Hannah Wheelwright, an undergraduate at BYU and founder of the group Young Mormon Feminists, who had written online in favor of women’s ordination, received a phone call from Kelly one winter day.

“It was awesome,” Wheelwright says, “because I was just sitting on my bed in my room and she was like, ‘Hey, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I want to do strategic direct action to support women getting ordained in the church — and are you in?’ It was a very blunt ask.”

Less than a year in, the Ordain Women leadership has expanded to a steering committee of about 30, with a number of smaller subcommittees. Kelly is constantly on conference calls with other OW leaders. Her husband has even quipped, “Sometimes if I want to get a hold of Kate I’ll just join the conference call and get in the stack so I can say something to her.”

When the Ordain Women website went live last March, it had 24 profiles, modeled on the church’s hugely successful “I’m a Mormon” campaign, a rebranding push attempting to show the diversity — and normalcy — of LDS members. Similarly, each profile on Ordain Women is an expression of sincere faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and an equally sincere explanation of why each individual hopes for women’s ordination. Twenty-four profiles was the benchmark chosen by Kelly and the other founding members: Twenty-four, so the site could look nice and symmetrical — and so no one would feel like they were going it alone.

There are now nearly 250 profiles, with more arriving every day. The profiles don’t include last names, but the first names are their real names; their pictures are their real faces.

Nearly every picture is itself a careful expression of Mormonism — an older man holding his grandchild; two smiling young people in the simple white clothes of baptism; a husband and his pregnant wife walking in a grove of trees. “We’re Mormon,” the pictures say to visitors of the site. “Can’t you see?”

Other church members, though, don’t agree. While no participant in Ordain Women has been officially disciplined (read: excommunicated) for her association with the group, some members, especially those who live in Utah (or as Donna Kelly calls it, “Mormon ground zero”), have faced other, subtler consequences. According to Kelly, some women have been relieved of their responsibilities in their congregations — in Mormon parlance, “released from their callings.” (Though the reasons for releases aren’t typically offered, these women interpreted the changes as related to their involvement in the movement.) Children have been forbidden from playing with other children whose mothers or fathers support Ordain Women. A few women have lost their jobs.

Kelly’s East Coast life and supportive family make her mostly immune to the backlash — although her in-laws think she and her husband are “on the slippery slope to apostasy.” How have they communicated that? I wanted to know. “They called us and told us.” She laughs. “Christmastime might be a little awkward.”

She says the same thing, still laughingly, during her presentation at the Counterpoint conference the next day, in a large, spare room on the top floor of the University of Utah’s student union building. Her audience chuckles and makes some humming noises of support. There are 60 people watching the “effective activism” panel, the largest audience that day. Fifteen are men. Several women are knitting while they listen, and one young woman stays the whole day at the side of the room, quietly pacing up and down the room with her bald baby. The atmosphere is supportive and polite. Most everyone is conservatively dressed. When the panels end, many hugs are exchanged. It’s an unlikely setting for revolution, with some decidedly unconventional firebrands leading the charge.

But even in this group, Kelly's zeal sets her apart. “Kate, almost uniquely of anyone involved with Ordain Women, has never gone through a crisis of faith,” Wheelwright says. “She's never doubted the church, or doubted God or her testimony, whereas so often the common narrative in Mormon feminism is doubting the church, doubting your faith because of gender issues. But Kate has never had that. Kate has always been a true constant believer — she served a mission, she's married in the temple, she believes everything. And so uniquely she is capable of addressing the church on those terms.”

Kelly agrees: “I never considered leaving the church. That was never on the table for me. I’m more of a person who’s like, ‘Well, I’m in an institution and I can see it needs to be improved. It needs to change; I don’t need to leave.’”

Kelly and the other OW spokespeople used the Counterpoint conference to officially announce that they are preparing to knock at the same door that remained closed to them this fall in the upcoming April 2014 General Conference, now mere weeks away.

“One of the main things that Ruth Todd, who is the church’s new female spokesperson, said to us when we met her on Temple Square, and what she said to the media, was, ‘We are a small and insignificant group.’ So, we’ll take that as a challenge,” Kelly says during her speech to Counterpoint.

It remains to be seen how many women will walk to the Tabernacle in April. In the meantime, Kelly continues to invest in her faith, to “pray with her work,” as her heroine Susan B. Anthony did. It is this kind of worship, Kelly says, that fulfills her. She and her husband are planning to move to Nairobi this summer, but Kelly has no intention of letting the change impact her involvement with the cause. “Since this is a worldwide church,” Kelly wrote in an email, “we need to reach out to Mormon women all over the globe who are concerned about gender inequality. Women worldwide want the Priesthood and to make the church a more open and inclusive place to worship, and having more OW leadership outside the U.S. will help us hasten the work.”

Ordain Women has already made an impact in the year since its birth. In what many see as a concession to the organization and its planned public action, the church announced the week before last October’s General Conference that it would live-stream the priesthood session on its website, providing unprecedented access to the meeting for women. This month will also see the first spring “General Women’s Meeting,” a church-wide event and broadcast for women and girls ages 8 and up (which has previously only taken place in the fall, and replaces two separate meetings for women and young women). “So, to celebrate this great step forward OW supporters will attend the meeting wearing purple, a symbol of equality,” Kelly says in an email.

And the conversation surrounding women’s ordination has moved further into the Mormon mainstream; as evidenced by the growing profiles on the OW site and renewed discussion across the bloggernacle, the issue is no longer shrouded in secrecy or shame.

Still, for Kelly, conversation is not enough — ordination is what all Mormon women need most. Priesthood is "the only thing that will make us fundamentally equal," she says, "and the only thing we can ask for where [equality] is very easily measured."

When that happens, she says, "We’ll know."

***

Continue onto part III, "Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s Challenge To The Vatican."

Return to the Feminism in Faith page.