“The Sting of Being Erased”
(1 Timothy 2:11, RSV)
A few days before Melissa Inouye died, she suggested that the one thing Latter-Day Saints could do better as a faith community is to “preserve the words of dead Mormon women.” Her bold and pointed plea shines a light into a vast hole of Mormonism, a hole shaped like the words of women.
Unfortunately, the silencing of Mormon women started at the very origins of our religion. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, in her book A House Full of Females, tells the story of Eliza R. Snow’s precious Relief Society minutes (that she meticulously wrote and carried across the continent) and how in 1853 her words were distorted from their original text to center male authority and power. Eliza’s words were edited unapologetically by a group of male leaders and then approved by the prophet and published in the Deseret News. This is how patriarchy silences women. Additionally, when Brigham Young authorized the building of a fireproof vault for church records the same year, “Eliza’s minutes were not among those preserved.” (310)
Luckily, many of Eliza’s words miraculously survived on their own but so many other words of Mormon women are lost forever and will never be spoken out loud. These stories remind me of the harrowing lamentation of Ana, the fictional wife of Jesus in Sue Monk Kidd’s novel, The Book of Longings, when she realizes her life and stories are excluded from history simply because she is female, “I found no answers, only the sting of being erased.” (407)
There are many, many ways to erase women from the narratives of history but the one that scares me the most is the silencing of women by creating Silent Women who have no stories of their own to tell – women who tell the stories and words of men as if they are more important than their own.
In April 2019, Sister Sharon Eubank shared a story about a vision she received early one Saturday morning. She called it “a little dream” and described the scene she saw and the feelings she felt about a dark gazebo with arched stone windows. It’s a beautiful dream and I admire Sis. Eubank’s deep goodness, but the whole thing fell disappointingly flat for me. Sis. Eubank boldly shares her dream but then her dream pivots back securely into a man’s myth and interpretation.
Her dream seemed like someone else’s dream. Sharon only has one “she” in her entire talk. Contrastingly, Sharon’s talk is littered with quotes and stories by men and includes thirteen “he”s, one “him,” and five “his.” That’s a total of 19 to 1. Are these her words? Or is she just the vessel for theirs?
Sharon Eubank’s dream reminds me of another prophetess who dreamed about stone tablets.
Sue Monk Kidd, in her book, The Dance of the Dissidant Daughter, describes a dream she had about a shriveled old bishop who attempted to whack her with two stone tablets. She notices that the tablets are inscribed with the Ten Commandments and the bishop is too weak to lift them so she grabs the tablets from him and places them in a bag before walking away. Soon, in her dream, Sue meets an old smiling woman inside a cottage filled with flowers. When Sue looks in her bag, the stone tablets are gone and in their place is a Russian nesting doll.
In Sue’s dream, the wrinkled woman sings an exuberant song about “beautiful breasts and beautiful wombs,” and when Sue looks into a dream mirror, she is struck by her beauty and awed that her reflection is “nested” within the old crone’s.
The difference between Sharon’s dream and Sue’s dream is that Sharon’s dream is safe and approved by patriarchy while Sue’s is untamed. Sharon’s falls securely into Mormon theology without disrupting the male narrative; I knew she’d find peace and light through faith just like the brother of Jared did. But Sue’s dream is not distorted to fit into a patriarchal narrative or held up by one. In fact, it puts that narrative into a bag and transforms it into something else, something unsafe and entirely different and feminine.
Kidd laments that “Being a Silent Woman is not about being quiet and reticent, it’s about stifling our truth. Our real truth.” (70) In other words, women can speak and regurgitate men’s stories, the scripture stories they are made of, the stories they are beaten with, the stories as old as time, but are those Mormon women’s real truth?
Women can speak boldly and loudly from pulpits and still hide their bloodstains and blood symbols and their breasts and wombs and their wisdom and their dreams from everyone who listens. They can keep their truths hidden inside the bags they hold, clinging to the ancient stone tablets. They can be Silent Women.
Or, we can open the bag and find something else, create something new and wise and feminine and real. Preserving Mormon women’s voices is so much more than just placing them in fireproof vaults, it’s about leaving the old (and new) stories that don’t include us and building our own. We need new myths. We need more stories. Mormon women’s stories. We need more than recycled patriarchy. We need to leave the old, weak men behind us and find ourselves in the mirror, beautiful and unspeakably valuable.
We need to preserve Mormon women’s real words.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash
