W&A: Notes on Chapter 3
This week is “Empowerment and Mormon Women’s Publications” by Vella Neil Evans. There should be a subtitle for this chapter, and it should say, “How cool the Mormon Relief Society used to be.”
The gist of the chapter is this: the Relief Society used to have it’s own official magazines in the form of The Exponent/Young Woman’s Journal/Relief Society Magazine. These magazines toed some basic lines on supporting male leadership and female submission, but they were also used to promote women’s spiritual gifts and some form of female priesthood, women’s suffrage and support for female politicians, wage and non-wage work (complete with equal pay for equal work), and women’s independence. They challenged assertions on the part of male leaders that women were meant to be mommies and homemakers. Over time the church’s male leadership correlated these magazines into promoting their version of female roles and femininity, then they correlated them right out of existence. If you need proof irrefutable that it isn’t women who try and force women into the rigid corset of stay-at-home-motherhood as the ideal primary occupation for all women, this is it.
Naturally, I enjoyed this chapter immensely, but I believe that Evans’ rhetoric is at times unnecessarily grating and harsh. She repeatedly puts “male discourse” and “female discourse” in opposition to one another with the effect that the “males” become the persistent villains in this narrative. While I certainly believe that [male] LDS leaders are culpable in the marginalization of LDS women, this chapter’s rhetoric can easily be mistaken for a sort of indictment of all males. I would have favored some more qualified terminology.
Anyways, if anyone in power at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is reading this post, here is a request from me. Would you please go back to teaching my daughter things like this:
- “It has been the popular cry that no woman could be a good, true, loving wife, and at the same time successfully follow any profession. If so, neither can a man do justice to any professional calling and prove a kind, affectionate, and loving husband.” ~ “Heart vs. Head,”Exponent, 15 Nov. 1874, 92.
- “If there be some women in whom the love of learning extinguishes all other love, then the heaven-appointed sphere of that woman is not the nursery. It may be the library, the laboratory, the observatory.” ~ “Education of Women,” Exponent, 1 Apr. 1873, 163.
- “[T]rain [you]rself to fill any position and place of trust and honor as appropriately and with as much dignity as [you]r brother man.” ~ “Man’s Flattery of Woman,” Young Woman’s Journal1 (Mar. 1890): 192.
Instead of this?
- “The husband is expected to support his family and only in an emergency should a wife secure outside employment. Her place is in the home, to build the home into a heaven of delight. . . . I beg of you, you who could and should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter, the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the café. No career approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother—cooking meals, washing dishes, making beds for one’s precious husband and children.” ~ Spencer W. Kimball, “The Blessings and Responsibilities of Womanhood,” Ensign, Mar. 1976, 73 [cited in the 2003 Eternal Marriage Student Manual]
- “It is well-nigh impossible to be a full-time homemaker and a full-time employee.” ~ Gordon B. Hinckley, “Women of the Church,” Ensign, Nov. 1996, 69 [cited in the 2003 Eternal Marriage Student Manual].
- “Do you wish to marry a girl whose education has been far superior to your own?” ~ Gordon B. Hinckley, “Rise Up, O Men of God,” Ensign, Nov. 2006, 61.
Much appreciated.
(For the record: I do not entertain any delusions that anyone in the Church Office Building gives a damn about my blog.)
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W&A: Notes on Chapter 3 — 3 Comments
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“It is plainly evident from these statistics that young women are exceeding young men in pursuing educational programs. And so I say to you young men, rise up and discipline yourself to take advantage of educational opportunities. Do you wish to marry a girl whose education has been far superior to your own? We speak of being “equally yoked.” That applies, I think, to the matter of education.” He is telling the men to step up and meet womens educational superiority.
Just some food for thought
thnx for clearing that up