The Parallels of Women's History in Mormonism

A Guest Post by Baylor History PhD Candidate Brooke LeFevre

In each of my graduate seminars, I have students write a blog-post style essay over a topic of their research. I have posted a few of these in the past, including one by Brooke LeFevre. Brooke has been working with me as a graduate assistant on the pastor’s wife book and has found interesting parallels between books written for evangelical women and Mormon women. Today I am posting an earlier (updated) blog that she wrote for my seminar two years ago which emphasizes that feminism is not a recent product of the 1960s and 70s (as is often argued by evangelical proponents of complementarianism). I think you will find it interesting—especially in light of Benjamin Park’s recent book on Mormon History: American Zion: A New History of Mormonism.

Hopefully soon I will post some of the parallels she has discovered between evangelicalism and Mormonism in the pastor’s wife material.

The Power of (Re)Discovering Mormon Women’s History

During the 1970s, a group of Latter-day Saint women in Boston, many of them pursuing graduate school, decided to form a group to read and discuss feminism. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich explained, “Sometime in June 1970, I invited a few friends to my house to chat about the then emerging women’s movement.”^[1] The group also included Claudia Bushman, a doctoral student in history. As the group began to discuss what feminism might mean to them, they turned to the past. In their research, they discovered a history completely unknown to them. For example, they found that almost exactly one hundred years earlier in 1872, Mormon women began publishing a periodical titled Woman’s Exponent, one of the few periodicals in the United States owned and operated exclusively by women. In it, they argued for the expansion of woman’s sphere and for women’s suffrage.

Bushman explained, “The discovery of this newspaper has meant a lot to women today. Our foremothers had spirit and independence, a liveliness that their daughters can be proud of. Devoted mothers and wives, they tended their homes and children, helped support the family, and turned out a dynamic newspaper on the side. Can we do the same?”^[2]

Inspired by their discovery, this group of women started another periodical, entitled Exponent II. ^[3] They also put together the first book published on Mormon women’s history in the 20^th century, Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah, edited by Bushman. In the preface, Bushman explained, “A longtime dream of the writers has been that other groups of Mormon women might join together to learn about their sisters of the past. Their stories are illuminating and inspirational in the best way: they help us to see new possibilities for our own lives.”^[4]

Fascinatingly, almost fifty years after Ulrich, Bushman, and others first rediscovered the history of Latter-day Saint women, members of the church, like myself, are still rediscovering that same history on our own. I was raised in a conservative Latter-day Saint family in the 1990s and early 2000s. While my family did not often discuss politics growing up, I tended to see myself as conservative, especially gender relations and reproductive rights, and imagined that I would follow the typical path for a conservative Mormon woman: get married while in college and spend my life as a stay-at-home mom.

While attending Brigham Young University, a private university run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I realized I had a passion for learning about the history of my church. I was especially surprised to learn about the history of Mormon women. I had known that during the nineteenth century, Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage, but I was intrigued that the women themselves publicly defended the practice. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s award-winning book, A House Full of Females, had recently come out and I purchased a copy. The introduction pulled me in with a story about an indignation meeting held in Salt Lake City in January 1870 to protest the Cullom bill, a piece of anti-polygamy legislation being debated in the Senate. These women were informed, intelligent, organized, and powerful public speakers, and their activism was fully endorsed by the male leaders of the church.

I also discovered that these women were adamant defenders of women’s rights and suffrage. I, too, discovered the Woman’s Exponent and reacted very similarly to it as the Boston women had. I was obsessed with the image I found in my church’s history, in my own family history, of women who were fighting for their place in the public sphere, fighting to defend their religion, and fighting to have power within their society and religion.^[5]

For women like Bushman and like myself, understanding the history of women in our faith allows us to expand the possibilities of our future. This history inspired me to better understand feminism today and, shortly thereafter, confidently identify myself as a feminist.

But why was I so unaware of the work that had been done by Bushman, Ulrich, and others to uncover this history? Why isn’t this history more broadly taught? Why was I raised in a church culture that approached feminism as a negative thing? And why did I have to “discover” Mormon women’s history on my own?

There is not a short, easy answer to those questions. While a more complete answer would take something like a dissertation and not a blog, one example and one scholar’s experience might help.

Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated from the church in 1993 for her feminist writings. Anderson, who was known for co-editing Sisters in Spirit: Mormon Women in Historical and Cultural Perspective, was excommunicated for her views expressed in an article entitled, “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology.” In it, Anderson compiled a chronology, from 1972 through 1993, of ways that the institutional church had censured and disciplined intellectuals and feminists within the church, as she saw it, abusing their ecclesiastical authority. She encouraged Latter-day Saints to speak up, protest injustice, defend each other, expose wrong-doings, and be assertive when dealing with their leaders.

She explained, “If we silence ourselves or allow others to silence us, we will deny the validity of our experience, undermine the foundations of authenticity in our personal spirituality, and impoverish our collective life as a faith community.”^[6]

But with her excommunication, the church did essentially silence Anderson, at least within institutional spaces, so that well into the twenty-first century, Latter-day Saints not only rarely knew who she or other Mormon feminist were, but to be a Mormon feminist became an oxymoron.

Anderson was part of a group of Mormon feminists and intellectuals who were excommunicated in September 1993, known as the September Six. Sara M. Patterson’s book, The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism, explains how these excommunications occurred during a time when LDS church leaders were trying to reinforce orthodoxy, rooted in prophetic authority and doctrinal purity, and believed that “diversity of perspectives was not a boon to the church.”^[7] However, diversity has always existed and been central to the shaping of Mormonism, as Ben Park explains in his new book, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism. Anxiety about this diversity, anxiety about dissent, has shaped how that the church has told its history, recognizing that “history was a matter of life or death.”^[8]

The history that the church tells, then, is often wedded to an orthodoxy not always present in the historical realities.

Like Bushman and the group of women who met together in the summer of 1970 in Boston, understanding Mormon women’s history has helped me “to see new possibilities” for my future and the future of my faith. While many Latter-day Saint women will undoubtedly still have to “rediscover” Mormon women’s history as I did, perhaps the possibilities that they discover in that history can help shape future realities.

-       Brooke R. LeFevre

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^[1] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “The Pink Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought and Beyond,” Dialogue 14, no. 4 (1981): 28-29, found in Joanna Brooks, Rachel Hunt Steenblik, & Hannah Wheelwright, eds., Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings (Oxford University Press, 2016), 113.

^[2] Claudia L. Bushman, “Exponent II Is Born,” Exponent II 1, no. 1 (July 1974): 2, found in Brooks, Steenblik, & Wheelwright, eds., Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, 40.

^[3] Exponent II continues to run to this day. See

https://exponentii.org/

^[4] Claudia L. Busman, ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (Utah State University Press, 1976), xii.

^[5] Since my early discovery of Mormon women’s history, my understanding of their agency has become more nuanced and complicated. I recommend Catherine Brekus, “Mormon Woman and the Problem of Historical Agency,” Journal of Mormon History 37, no. 2 (2011): 58-87 for an excellent analysis of the problems faced by historians trying to understand the agency of women who simultaneously defended the patriarchal practice of polygamy and fought for women’s suffrage.

^[6] Lavina Fielding Anderson, “The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 26, no. 1 (1993): 61.

^[7] Sarah M. Patterson, The September Six and the Struggle for the Soul of Mormonism (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books, 2023), xxi.

^[8] Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (Liveright Publishing Cooperation, 2024), 3