Volume 23, No. 3

Helen Candland Stark, born of hardy pioneer Utah stock, was a thriving transplant in Delaware for most of her adult life with her husband, Henry Stark, a research chemist. Adoptive parents of three, they nurtured the Delaware Branch from its ecclesiastical preexistence until it became the Delaware Stake in 1974, only five years after they moved back to Utah. Many-roled, Helen has been teacher, actress, wife, mother, writer, environmentalist, and feminist, all interpreted in her own distinctive style. Now, almost eighty-nine and widowed by Henry’s death in 1988, she is a survivor of resilient spirit. In 1989, a DIALOGUE team of interviewers, Shirley Paxman and Belle Cluff, using questions composed by Ann Fletcher, conducted an oral history session which Helen herself edited and supplemented with the assistance of Wanda Scott, who transcribed tapes and typed many earlier drafts. 

When a third big kettle of beets boiled over, I stared at the bloody mess and asked myself if this were mere happenstance. Perhaps here was a Freudian slip trying to tell me something. Perhaps I had better sort out a few feelings, the one uppermost being: When is enough, enough? I also wondered if I am a solitary case, or whether other women find themselves in a similar bind. 

On 24 September 1977, a group of fifteen Latter-day Saint women met for a luncheon at the home of Anna Taylor in Orem, Utah. The group, including Taylor’s sister-in-law Fern Smoot Taylor, Wanda Scott, Florence…

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 65–82
Evidence from Mormon women’s journals, diaries, and meeting
minutes tells us that from the 1840s until as recently as the 1930s,
LDS women served their families, each other, and the broader com￾munity, expanding their own spiritual gifts in the process.

Dialogue 23.3 (Fall 1990): 79–95
MOST RESEARCH BY MORMON FEMINISTS has been historical in nature. Proponents of greater power and privilege for women cite as prece￾dents the lives of Huldah and Deborah of the Old Testament, the treatment of women by Jesus Christ, or the activities of pioneer women in the early restored Church.

I was a true innocent when I was married for time and all eternity in 1975. One month later, pregnant and exhausted, I spent the evening enduring my Eagle Scout, returned-missionary, medical-student husband bouncing up…

As a journalist, I have learned secondhand about domestic violence, child abuse, mental health, and homicide. I have interviewed experts and victims; I have read and listened. I know that the names printed in the…

Once while I was wandering through my life, I had a need to say something. I’m not sure where this something came from, but opinions and observations grew on the interior walls of my mind…

As one of many who have borrowed deeply from May Swenson’s art, in classrooms over the nation and abroad, I offer tribute to her respect for the wonder, the splendor, of every living thing she…