Evolution of ideals for women in Mormon periodicals, 1897-1999

Sociology of Religion, Spring, 2002 by Laura Vance

In the last three decades the Mormon Church has taken a public stand as a defender of "traditional family values." In its opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and 1980s, the excommunication of Sonia Johnson -- president of Mormons for the ERA -- and more recently, the excommunication of feminist scholars and intellectuals in the mid-1990s, publication of the Proclamation on the Family, and public support for proposition twenty-two in California, the Mormon Church has taken a position as protector of the "traditional" heterosexual nuclear family.

Central to the Mormon articulation of the ideal family is definition of ideal gender roles. Recent scholarship on Mormon women indicates, however, that ideals for women have been far from monolithic over the course of the movement's history. Historical research demonstrates that in Mormonism's early decades women participated in expression of gifts of the spirit, most importantly healing and conferral of blessings by the laying on of hands -- practices now reserved exclusively for male priesthood holders (Newell 1992a; Barber 1992) -- and participated in an autonomous Relief Society (the Church's women's organization) in which women elected leaders and controlled an independent budget (Newell 1992a, 1992b). Scholars and Church leaders disagree about whether Mormon women were ever allowed to "hold" (have conferred upon them) the priesthood, but scholars have presented historical evidence that in the first decades of the Church's history some Church members and leaders (including Joseph Smith) believed that wo men would, and eventually did, have personal, direct access to priesthood power (Quinn 1992).

Historical research indicates a schism, then, between contemporary Mormon emphasis on, for example, an exclusively male priesthood and nineteenth century emphasis on women s active participation in healing rituals; or contemporary administration of the Church's women's auxiliary by male priesthood leaders in contrast with the economically and politically autonomous Relief Society that existed prior to 1971. (1) Sociologists have long postulated that gender ideals evolve within a religious movement as a consequence of the evolution of the relationship between the movement and its sociocultural context. Weber (1922) was the first to suggest that as religious movements emerge, they exist in a high "state of tension" with their "surrounding sociocultural environments" (Stark and Bainbridge 1985:23) and provide greater opportunities to those, such as women, who are disprivileged in the larger culture, as to do so serves to heighten the movement's distinction from the world. As these movements become bureaucratize d and increasingly seek to accommodate secular society, authority and freedoms previously available to women diminish. Weber contends that while women are allowed greater authority in the initial stages of religious development, "only in very rare cases does this practice continue beyond the first stage of a religious community's formation, when the pneumatic manifestations of charisma are valued as hallmarks of specifically religious exaltation" (1922:104). "Thereafter, as routinization and regimentation of community relations sets in, authority previously allotted women diminishes" (Weber 1922:104).

Hans Baer (1993), in his examination of women in Black spiritual churches, observes that new religious movements which "appeal to the disinherited often grant equality to women" (66). Charles H. Barfoot and Gerald T. Sheppard (1980) agree, noting in their study of Pentecostal women that although female church members played an important, even indispensable, role in the founding of the movement and in its early growth, as it underwent the process of denominationalism, women were increasingly denied access to leadership positions.

According to Carroll, Hargrove and Lummis (1983), a religious movement's initial response to the world -- termed the charismatic stage -- is characterized by the introduction of new, unique truths, which unite believers against unbelievers. In this stage women are allowed and expected to participate fully in the movement: "When a movement is in its charismatic phase, 'women's place' is not an issue" (Carroll et al. 1983:21). The second phase of development focuses on consolidation and organization, it is a time of increased accommodation to the secular world. If secular society restricts women's participation in positions of authority and leadership, these authors suggest, the religious movement will, as it increasingly attends to secular norms in a search for decorousness, restrict women's access to religious authority: "Respectability demands that women be put in their place" (1983:23). Last, a religious movement may eventually enter the third stage of development identified by Carroll et al., in which the movement will attempt to instigate social change rather than maintain a hostile relationship with the world or adapt to prevailing social customs.