Midwest to start a graduate program in history. I was in a singles branch there, and my church experience was radically different from anything I’d experienced before. It didn’t matter how unorthodox I was; people were happy that I came. I also was lucky enough to encounter a group of academically-oriented women who were supportive both when I wondered if I could survive grad school, and when I brought up feminist questions. (I met my close friend and current co-blogger Seraphine during this time.) I started to think that maybe it was possible after all to be a Mormon feminist.

Things also became somewhat less black and white for me. It was harder to see the church as nothing but a monolithic, oppressive institution when I was having positive experiences with it, when I felt like there was room for me. I was also having more mixed feelings about feminism; I thought that some of the feminism I was encountering in my classes was a little crazy. I once emailed my brother Ziff:

Speaking of gender, I just read this article for my English class that was too much. All discourse is patriarchal, so we have to find new ways of communicating that escape the patriarchy and blah blah blah. You know, in a Mormon context I feel very strongly about feminism (as you know), but in the world of academia sometimes I can’t stand it. I have a hard time with this idea that trying to persuade someone of something is an act of violence, so we need to get away from all arguing. Or how about a quote like this: “Cixous, then, presents this nameless pre Oedipal space filled with mother’s milk and honey as the source of the song that resonates through all female writing.”

But I also really liked some of the academic feminism I encountered. I took a class I particularly enjoyed on gender and religion. One of the papers I had the most fun writing was a comparison of Hildegard of Bingen and Anne Hutchinson. The paper began:

Throughout the history of Christianity, women have repeatedly struggled to find a voice for themselves in strongly patriarchal settings which tend to silence women’s voices.  In a system in which authority is hierarchical and male, how can a woman possibly claim the authority to speak?  One answer to this dilemma is to subvert the earthly hierarchy and claim authority straight from God.

I noted that this had been a more effective tactic for Hildegard than for Hutchinson, at least in terms of the reaction of the ecclesiastical hierarchies with which they were dealing. And, of course, it made me think about ways that Mormon women could claim a voice in a patriarchal religion.

Reading contemporary feminist work also made me realize that LDS feminists were still grappling with very basic issues and questions, ones that most feminists tended to take for granted as resolved. From an email I wrote to Eve during this time:

Yes!! yes!! I know what you mean about feeling like Mormon feminism is still fighting 19th century battles. Honestly, I roll my eyes when I see a lot of contemporary feminist stuff. And maybe it is because it isn’t even relevant for me, because I am still struggling in a tradition that has yet to decide that women are even equal . . . when I belong to a church which states that men preside over women, that like you said, is still functioning with a separate but equal view of gender? It is definitely exhausting.

As evidenced by emails like this, my siblings were a great support system. I knew I could talk to them when I was frustrated about various church stuff, and count on a sympathetic audience. That made a big difference in maintaining my sanity.

A lot of good things happened during this time, particularly in terms of the people I met, but gradually it became clear to me that I was in the wrong field. I liked history, but I didn’t love it enough to work through the grueling process of getting a PhD. And I’d realized that what I particularly enjoyed in my historical studies was the theology. It felt like jumping off a cliff—I only had a vague idea of what theological studies would consist of—but I decided to apply to theology programs.

(to be continued)

By contrast, I was first read The Lord of the Rings at such a young age that I don’t remember a Before LOTR. It feels like I’ve always known the basic storyline (though there were a lot of plot points that I didn’t really grasp until I was a teenager.) Frodo and Sam have been as familiar of characters in my life as Nephi and Sam.

I’m always interested to hear Mormon feminists talk about their history with feminism. My own history is closer to my experience of LOTR than of Star Wars.¹ I’ve had a lot of feminist crises, but not a Feminist Crisis of the kind that turns your world upside down and leaves you a different person, that gives you a clear Before and After. My story is rather more meandering.

The first time I remember posing a feminist-type question in church was when I was in primary. I wanted to know why women didn’t have the priesthood. Remembering what I was like as a primary kid, it was probably half an honest question, and half a desire to cause trouble. My teacher’s response was to ask what women could do that men couldn’t. I responded, quite sincerely, with the first thing that came to mind: wear dresses? (The teacher, of course, explained that women got to be mothers. I don’t remember being particularly persuaded by the answer.)

When I turned twelve and moved into Young Women’s, I was given a pamphlet of a talk by President Gordon B. Hinckley. In it, he expressed his confidence that God loved his daughters as much as his sons. I found that reassuring, but also troubling in a way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. (In retrospect, I think I was reacting to the fact that such reassurance was necessary.) When I asked questions about women and the church, I pretty much always got the “separate but equal” answer. I wasn’t happy with it, but I didn’t have the language to articulate why. How could I have objections, I was asked again and again, when women had such an important role, when General Authorities had said so much about the equality of the sexes? I was frustrated at my inability to respond. It’s crazy-making to see something that everyone around you is telling you isn’t real.

By the time I was in high school, I was pretty obsessed with the subject of Mormon feminism. I decided to write a paper on the topic for my sophomore English class. I read the Deseret Book-published Woman, composed of talks by General Authorities, with titles like: “No Greater Honor: The Woman’s Role.” (The cover, which includes the title Woman, followed by the names of 14 men, is already classic.) The talks praised traditional gender roles and warned that the movement for female emancipation and independence was Satan’s attack on the family. I read Mormon Doctrine, and Bruce R. McConkie, of course, was no chicken patriarch: women, he asserted flatly, were to be subject to their husbands. I read an extremely cheesy book called Mormons and Women, in which the female authors explained that a marriage was like lemonade. The Holy Ghost and the man were the water and lemons (I don’t remember which was which), and the woman contributed the sugar. And I read Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman, by Marilyn Warenski, which (as the title suggests) portrayed the church as being harshly oppressive to women.

(A fun tangent here. My older sister Eve was in college at the time, but she happened to be visiting one weekend when we went to the library. I was returning a stack of books, including the Warenski one. She noticed that and said to me, are you interested in this stuff? I said, yes. I don’t think we talked about it further—Eve and I weren’t at all close at the time—but it was an early realization that we had some common interest in this subject.)

The paper I wrote argued this:

Many religions look upon women as inferiors, and the Mormons are no exception.  The LDS Church clearly discriminates against women.  Women cannot develop their talents, be feminists, or be single, and their position is greatly inferior to that of the men.

It makes me both cringe and laugh to look back at the paper now; the tone is more than a little melodramatic. My teacher critiqued it (fairly) for making a lot of generalizations, and not clearly citing my sources.

The summer before my senior year, I went to Sunstone for the first time (with Eve). I loved it. Not only did I get to hang out with Eve and her cool college friends, I was blown away by the exciting atmosphere. I wrote a friend, “I absolutely loved the symposium.  It was incredible.  I feel like I have finally found my place in Mormonism.  I have never been around so many people that think like I do, and that aren’t afraid of ideas and questions.” I heard critiques of the pat answers I’d been hearing all my life when I raised questions about the place of women in the church, arguments for female ordination, and speculation that Heavenly Mother could be the Holy Ghost. I didn’t agree with all the ideas, but I couldn’t believe that people were talking so openly about these questions.

During my senior year of high school, I decided to do another paper on LDS women, this time for a world affairs class. But I wanted to be a little more nuanced this time around. I carefully quoted only statements of church leaders (no vague generalizations), tried to be more balanced, and noted how church teachings about women had changed over time. But my conclusion was still pretty bleak:

The role of women in the LDS Church is a very complex one.  Although their position has improved in the last century and a half, they are yet formally subordinate to the men and denied the priesthood.  Whether they are indeed equal, as church leaders state, is an open question.  But if it is true, as Joseph F. Smith stated, that “The patriarchal order is of divine origin and will continue throughout time and eternity,” there seems to be little hope for change—now or ever.

For this paper, I also did a survey in my predominantly Mormon high school. I asked, “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” To that question, 75% of the males and 63% of the females answered negatively.²  Many saw feminism as too radical, or trying to set women as superior to men. Typical comments included:

I believe that women are treated poorly in our society, but I don’t see the entire male species as the enemy.

Although I believe in the equality of men and women, the “feminists” have gone overboard

If I was a feminist, I wouldn’t be content with my life.  I would believe that I was better than men.  I don’t.  I’m equal to men.

Another of my questions was whether the LDS role for woman was inferior to that of men. I got the same percentages: 75% of the males and 63% of the females said it was not.³ “Children are the future of our society, and a woman has a very important job in raising them,” said one female.  Another wrote, “It is an honor for women to enforce and support the work of the Lord.  This role is in no way demeaning to me.” Only a few dissented, such as a female who wrote “I think it is very wrong and prejudiced.”

I already had a lot of feminist angst, then, as a teenager. I remember reading D&C 132 and wanting to throw my scriptures at the wall. When the boys in my high school class read from Paul about the need for women to be silent at church, to be subordinate to men, I felt intensely frustrated that—although they were teasing—I didn’t have a comeback. No matter how much my seminary teachers tried to explain it away, it was all too clear that the scriptures were sexist. Even more troubling, I noticed how I’d internalized patriarchal values. When I was honest with myself, I was uncomfortable with women having final authority. I didn’t have a lot of role models of that happening.

I read whatever I could find about Mormon feminism: the pink issue of Dialogue, Sonia Johnson’s From Housewife to Heretic. Eve gave me Sisters in Spirit one year for Christmas, and I read it multiple times. I wavered between wanting to give up on the church altogether (for a variety of reasons, though feminist issues were prominent ones), and thinking that I wanted to stick it out. The best answer I ever got about women and the priesthood came from a former bishop who simply said that he didn’t know. It was a relief to hear someone say that, after all the explanations I’d heard that made me feel worse. I also read essays by Eugene England that gave me hope, especially his rejection of polygamy in the next life.

And despite everything, I ended up going to BYU . . .

(to be continued)

1. I realize there is some irony in my using Star Wars and LOTR as examples, given the serious dearth of female characters in both of them. But they were my favorite stories nonetheless.
2. 8% of the males and 17% of the females answered “yes”, and 8% of the males and 17% of the females said “maybe.”
3. 17% of the males and 13% of the females said it was, with the rest saying that it depends.

Given that, if I didn’t know much about Facebook, I think my assumption would have been that it would be a place where people were less snarky to each other than in most online communities. Because unless you’re breaking the rules and using a fake name, there is no anonymity. You’re posting as yourself, which might make you feel more accountable for what you say.

And yet, I’m not sure that Facebook is all that much more civil than blogging, even though large numbers of people use pseudonyms on the blogs. You can still find name-calling, personal attacks, and spectacular fights. The lack of anonymity doesn’t make as much of a difference as I would have thought it would.

I can think of a few reasons why this might be the case. For one thing, it’s still the internet, and people post about controversial subjects that they might be more hesitant to bring up in live conversations. Another factor perhaps is that (at least if you’re participating in a private Facebook group, or you have your wall limited to friends) it’s less public, which might make it feel safer to speak in a less censored manner. And if I’m comparing Facebook to the bloggernacle specifically, it’s probably worth noting that most bloggernacle blogs are moderated (at least to some extent.)

This isn’t meant as a criticism of Facebook (I’m a total addict). And I’m in no position to throw stones–when the bloggernacle FB group first got started, it wasn’t long before I found myself in a 500+ comment thread about feminism which involved plenty of snark. But I am interested: if you post about controversial issues on your personal FB page, or participate in FB groups, do you feel that you are more or less likely to censor yourself than if you post on a blog? Are you more comfortable in one venue than another? Do you find that you participate in different ways in the different settings?

Here’s the thing: the phrase “compassion for gays” kinda makes me cringe. Should we have compassion for women? Should we have compassion for singles? Should we have compassion for left-handed people? When it’s framed like that, the implicit message is that these are categories of people who are somehow broken and defective, and therefore in need of our compassion. I’m reminded of people expressing horror at the possibility that they are on “the list” of the compassionate service committee. And I’m guessing that most of us aren’t crazy about Mormons being labeled as a group in need of compassion (because we’re spiritually deluded and/or don’t realize we’re in a cult).

I’m also wary of the language of compassion because I’ve seen it get used in contexts where something like “basic respect for human dignity” would make a lot more sense. To say that it’s “compassionate” to advocate for equal housing and employment rights for gays, for example (as I once saw asserted in the Deseret News), sounds like an assertion that one is going above and beyond what might be expected—as if the acceptable norm would be to treat gays like second-class citizens, but because we are such good, compassionate people, we’ll opt to do better (at least once in a while.) I also think it’s telling that when a person begins a comment by saying, “let me first say that I have a great amount of compassion for gays,” the comment usually continues, “but I’m opposed to [some form of gay rights].” That sort of thing makes me suspicious of compassion.

But I’m probably going too far if I’m completely dismissing compassion as a virtue. After all, Jesus exhibited it. So maybe my question is–how do we have compassion without condescension, without a metamessage that something is wrong with the person? Perhaps there’s a difference between compassion as a response to a particular situation—seeing a person in pain, realizing that a person is having a hard time and wanting to help—and labeling a general class of people as objects of compassion. With the latter, I think we run the risk of using the language of compassion as a way of making us feel good about ourselves (e.g., I’m such a virtuous person, because I have compassion for all the unenlightened bloggers who disagree with me.)

The baptismal covenant in Mosiah 18 calls us to bear one another’s burdens, to mourn with those that mourn. I like that as a possible definition of compassion. And there’s something significant in there, I think, about the need to take each other’s experience very seriously. I would guess that many if not most members of the church would agree that we could do a better job of being kind to gay individuals. But genuine compassion, I think, might require something harder. We can’t mourn with those that mourn without really listening to them—even if what they have to say isn’t easy to hear, even if it challenges some of our deeply held beliefs.

A friend of a friend commented a while ago on Facebook about how much she loved the LDS doctrine of marriage (specifically, our rejection of same-sex marriage). I’ve read more arguments about gay marriage than any sane person should, but for some reason I found the tone of this particular comment very unsettling. I’ve been trying to articulate why, and I think it has to do with what I’m saying about mourning. Because no matter how beautiful and wonderful our doctrine of marriage might be for many people, we’re paying a very high price for it. We’re losing our gay sisters and brothers. And I think the least we can do is acknowledge that cost.

I’m also thinking that it’s a problem to describe compassion in terms of personality traits or feelings. Because ideally it’s not about how we feel; it’s about how we act. The question has occasionally come up of whether it’s possible to oppose gay rights, or condemn gay relationships, while still feeling compassion for gays. But I think that’s the wrong question, both because it assumes that compassion is primarily a feeling, and because it so easily lures us into a scenario in which gays are not really people, but potential objects of our compassion. In that framework, the focus is less on the actual needs of others, and more on how we can manage to have the right feelings, as if the primary issue at stake is how we feel. The harder–but more important–question, I think, is what it means to act compassionately. And when it comes to gays, I think that as a church, we’re still pretty muddled about what that looks like.