Frustration and Fulfillment | Mary Lythgoe Bradford, ed., Mormon Women Speak

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I was intrigued by the cover design of this collection of twenty-four essays by Mormon women. It reminded me of a circular stained glass window with a gently smiling woman’s face in the center sur rounded by four compartments containing women’s hands in various symbolic postures. This design is described by Mary Bradford in her introduction as the “graphic symbol of the mandala” which depicts “the self, the wholeness of personality . . . which cannot tolerate self deception.” The hands depict the four aspects of the Mormon woman’s life — home, service to others, development of her own talents, and church. This simple design not only summarizes the contents of the book, it also serves as an ingenious device for organizing the twenty-four heterogeneous essays chosen from more than a hundred submissions. 

Reading these essays was a moving experience. Certain essays stand out because of a more dramatic approach or certain stylistic felicities. Despite some qualitative differences, all twenty-four authors expressed themselves so honestly and in such intensely personal terms that I am un comfortable singling out specific essays for special praise. Still, I would like to give the prospective reader a sense of what to expect by discussing a representative sample. 

The first section, introduced by the face with the hesitant smile, includes four essays which set the tone for what is to follow. These essays offer distinctive at tempts at self-definition which strive to preserve personal integrity while retaining some semblance of traditional Mormon womanhood. I found them to be gripping statements in which pain and triumph alternate, displaying an admirable open endedness befitting a struggle which will not settle for the facile solutions suggested by general conference rhetoric. Helen Candland Stark describes “An Under ground Journey Toward Repentance” in which she recognizes in the assertive, angry side of her nature ‘”an irascible witch” who must “learn to accept injustice, paradox, pain and loneliness” by befriending her alienated self. Karen Rosenbaum concludes “For Now I See Through a Glass Darkly” by confronting the absence of any divine visitation in her life and deciding to ‘reconcile my adult experience with child hood faith so that I may remain a Mormon” even though this entails settling for a larger measure of “not knowing” than of “knowing.” 

The section on the home depicts a woman’s hand holding the hand of a child and serves as an impressive centerpiece of the book since it contains the three prize winning essays published in DIALOGUE Winter 1982 issue and deals with the beginning and ending of life. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher gives an account of her first experience of “Birthing,” in which she fuses the major dimensions of Mormon childbearing—the clinical with the per sonal, and the matter-of-fact modern ap proach with the mystical approach of nineteenth-century Mormon midwifery. Edna B. Laney’s “The Last Project,” deals with death. She relates with unpretentious poignancy how she and her husband con front the jarring news that he is dying and how they share his waning days to achieve personal and spiritual resolution devoid of bitterness. 

The section on service to others deals with the heartache and breakthrough of transcending racial, religious, and ideological barriers. It begins with Rubina Rivers Forester’s description of what it means to be “Mormon and brown,” and ends with Phyllis Barber’s personal retrospective on Mormonism’s love-hate relationship with blacks. 

The section on creativity contains Jean Wadsworth Johnson’s “Life Beyond the Pumpkin Shell,” a memorable and representative example of the dilemma con fronting divorced Mormon women who are dispossessed from their “pumpkin shell style of life” and are faced with evolving from a “bread baker to a bread winner” with no previous work experience outside the home. 

The final section is depicted by two hands joined in prayer and contains essays focused on worship. They serve as an appropriate culmination to the book since they deal with Mormon women’s relationship to the Church and the gospel. They recapitulate earlier themes by providing different perspectives on what I would call the “odyssey of the thinking Mormon woman.” This odyssey takes the form of departure from orthodoxy, a basic disagreement or a sense of alienation which, after inner turmoil, confrontation with the world, and personal growth, leads to recon ciliation and a return to the fold on one’s own terms. 

Cherie Taylor Pedersen writes how she first ignored the women’s movement, then was challenged by it to find a “comfortable middle ground” between selflessness and selfishness, and finally concluded that, because it proved a much needed corrective to an exaggerated notion of “ideal” Mormon womanhood, she could regard it “not as a threat, but as a blessing.” Mary Ellen Romney MacArthur describes an ideological schizophrenia first apparent during her college days in her church-orientated “home self” as opposed to her secularized “Stanford self.” She concludes triumphantly that “it is perfectly possible to be considered a liberal, intellectual feminist at church and a religious, conservative ‘square’ in the world and still be accepted in both spheres.” 

Despite its unpretentious title, this book makes a powerful statement about what it means to be a concerned, thoughtful Mormon woman in today’s world with all the attendant frustrations. It offers a rich tapestry of the Mormon female experience expressed by twenty-four women representing a wide range of stations in life, age groups, and geographical regions. Reading these essays was like hearing twenty-four of the most compelling testimonies ever expressed in an LDS setting. Despite the variety of voices, I detected a common concern with the difficulty encountered by dedicated, thinking Mormon women as they attempt to reconcile their quests for self-discovery with the restrictive traditional definition of a woman’s role as a self-effacing, modest wife and mother dedicated to a life of service. Arriving at a satisfactory resolution of such antithetical concerns seems almost impossible—yet each of these women reached a positive solution. Indeed this book offers a refreshingly believable middle ground between the male-oriented preachiness of the collection of sermons by Church authorities entitled Women and the strident negativism of Sonia Johnson’s From Housewife to Heretic. 

Mormon Women Speak is above all a profoundly human document which deserves the attention of women and men alike. It should be required reading for anyone interested in the women’s movement or the status of LDS women. It is certainly a must for any man who seeks to understand Mormon women. 

Mormon Women Speak, edited by Mary Lythgoe Bradford (Salt Lake City: Olympus Publishing Co., 1982), 237 pp., $9.95.