Camille Johnson and the Missing Parts of her Working Mother Story

I remember talking with Margaret Toscano fifteen or so years ago about the recently published David Paulsen and Martin Pulido article, “A Mother There: A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven,“ which had made a big splash in the Mormon studies world. After all, Margaret had, along with her sister Janice Allred, been warned to stop writing about Heavenly Mother. They continued to do so and both were eventually excommunicated. But here was this new article analyzing hundreds of church leaders’ statements about her, published in BYU Studies of all places. What did Margaret make of this, I wanted to know.

I’m sure Margaret had insightful things to say about the article, but the one thing I still remember distinctly is that she said that that article hurt a little. It hurt because it seemed to imply there really was never any “sacred silence” being enforced by church authorities about Heavenly Mother discourse and theology. It hurt because it ignored the severe price women like her had paid in the past for thinking, talking, and theologizing about Mormonism’s feminine divine. It hurt because it felt like it was erasing her experience.

Margaret’s reaction may help explain my own mixed feelings about Camille Johnson’s recent talk at the BYU Women’s Conference, in which she spoke about pursuing her career and motherhood simultaneously. Tamarra Kemsley has a great writeup on it in the Tribune (which particularly focuses on Johnson’s encouragement to women to have children, a topic I won’t be addressing here), and a quote from the talk has been featured the Church’s Instagram. In this talk, Johnson said:

“I pursued an education, both undergraduate and a law degree. I was married midway through my legal education. I had my first son the year after I passed the bar. I had babies, and my husband and I loved and nurtured them while we were both working. It was busy, sometimes hectic; we were stretched and sometimes tired. I supported him, and he supported me. Family was, and still is, our top priority. My husband and I sought inspiration in these choices and in the timing. It was what we felt impressed to do. We were trying to let God prevail.

“From a financial and professional perspective, it would have made sense to put off having children until I was more established in my career. In letting God prevail, we sometimes do things that others can’t make sense of.

“I juggled pregnancy, having babies, nurturing children, carpool, Little League, Church responsibilities, being a supportive spouse, and my professional pursuits. It was a joyful juggle I wouldn’t change. We felt confident in our course because we were letting God prevail.”

I feel, maybe not hurt so much, but more a sense of consternation that a significant part of the story has been left out.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s fantastic that President Johnson followed her own conscience and figured out a way to participate in her career while having kids. I love that she’s laying this path out as a respected possibility for Mormon mothers. And I think she’s also setting out a great example of placing primacy on own relationship with deity. All very good things.

But a huge part of her story as a working LDS mother in the 1980s and 90s is glaringly missing. What about all those authoritative messages that she heard loud and clear in her formative years that emphasized the evils of working motherhood? She would have been in her mid-twenties in 1987, pursuing her law education or career, when President Benson quoted extensively from President Kimball’s 1977 “Mothers, Come Home” talk, saying:

“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. Come home, wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your children, born and unborn.”

and

“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. Numerous divorces can be traced directly to the day when the wife left the home and went out into the world into employment.”

She would have been raised in the era when church leaders were saying things like:

“Earning a few dollars more for luxuries cloaked in the masquerade of necessity – or a so-called opportunity for self-development of talents in the business world, a chance to get away from the mundane responsibilities of the home – these are all satanic substitutes for clear thinking.” (H. Burke Peterson, 1974)

She would have been about twenty or so when Ezra Taft Benson said, “It is a misguided idea that a woman should leave the home, where there is a husband and children present, to prepare educationally and financially for an unforeseen eventuality.”

Those messages were real and pervasive in North American Mormonism during this time period. That rhetoric absolutely influenced women’s experience with Mormonism and affected not only their life choices, but also their feelings of self-worth, their sense of guilt, and the expansiveness through which they could view the future and their place in it.

Even though I was a teen in the 1990s when working mother rhetoric was softening a bit, I too felt the weight of it. I have no doubt this discourse influenced some of my choices in my twenties and encouraged me to aim lower professionally than I might have otherwise. And as for the women living through that moment in 1987 when President Benson told mothers to come home from the workplace, well, we know the devastation that incurred. Lavina Fielding Anderson, examining the repercussions of Benson’s 1987 “To the Mothers in Zion” talk, wrote in a 1988 Dialogue article:

“Overwhelmingly, the reaction I have heard from women has been one of pain and of anger, whether they have been employed or not. One woman, who has worked all her adult life and has five children, said that her husband, who was a bishop, had been besieged during the week following the address by women full of hurt and resentment.” (p. 105)

Authoritative messages about the evils of mothers working had real impact on the lives of LDS women. Because of them, we very well may have lost, to a significant degree, a generation of LDS women in North America developing careers and therefore decreasing their own financial vulnerability. I’m sure we all know middle-aged or older LDS women whose marriages ended and who were left in terrifyingly vulnerable positions, having to try to reenter the workplace after decades of not being in it.

So what I want to know is: how did President Johnson metabolize those messages? How did she live “joyful[ly],” without regret, guilt, and self-recrimination as a working mother in the 1980s and 90s, given these very strong currents telling her that her choices were selfish and would possibly bring calamity on her family?

Again, I’m glad she talked positively about being a working mother. This is a good rhetorical shift. I celebrate a future in which Mormon mothers are less torn up over the work-motherhood issue, when they realize that it’s absolutely valid and righteous to pursue both simultaneously.

But I don’t think we should forget the distance we’ve traveled to get to this moment. As with many other topics pertaining to the church, it just doesn’t help to ignore past reality. Let’s acknowledge the difficulties, the contradictions, and the ways women have had to wrestle with God, conscience, desires, and authority in the face of negative rhetoric from church leaders about working mothers. Let’s acknowledge the fact that so many statements from church leaders in years past emerged in specific cultural contexts and were reflections of their time and people’s limited understandings in that time. Let’s acknowledge progress as women are encouraged to decide for themselves, in concert with their conscience and inspiration, the path and pattern of their lives.

This talk was an important start to President Johnson’s working mother story. But LDS women now are craving to hear the rest of her story, including the messy and difficult parts. The parts where she confronted head-on authoritative rhetoric that critiqued and misunderstood her choices, and where she learned to place primacy on her own inspiration. Now that will be a story I’ll be excited to hear.