W&A: Notes on Chapter 2
Hanks, Maxine, ed. Women and Authority: Re-emerging Mormon Feminism. Salt Lake City, Ut.: Signature Books, 1992.]
In the extreme this attitude toward women has led to views such as those in Rodney Turner’s address “Woman and the Priesthood,” delivered at a BYU six-stake fireside in 1966. Turner asserted, “The stewardship of woman is encircled in the stewardship of man . . . Woman therefore finds her fulfillment in man as man finds his in God.” The ultimate degradation appeared in four lines of doggerel, purportedly written by a woman: “Women are doormats and have been/ The years those mats applaud—/ They keep their men from going in/ With muddy feet to God.” Turner commented, “I am afraid that this is only too true. A man needs that kind of support so that he can go back home without muddy feet.” ~ p. 42-3
I know that I ought to be amazed that a BYU religion professor in the 60s actually taught with a straight face that women were doormats. I should find that outrageous and alarming and appalling or something.
What does it say about me that nothing surprises me anymore?*
This week’s chapter is “The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Priesthood” by Linda King Newell. It’s really more like “The Historical Relationship of Mormon Women and Giving Blessings of Healing,” although the chapter does cover some broader aspects of priesthood as well. Newell starts out with an examination and analysis of the minutes of the earliest Relief Society meetings—which do, in fact, contain some tantalizing phrases indicating that Joseph Smith meant for the Relief Society to function as a female priesthood to complement the male priesthood. Joseph Smith spoke of granting the Relief Society a “key” and instructed that the organization should “move according to the ancient Priesthood.” Women were said to be “ordained” to their callings within the Relief Society.
From that point onward though, I feel like many of the examples given in this essay could just as easily be used to argue that women never did have a priesthood of their own. For example, Newell cites Newell K. Whitney as teaching the Relief Society sisters on 17 May 1842 (two months after the society was organized) that: “In the beginning, God created man, male and female, and bestow’d upon man certain blessings peculiar to a man of God, of which woman partook, so that without the female all things cannot be restor’d to the earth—it takes all to restore the Priesthood.” She interprets this statement to mean that Whitney anticipated that “women’s role within the church was to include priesthood powers—at least in some form.” I read Whitney’s statement as an affirmation that men are central and preeminent in the Gospel while a woman’s main role is to complement and complete male priesthood. Is there really any contradiction between what Whitney said and this 1980 Semiannual General Conference talkby Boyd K. Packer?
Those who tell you that in the kingdom of God a woman’s lot is less than that of the man know nothing of the love, akin to worship, that the worthy man has for his wife. He cannot have his priesthood, not the fulness of it, without her. “For no man,” the Prophet said, “can get the fulness of the priesthood outside the temple of the Lord” (see D&C 131:1–3). And she is there beside him in that sacred place. She is there and shares in all that he receives. Each, individually, receives the washings and anointings, each may be endowed. But he cannot ascend to the highest ordinances—the sealing ordinances—without her at his side.
I don’t see it.
(Just in case you’re new to feminist philosophy: affirming that women are important and valuable because of what they can do for men is a bad thing.)
Such is the case with many of the examples Newell uses. The idea that women don’t hold the priesthood themselves or only hold it in conjunction with their husbands pre-existed the formation of the Relief Society—as evidenced by the fact that women weren’t ordained to the priesthood when it went through the final stages of its organization in the early 1830s. That they still did not hold their own priesthood was articulated within a few years of the Relief Society’s formation. This really isn’t about women losing the priesthood so much as it is about women losing the right to perform blessings of healing and exercise spiritual gifts. Newell seems to think that it wasn’t until 1914 that the Relief Society became “firmly subordinated to the Melchizedek priesthood as an auxiliary,” but I beg to differ. The Relief Society was always firmly subordinated to the Melchizedek priesthood; it just wasn’t always called an “auxiliary,” and it once had a longer leash, but it was still a leash.
Newell even seems to accept that the functions of pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing can be seen as a basic complement to male priesthood functions (42). So what about single women and women who can’t get pregnant? What unique roles do they receive that complement the male priesthood? Someone really needs to start a religion where men are excluded from the exercise of spiritual authority because they already hold the divine right of superior physical strength and siring children at virtually any age they please. Then maybe people would clue in to the absurdity of this motherhood-priesthood equivalence. BTW, that is another thing that the essay does well. The idea that women have motherhood instead of the priesthood was something that developed over time. The specifics of their unpriesthooded status were once much muddier.
On that note, the essay does give a nice overview of the decline of women’s healing practices in the LDS church. It also shows how spiritual gifts came to be seen as exclusively the domain of men. For example, Apostle Marion G. Romney gave a General Conference address in 1956 wherein he taught that “Righteous men, bearing the holy priesthood of the living God and endowed with the gift of the Holy Ghost, who are magnifying their callings . . . are the only men upon the earth with the right to receive and exercise the gifts of the spirit” (41). Also noted is Apostle John A. Widtsoe’s Priesthood and Church Government, wherein his “discussion of revelation, discernment, healing, translation, and power over evil makes no acknowledgment that these gifts may exist outside the male priesthood quorums” (41). Oh, I know that a lot of Mormons like to think that women can have charismatic gifts in the LDS church, but in twelve years of studying the church, I’ve never seen it.
Next week we’ll be looking at “Empowerment and Mormon Women’s Publications” by Vella Neil Evans.
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* For all of you Mormon women freaking out over that awful “doormats” quote, allow me to cheer you up with this gem from popular evangelical preacher Mark Driscoll (commenting on 1 Timothy 2:11-14):
Without blushing, Paul is simply stating that when it comes to leading in the church, women are unfit because they are more gullible and easier to deceive than men. While many irate women have disagreed with his assessment through the years, it does appear from this that such women who fail to trust his instruction and follow his teaching are much like their mother Eve and are well-intended but ill-informed . . . Before you get all emotional like a woman in hearing this, please consider the content of the women’s magazines at your local grocery store that encourages liberated women in our day to watch porno with their boyfriends, master oral sex for men who have no intention of marrying them, pay for their own dates in the name of equality, spend an average of three-fourths of their childbearing years having sex but trying not to get pregnant, and abort 1/3 of all babies – and ask yourself if it doesn’t look like the Serpent is still trolling the garden and that the daughters of Eve aren’t gullible in pronouncing progress, liberation, and equality. (Source)
Remind me again, how many languages are we translating Mark’s books into so that we can get them out to as many people as possible?
So cheer up, Mormon women. It could be worse.
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W&A: Notes on Chapter 2 — 4 Comments