Join Editor Taylor Petrey as he interviews Eliza Wells about her Winter 2022 article “Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference” for Dialogue Out Loud #34.
When the most powerful leaders in the Church use their limited time in the spotlight to highlight someone else’s words, they send a signal about how that source should be perceived. The quotation patterns in fifty years of general conference addresses reveal that, despite increasingly vocal commitments from Church leaders to the equal though separate status of women and men, those leaders continue to treat female voices as less authoritative than male ones.