Women

She Simply Wanted More: Mormon Women and Excommunication

Amanda Hendrix-Komoto

Dialogue 56.3 (Fall 2023): 109–123
As an adult, I learned that 1993 represented a kind of death for members of the Mormon studies community. Since the 1970s, Latter-day Saint women had been challenging the limited role the Church provided for female spirituality.

“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…

Quoted at the Pulpit: Male Rhetoric and Female Authority in Fifty Years of General Conference

Eliza Wells

Dialogue 55.4 (Winter 2021): 1–50
While much has changed for women in the Church over the last half-­century, much remains the same. Women consistently make up less than 3 percent of quotations in general conference. They are still described in terms of their appearance and relationship status; sermons about how they should live are the domain of male authority; their own representatives in the Church spend much of their time at the pulpit repeating male leaders’ words.

Developing Talents

Alene Wecker

As a mother of six young children, I was surprised when I received the impression to apply for grad school. I already held a bachelor of music, and though I taught voice lessons and sang…

Missing and Restoring Meaning

Jill Mulvay Derr

Fifty years ago I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a shotgun apartment just off Mass. Ave. at Central Square: 22 Magazine Street, Apt. 3. Spring 1971 marked the last months of my master of…

The Seeking Heavenly Mother Project: Understanding and Claiming Our Power to Connect with Her

Charlotte Scholl Shurtz

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 169–178
Our goal is for the Seeking Heavenly Mother Project to have this empowering effect on all who participate. We see a strong need to ensure that our community is inclusive and intersectional, creating spaces wherein LGBTQ+ individuals and other members of marginalized groups can be affirmed in the knowledge that they too are created in the image of God.

Dear Heavenly Mother

Taisha Ostler

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 167
I am encouraged by small changes, but change takes time. For now, I will speak your name. I will make you part of our eternal narrative. I will share your love and stop myself from looking past you. I will teach my children to see your light and be lifted by your strength, that they will speak your name as easily as they do Father’s—for both of you are part of their eternal makings.

A Woman Here

R.R.

Podcast version of this piece. I try to strengthen my relationship with my Heavenly Mother, but I’m not always sure how. Some days I sing, “Heavenly Mother, are you really there? And do you hear…

Mothers and Authority

Katie Ludlow Rich

Podcast version of this piece. It was not in a grove of trees, and I did not see a pillar of light when I first communed with Heavenly Mother. Instead, I was lying crumpled on…

In Praise of Belly Buttons (four meditations)

Megan Armknecht

Podcast version of this piece. [one] My belly is expanding. It is not as much as I had expected—nothing like the maternity models (who I suspect might not even be pregnant) who now populate my…

Guides to Heavenly Mother: An Interview with McArthur Krishna and Bethany Brady Spalding

McArthur Krishna

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 135-166
When Dialogue asked us to write a personal article about our process of writing A Girl’s Guide to Heavenly Mother (D Street Press, 2020), we were delighted.

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women’s Authority

Cristina Rosetti

Dialogue 55.1 (Spring 2022): 119–135
As the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moved away from the plural marriage revelation, a marital system that created the cosmological backdrop for the doctrine of Heavenly Mothers, the status of the divine feminine became increasingly distant from the lived experience of LDS women. Ecclesiastical changes altered women’s place within the cosmos.

The Mask We Must Wear in a Racist Society: Reflections of Black Suffering in the LDS Church Through Art

Darron T. Smith

I reflect upon a work of art by Marlena Wilding, a Black female artist with ties to Utah and Mormonism.[1] Her artwork is a stark representation of the complex nature of living while Black in…

Finding Rebecca: A Eulogy

Marie Blanchard

Podcast version of this Personal Essay. The DAILY ENQUIRER—April 24, 1897A Poor Widow Distracted by Life’s Burdens “One of those events occurred this morning which causes the heart to grow sad and go out in…

The Complementarity Principle

Lisa Poulson

In 2008, I turned forty-five, Wall Street collapsed, California voters banned gay marriage, and I lost my virginity. The financial system’s meltdown changed the air I breathed, in the same way fire distributes ash for…

Assuming Power

Linda Hoffman Kimball

Dialogue 54.1 (Spring 2021): 53–57
Some feel that “smashing the patriarchy” is the ultimate goal of what they define as “feminism.” That is not my opinion. Each of us—female and male—have power given us to serve and lead, speak out and nurture, preach doctrine, and clean the bathrooms in the ward building.

The Gebirah and Female Power

Amber Richardson

Women in Workplace Power

Barbara Christiansen

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 143–157
Women’s work has always been multifaceted and applied across all aspects of human experience. Women have filled many roles: queen, mother, inventor, artist, healer, politician, caretaker, prophet. Wom￾en’s voices have been loud and quiet, sometimes invisible but always present, on the vanguard or on the margins, leading, pushing, making change.

Mormon Women in the Ministry

Emily Clyde Curtis

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 129–142
Interview with Brittany Mangelson who is a full-time minister for Community of Christ. She has a master of arts in religion from Graceland University and works as a social media seeker ministry specialist.

Women in Dialogue

Claudia L. Bushman

While to all outward appearances we had nothing to complain of, the first meeting was an impassioned exchange of frustrations, disappointments and confessions. We had expected some serious confrontations because all attending are not in…

“For the Power is In Them”: Leonard Arrington and the Founders of Exponent II

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

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

Women’s Lived Experience as Authority: Antenarratives and Interactional Power as Tools for Engagement

Emily January Peterson

Multiculturalism as Resistance: Latina Migrants Navigate U.S. Mormon Spaces

Brittany Romanello

Dialogue 53.1 (Spring 2020): 5–32
I cannot help but smile when she calls me hermana, her “sister.” Her reference to me signifies a dual meaning: I am not only like a family member to her, but additionally, the term hermana is used among Spanish-speaking members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as Mormons) to signify solidarity and integration with one another.

Backwards Pioneers

Heidi Naylor

The Mother Tree: Understanding the Spiritual Root of Our Ecological Crisis

Kathryn Sonntag

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
But the experience of women as women, their wilderness crescent,
is unshared with men—utterly other—and therefore to men, unnatural.

Condemn Me Not

Jody England Hansen

Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 17–32
I do not lend the weight of truth to the language of ritual. Such language is symbolic. But even in the context of symbolism, language that is so preferential toward men and dismissive of women—especially when such language more aptly demonstrates the bias of the writers than the purpose of the ritual—needs to be removed.

Heavenly Mother: The Mother of All Women

Blaire Ostler

Dialogue 51.4 (Winter 2018): 171-174
Heavenly Mother is a cherished doctrine among many Latter-day Saints.
Her unique esthetic of feminine deity offers Latter-day Saint women a
trajectory for godhood—the ultimate goal of Mormon theology.

Remember Me: Discursive Needlework and the Sewing Sampler of Patty Bartlett Sessions

Stacey Dearing

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 Missing Mrs.

Marianne Hales Harding

“The Perfect Union of Man and Woman”: Reclamation and Collaboration in Joseph Smith’s Theology Making

Fiona Givens

Dialogue 49.1 (Spring 2016): 1–26
Central to Joseph’s creative energies was a profound commitment to an ideal of cosmic as well as human collaboration. His personal mode of leadership increasingly shifted from autocratic to collaborative—and that mode infused both his most radical theologizing and his hopes for Church comity itself.

Toward a Mormon Theology of God the Mother

Janice M. Allred

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 15–40
It would seem that Mormons who have believed for over a hundred years in the real existence of the Goddess, the Mother in Heaven, should be far ahead of other Christians in developing a theology of God the Mother. However, our belief in her as a real person puts us at a disadvantage. If the Goddess is merely a symbol of deity, as the male God is also a symbol, then certainly God can be pictured as either male or female with equal validity.

Matricidal Patriarchy: Some Thoughts toward Understanding the Devaluation of Women in the Church

Erin R. Sliva

Beautiful Naked Women

Holly Welker

A History of Two Stories: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

Peggy Pascoe

A Spiritual Map for Singles | Carol Clark, A Singular Life: Perspectives For Single Women

Maureen Derrick Keeler

This slim, significant volume is to date the best of the self-help books published for LDS single women. It succeeds largely because of Carol Clark’s unique grasp of gospel principles as they relate to even…

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…

On Women

Karen Sorensen Smith

Dear Dr. Cline: 

Your reply to Ms. D. of Washington D.C. left me feeling less than comfortable. While agreeing that women should be freed from those things promoting loss of self esteem, doubt, fear, etc., there are a few points I would like to discuss.

On Women

Victor B. Cline

Women: One Man’s Opinion | Rodney Turner, Woman and the Priesthood

Claudia L. Bushman

Rodney Turner, a BYU professor of Church history and doctrine and a scholar widely revered as the conservatives’ conservative, here attempts to answer some of the burning contemporary questions about which the scriptures are so…

Sisters Under the Skin | S. George Ellsworth, Dear Ellen: Two Mormon Women and Their Letters

Edward A. Geary

Ellen Spencer and Ellen Pratt were born in 1832 and moved to Nauvoo in 1841, where they became close friends. They both crossed the plains in the emigration of 1848 without their fathers. Orson Spencer…

Three Portraits of Women from the Old Testament

Margaret R. Munk

Hagar | Esther | Hannah

Taking Them Seriously | Claudia L. Bushman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah

Elouise M. Bell

Edited by Claudia Lauper Bushman, founder of Exponent II, Mormon Sisters covers sizeable ground: articles about women as mystics and healers, midwives, schoolteachers, politicians, feminists; selections dealing with individual women (like Eliza Snow and Susa…

Generalized Hatred | Marilyn French, The Women’s Room

Elinore Hughes Partridge

Mira, the protagonist of Marilyn French’s best-selling novel, did not usually buy women’s magazines, but she pored over them at the dentist’s office: “Rate yourself: are you a good wife? Are you still attractive? Are…

Two Venturesome Women | Juanita Brooks, ed., Not By Bread Alone: The Journal of Martha Spence Heywood, 1850–56

Cheryll May

The study of early Utah history has been notably enriched by the recent publication of two contemporary accounts from the 1850s. The Journal of Martha Spence Hey wood, 1850 to 1856 includes Martha’s accounts of…

Out of the Slot | Marilyn Warenski, Patriarchs and Politics: The Plight of the Mormon Woman

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Mormons who believe feminism is deeply subversive will find confirmation in Marilyn Warenski’s Patriarchs and Politics. Her argument can be simply stated: Feminism and patriarchal religion are incompatible. Mormonism is a patriarchal religion. Therefore, there…

Women Under the Law

Susan Taylor Hansen

Dialogue 12.2 (Summer 1979): 82–91
Any constitutional amendment unavoidably casts a shadow of uncertaintyover its future interpretation and implementation. The Fourteenth Amendment, for example, has far exceeded the originally perceived purpose—elevating thestatus of blacks—and has come to serve as a tool of justice for many oppressedpersons and groups.

New Voices, New Songs: Contemporary Poems by Mormon Women

Linda Sillitoe

The sensibility described by Amy Lowell—that there is something odd about women who write serious poetry—is still given substance today by the endangered state of the species. Even I will not waste time counting the few woman poets anthologized before Lowell’s time; contemporary statistics suffice.

The Last Project

Edna Laney

In our many years together Bert and I faced many trials, but working together, we managed to bring to successful conclusion all the projects that come with a good marriage. We raised seven children while…

Birthing

Maureen Ursenbach Beecher

Dialogue 14.4 (Fall 1981): 117–124
So this was birthing, this crazy-quilt of contrasts, of senses and feelingsin chaos, coming occasionally to rest, as now, with a sleeping son in the crookof my arm. Had I won the grand prize?

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.

Nothing New Under the Sun | Ann Terry, Marilyn Slaght-Griffin, and Elizabeth Terry, Mormons & Women

Susan Taylor Hansen

I admit an acquired skepticism about books with pretentious titles, so my eyes narrowed at the sight of a slim volume with the weighty title Mor mons & Women. I became even more suspicious when…

Skulduggery, Passion, and Everyday Women | Cathy Luchetti and Carol Olwell, Women of the West

Sherilyn Cox Bennion

Women of the West is a compelling tribute to the “everyday women of history,” as the jacket copy puts it. “Lively stories of courtship, love, inventiveness, humor, skulduggery, [and] passion” are told in the words of…

Voices from the Dust: Women in Zion | Kenneth W. Godfrey, Audrey M. Godfrey, and Jill Mulvay Derr, Women’s Voices: An Untold History of the Latter-day Saints 1830-1900

Elouise M. Bell

The subtitle of this book indicates its primary shortcoming. This is, indeed, one more history of the Mormons. The chapter headings could be those of any similar work giving a general overview of the growth…

Ministering Angels: Single Women in Mormon Society

Lavina Fielding Anderson

Dialogue 16.3 (Autumn 1983): 68–69
I would like to discuss teh social experience of historical Latter-day Saint single women in the context of five questions: (1) Does she have an acceptable reason for being single? (2) Can she provide for her own economic security? (3) What place does she occupy in her family of origin? (4) Can she contribute to her community in a way that she will be rewarded for? (5) What was the emotinoal life of a single women in past generations? 

Accolades for Good Wives | Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750

Gene A. Sessions

I have written book reviews on a regular basis for almost a decade. Most of them have been in the field of Mormon/ Utah history, although I consistently try to disclaim my expertise in the…

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

Richard J. Cummings

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…

“Strange Fever”: Women West | Kenneth L. Holmes, ed., Covered Wagon Women: Diaries and Letters from the Western Trail, 1840-1890

Ann H. Costello

“This past winter there has been a strange fever raging here … . It seems to be contagious and it is raging terribly, nothing seems to stop it but to tear up and take a…

A Shaded View | Leonard J. Arrington and Susan Arrington Madsen, Sunbonnet Sisters: True Stories of Mormon Women and Frontier Life

Susan Sessions Rugh

Another “sisters” book—enough for a quartet. Where Mormon Sisters is a topical approach to pioneer women’s history, Sister Saints a compilation of biographical essays, and Women’s Voices a selection of diary excerpts with historical commentary,…

Bleaker by the Dozen? | H. M. Bahr, S. J. Condie, and K. Goodman, Life in Large Families: Views of Mormon Women

Godfrey J. Ellis

“Today,” said the teacher, “we have a special activity. We’re going to have a survey and find out how many brothers and sisters we all have.” One little girl from an LDS family of six…

Crying Change in a Permanent World: Contemporary Mormon Women on Motherhood

Linda P. Wilcox

Dialogue 18.2 (Summer 1985): 116–127
Women in the Mormon Church are encouraged toward traditional roles and attitudes that discourage personal, familial, and societal change. The ideal female role is that of a non-wage-earning wife and mother in a nuclear family where the husband is the provider and the woman’s energies are directed toward her family, the Church, and perhaps community service.

Exiles for the Principle: LDS Polygamy in Canada

Jessie L. Embry

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 108–116
Embry describes the role that polygamy played in the forming of Cardston Canada, both Pre-Manifesto and Post Manifesto.

Mothers and Daughters in Polygamy

Jessie L. Embry

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 99–107
An analysis of what the individual wives’ roles are in the 19th century among plural marriages. Embry and Bradley make the argument that the daughters in a polygamous relationship pay attention to how their own mom is doing, which determines whether or not when they are older they enter into a polygamous relationship.

Women’s Response to Plural Marriage

Kahlile Mehr

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 84–98
Mehr shares stories of polygamy in late 19th century and early 20th century. He especially focused on LDS women’s opinions of polygamy when they entered into polygamous relationsips.

Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo

Richard Van Wagoner

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 67–83
Van Wagoner defines polyandry as having two or more husbands at the same time. He identifies women who ended up marrying members of the Twelve or Joseph Smith while they were were already married to their own husband

Government-Sponsored Prayer in the Classroom

Robert Riggs

During its 1984 session the United States Senate fell eleven votes short of the two-thirds majority required to endorse a constitutional amendment allowing government-sponsored prayers in public schools (S. J. Res. 1983). This was the…

LDS Women and Priesthood: An Expanded Definition of Priesthood: Some Present and Future Consequences

Margaret Wheatley

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 35–42
In seeking to predict what might occur in the Church if priesthood were extended to women, it is helpful to focus attention on some of these organizational dynamics.

LDS Women and Priesthood: The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood

Linda King Newell

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 21–32
While an examination of that history leaves unanswered the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood, the historical overview of LDS women’s relationship to priesthood suggests a more expansive view than many members now hold.

LDS Women and Priesthood: Scriptural Precedents for Priesthood

Melodie Moench Charles

Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 15–20
I have heard many LDS women approach the issue of women and the priesthood by protesting that they do not want to hold the priesthood because they have no interest in passing the sacrament or performing some other ecclesiastical duty. I will venture a guess that many men who have the priesthood do not particularly want to hold it either, and that some of them also have no interest in passing the sacrament. But the reluctance of some men would hardly be a good reason to prevent all men from holding the priesthood.

Depression in Mormon Women

Harry P. Bluhm

Depression is a common problem in Western societies; various studies have reported that between 3.2 and 9.3 percent of the population suffers from clinical depression. Women seem to be at least two times more likely…

Women Coping | Linda Sillitoe, Sideways to the Sun

Gary Topping

What happens when a Mormon house wife, faithful to husband and church, encounters the dark side of human experience including adultery, child molestation, spouse abandonment, and divorce? In this fine first novel, Linda Sillitoe answers…

A Celebration of Diversity: A Heritage of Faith: Talks Selected from BYU Women’s Conferences

Helen Beach Cannon

In 1986 Deseret Book published an anthology of talks selected from BYU women’s conferences. That collection, Woman to Woman, as the title suggests, included talks exclusively by Church women. Now, a 1988 anthology includes both…

Polygamy, Patrimony, and Prophecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston

John C. Lehr

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs.

A Voice from the Past: The Benson Instructions for Parents

Lavina Fielding Anderson

In February 1987 at a fireside for parents, President Ezra Taft Benson delivered an address called “To the Mothers in Zion.” In October 1987, he delivered a parallel address in the priesthood session of general…

How Do You Spell Relief? A Panel of Relief Society Presidents

Sharon Lee Swenson

The idea for this panel sprang from last year’s western Pilgrimage reunion, an annual meeting of women. We were sitting around observing who’d become a Relief Society president and being amazed. We tried to figure out what it could possibly mean and came to no conclusion but decided it would be interesting to talk about.

What Do Mormon Women Want? | Maureen Ursenbach Beecher and Lavina Fielding Anderson, eds., Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective

Rebecca Reid Linford

Early in my academic career I determined to study neither Mormon history nor women’s history, so I was at first somewhat hesitant to review this book which obviously dealt with both. As a historian I…

The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953

Martha Sonntag Bradley

Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 15–38
Bradley describes how even after the Short Creek Raids happened, the women there still believed in plural marriage.

One of the Women

Dixie Lee Partridge

One of the women inside me 
cannot rejoice with anyone. 
She stays in the shadows 
bowing her head. 
Her long hair has never been cut. 

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. 

Mormon Women and the Right to Wage Work

Vella Neil Evans

Dialogue 23.4 (Winter 1990): 47–82
In this essay, I will analyze recent Church discourse against a pattern of constricting employment options for women and will discuss the implications of that pattern.

Bearing Out Crosses Gracefully: Sex and the Single Mormon

Robert A. Rees

In Their Own Behalf: The Politicization of Mormon Women and the 1870 Franchise

Lola Van Wagenen

Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1991): 75–96
IMMEDIATELY UPON THE PASSAGE of territorial legislation enfranchising Utah’s women in 1870, almost fifty years before the Nineteenth Amend￾ment extended the vote to American women, arguments erupted between the Mormon and non-Mormon community over the reasons behind this legislation.

Song of the Old/Oldsongs: Only Morning in Her Shoes: Poems about Old Women edited by Leatrice Lifshitz

Karen Marguerite Moloney

The Extraordinary in the Ordinary: Women’s Stories, Women’s Lives

Julie J. Nichols

Dialogue 25.2 (Fall 1992): 75–96
The personal essay, unlike personal journals, letters, and oral histo￾ries, is not an artless form. It transforms the raw material of personal experience in the double crucible of carefully chosen language and the light of mature retrospection.

Sexual Hegemony and Mormon Women: Seeing Ourselves in the Bambara Mirror

Kathryn Lindquist

On Being Female: A Voice of Contentment

Barbara Elliott Snedecor

Mormon Women and Families: Women, Family, and Utopia

Glenda Riley

Women Alone: The Economic and Emotional Plight of Early LDS Women

Linda Thatcher

Women’s Place in the Encyclopedia: Encyclopedia of Mormonism

Lavina Fielding Anderson

How Common the Principle? Women as Plural Wives in 1860

Marie Cornwall

Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
A study done to see how many polygamous wives there were at the peak of polygamy in the church.

Women’s Rights: Women’s Rights in Old Testament Times by James R. Baker

Alan C. Tull

A Diminished Thing?: Women of Covenant: The Story of Relief Society

Cheryll May

If Mormon Women Have Had the Priesthood since 1843, Why Aren’t They Using It?

Margaret Merrill Toscano

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 231–245
In the brief essay
which follows, I do not reassert the arguments supporting women’s right
to priesthood, but focus on certain problems raised by the assumption that
women have priesthood authority.

Familial, Socioeconomic, and Religious Behavior: A Comparison of LDS and Non-LDS Women

Tim B. Heaton

In Search of Women’s Language and Feminist Expression Among Nauvoo Wives in A Little Lower Than the Angels

Helynne Hollstein Hansen

“Seizing Sacred Space”: Women’s Engagement in Early Mormonism

Martha Sonntag Bradley

Dialogue 27.2 (Summer 1994): 69–82
Zina, like many other early converts to Mormonism, was a child of the Second Great Awakening.

Sustained by Faith and Community: In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo edited by Carol Cornwall Madsen

Susan H. Swetnam

The Woman of Worth: Impressions of Proverbs 31:10-31

Jana Riess

Women of Cards

Jocelyn Kearl

Quilts as Women’s History: Quilts and Women of the Mormon Migrations: Treasures of Transition

Judy Elsley

More Than Just a Battle for the Ballot: Battle for the Ballot: Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah, 1870-1896

Janet Ellingson

Joseph Loved His Women

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

Women are the Keepers of Secrets

Mary Lythgoe Bradford

If I Hate My Mother, Can I Love the Heavenly Mother?

Margaret Merrill Toscano

Dialogue 31.4 (Winter 1998): 31–42
A series of questions began to occur to me: If I hate my mother, can I love the Heavenly Mother? If I hate my mother, can I love myself? If I hate God, can I love myself? If I hate myself, can I love my mother or theHeavenly Mother? I wanted to put these questions in the sharpest terms possible—love/hate. There was no room for ambivalence at this point. I had to let myself feel my strongest and darkest feelings, about mymother, about myself, and about God.

“One Flesh”: A Historical Overview of Latter-day Saint Sexuality and Psychology

Eric G. Swedin

Preaching the Gospel of Church and Sex: Mormon Women’s Fiction in the Young Woman’s Journal, 1889-1910

Rebecca De Schweinitz

Edward Tullidge and the Women of Mormondom

Claudia L. Bushman

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

Life Writings of Frontier Women Series, Vol. 1-5.

Judy Nolte Temple

First, Mothers and Children: A Postscript to “Moving Zion Southward Parts I & II”

Bradley Walker

Being a Mormon Woman or “Am I Not a Woman and a Sister? Isn’t That Enough?”

Linda Hoffman Kimball

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

“Gender Troubles” and Mormon Women’s Voices: Faithful Transgressions in the American West: Six Twentieth Century Mormon Women’s Autobiographical Acts by Laura L. Bush

Cecilia Konchar Farr

Women in a Time Warp: Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, Edited by Sheree Maxwell Bench and Susan Elizabeth Howe

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky

A Woman of Influence: An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells by Carol Cornwall Madsen

Deborah Farmer Kris

Should Mormon Women Speak Out? Thoughts on Our Place in the World

Claudia L. Bushman

Balancing Faith and Honesty : Segullah: Writings by Latter-day Saint Women

Darlene Young

A Must-Read on Gender Politics : Martha Sonntag Bradley, Pedestals, Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

Deborah Farmer Kris

The Kind of Woman Future Historians Will Study : Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Jana Bouck Remy

Meeting Donna Freitas

Donna Freitas

“A Style of Our Own”: Mormon Women and Modesty

Katie Clark Blakesley

Clothing has been the subject of scriptural injunctions and aperennial topic of Church leaders’ concern. Subtle changes inboth dress standards and rationales for modest dress in the latterhalf of the twentieth century reflect the LDS…

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.

Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon

Kenneth L. Cannon II

Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research Conference: To Do the Business of the Church: A Cooperative Paradigm for Examining Gendered Participation within Church Organizational Structure

Neylan McBaine

Dialogue 45.3 (Fall 2012): 70–83
I will be talking today about how women fit into the functional structure of LDS church governance; but, unlike many of the oth￾ers speaking today, I do not have advanced degrees in my subject, nor do I consider myself an academic

BYU Women’s Studies Conference: “I Will Sing to the Lord”: Women’s Songs in the Scriptures

Julie M. Smith

Woman: Joint Heiress With Christ

Liz Hammond

Dialoguing Online: The Best of 10+ Years of Mormons Blogging

Emily W. Jensen

Celestial Terms, In the Night, Tangled Women

Sarah Dunster

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.

Review: Full Lives but Not Fulfilling Paula Kelly Harline. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women

Polly Aird

Issue Art: Page Turner

Issue Art

Complicated Womanhood Julie Debra Neuffer. Helen Andelin and the Fascinating Womanhood Movement

Jessica Jensen

On Virtue: What Bathsheba Taught Me about My Maligned Sisters

Mel Henderson

The Struggle for Female Authority in Biblical and Mormon Tradition

Cory Crawford

Dialogue 48.2 (Summer 2015): 1–57
Although race and gender are connected in 2 Nephi 26:33, the historical origins of the gender ban have not yet been addressed with the same degree of attention in Church discourse.

A Mormon Midrash?: LDS Creation Narratives Reconsidered

Anthony A. Hutchinson

Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1989): 135 – 139
Latter-day Saints, with other groups in the Judeo-Christian tradition, accept as scripture the stories of creation found in Genesis 1-3 but are unique in accepting as scripture three other parallel versions of the same stories. These include chapters in the books of Moses and Abraham brought forth by Joseph Smith, Jr.