Feminism

“My Indignation Has Got the Better of My Intention”: A Case Study in Latter-day Saint and “Gentile” Female Family Correspondence in Nineteenth-Century America

Bonnie Young

Listen to the audio version of this piece here. Although members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shared many values with their Christian neighbors, the differences between Mormons and non-Mormons during the…

In Defense of Heavenly Mother: Her Critical Importance for Mormon Culture and Theology

Margaret Merrill Toscano

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 37
Marginalizing God the Mother does not solve the problems raised by Mormonism’s doctrine of divine and human embodiment. It merely diminishes femaleness as a reflection of divinity. We do not need fewer images to understand God; we need more. Critics of Heavenly Mother have not fully grasped the negative consequences of moving toward a God beyond gender

Gendering Mormon Studies—At Last! Amy Hoyt and Taylor G. Petrey, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Mormonism and Gender

Christine Talbot

Women’s and gender studies emerged out of the women’s and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, movements the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints vigorously opposed. The so-called New Mormon History flourished around the same time, opening the field to new approaches

Fear, Faith, and Other F-Words

T Boyd

Podcast version of this piece. I’m sitting in the bishop’s office. My dress is slightly damp, but I can’t determine whether the moisture is a result of the snowstorm or sweat beading beneath the cotton.…

Unpacking Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Mormonism Taylor G. Petrey, Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism

Alison Halford

Inevitably at some point, due to structural white patriarchal privilege and a central and abiding concern with discrete gendered bodies and heteronormative relations, the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will…

Sisterhood and the Divine Feminine Twila Newey, Sylvia

Rebecca Bateman

Like a mother opening her arms to embrace her children, the span of mountains and trees that look over my childhood home in Salt Lake City extend to the south and cradle also the homes…

Mette Harrison, The Women’s Book of Mormon: Volume One

Adam Mclain

Lavina Fielding Anderson, Mercy Without End: Toward a More Inclusive Church

Claudia L. Bushman

Beauty in the Irreversible Lisa Van Orman Hadley. Irreversible Things

Sarah Nickel Moore

Judging by its length, Irreversible Things is the kind of book that I should have been able to finish in a couple hours. Perhaps one evening, after the kids had gone to bed, I could curl up…

The Gebirah and Female Power

Amber Richardson

Tipping the Scales: LDS Women and Power in Recent Scholarship

Charlotte Hansen Terry

A Rising Generation: Women in Power in Young Adult Novels Jo Cassidy. Good Girls Stay Quiet Emily King. Before the Broken Star Julie Berry. Lovely War

Katherine Cowley

The Order of Eve: A Matriarchal Priesthood

Kyra N. Krakos

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 99–107
Elder Oaks clarified that priesthood is the authority and power of God. By extension, that must also be the authority and power of our Heavenly Mother. I decided to give it a name. Not the Order of Aaron, that great Old Testament wingman to Moses, or the Order of Melchizedek, mentor and life coach to Abraham, but the Order of Eve, a matriarchal priesthood, in honor of the mother of all living.

The Stories We Tell—And What They Tell Us

Heather Sundahl

The Power of an Unbroken Woman

Joy Sitawa Richards

The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 33–47
In this essay, I discuss this history, present evidence that Latter-day Saint men sold abortion pills in the late nineteenth century, and argue that it is likely some Latter-day Saint women took them in an attempt to restore menstrual cycles that anemia, pregnancy, or illness had temporarily “stopped.” Women living in the twenty-first century are unable to access these earlier understandings of pregnancy because the way we understand pregnancy has changed as a result of debates over the criminalization of abortion and the development of ultrasound technology.

Feminism, Polygamy, and Murder John Bennion. An Unarmed Woman.

Helynne Hollstein Hansen

John Bennion’s work is set in the late 1880s and focuses on plural marriage through the lens of a murder mystery.

Roundtable: When Feminists Excommunicate

Mette Ivie Harrison

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 183–192
I am concerned about the ways in which I see patriarchy swallow up the demands of feminism and use them against women. Each time we gain som

Roundtable: Mormon Women and the Anatomy of Belonging

Neylan McBaine

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 193–200
n looking at the definition of Mormon womanhood, it seems to me that the boundaries of that community have shifted over the past almost two hundred years from being initially proscribed by the institution, in the early days of the Nauvoo Relief Society, to essentially being defined by the Mormon women themselves in today’s modern global Church.

Roundtable: Shifting Boundaries of Feminist Theology: What Have We Learned?

Maxine Hanks

Dialogue 50.1 (Spring 2017): 167–180
This tendency to rewrite Relief Society history continued from the
1850s into the 1990s.

A Double Portion: An Intertextual Reading of Hannah (1 Samuel 1–2) and Mark’s Greek Woman (Mark 7:24–30)

Julie M. Smith

The Physical Process of Creation

Carrel Hilton Sheldon

Discovering the Woman’s Exponent

Susan Whitaker Kohler

Key Turning Points in Exponent II’s History

Nancy Tate Dredge

Exponent II: Early Decisions

Claudia L. Bushman

A Laurel’s First-Night Fantasies

Theric Jepson

Possibility one, extrapolated from what Betty, second clarinet, said about what Tabitha, first clarinet, did last Saturday:  They enter the hotel room, both of them shaking as only virgins can shake. Somehow he manages to…

Listening to Each Other: Religion, Feminism, and Freedom of Conscience: A Mormon/Humanist Dialogue Edited by George D. Smith

Florien J. Wineriter

A Mormon Mother | Annie Clark Tanner, A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography

Charlotte Cannon Johnston

A Mormon Mother, which Annie Clark Tanner wrote in long hand in 1941 in her 77th year, seems especially valuable to me as an honest, perceptive account of the human problems of living polygamy during…

Biography of an Indian Latter-day Saint Women: Me and Mine | Louise Udall, The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa

Grace F. Arrington

Me and Mine ranks with the finest autobiographical accounts of Latter day Saint women. Informative, interesting, and written simply but with a sense of drama, it is a fascinating book. Louise Udall, mother of Stewart…

Lyrics and Love in Orderville | Carol Lynn Pearson and Lex de Azevedo, The Orders is Love

A. Laurence Lyon

To write a musical play based on any church theme or motivate will inevitably invite comparison with the “Father of Us All,” Promised Valley, written by Arnold Sundgard (lyrics) and Crawford Gates (music).  Promised Valley…

Fiddlin’ Around in Orderville, or, A Mormon on the Roof | Carol Lynn Pearson, The Order is Love

Richard Cracroft

Carol Lynn Pearson, in her delightful musical, The Order is Love, has managed to put her finger on the pulse of Mormon history and discover a vigorous throb of universality which is at times sobering…

The Mattress

Georgina Alvillar Wibert

I look around me and I laugh. I am caught by the interplay of light and color upon the chandelier. From long ago I see a child’s triumph. In one dangling crystal I see her…

The Courtship

Patricia Rasmussen Eaton

It was nearly seven. Uncanny the way she could sense that particular hour even without looking and even on days that were not Thursday. The library was quiet as always. The afternoon people had been…

Snowflake Girl

Louise Larson Comish

I grew up in Snowflake, which lies in desert country in Arizona, altitude 5600 feet. Alof Larson and May Hunt, my parents, were among the early arrivals to this pioneer settlement, named for Erastus Snow…

Triad

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

STEPHEN 
carries secrets he hasn’t had time 
to decode, 
takes his clues from me 
as I search for signals myself, 

My Temple

Blanche Berry

My roots are planted in God’s earth. 
My wings extend throughout God’s ether. 
My interior is God’s kingdom. 

The Perennial Harlot

Blanche Berry

I met my first man in a garden. 
He fell easy; it only took a red apple. 
I laid the blame on a snake— 

Friends

Blanche Berry

Those whom I have called friends, 
Whose exchange of thought 
Once brought that blessed relief 

Devotion to Sam

Blanche Berry

The ocean’s wide, and I can’t step it; 
I love Sam and I can’t help it. 
But there ain’t no mule 
Had a harder life 
Than I 
Tryin’ to be Sam’s wife. 

Canyon Country

Ina Jespersen Hobson

The bend, sharp thrust, and color 
Of this land abide the centuries 
Unchanged. Earth keeps another time 
Than man, and soon and late inters 
Each vanished traveler in her dust. 

Mormon Country Women: With an Introduction by Gordon Thomasson

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was a happy example of a “self-fulfilled” woman. She enjoyed a long and fruitful career as America’s foremost woman photographer, successfully blended her work with that of her husband, historian Paul Taylor,…

Mother’s Day, 1971

Lucybeth Rampton

Brothers and sisters, I find this a bittersweet year for me to be participating in a Mother’s Day program, for my own mother passed away last November and my husband’s mother was buried just two…

Dirt: A Compendium of Household Wisdom

Shirley Gee

Housekeeping provides the setting, if not the solution, to many basic and profound philosophical questions.  What housewife has not, in viewing the unending stream of dirty dishes or unmade beds, pondered the categories of reality:…

Single Voices: Thoughts on Living Alone

Alberta Baker

If singleness is an affliction, I can only conclude that I’m not a good example. I love living alone. I love travelling alone. I love people but not necessarily to live with. I enjoy company…

Single Voices: A Candid and Uncensored Interview with a Mormon Career Girl

M. Karlynn Hinman

Q. Our readers are interested in knowing more about single professional women in the Church. Tell us about your background. 

A. I’m from a small Utah community. I went to college in Utah and to graduate school in the east.

Single Voices: Journal Jottings

Dianne Higginson

The Victorian Ideal of Womanhood doesn’t seem so disadvantageous to girls thrust into a hostile world “on their own.” When you remain single, society takes away the advantages of being a girl and forces upon…

Single Voices: A Letter Home

Maryruth Bracy

Dear Mom and Dad, 

Your phone call last night left me feeling strangely orphaned, as if you had placed me on some foreign doorstep. I know you thought that Tom and I would get married, and that you can’t understand why I’ve quit my job. Last year you questioned my going on to graduate school; last night you wanted me to return for more schooling in Utah: is it that you’d rather have me in school there than struggling out here?

Somewhere Inbetween

Grethe Ballif Peterson

I had always known, or at least hoped, that my role as an adult female would be varied and progressive. I didn’t know it would be as complicated or as conflicting as it has been. …

Belle Spafford: A Sketch

JoAnn Woodruff Bair

In 1945, while Belle Spafford was serving as a counselor in the general Relief Society presidency, a rumor circulated that Church auxiliaries would be reorganized and that future presidents would serve a specified term of…

A Survey of Women General Board Members

Dixie Snow Huefner

In February, 1971, the questionnaire found on the opposite page was mailed to the 175 women who were then serving on the Relief Society, Primary and YWMIA General Boards of the Church. The following explanation…

All Children Are Alike Unto Me

Almera Anderson Romney

“I’m sure that you wouldn’t be interested in the only position I have to offer you. We do need a teacher in our Negro school but the problems are insurmountable. The children are undisciplined and can’t learn, the parents are ignorant, and the school’s as dirty as a pigpen.” 

This pronouncement by a school superintendent amazed and challenged me.

The Mormon Woman and Priesthood Authority: The Other Voice

Cheryll May

While engaged in some research the other day I ran across a commentary on the Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith” that lies at the heart of the Protestant Reformation. The doctrine was described as…

And Woe Unto Them That Are With Child In Those Days

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Dialogue 6.2 (Summer 1972): 40–47
It isn’t easy these days to be a Momon mother of four. In the university town where I live, fertility is tolerated but not encouraged. Every time I drive to the grocery store, bumper stickers remind me that Overpopulation Begins At Home, and I am admonished to Make Love, Not Babies. At church I have the opposite problem. My youngest is almost two and if I hurry off to Primary without a girdle, somebody’s sure to look suspiciously at my flabby stomach and start imagining things. Everybody else is pregnant, why not I?

Having One’s Cake and Eating It Too

Christine Meaders Durham

It has occurred to me that the one element most likely to insure success in marriage is that element most discouraged by dating and courtship norms: honesty. Too many young women who feel themselves capable…

Blessed Damozels: Women in Mormon History

Leonard J. Arrington

Historians have long recognized the role of women in the development of Western civilization and culture, but for some reason the role of women in Mormon history has been overlooked. Among both Mormon and non-Mormon…

I Married a Family

Juanita Brooks

I often spoke in jest of our “Compound-Complex Family,” but I was firm in my resolution to make this marriage and our family life a success. I well knew that I could never have the…

Full House

Jaroldeen Asplund Edwards

I wake up in the morning to the sound of my husband’s voice. But it is not really an awakening, rather it is a continuing. For night as we used to know it no longer…

A Time of Decision

Judy Dushku

“You are ‘pro-choice’ aren’t you?” mumbled the young legislator at his desk as he pored over my application. Anticipating my response, he wrote the label boldly across the front page. I asked why the label…

My Personal Rubicon

Eleanor Ricks Colton

Living in our nation’s capital during the recent ERA controversies has been a learning experience for me. After the turmoil of the 1975 IWY Conference in Utah, I spent a good deal of time trying…

Mary Fielding Smith: Her Ox Goes Marching On

Lavina Fielding Anderson

I should preface these remarks by establishing two things. First, I am no blood relation to Mary Fielding Smith, although, like all of you, I proudly claim her for a spiritual sister; second, my subject…

Getting Unmarried in a Married Church

Marybeth Raynes

My earliest memory of my Bluebird class in Primary is cross-stitching a sampler: “I will light up my home.” Our teacher admonished us to embroider carefully because we would want our samplers to hang in…

Women and Ordination: Introduction to the Biblical Context

Anthony A. Hutchinson

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 60–69
THE QUESTION of whether worthy women could be or ought to be ordained to the LDS priesthood has not, until recently, been considered seriously in the LDS community.

Women and Priesthood

Nadine Hansen

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 48–59
I smiled wryly at the cartoon on the stationery. The picture showed a woman standing before an all-male ecclesiastical board and asking, “Are you trying to tell me that God is not an equal opportunity employer?” I thought to myself, “Yes, that is precisely what women have been told for centuries.” 

Mormon Women and the Struggle for Definition

Carol Cornwall Madsen

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 40–47
I am sensitive to that steadying hand as I attempt to identify and define what for an earlier generation of women identified and defined them as women—their relationship to the Church. 

The Pink Dialogue and Beyond

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Dialogue 14.4 (Winter 1981): 28–39
Some time in June 1970,I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement. If I had known we were about to make history, I would have taken minutes or at least passed a roll around, but of course I didn’t.

A Tribute to May Swenson

Veneta Leatham Nielsen

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…

The Mormon Woman as Writer

Phyllis Barber

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…

Rescue from Home: Some Ins and Outs

Linda Sillitoe

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…

Speaking Out on Domestic Violence

Anne Castleton

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…

Theological Foundations of Patriarchy

Alison Walker

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.

Woman as Healer in the Modern Church

Betina Lindsey

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.

Comforting the Motherless Children: The Alice Louise Reynolds Women’s Forum

Amy L. Bentley

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…

The Good Woman Syndrome; Or, When Is Enough, Enough?

Helen Candland Stark

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. 

A Strenuous Business: The Achievement of Helen Candland Stark

Lavina Fielding Anderson

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. 

Toward a Feminist Interpretation of Latter-day Scripture

Lynn Matthews Anderson

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 197–230
I am astonished that it took so many readings and a focus on the question of using gender-inclusive language in the simplified version to discover something that should have been obvious to me from the beginning: females scarcely figure or matter in our sacred books.

An Expanded Definition of Priesthood? Some Present and Future Consequences

Margaret Wheatley

Dialogue 34.4 (Winter 2002): 319–325
But the fact that we must look at organizational dynamics before we can begin to understand the issues that would be raised by expanding priesthood to include women is an apt commentary on the complex and sometimes confused role that priesthood authority has come to play in the modern church.

Mormon Women and Priesthood

Nadine Hansen

On Being a Mormon Woman

Vicki Stewart Eastman

“Dear Brethren” — Claiming a Voice in the Church

Carol Lynn Pearson

Carol Lynn Pearson explains ways she has claimed a voice and encouraged others to do so. 

Pioneers

Carol Lynn Pearson

Midwest Pilgrims: We’re Still Here

Ann Gardner Stone

Plymouth Rock on the Mississippi

Rebecca Chandler

My Short Happy Life with Exponent II

Claudia L. Bushman

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 191–1933
Claudia Bushman and others reflect back on Exponent II.

Bodies, Babies, and Birth Control

Melissa Proctor

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 159–175
In this paper I will explore official and unofficial messages that theLDS church has sent to girls and women about childbearing during the twentieth century and the effect those messages have had on women’sreproductive choices.

Temporal Love: Singing the Song of Songs

Molly Bennion

Eternal Love

Carrie A. Miles

How My Mission Saved My Membership

Tania Rands Lyon

Why I Didn’t Serve a Mission

Mary Ellen Robertson

Junior Companion

Holly Welker

Sisterhaters

Teresa P. Carr

Missions and the Rhetoric of Male Motivation

Allison G. Stimmler

“Not Invite but Welcome”: The History and Impact of Church Policy on Sister Missionaries

Tania Rands Lyon

Present at the Beginning: One Woman’s Journey

Barbara Higdon Lyon

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 99–193
On November 17,1985, many RLDS (now Community of Christ) congregations witnessed the sacrament of ordination to priesthood office.

Ordaining Women and the Transformation from Sect to Denomination

William D. Russell

Dialogue 36.3 (Fall 2003): 61–64
Over the past forty years the top leadership of the Community of Christ church (until recently the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ o f Latter -Day Saints) has gone through significant changes in religious thought. I have contended elsewhere that the decisive changes occurred in the 1960s.

“Kingdom of Priests”: Priesthood Temple and Women in the Old Testament and in the Restoration

Todd M. Compton

Dialogue 36.3 (2003): 53-80
Compton considers priesthood as portrayed in Old Testament texts and how women are underrepresented in today’s discourse.

Saints for All Seasons: Lavina Fielding Anderson and Bernard Shaw’s Joan of Arc

Karen Marguerite Moloney

Does Justice Rob Mercy? Retribution, Punishment, and Loving our Enemies

Janice M. Allred

A Price Far above Rubies versus Eight Cows: What’s a Virtuous Woman Worth?

Holly Welker

Mormon Women in the History of Second-Wave Feminism

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Dialogue 43.2 (Fall 2010): 45–63
Mormon women weren’t passive recipients of the new feminism. We helped to create it.

Review: Negotiating the Paradoxes: Neylan McBaine’s Women at Church Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Julie M. Smith

Review: Empowerment at the Local Level Neylan McBaine. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact

Lisa Torcasso Downing

Standards Night

Ann Cannon

Pornographic

Maren Christiansen

In Light

Ashley Mae Hoiland

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 89–94
The day the missionaries came to our house in 1988, a rainbow fell across the sky in our neighborhood on the hill. I stood on the ledge of the bathtub and curled my fingers on the windowsill to pull my scrawny body up to see.

Mormon Priesthood Against the Meritocracy

Rosalynde Welch

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 85–90 Defenses of the male-only LDS priesthood generally pursue a combination of three approaches: ground the practice in ancient scripture, secure it in Restoration history and tradition, or justify it through its sociological effects on gender culture and family formation in the present day.

A Letter to My Mormon Daughter

Courtney J. Kendrick

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 79–84 One day you’ll probably hear the name Kate Kelly. And you’ll probably ask me my thoughts about her and her work with Ordain Women and her subsequent excommunication.

Mormon Feminist Perspectives on the Mormon Digital Awakening: A Study of Identity and Personal Narratives

Nancy Ross

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 47–83
This study examines online Mormon feminists’ identities and beliefs and their responses to the Mormon Digital Awakening. This is the first published survey of online Mormon feminists, which gathered quantitative and qualitative data from 1,862 self￾identified Mormon feminists.

Mormon Feminism: The Next Forty Years

Joanna Brooks

Dialogue 47.4 (Winter 2014): 167–180
Brooks talks about the period from 1970s Mormon feminism in Boston to the present and imagines what needs to be part of the future. She identifies five areas for Mormon feminism: theology, institutions, racial inclusion, financial independence, and spiritual independence.

Dialogue Topic Pages Podcast #3: Feminism

(author)

This month is March and that means it is Women’s History Month. With that in mind, I [Taylor Petrey] wanted to take some time to talk about the role that Dialogue has played in Mormon women’s history,…