Showing all posts in Feminism

In Equality, Feminism, Statistics

Reading Comments on the Church’s Instagram Post

Author ZiffPosted on 14 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, the Church put up an Instagram post with a quote from J. Anette Dennis of the Relief Society General Presidency from her talk in the Relief Society broadcast. The quote begins, speaking of the Church:

There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.

The quote continues for a couple of paragraphs that add some context, but it has been edited since it was first put up, and I believe it was originally just this quote. In any case, it drew thousands of comments on Instagram, many from commenters saying this is obviously false. Comments were deleted a couple of days into the discussion, which provoked further outrage and sadness from commenters, but fortunately they were eventually restored and the discussion continued. The Church social media team (and many commenters) said this was a broader platform issue, although a Meta spokesperson quoted in a New York Times story (gift article—no subscription required) denied this.

The blowup was also covered in the Salt Lake Tribune. From the more apologetic side, the Deseret News published a couple of opinion pieces from women who don’t feel unequal in the Church, and Public Square Magazine put up a response to the New York Times article. From the more critical side, the Salt Lake Tribune published an opinion piece from Rosemary Card, April Young Bennett at the Exponent traced the line of thinking to then-Elder Oaks trying to placate Ordain Women a decade ago, and Lisa Torcasso Downing at Outside the Book of Mormon Belt wrote an extensive response to an apologetic post on Facebook. Molly at Roots and Reckoning also curated and categorized a few hundred of the best quotes from the Instagram discussion at her blog.

I thought it would be interesting to read all the Instagram comments. I found a handy tool called IGCommentExporter, and it pulled 12,578 comments into a csv file for me. I read through them and tagged them with themes they brought up and noted some of my favorites, and that’s what I’ll tell you about in this post.

Before I get to that, though, let me tell you about some limitations in the data and my work:

  • Instagram currently says there are over 17,000 comments on the post, so when I scraped them on March 21st to start this project, I only got about 70% of them. This means that I didn’t include Sister Dennis’s follow-up comment, or any responses to it.
  • At least a few people appear to have deleted their comments. I say this because in what I read, there were a lot of responses tagging commenters who appeared to have few to no comments themselves.
  • The comment scraper couldn’t give me the structure of the comments, by which I mean which were replies to another commenter and which were top level. I was able to reconstruct this for about 6,000 comments by just manually loading them in my browser and using a link scraper, but for the rest, I just had to infer based on timing and who, if anyone commenters tagged.
  • You can probably guess my bias, but just to be clear, I agree with April Young Bennett. I think the whole idea of women having the priesthood in some way is clearly just a hand-wavy explanation that Dallin H. Oaks came up with in an attempt to shut Ordain Women up without actually making any changes in the Church. The only way Sister Dennis’s quote can be made sense of is to start with the idea that LDS priesthood is real and all others are fake, so of course any access to it at all—even mediated through men—is better than even the best access to the fake priesthoods of other churches. (By the same logic, you could make all kinds of other absurd arguments, like that LDS churches are the most beautiful churches in the world because they’re the only real churches, and everyone else is just “playing church” [thanks, Brad Wilcox].)
  • I’m sure my bias played into how I tagged themes in comments. As you’ll see, I used more granular theme tags for critical comments than apologetic ones.
  • I probably should have made the theme tagging more granular in general, but at some point, reading through all the comments was a long process, and I had to stop tinkering with it and go with what I had.
  • Even setting aside my biases, I probably wasn’t the most reliable tagger, meaning that if I had read through the comments more than once, I likely wouldn’t have assigned exactly the same set of tags both times. (Serious researchers do things like estimate reliability of people doing ratings by having multiple raters, but it would seem unfair to rope anyone else into reading all the comments with me.)
  • I couldn’t always figure out commenters’ meaning, especially when they commented with only an emoji. For example, it was hard to distinguish laughing at from laughing with. I was fortunate that I could ask my teenage daughter the meaning of a few slang terms.
  • I had hoped to do some analysis of likes of comments, but unfortunately my comment scraper didn’t gather them. I tried to sample some manually, but it was clear that Instagram was showing me commenters it thought I would like first, so my sample was inevitably going to be biased, so I had to give this up.

Is that enough caveats? Okay, here’s what I found. I read 12,578 comments. I assigned each comment at least one tag, a total of 16,921 tags, or about 1.3 per comment. This graph shows how often the tags were used.

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In Chicken Patriarchy, Feminism

Happy Divine Gender Role Enforcement Day!

Author ZiffPosted on 12 Comments

For Father’s Day today, my ward gave men a treat, but sacrament meeting talks weren’t focused on the importance of fathers or anything like that. This feels consistent with my experience generally. Father’s Day is mentioned at church, and sometimes talked about, but Mother’s Day by contrast is absolutely essential. It would be unthinkable to have talks about tithing or food storage on Mother’s Day, or even (at least in my experience) to have a stake conference. But Father’s Day is totally fair game to tromp on with other topics. Just to be clear, I’m absolutely not complaining about this. I’m just observing. I can buy my own treats.

The reason this happens is, I think, pretty obvious. Since it has become less acceptable to openly put women down and GAs have largely rhetorically moved from patriarchy to chicken patriarchy, they’ve needed to embrace their opportunities to pedestalize women, and explain at every turn how very very honored and equal they are. Mother’s Day is a great opportunity. Largely male speakers can rhapsodize at the pulpit about how wonderfully self-sacrificing their mothers and wives are, and how inspiring they find it that these women choose to give up their own aspirations in life to serve as supports to the men in their lives. Needless to say, there is no parallel need to reassure men about how important we are. The very structure of the Church communicates it to us constantly. Father’s Day is a nice afterthought, a reminder that oh, sure, fatherhood matters too. But it’s not doing the work that motherhood is, rhetorically, to make it seem more okay that women aren’t ordained or allowed to handle money or run wards or sacrament meetings or the highest Church councils or baptisms or funerals or excommunications. The Church embraces Mother’s Day more than Father’s Day for the same reason that we get conference talks called The Honored Place of Woman, The Moral Force of Women, LDS Women Are Incredible!, and Woman—Of Infinite Worth, but no parallel talks directed at men.

But of course it’s just my experience that a bigger deal is made at church of Mother’s Day than Father’s Day. And I’d understand if you’re a bit suspicious that I’m remembering it that way simply because I expect it to be that way. So I thought I’d do a quick look at Church magazines. I looked for references to both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the Ensign (this was the Google search string I used for Mother’s Day: “mother’s day” site:churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign). I didn’t read through each article, but I did do some quick checking to make sure the results weren’t spurious (for example, excluding those that matched only because the Table of Contents on the left of the article listed another article that had “Mother’s Day” in the title).

Here are two hypotheses I had before I gathered the data: (1) There would be more references to Mother’s Day than to Father’s Day, and (2) the number of references to Mother’s Day in particular would go up from the 1970s to the 1990s as the Church moved more toward becoming the Church of the Family Proclamation.

As you can see, the total number of mentions is small enough that I put it into five-year bins to make the results easier to look at. The data are surprisingly consistent with both of my hypotheses. Mother’s Day has 68 total mentions, and Father’s Day only has 24. Also, the mentions of Mother’s Day went up markedly in the 1980s and 1990s, although they’ve dropped off again since then.

Again, the number of mentions is really small. For Mother’s Day, 68 in the 50 years of the Ensign is only 1.4 mentions a year. So it’s not like discussion of these holidays is dominating Church discourse. But when one or the other does get brought up, it is, as I expected, far more often Mother’s Day.

I’d love to hear your experiences of whether Mother’s Day or Father’s Day has gotten more emphasis in wards you have lived in.

In Church Policy, Feminism

Invisible (Mormon) Women

Author ZiffPosted on 19 Comments

In her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Caroline Criado Perez documents and discusses what she calls gender data gaps. These are places where data that’s gathered from only (or mostly) men are used to make design or policy decisions that have bad effects on women because, on average they differ from men in consistent ways. Although she doesn’t ever gather them in a list like this, I think there are at least three different points at which data from women can be lost.

  1. Sometimes data isn’t gathered from women at all. For example, a medical researcher might decide that women are too complicated what with menstrual cycles and possible pregnancy, so they study only men and then just assume that the results generalize. Or decision-making bodies that consist of all or mostly men use their personal experience to make policy decisions, without even considering that their experience might not be representative because of their gender. For example, Criado Perez discusses governments making decisions about snow removal and public transportation and even city design with an eye toward trip patterns of commuting to work and back home that is more common among men. In so doing, they ignore or downplay the importance of a pattern more common among women where they go to multiple destinations in one trip. This is especially common among people who care for children or the elderly, which are tasks that women do far more often than men do.
  2. Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men, but isn’t reported in disaggregated form, so it’s not clear whether there are gender differences or not.
  3. Sometimes data is gathered for both women and men and is reported disaggregated, but decision-makers are still ultimately unconcerned with the differences. This is generally the case for data on harassment of political office holders that Criado Perez reports, where women holding office are harassed more often and more seriously by their colleagues and even their constituents than men holding office are, but the response of heads of legislative bodies seems to be to tell women to toughen up rather than to do anything themselves to make harassment more difficult.
    Photo credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Reading this book got me to thinking about how gender data gaps might affect Church policies. Of course it’s obvious that many Church policies discriminate against women by design, for example the priesthood ban for women. But what the book made me think about is all the ways in which the Church maybe unintentionally makes policies that differentially affect women, and the decision-makers just aren’t very aware of it because they include no women (or if they do, the women know that their place is to not talk too much).

 

Another thing too is that in terms of the three points at which data on women might be lost that I’ve listed, the Church seems like it’s often stuck at what might be called step zero. That is, Church leaders are loath to admit that they need any data from anyone, men or women, because surely God will put into their minds everything they need to know, and they really don’t want to be troubled by input from rank-and-file members.

But that’s beside the point. What I’m going to do in the rest of this post is just list some Church policies and practices I came up with that are maybe not explicitly designed to give women a worse church experience than men, but end up doing so anyway. These are the types of things that, even without making major changes like ordaining women, could be improved if GAs (and in some cases even local leaders) closed their gender data gaps by getting more input from women.

  • The requirement for endowed members to wear temple garments is much more burdensome to women than it is to men. Although they’re roughly the same shape as men’s, women’s garments are less compatible with typical clothing options available to women than men’s are with typical clothing options available to men. And that’s to say nothing of issues like yeast infections, which the cisgender men among the ranks of the GAs aren’t going to be personally familiar with. (For much more on this issue, see Angela C.’s excellent post from several years ago at BCC.) Even if getting more women’s input only meant a softening of language around how consistently garments are to be worn, it seems like this would be an improvement.
  • Mothers’ lounges (or whatever the rooms are called in church buildings where women can retreat to breastfeed their children) are consistently too small, too poorly ventilated, too poorly furnished, and too frequently attached to bathrooms. Sometimes they’re non-existent. All this is anecdotal, but it seems like the pattern is so consistent that it clearly reveals a problem. If more women were asked to give input on building design, perhaps this could be fixed.

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In Arguments, Feminism, Patriarchy

“You Just Don’t Understand”

Author LynnettePosted on 8 Comments

As someone who’s been raising questions about LDS teachings and practices pretty much since my Primary days,  I find that one of the most infuriating responses to people’s concerns is something along the lines of, “you just don’t understand,” whether the gospel generally or the specific principle being discussed. Because if you did understand, it seems to be assumed, you would cheerfully accept it, no more questions needed thank you very much. In years of feminist discussions, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been told that women who are discontent “just don’t understand” the true, eternal nature of patriarchy; or the meaning of divine gender roles; or the many opportunities the church gives to women. When people try to clear up complicated issues by producing a slew of GA quotes that purportedly explain everything, I find myself at a real loss as to how to best respond. Read More

In Feminism, Gender Issues, Pride, Service, Sin, Theology

The Sins of Pride and Self-Negation (or, How I Learned to Lighten Up a Little About Service)

Author LynnettePosted on 6 Comments

In 1960, a thinker by the name of Valerie Saiving wrote an influential article which is often considered the beginning of modern feminist theology, critiquing traditional models of sin which were centered around pride. Since such perspectives considered pride or excessive self-assertion to be the most basic sin,  they understood the process of overcoming sin as necessarily involving a move toward greater selflessness. Love was defined in such approaches as being “completely self-giving, taking no thought for its own interests but seeking only the good of the other.”1 Saiving raised the objection that these models ignored some basic differences in the self-development of women and men, and arose from an essentially masculine perspective. The crucial point that these formulations overlooked, she argued, is that there is danger in the other direction as well, as it turns out that too much selflessness, far from producing someone in an idealized and virtuous state, leads to the development of a kind of “chameleon-like creature who responds to others but has no personal identity of his [or her] own.”2  Saiving saw this as a temptation to which women are particularly vulnerable. Read More

  1. Valerie Saiving, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” in Womanspirit Rising (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 26. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 41. [↩]
In Epistemology, Feminism, Race, Religion, Truth

Oh Say, What is Truth? Understanding Mormonism through a Black Feminist Epistemology

Author GaldralagPosted on 8 Comments

My husband Rebelhair and I often talk about the things that make up the culture of Mormondom – its idiosyncrasies, its cultural quirks, its bedrock beliefs and non-negotiable narratives, and especially the processes by which it navigates and establishes its biggest truth claims. We’ve spoken frequently about the concept of truth in Mormonism – not just what Mormonism’s particular truth claims are, but how one arrives at them, and how one both frames and holds onto them, given the inherently shifting nature of continuing revelation.

In other words, we like to talk about the idea of a Mormon epistemology, or the ways that Mormon culture produces and frames knowledge: How do we come to know things? What are our frameworks for establishing theological and doctrinal truths?

We often discuss how, unlike older religious systems, we don’t have an established systematic theology; there aren’t yet agreed-upon hermeneutical frameworks through which we establish what our leaders teach. Instead, it’s far more common for leaders to make a truth claim or suggest a principle, and for the Mormon faithful to find other things in our teachings that seem to make that truth claim make sense. This works well if our leaders are teaching culturally well-established truths or non-controversial ideas. If a leader teaches that we mustn’t abandon our children, for example, we can easily find scriptural accounts and a multiplicity of conference talks about loving one another. But if a leader makes a less intuitive remark, as when Elder Oaks recently stated that the Church neither “seeks for” nor “gives” apologies and that the word “apology” does not appear in the scriptures, many are left a bit bemused. Yes, it’s apparently factually correct, but there are many elements of Mormon teaching, including our most basic teachings of repentance, that advocate for humility and asking forgiveness of others. How is that not an apology, regardless of whether the word is used? Understanding what Elder Oaks was getting at in that moment, and even understanding if such a remark should be taken at face value or if it was more tongue-in-cheek, requires a great deal of familiarity with Mormon systems of knowing (and even then leaves some scratching their heads).

All of this leads up to a question that we’ve batted around throughout our courtship and now newly married life: How can one describe Mormon ways of knowing? Is there a traceable Mormon epistemology; a consistent Mormon system of knowledge production that links together its myriad truth claims in a comprehensible manner?

The other day Rebelhair turned to me and casually mentioned, “You know, I actually think that there are some models of knowledge production that come out of black feminism that are remarkably similar to and could explain Mormon epistemologies.” You can imagine my intrigue. This essay, courtesy of Rebelhair, is the result of that conversation.

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In Feminism

Sources of Mormon Feminism

Author LynnettePosted on 2 Comments

Mormon feminists, like Christian feminists more broadly, are posed with the difficulty of making sense of the patriarchal aspects of a tradition which they believe to be inspired. One of the most challenging questions for both groups is this: if one is to reject particular aspects of the tradition (for example, female subordination), on what basis can such a rejection be made?

Some feminists have concluded that Christianity and patriarchy are too closely intertwined for them to be ever pulled apart, and have therefore abandoned Christianity. (Interestingly, a similar assumption is made by those conservatives who see Christianity as inherently patriarchal, and therefore argue that real Christians must abandon feminism). However, a number of others have proposed ways to maintain serious commitments to both Christianity and feminism, looking for creative ways of negotiating the tensions. Some propose drawing on contemporary experience, while others look to liberating elements within the tradition. And in an LDS context, I would add the approach of drawing on personal revelation. Read More

In Belief, Equality, Feminism, OW, Personal Narratives, Sacrament Meeting, Testimony, Uncategorized

Taking Ally Isom at Her Word

Author Mike CPosted on 36 Comments

On Sunday I decided to bear my testimony in sacrament meeting and talk about my involvement with Ordain Women. I’ve transcribed below approximately what I said. In case you were wondering, in my opinion it was only the third strangest testimony of the meeting. Yay for Mormon weirdness!

Next post I’ll share the response so far from my local leaders and fellow ward members. I think you’ll find it to be generally good news.

This past year I taught Book of Mormon in seminary and I absolutely loved it. I loved the kids, even when they were half-asleep or all-the-way asleep, or even when my son was making smart remarks. What I especially loved, though, was the opportunity to help the kids develop a personal relationship with God.

I love the Book of Mormon and am deeply moved by many of its teachings. One of my favorites is when Nephi teaches us that all are alike unto God. Over the years this scripture and other Church teachings have led me along a path of life that may be different from yours, and that is what I’d like to talk about even though it is hard for me. I feel very vulnerable baring my soul like this so I hope you’ll bear with me. Read More

In Feminism, GA's, General Conference

Elder Christofferson’s Edit Suggests Some GA Doesn’t Dislike All Feminists

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

As you’ve probably heard, Elder Christofferson’s Conference talk a couple of weeks ago originally included a swipe at “some feminist thinkers,” who he claimed “view homemaking with outright contempt.” This statement was edited in the printed version to be aimed at a more nebulous “some” who view homemaking with outright contempt. This change seems like a clear win for feminists, as the written record, which will likely be referred to far more often than the audio and video recordings of the spoken talk, now no longer has an explicit mention of feminists in a negative light.

But I think an even more positive outcome of the edit is what came out of the explanation for it. Here’s Peggy Fletcher Stack quoting Ruth Todd, Church spokesperson:

Church editors had suggested to the apostle that “referencing ‘some feminist thinkers’ would inevitably be read by many as ‘all feminist thinkers,’ ” Todd explained in a statement. “Elder Christofferson agreed and has simply clarified his intent.”

Okay, so call me a cynic, but I thought that Elder Christofferson’s original intent was to do precisely what Todd’s statement says he wanted to avoid: put down all feminists while using the word “some” to maintain plausible deniability. I really doubt, then, that the edit originated with Elder Christofferson. But whether or not I’m right, the important point in Todd’s statement is that whoever originated the edit did not want it to be thought that Elder Christofferson was putting down all feminist thinkers. This suggests that there are some other feminist thinkers who the editor of the talk thought should not be put down. I think this is huge! Since when has any word from the general level of the Church had anything positive to say about any feminists or feminism? I thought President Packer’s view of feminists as one of the big three enemies of the Church reigned supreme, with others like Elder Nelson clearly subscribing to the view that feminists oppose all that is true and right in the world. Ruth Todd’s statement gives me a glimmer of hope that some GA somewhere does not want all feminists to be painted with a broad negative brush.

In Church Life, Feminism, Gender Issues, God, Heavenly Mother

Dona Nobis Aequalitatem

Author PandoraPosted on 32 Comments

In May of 2010, I was standing alone in my new room after having just started a new job for the summer working the dorms at BYU. I had just finished completely unpacking, and everything was in place and orderly. And it was at that moment, when all seemed settled, that I decided I had to leave.

There I was, just done with my first year at BYU. The past year and a half of my life had been spent fighting against a thought that started as a small flicker but overtime became impossible to push back. That struggle had been spent with what seemed like virtually constant prayer, and I was feeling very close to God at that time in my life—closer than I had ever felt before.

And so, I sat down at the end of my bed and said a simple, to the point prayer. . It wasn’t a prayer of asking—I am much too decisive a person for that. I said something like “Hey. I know I just unpacked and everything. But I can take it no more, and I have decided to leave the church. No one understands my struggle better than you—you’ve been with me through it all. But I can’t do it anymore. I do not feel welcome, and I do not feel that this is my home. I’m starving slowly and I am finding no nourishment in this church. I am scared if I stay much longer, the damage will not be reversible and I’ll never recover. So, I have decided to leave. I’ll transfer to a new school. I’ll move on from this.” Read More

In Family, Feminism, Personal Narratives

My Lucky Day

Author Mike CPosted on 5 Comments

If I were playing the lottery, I know what numbers I would choose. They would have some variation of 0803 in them (but no, would-be scammers, that is not my debit card PIN number). If I were starting a land war in Asia, I would invade on August 3rd. If I were having elective surgery, I would do it on this day. Today is my lucky day.

You see, August 3rd is the day that my organizing, funny-story-telling, contagiously-laughing wife and my creative, ear-to-ear-grinning, anime-loving only daughter were born. What an awesome day!

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In Feminism, General Conference

Everything I Know about Feminism I Learned from the 1970s

Author BeatricePosted on 39 Comments

At a recent FAIR conference, Joshua Johanson spoke about how he has negotiated the conflict between his same sex attraction and his religious faith.  Something that struck me about this talk was a comment he made near the beginning about his wife’s relationship with the feminist movement and how it is similar to his relationship to the gay movement.  He stated: Read More

In Feminism, Gender Issues, Identity

Coercion: Stop it

Author ApamePosted on 54 Comments

One of my first posts at ZD was about what I called my “feminist awakening.”  I pinpointed it to a particular summer, the first of my graduate studies.  But, I don’t think it really explained the bigger picture of what really was happening.  That summer wasn’t the beginning of my discomfort with gender inequality, it was just the first time I named it.  And, it was the first time I really dealt with something I came to term “gender coercion.”  And by gender coercion, I mean:

The forcing of another party to act out gendered expectations in an involuntary manner (whether through action or inaction) by use of threats, intimidation, or some other form of pressure or force. Read More

In Feminism, Gender Issues, Interpretation, Modesty, Uncategorized

Critical Thinking and the Modesty Meme; or, Why We Need More English Majors

Author MelyngochPosted on 68 Comments

Likely everyone has come across the following internet/facebook meme, but just in case you’ve been backpacking in the Andes for the last two weeks with no wifi, or don’t have well-meaning conservative facebook friends, or have blocked all the well-meaning conservative facebook friends, or just aren’t on facebook precisely so you can avoid things like this, here you go:

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In Equality, Feminism, Gender Issues, Intellectual Passions, Uncategorized

My Feminist Beginning: The Joseph Smith Seminar

Author ApamePosted on 59 Comments

It has always intrigued me to hear about people’s “realization moments”–for it seems that, often, women and men come to understand feminism in a sudden moment in time when it became clear, or a series of common events that string together to form the sentence, “Something is not right here.”

I have these moments, and I’ve often thought how interesting it was that my first self-identifiable “feminist realizations” floated around in one single summer, the summer I studied at the Joseph Smith Seminar. Read More

In Church Life, Feminism, Questions

Feminism is Not a Trial

Author LynnettePosted on 215 Comments

Like every other human being on the planet, there are things in my life that I would consider trials. Mental health wackiness. Being single in a married church. Financial insecurity, and wondering whether I’ll ever get a job.

However, the fact that my perspective on the church is informed by feminism is not one of them. And I find myself bristling when concern with feminist issues is placed in that category, as if it were an affliction to be borne. As if some people have to struggle with illness or unemployment, and others come down with a bad case of feminism.

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In Feminism

In Defense of Negative Feminism

Author LynnettePosted on 18 Comments

One of the things that most struck me at the recent Claremont conference was the extent to which I was doing what I might call “negative feminism.”  I’m using “negative” both in a kind of netural, descriptive sense (in academic theology, there’s a tradition of “negative theology” which emphasizes what we don’t know about God), as opposed to more constructive work which puts forth new ideas–and “negative” in the more usual sense of the term, in that I was in fact  painting a rather negative picture of LDS teachings regarding the eternal status of women.  The reactions I got were varied; some liked it, but others found it excessively gloomy.  This has gotten me thinking about possible dangers with this approach, but also why I think it’s important. Read More

In Feminism

Thoughts from the Claremont Conference

Author LynnettePosted on 31 Comments

I spent last Friday at the Claremont conference, “Mormonism through the Eyes of Women.”  It was an amazing experience.  I’ve been to a lot of different Mormon conferences in the last couple of years, and presented at more than one of them, but none of them felt quite as intense to me as this one did.  Perhaps because Mormon feminist theology is a topic which matters so much to me; perhaps because I hadn’t really presented publicly on the subject before (and I have to admit that I had some anxiety about doing it).  But also, I think, because it was so exciting to be in a room full of people interested in talking about these ideas.  I know that Mormon feminism is thriving; I see it on the blogs every day.  But seeing it online isn’t quite the same as interacting live with a group of people who really care about the subject. Read More