Dancing Through the Doctrine: Observations on Religion and Feminism

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[1]Lucretia Mott, a nineteenth-century quaker minister and suffragist, delivered a speech at a Philadelphia women’s rights convention in 1854 in which she discussed the day of Pentecost. She said: 

Then Peter stood forth—some one has said that Peter made a great mistake in quoting the prophet Joel—but he stated that “the time is come, this day is fulfilled the prophecy when it is said, I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,” etc.—the language of the Bible is beautiful in its repetition—”upon my servants and my handmaidens I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy.” Now can anything be clearer than that? [Emphasis mine.][2]

Sarah Kimball, a nineteenth-century LDS Relief Society leader and suffragist, held similar beliefs about the relationship between religion and women’s suffrage, about the evidence of God’s hand in the expansion of women’s rights. She wrote that “the sure foundations of the suffrage cause were deeply and permanently laid on the 17th of March, 1842,” the day in LDS history when Joseph Smith “turned the key in the name of the Lord” to organize formally the Women’s Relief Society.[3]

It is not unusual to find among the early leaders of the cause of women’s rights repeated and sincere references to religion—Sarah M. Grimke, for example, wrote that God created man and women in his image: “God created us equal;—he created us free agents.”[4] Sojourner Truth reminded her congregation that Christ came “From God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with Him.”[5] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Fanny Fern, and of course the Mormon suffragists writing and organizing in Utah used religious doctrines as the foundation for their feminism. 

As American feminist thinkers and organizers, we’ve walked a long road since then, a road that has led us farther and farther away from religious discourse and Christian justification. Our reasons have been good: We didn’t want to limit or exclude. We didn’t want to direct all feminists down a single philosophical path. We wanted to avoid the violence caused by binary thinking and metaphysical justifications. So we’ve tread lightly, acknowledging but mostly avoiding sacred ground. Although academic feminists have revised history, philosophy, literature, and art with at least one foot in the confines of our patriarchal disciplines, our critiques of religion most often find us smelling the flowers off to the side of the road. Feminists in general don’t often publicly state allegiance even to the gentle male God of the New Testament, though many of us admit to loving Shakespeare. Even though American feminism’s mainstream is still made up of “liberal feminists” whose agenda remains reform rather than revolution, our discussions of religion are most often about women’s inherent (individual) spirituality or about the intractable patriarchal nature of The Church—not about how to find women’s place within mainstream religious movements.[6] As theorists, scholars, and activists, we work within patriarchal systems of education, economics, and government, but we give up on religion. Why? 

If there is a purpose for this essay, it is to call for two things: (1) a move on the part of American feminist organizations and theorists to re assert our ability to occupy the important ground of religious discourse, and (2) the establishment of a careful feminist critique of religion from positions of faith within religious communities.[7] Along our road to a revolution in metaphysical thinking, we need to find out what is worth keeping in our traditional theology as we’ve done in other fields. Many feminists in philosophy for example, point out that the Western humanist idea of a whole and unitary individual with unalienable rights has caused great violence to those defined as “other,” yet we’ve taken off from that concept of individuality, powered by deconstruction and revision, to explore some powerful new theories of subjectivity. 

I see the return of religious rhetoric to feminist thinking as a way to overturn the binary of good and evil that is doing violence to our nation on issues such as abortion and welfare: invoking a religious morality on both sides blurs the distinctions between entrenched opposites. And it will be an honest invocation, considering how many of us in the U.S. (liberal and conservative alike) connect our morality with an organized religion—many more than in most Western nations. Witness the recent media hype about angels, including a Time magazine cover story which asserts that 69 percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. A recent Gallup survey has 96 percent of Americans saying they believe in God, and at least 84 percent claiming a (Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish) religious affiliation.[8]

I also see an invocation of religion in feminist politics as inclusionary: American feminism has embraced a tradition of pluralism and done a much better job of encompassing diversity than most theoretical schools or political groups. We wrestle constantly with the hows and whys, we make mistakes and fall into patriarchal and colonial patterns, but we never give up. As long as we as feminists maintain mutual respect for religion as we’ve done fairly successfully (though not without a struggle) with sexual preference, this allowance of various religious discourses would do more to convince traditionally Catholic Chicanas, Jewish American women, mainstream Mormon women, the religious Eastern European-American women I grew up with, African-American women whose ties are Christian or Muslim, or oppressed women of many ethnic groups who embrace Liberation Theology that the movement belongs as much to them as to skeptical middle-class WASP women. 

As feminists, skilled in the discourse and practices of diversity, we’ll have to apply our commitments across belief systems and resist the temptation of religious discourse violently to invoke the transcendent as a proof—as the ultimate end of discussion. We can’t very well expect religion to do without a theory of transcendence—belief in a God and, generally, a heaven beyond earth are, after all, what religion is about. But as one of my religious, postmodern students in a theory seminar said, “Keep your transcendents to yourself.” Can religious feminists publicly express our faith without embarrassment but keep our religious proofs to communities of believers, approaching others with gentle deference? I have seldom seen such deference in religious com munities.[9]

But I have seen (and continue to see) such gentle deference, such attention to different beliefs and cultures, within the feminist movement. I have experienced it in my feminist communities, both academic and political.[10] Even so, in my scholarly study of feminist theories I have yet to find a home for my conservative religious beliefs. I have found, instead, that religion is one area where mainstream feminist thinking has been clearly secular and often barely distinguishable from current mainstream liberalism. For example, we could easily substitute “feminism” for “the nation” in the following passage from Yale law professor Stephen L. Carter’s book, A Culture of Disbelief: “It is both tragic and paradoxical that now, just as [feminism] is beginning to invite people into the public square for the different points of view that they have to offer, people whose contribution to [feminism]’s diversity comes from their religious traditions are not valued unless their voices seem somehow esoteric.”[11] Carter writes that despite the strong religious tradition in American social reform—from suffrage and abolition to Civil Rights and anti-war— where “the public rhetoric of religion . . . had been largely the property of liberalism,” suddenly, and immutably, the realm of religion has been ceded to the conservative right, so that “by the time of the 1992 Republican Convention, one had the eerie sense that the right was asserting ownership in God.”[12] Other recent texts on religion and politics have also traced the move from “religious sentiments, beliefs, and organizations” being “at the heart of a large number of contemporary social movements”[13]to the current perception that religion is only for hard-line conservatives. 

Mormon culture, especially in Utah, has participated in this broader cultural trend, successfully uniting religious doctrine with politically conservative dogma, for example, in the popular 1992 presidential campaign of the ultra-right-wing Bo Gritz, in the anti-choice politics and policies of the Utah legislature, and in a September 1993 special issue on “the conservative backlash” in the church-owned and -controlled BYU campus newspaper, the Daily Universe (which came close enough to absurdity to be actually quite funny). In a front-page editorial for that issue, BYU political science professor Bud Scruggs defended God, family, and hearth as the exclusive domain of the conservative Republican. He went as far as to suggest (as Jerry Falwell once did) that only Republicans pray (and, incidentally, that they should pray for the demise of the Clinton administration).[14]

Scrugg’s defense echoes Hyrum Andrus’s little 1965 book on Mormonism and conservative politics, in which the author posits that, “in order to meet the problems that currently confront them, Latter-day Saints are bound by that which they hold sacred, to support an intelligent, conservative position in social, economic and political philosophy . . .”[15] Such rhetoric moves feminists, political activists, and even Democrats from the center of the church into the margins. And, since there has not been an equally successful countering of this rhetoric, nationally or locally, there we have remained.[16]

Still there are those affirming moments when religion appears somewhere left of the political right, in the speeches of Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo and in the writings of Toni Morrison and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Martin Luther King, Jr., social activist and Baptist minister, had a dream that was decidedly not a secular one, and his speech on “Conscience and the Vietnam War” reinforces that: 

For those who question “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?”—and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace—I answer by saying that I have worked too long and hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating moral concerns. Justice is indivisible. … In 1957 when a group of us formed the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference], we chose as our motto: “To save the soul of America.” Now it should be in candescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. [Emphasis mine.][17]

King’s foundation, for both his pacifism and his civil rights campaign, was clearly a religious one. Perhaps in response to this impassioned religious rhetoric of the activists of the 1960s and early 1970s, however, mainstream American politics continued more determinedly along its path of secularization. While the causes of the secularization of politics are complex and beyond the scope of this study, some of the reasons most often cited include the privileged position science and empirical thinking have held since the Enlightenment and especially in the twentieth century; the “modernization” of the West, including technological advances, urbanization, and a growing mass media; and broad efforts toward public (read: secular) education for children from all racial, ethnic, and socio economic groups. The persistence of religious groups in the face of these advances has surprised many a social scientist. Recently in some countries, most notably in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe, religious resurgence has served as “an expression of cultural authenticity.”[18]

Certainly in the United States we can’t deny that, like it or not, religious belief is part of our historical and political legacy. And religion has returned to the political realm with a vengeance since the 1980s—but, again, only on the conservative right. Stephen Carter blames the left for yielding its right, for “shedding religious rhetoric like a useless second skin.”[19] But I believe he’s missing part of the picture. Religious feminists and certainly Mormon feminists might lay some of the blame for the loss of religious discourse in feminism not only on our reluctance to use it, but also on a wresting away of this language by the conservative groups who have set up feminists—along with witches and lesbians—as the enemies of God. For many people steeped in conservative thinking, “feminazis” are effectively silenced before they attempt to speak. I encountered many such people during my tenure as a professor at BYU, people who simply could not hear a word I said, even when I was teaching Hemingway or sharing my testimony of Jesus Christ. 

Let me make a space here to locate myself. I generally call myself a radical feminist, meaning that I imagine huge changes, not just reformative or cosmetic changes, are going to be necessary to alter women’s oppressed situation in our world. I am generally more sympathetic to revisioning and rethinking than I am to reform, because our oppressive ways of operating in this world are so firmly entrenched that painting over them will never be enough. We need to strip our institutions down to the bare structures, then see if they need rebuilding or renovation. We don’t repair structures by sitting in the middle of them and imagining that they are fixed. That said, I must acknowledge that my position on religion is much the same as my position on politics—I’m looking for revision and rethinking not just reform, which might explain why my tenure as BYU’s first trained feminist theorist was brief.[20]

I believe differences come even among religious feminists and, in my experience, Mormon feminists when we examine how to approach these patriarchal structures—the father’s house, in Audre Lorde’s terms. Do we attack them with the father’s tools? With our own? Should we build our own houses across the street? Or do we reject the imperialist constructions that deface that earth and go off to live in canyons and deserts? My position on religious conservatism and feminism is that (with apologies to Mary Daly, Sonia Johnson, and Carol P. Christ, whom I admire) feminists have been spending too much time in the desert. I say this perhaps because beginning at age six I was enmeshed in my mother’s personal religious revival and conversion from Catholicism to Mormonism. Mormonism was then and continues to be my conduit into the universe, my access to personal spirituality, to healing faith, and to empowering theology. It pushes the limits of my intellect, reminding me that there are many ways to construct and perceive truths, many, many of them beyond my power of understanding. It gives me a way, as a feminist theorist, to approach believers of any theology tenderly and with respect. 

Though I have studied feminist theory and been a committed feminist for years, I am still brought up short when we assume, as a group, that our feminist faith is New Age, goddess-worship, or earth-centered. At a Take Back the Night march in Salt Lake City in May 1993 I and a few of my friends were uncomfortable with the coupling of our political protest of violence against women with candle-lit chants about our bodies and our blood. I honor the organizers’ commitment to their faith, but I balk at the assumption that it is the faith of all feminists. 

Perhaps I am also writing in response to the question that I hear often from many of my (as we say in Mormonism) gentile friends, “Why do you stay in such a male-dominated religion?” I am often tempted to ask them, admittedly begging the question, which institutions they associate with are not dominated by men—their banks, their government, their schools or factories or hospitals? I stay because Mormonism means something to me at the deepest levels of my being. So I find myself, in my own religious odyssey, sitting in a structure I have deconstructed, but that I admire still. I stare at the clouds through the open beams where the ceiling once was and admire the beams without wishing for the ceiling. And currently I have no plans for a desert escape. It’s a tough position to take in this particular historical moment as an intellectual and a feminist,[21] but I love my church and am proud to be Mormon. That response informs this essay. 

Let me also add this caveat: I am neither historian—Mormon or otherwise—social scientist, nor theologian. I am a feminist literary critic with a penchant for cultural critique, and a Mormon woman anxiously (or should I say desperately?) engaged in finding a way to integrate a late twentieth-century postmodern feminist consciousness with a lifelong commitment to faith and active participation in the LDS church and a conviction that, for some feminists, the basic structure of Mormonism can and ought to remain—and by “structure” here I mean the basic doctrines and tenets of our faith, not the organizational structure. I emphasize some feminists because in this difficult time I must acknowledge the struggle many Mormon feminists have with “structure” in either sense of the word. This essay, then, is perhaps more aptly titled “justification” than “observation.” 

Within my call for the return of religion to feminism and feminism to religion, I would like to close by beginning a broader discussion than we’ve heretofore had of Mormon feminism, because this is the feminism I have the highest stake in. I hesitate to do this, as my first response to our present embattled position is to close ranks, yet I think it’s time we looked to the future armed with a clear praxis and an articulate agenda. To this purpose, as I understand from Debra Kaufman’s work, similar discussions are taking place among orthodox Jewish women; and notably Catholic, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian feminist theologians have made strides in this direction over the past several years. 

Recently some feminist thinkers, Gloria Steinem among them, have called for a return to consciousness-raising groups as a way of bringing feminism back to local relevance and back into the everyday lives of women. Feminist thinkers, mostly in the Academy, have turned our movement into a theory, they argue, to the detriment of the movement. This nostalgic place, where feminism was about the “liberation” of individual women rather than the complex, interwoven systems and institutions of oppression, is, I think, where Mormon feminism has remained. 

In the spring of 1993 I attended my first Mormon feminist retreat, Pilgrimage, with several graduate students and English teachers—all women in our twenties or early thirties—who had met together once a week for nearly a year to study feminist theory. A combination consciousness raising/support/study group, we had spent part of winter semester studying Mormon feminism. We read Sonia Johnson’s From Housewife to Heretic, and essays from Sisters in Spirit (edited by Lavina Fielding Anderson and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher) and from Women and Authority (edited by Maxine Hanks). As we talked our way through these texts, we began to outline a Mormon feminism from our roots in feminist theory and cultural criticism, a feminism based only partly on our own experiences. This feminism, we decided, was not so much a re action to disillusionment or mistreatment as it was an enactment of our theory and our theology. (Even as I write this I hear the loving, challenging voices of these women clarifying and modifying my description.)

At Pilgrimage our feminist thinking was set against the backdrop of the longstanding tradition of Mormon feminism which surrounded us there.[22] We spent our days pointing out to each other famous Mormon feminists we had read—there’s Linda King Newell in the sauna, Lavina Fielding Anderson by the fireplace, Margaret Toscano at the book display—and our nights sorting through our experience. Aside from a group of women we admire and respect, here is what we saw at Pilgrimage: 

• A feminism based on individual liberation, where meetings consisted mainly of entertainment, affirmation, and sharing stories of awakenings and abuses. 
• A homogeneous feminism that seemed, for the most part, comfortable in its familiar surroundings. 
• An insular feminism that based its desires for change almost solely on getting male leaders to understand women in the church. 
• A non-theoretical feminism, whose major premise was that women should no longer be silent. 
• An apolitical feminism that saw most of the women resisting a pull into a mild protest campaign, led by some of the more activist members of the group, which involved wearing small white ribbons on their lapels at church. 

It was a feminism in the wilderness or focussed on reform, and a feminism that highlighted all of the imperfections of our smaller group— our homogeneity, our middle-class consciousness, our insularity. It was also a feminism quite different from the Mormon feminism we had been developing hopefully together in some of the following ways: One member of our group worked on the rape crisis hotline in Provo. She, like many activist feminists, talked to rape victims, sometimes several a week, took them to the hospital and the police station. She insisted that we always keep broad social and cultural change on our agenda. Another woman, actually an undergraduate, but certainly not your average undergraduate, studied Hispanic literatures. She never let us forget that white women are not the center of the world—that we aren’t even a majority of women in many parts of America. She inspired us to read the theorist /novelist /poet Gloria Anzaldua together. Another had just finished teaching for a year in inner-city schools in Boston and had, she told us, altered her approach to life at a very basic level to accommodate what she learned there. Together we confided and theorized and negotiated. And we demonstrated, organized, and gave political speeches. 

In short, though our discussions were, like consciousness-raising groups, local and personal, they were also theoretical and global, always with immense political and cultural pretensions. We, in other words, are determined not so much to change the church as to change the world, because when we change the world the church will follow. Instead of locating ourselves in the church, we located the church in ourselves—and ourselves in the world. As one member of our group, Camie Chris tiansen, wrote to me recently, “I am more interested in connecting Mormon women with mainstream women’s movements and concerns in academics, politics, and in the political world.” Most of us agree that religious institutions resist change and close most doors to revolution. (The case of Galileo is instructive here). However, sometimes they open a sky light to revelation, and therein lies hope for changing the church. We approach this hope on its own philosophical ground: We pray for change. But in the meantime there’s a lot to be done, and we feminists must be about our Mother’s business. We need to be much more anxiously engaged beyond the boundaries of our religious congregations and our individual souls. Barring revelation over which we have no tangible control in the strictly established patriarchal hierarchies of contemporary religion (imagine Joan of Arc in Salt Lake or Vatican City today), these broader activities are the only way to change the church. 

For me this means returning to my basic faith in Mormon doctrine for renewal and spiritual strength as I work to change the world, because, in all honesty, it is in that doctrine that created me as a moral being that I discover the passion for social and political activism. As my friend Joanna Brooks explained in a personal letter last year, “Religion is not just metaphysical. It is not just a head game. It is just as much a physical construction as is race or sex. It absolutely determines our conception of our bodies, our spirituality [and morality], our roles.” At the risk of overextending my metaphor, I can’t stop myself from adding here that sometimes the best way of dealing with the father’s house is to use his summer cottage (even if it has no roof) while you’re taking the hacksaw to the family mansion. Again, let me call on feminist methodologies in the academic disciplines for examples of how this is to be done. We haven’t thrown out all of Western culture because much of it is painful, heterosexist, and misogynist. It is our culture—we are it and it is us—so we examine its length and breadth, its foundations and structures, then alter and adjust it for our own survival and the survival of our friends and communities. Meanwhile, we cannot get beyond it. There is no “Beyond.” We continue to be constructed by and even admire certain aspects of it. 

Let me acknowledge here, finally, that I don’t speak for all Mormon feminists, many of whom differ fundamentally with me on how to approach our religion. To them I say, let the conversation begin. Because Mormon feminists are well-suited to initiate a faithful discussion of religion and women’s issues; we have a history of courageous feminists and, in our faith, a common bond that crosses cultures and ideologies. It is now a worldwide church, and many of us are lucky enough to live and serve in wards that reflect this. 

In conclusion, I must insist that those of us who are committed to Mormonism are committed to social change, to feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, mourning with those who mourn. We are bound to be humble in our assertions, reluctant to exercise authority, eager to serve others, and loving to those who believe differently. I say, with all due respect for your difference and no desire to proselytize or convert, that I, as a Latter-day Saint, am bound by that which I hold sacred to support an intelligent, radical feminist position in social, economic, and political and religious philosophy. My faith frames that position, and my religious practice demands it. Now can anything be clearer than that?

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[1] This essay is dedicated, with respect and love, to the women of Feminist Home Evening: Camie Christiansen, Joanna Brooks, Becca Wahlquist, Melissa Bradshaw Vistaunet, Marni Asplund Campbell, Jaime Harker, Rachel Poulsen, Elizabeth Visick, Jane England, Adriana Velez, GaeLyn Henderson, Michelle Paradise, Kim Anderson, Tiffany Bunker Noble, Melanie Jenkins, and Claudine Foudray Gallacher (and Bryan Waterman, Sam Hammond, Tracy Farr, and Wes Smith, who had occasional “honorary” status). 

[2] Lucretia Mott, in Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Schneir (New York: Vintage, 1972), 102.

[3] Jill Mulvey Derr, Sarah M. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1976), 7.

[4] Schneir, 37. 

[5] Ibid., 95 

[6] I use the adjective “mainstream” to modify both “feminism” and “religions.” In the first case I use it to indicate the central, liberal body of the feminist movement, characterized by the actions and philosophies of the National Organization for Women and excluding, for the purpose of clarity in this essay, the work of more radical academic and activist feminists and some more conservative groups. In the second case I use it, following Stephen Carter, to indicate “the dominant, culturally established faiths held by the majority of Americans,” a definition Carter borrows from Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney in American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief [New York: Basic Books], 18).

[7] I want to acknowledge here that I look for inspiration to the long tradition of reformers, especially in Catholicism, who critiqued their religion from positions of faith. Also valuable to me is the recent work of Mormon thinkers, especially Eugene England in his personal essays (see various issues of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought of which he is a founding editor and in Dialogues with Myself). I was also influenced by Debra Kaufmann’s presence as she held a visiting professorship at BYU in 1992-93, and her generous and open discussion of her work on newly orthodox Jewish women (Rachel’s Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women). 

[8] Statistics cited from Time magazine, 27 Dec. 1993, 56-65, and from Carter, 279 n2.

[9] In fact our Christian history is quite the opposite of deferential—full of violence, especially violence against women: witness the mass murder of “witches” in medieval Europe and of “heathens” in Asia and the Middle East. By inviting feminism to participate in religious discourse, I’m inviting feminism to work within this bloody history. I realize that for some this is more than a little problematic. I would add, however, with Carter, that bloody histories are not unique to religion. Our response to repressive governments is not generally to opt out of government altogether. “We need,” concludes Carter, “to distinguish a critique of the content of a belief from a critique of its source” (277—see also 85). 

[10] In fact, an earlier version of this paper was delivered at a meeting of the Salt Lake City chapter of Utah NOW in January 1994. In that community, dominated politically and economically by the Mormon church, the NOW chapter is mostly ex- or non-Mormons, yet group members were always blessedly open in their acceptance of me, an orthodox Mormon and feminist. This acceptance was not as prevalent in the Mormon community, where feminism is quite suspect (see n20 below). 

[11] Carter, 57.

[12] Ibid., 58. 

[13] Anson Shupe and Jeffrey K. Hadden, eds., The Politics of Religion and Social Change (New York: Paragon, 1988), viii. 

[14] See Daily Universe, 19 Sept. 1993, 1. 

[15] Hyrum L. Andrus, Liberalism, Conservatism and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1965), ix. 

[16] This is complicated in Mormonism by the increasing presence of political conservatives in the hierarchies of the church, especially since the recent tenure of Ezra Taft Benson, a staunch right-wing conservative, as prophet. When believers look to their leaders for patterns of political activity, they are hard pressed today to find even a single Democrat.

[17] Martin Luther King, The Trumpet of Conscience (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1967), 24. 

[18] Emile Sahliyeh, Religious Resurgence and Politics in the Contemporary World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), vii. 

[19] Carter, 58.

[20] I was a professor at Brigham Young University from 1990-94 (after obtaining my M.A. degree there in 1987 and being named “Outstanding Graduate Student” in the English department). I found myself the subject of some controversy after my feminist research, teaching, and politics became the (publicly unacknowledged) grounds for my dismissal in June 1993.1 appealed the decision and reached a settlement with the university in November 1993. See Bryan Waterman and Brian Kagel, “BYU and the Farr/Knowlton Cases: A Preliminary Sketch,” forthcoming in Sunstone.

[21] Reference to this “historical moment” assumes familiarity with the LDS church’s recent pattern of harassment of Mormon feminists and intellectuals. See Lavina Fielding Anderson, “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology,” in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26 (Spring 1993): 7-64, and Anderson, “Landmarks for LDS Women: A Contemporary Chronology,” in Mormon Women’s Forum 3 (Dec. 1992): 1-20.

[22] Though the Pilgrimage retreat is not definitive of Mormon feminism as a whole, it is typical in many ways of the most common trends in Mormon feminism as I have observed them over the past several years, so I chose it, for the purpose of this essay, as exemplary. My apologies for my academic reductivism to feminists of diverse perspectives who compose this and similar groups.