Mormon Feminists Riding the Edge: Thoughts on Institutional Improvements for Women in the Last Decade

Juanita Brooks’s father

 

I always liked that story from Juanita Brooks about riding the edge of the herd.* Her father once told her that it is the cowboy who rides on the edge of the herd, “who sings and calls and makes himself heard who helps direct the course.” The cowboy in the middle of the herd is helpless, he told her. The cowboy trailing behind is useless and shirking responsibility. The cowboy who rides counter to it is trampled.

Rather, her father said, “Ride the edge of the herd and be alert, but know your directions, and call out loud and clear. Chances are, you won’t make any difference, but on the other hand, you just might.”

This, of course, was his metaphor to Juanita Brooks about her place in the church. As a brilliant historian, she had things to say about Mormon history, the scriptures, and more. She acknowledges that the metaphor isn’t perfect, but she found some value in it. And as I sit back and reflect on the last decade or so of Mormon feminist activism that I’ve been involved in, I wonder, “Have our years of riding the edge and calling out made any difference? Have we Mormon feminists been able to turn the herd at all?”

I think maybe we have. Just a little. It’s hard to know if our writing and organizing made the difference, or if it’s just massive societal shifts that have swept the church along towards some improvements for women. But some things have changed, and for the better. Here are the institutional improvements that stand out in my mind:

January 2019. Women no longer covenant to hearken unto their husbands in the temple. I was devastated by the hearken covenant in the temple twenty years ago. It made me wonder if God saw women as substandard, if God thought women were less than men. I knew something was deeply wrong when I went through the temple – was it me? Was I fundamentally messed up to be so horrified by this covenant? Was it God? Was God fundamentally a sexist? Over time I came to understand that it was neither. But I can’t underscore the pain of those years as I chewed over the questions.

I’m glad that covenant is gone. Maybe women now won’t feel that same degree of pain that I felt. (They still may feel some, goodness knows, since patriarchy is still laced through the temple – it’s just more obscured now.) But the lessening of pain matters to me. I hate thinking of women doubting themselves and God the way I did as they embark on important new journeys in life. I’ll choose to hope that more changes are in store.

October 2019. Women can be witnesses at baptisms and sealings. This was such low-hanging fruit that it’s shocking it didn’t happen decades ago. But nevertheless, I’m glad it happened, even long overdue. I’ll celebrate the baby steps. Is it a little bit of slap in the face that women *and children* can do this now? Yes. I don’t like when women and children are lumped in together. But it’s still a step forward.March 2018. Policies change to explicitly allow youth and women to bring another adult in with them during bishop’s interviews.November 2014. Women with children at home can now be employed as full-time CES employees. I don’t even know what to say about this.April 2013. Enhanced leadership roles for sister missionaries; sister training leaders oversee and train sisters. This is good. Sister missionaries should certainly have access to leadership roles. Now if only sister training leaders could be leaders over both the elders and the sisters. . . .April 2013. A woman prays in General Conference for the first time. Again, mindboggling that this hadn’t happened before, but it’s a baby step.October 2012. The age for sister missionaries is lowered from 21 to 19, making it easier for women to choose to serve a mission. This was an important shift. People have the opportunity to gain a lot of skills on missions, ones that can translate to the workplace or many other aspects of life. I’m very happy that those women who are inclined toward missionary work now have more access to missions.

And there are other improvements, both women-specific and not, that are significant. (I’d love for you to add some of those in the comments.)

Are these improvements I enumerated due to Mormon feminist writing and organizing? At least in part? Again, I can’t say, but I suspect it played some kind of role. It doesn’t escape me that some of the more important changes came in the wake of the outward-facing and media-savvy efforts of Ordain Women, which launched in 2013. These changes also came in the wake of the visionary document written by Mormon feminists in 2012, “All are Alike Unto God,” which lists 22 policy changes short of ordination that would help make the church “a more equitable religious community.” Note that several of these suggestions have indeed come to pass. And all of these improvements I listed, of course, came in the wake of Mormon feminist consciousness raising and writing that began in in the 1970s.

As Margaret Toscano once told me, the outer edges of these movements for change are important. Groups like Ordain Women, the What Women Know Collective who wrote “All Are Alike Unto God,” and all the courageous Mormon feminists who have been disciplined, excommunicated, and driven out serve a crucial role. They create room for people who want moderate change to look reasonable. By staking out the revolutionary position, they shift the needle, moving the outer boundaries farther so that things in between the outer boundaries and the status quo now seem more possible and moderate.

Toscano’s vision of the edges doesn’t exactly overlap with Juanita Brooks’s vision of the edges. In Toscano’s vision, those on the edges are excised and written off, and it’s that sacrifice that creates room for some moderate change in the institution. This is different, of course, from Brooks’s more hopeful vision of those on the edges as potentially powerful change makers that stay with the herd.

I suspect both visions are true in their own ways. I’ve ridden the edges, calling out, and staying with the herd. I’ve also staked radical positions. And the church has changed in its glacial pace, which I celebrate. But above all, as I reflect on my Mormon feminist journey, I celebrate the community and connections I’ve made within the movement. I will never see the church become what I would like it to become. But how I treasure those women who have walked this path beside me, who share similar hopes and dreams, who understood the struggle as no one else ever could. That has been the real gift of Mormon feminism to me, and will always remain, no matter what the institution does.

*Davis Bitton, Maureen Ursenbach, Juanita Brooks, “Riding Herd: A Conversation with Juanita Brooks,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought (1974) 9 (1): 10–33.