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

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In 1986 Deseret Book published an anthology of talks selected from BYU women’s conferences. That collection, Woman to Woman, as the title suggests, included talks exclusively by Church women. Now, a 1988 anthology includes both male and female voices. 

That is one difference in the two col lections. Another is that, while Woman to Woman listed no editor, A Heritage of Faith credits two competent ones, Mary E. Stovall and Carol Cornwall Madsen, who have selected and arranged the talks (from 1985, 1986, and 1987 women’s conferences) thematically under the headings, “Seeking Spirituality,” “Coping with Hard Realities,” “Inspiration from the Past,” “Women in an International Church,” and “Individuality and Community.” Though the talks probably were not originally written to those assigned themes, they fit nicely under the headings now. 

Stovall and Madsen have gathered here a balance of the bold and the conventional, of the provocative and the familiar. Con sider, for instance, ninety-year-old Camilla Eyring Kimball’s candid view of old age as “a time of dependency on others after a lifetime of being self-sufficient,” a comment she immediately tempers with the reassurance that old age can hold the “satisfaction of enduring to the end by being faithful to important values in life” (p. 4). In a similar balance, she notes dangers of learning, while fondly relating her lifelong love of study and teaching. Citing 2 Nephi 9:28-29, Sister Kimball concludes “that learning has its risks. But on the other hand, ignorance has its risks too — just a different set” (p. 8). 

Patricia Terry Holland takes a hard look at the complexity of women’s concerns and cautions against the Paula-Perfect Syn drome of being “caught in the crunch of trying to be superhuman instead of realistically striving” (p. 12). From experience she counsels for a “stilling of the center,” for an “acceptance of diversity,” and for faith in a Mother in Heaven. This section also includes talks by Dallin H. Oaks and Carolyn J. Rasmus. 

In the section “Coping with Hard Realities,” besides Francine R. Bennion’s scriptural, philosophical understanding of suffering as applied to our own lives and Deanne Francis’ behavioral, psychological exploration of the charted phases of grief, we additionally find two very specific looks at “Hard Realities” for women within the Church: women as affected by divorce laws, presented and analyzed by lawyer Stephen J. Bahr, and Anne L. Horton’s candid sociological discussion of child and spouse abuse within the Church. Her challenge for us is to understand as well as to eliminate this problem in our midst. 

The third section, “Inspiration from the Past,” has only two selections, one by Carol Cornwall Madsen, and the other a joint paper by Harriet Home Arrington and Leonard J. Arrington. These are both strong and relevant historical portraits suggesting that when we feel inclined to congratulate ourselves, assuming Church women have “come a long way,” perhaps, in the light of crusades and achievements by our nineteenth-century sisters, our own strides are often tentative and even mincing. 

In terms of boldness and relevance, perhaps talks in the section “Women in an International Church” would win the prizes. Betty Ventura, Val D. MacMurray, and John P. Hawkins speak from experience and training on the necessity to move beyond insular, provincial concepts of the Church. Noting cultural differences as well as a need for gospel unity, Ventura dis cusses certain cultural barriers that are controllable if “humanizing” principles, rather than programs, schedules, and, what she calls “Americana,” are allowed to govern. What we want to achieve, she says, is “not a melting pot,” but rather, “a mosaic” (p. 145). 

Virginia Woolf, in her classic A Room of One’s Own, imagines Shakespeare to have had a wonderfully gifted sister — a sister bent on writing. Though as ad venturous and ambitious as her brother Will, whenever sister Judith picked up a book, she was told to “mend the stocking or mind the stew,” and when yearning for theatre, was told to marry the first man who would put a ring on her finger. In a similar vein, Val MacMurray imagines how it would be for his seventeen-year-old daughter Heidi to have been born a third world child. How would she function in the Church — or in the world even? Would she had lived to celebrate that seventeenth birthday? Would she have had chances to learn, or to marry, or to have children of her own? How might the gospel enhance, and even save, his “Third-World Heidi’s” life? How must the Church change to properly encompass these Heidis? 

John P. Hawkins looks at behavioral differences in a world-wide Church and concludes “because behavior says things, I believe that we, as Mormons, must abandon the adherence to precise patterned behavior as a definition of Mormoness. . . . Procedural uniformity may make members comfortable when they travel about the Church, but it tends to make many local Saints uncomfortable” (p. 167). 

Finally, Karen Lynn Davidson and Louise Plummer look at how it is possible to remain individual within a generally conforming society. Davidson concludes that “we do not all need to be the same. Sameness is one of the false premises of peer pressure. One of the most important things we come to learn as adult women is that two profoundly different people may both be fine, devoted members of the Church” (p. 183). Then humorously, Louise Plummer asserts the same necessity — the need for diversity. Just because her mother is a prudent, prepared “ant” doesn’t mean that the Church — or the world — has no need for herself as a “grasshopper.” Rewriting the end of the fable of the grasshopper and the ants, Plummer has the ants coming to the grasshopper in all their preparedness and saying, “We are bored to death. Won’t you tell us a story, or at least a good joke?” The grasshopper consents, and when asked where she gets all of her good ideas, she replies, “They come to me while I’m taking long hot baths” (pp. 190-91).

The collection has come full circle, then, back to Pat Holland’s earlier realization that until she told herself it was all right not to sew, she had to suppress the urge to tear out all the handsewn pleats in the pinafores of six little girls, trouping ahead of their mother down the church aisle, the mother in her own handsewn immaculate outfit.

The diversity of voices in A Heritage of Faith in itself speaks in favor of diversity.

A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from BYU Women’s Conferences, edited by Mary E. Stovall and Carol Cornwall Madsen (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), 191 pp., index, $10.95.