President Oscarson,

I am so glad you have been called to lead the Young Women’s organization of the Church. After seeing your pinterest page, I think my wife and I would really enjoy having you over for dinner! (I make killer homemade pizza and cinnamon rolls…) Since I can’t invite you over, perhaps a letter will do? As a father of two girls, one of whom will have her first experiences as a Young Woman under your leadership and another who will become one shortly after you leave office, I want to welcome you to your calling and declare that I sustain and support you!

I wanted to tell you about some of the things I hope for during your tenure as you endeavor to make the LDS faith a relevant, positive and affirming place for my daughters. Specifically, I hope that under your leadership there will be a larger place for families who raise their daughters the way we are raising ours. As you take the reigns, please consider the following concerns and suggestions – springing from my sincere hopes and dreams for my daughters – from a father in the trenches who truly wants what is best for his family and the Church.

On Modesty

I have a few deep concerns regarding our current discourse on modesty in the Young Women’s program. I want you to know that I sustain the principle of modesty, but as a parent of daughters I am telling you it has just become too much. It seems like 50% of content directed toward young women is about modesty, and at the very least it is disproportional to the role it should play in their spiritual development. Please think about how much emphasis to place on modesty in your talks and in the curriculum and other materials you produce for our girls. There is so much more to our girls than the way they dress, and they face so many other important challenges. Modesty is just taking up so much air time and cognitive space for young Mormon women. Please prayerfully consider whether a shift in emphasis might be more spiritually productive.

When we do teach modesty lately, few, if any leaders have been warning parents and wards about “shooting beyond the mark” and the damage that taking modesty rhetoric to extremes can cause to girls, boys, and our community as a whole. Just as people need to be warned against extreme, overly-sexualized fashions, in a religious community some need to be warned about the spiritual dangers of dwelling too forcefully on appearance, that we may judge others, or cause them harm through ostracization or seeing others as sexualized when this was never their intent. Both cases are instances of objectification of the body – a slippery slope that quickly drowns out unconditional love. Even just a small group of extreme modesty police has a huge negative impact on a ward – and as parents we need our leaders’ help protect our girls from zealous interpretations of modesty standards.

As a concrete example, we are seeing multiple stakes around the country embrace extreme modesty standards for things like Girl’s Camp – no shorts (even on long hikes or in hot weather) and requiring that T-shirts and shorts to be worn OVER swimsuits at all times. Classic shaming behavior such as girls being asked to kneel in front of male chaperons to gain admittance to dances, BYU male students writing shaming notes to girls walking around campus, the very public example of students being turned away from the BYU Testing Centers for “too tight” jeans, and local council that young men should refuse to interact with or date a girl who might have worn a tank top are stories that frequent our community. Surely these are not Christ-like behaviors. Maybe we could build on Sister Dalton’s recent appeal to not “draw a line in the sand” but rather a “line in the heart”. There is a lot of line in the sand drawing currently going on at the local level, far beyond For the Strength of Youth. Generally those doing it feel justified and supported by leadership in their policing. I really don’t think the creation of strong social pressure and shaming as an enforcement mechanism was the intent of your predecessors. Yet it is happening. A lot. The results can lead to valuing others based not on the heart but on appearance, decreased confidence, eating disorders, social isolation, etc. right at a time in Young Women’s lives when they are particularly vulnerable to feelings of peer pressure, when their bodies are changing, and when social interaction is key to development of personal identity.

Please think carefully and deeply about such cultural trends as “Modest is Hottest” activities. At very least, can we move toward re-empowering parents and girls to come up with their own wardrobe standards based on correct principles? As a father, I care deeply about the standards we set for our daughters (and sons) in their behavior and dress. You can trust us and our girls to make wise choices without specifying hem and sleeve lengths or fostering a culture in which leaders, ward members, other girls and young men shame those who don’t follow their own family’s standards.

Finally, please help me as a parent teach my girls that they are NOT responsible for the thoughts and actions of young men. This is another theme that is frequently is used to justify judging girls and is being actively taught at the local level. It is simply harmful and not in line with gospel principles of agency and accountability for one’s own thoughts and actions. I was a Young Man in the Church and I can testify to you that the ability of Young Men to have lascivious thoughts about a girl is only very, very, very, very marginally related to what they are wearing. What helped me most to control my thoughts as a Young Man was expending effort to actively humanize Young Women, learning respect for them, seeing others treating Young Women properly, and interacting with them as friends and completely whole spiritual beings – as Daughters of God – instead of as bodies to be appraised. Clothing had almost no impact except at the very extremes (and I don’t mean tank tops or shorts). In fact, I fear that today we are teaching our young men indirectly, but powerfully, to displace their own accountability for their thoughts and to place onto the Young Women. By doing so we are actually inviting Young Men to focus their attentions more on what Young Women wear than on the content of their character.

On Leadership Development

The YW program has such an opportunity to help our girls develop leadership skills and self-confidence! I have seen wonderful local Young Women’s leaders empower girls, expand their horizons, and teach them how to confidently impact their peers in productive and uplifting ways. Please offer any extra emphasis or support you can to encourage local leaders to teach leadership development that will specifically prepare our daughters and sons to be “co-leaders” and “co-presidents” in our homes, wards, and in the world! A careful look at the new YW’s manuals in comparison with the YM’s demonstrates clear differences in the rate of usage of passive versus active verbiage (for girls and boys, respectively). There is clearly a stronger emphasis in the boys’ manual on leading and making decisions. I hope that such differences are unintentional and, thanks to the material being online, it could be easily fixed at almost no cost (please do!). However, the manuals’ differences are representative of a widespread cultural tendency we have in the Church that can feel off-putting to the current generation of Young Women. Please prepare YW leaders to teach our daughters how to actively lead instead of be passively led. This is one place where the Church can help us combat some of the world’s influence where the commercialization and princessification of women tend to depict them as passive, overly-emotional, and as objects of desire/prizes for strong and successful men instead of what women really are: Agents in their own right.

On Motherhood

Relatedly, I know many families like mine that struggle with their local YWs organizations when the leaders overemphasize crafts, homemaking and highly gendered activities that often are oriented around preparing girls for motherhood (particularly stay-at-home motherhood). At the most extreme, sometimes we see programs that have replaced teaching Jesus with teaching gender roles. While teaching about the sacredness of and preparing for parenthood is undoubtedly important, as young women my daughters need more help in preparing for the next pressing stages of their lives – navigating high school, developing their identity as disciples of Christ, preparing for missions at 19, navigating college, and attaining decent, self-sustaining employment. These are all things I see emphasized in YM’s programs but not always so in YW’s. Now would also be a good time to revisit the materials’ approach to the diversity of models of motherhood. The fact is that a large portion of mothers in the church work outside the home (especially worldwide). Given the current structures of the US economy and the growth of the Church in developing countries, this demographic is most likely to represent an increasing number of Mormon women, not fewer. Some mothers work out of necessity, for others it is because the world has changed and there are increasing opportunities for (well-educated) women to balance involved motherhood and career responsibilities. Given our wonderful emphasis on education for women, we see more women able to take advantage of these opportunities. Either way, it is important to me as a parent that I prepare my girls for these new realities. I hope the YW program can help rather than hinder our efforts. I promise to work in good faith with our local leaders and to pitch in to help create and run such programming, but it would be a big help if the General Presidency would prayerfully consider the balance that is occurring in many places, to take into account the statistical realities and needs of most of the women of the church and balance that with doctrine instead of nostalgic ideals.

On Young Women In Ward Life

Similarly, I think there is a wonderful opportunity opening up before us to re-envision the role that young women play in our local congregations. The young men, through their offices in the priesthood, have many opportunities to serve, particularly publicly. I know my daughters long for similar opportunities to be a recognized, visible part of the community – not because they are vain, but because they simply want to contribute. As a parent I see the tremendous positive spiritual, emotional, and social impact that visible participation brings to my sons and their friends. There are many local efforts to creatively expand the role of young women at the ward level. I would love it as a parent if you would look around and see if you can find some modes of Young Women participation that are worthy of developing church-wide. For example, one of my favorites is having the young women act as the ushers and helpers during the sacrament – opening doors and helping to make sure all are given the opportunity to participate and being examples of reverence. Another best-practice I have seen is making sure that Young Women’s recognitions and advancements are treated with the same respect as are Young Men’s advancement in the priesthood and scouts (thought they remain much less frequent than young men recognitions). Please consider the expansion of Activity Days to mirror the cub scout program to better prepare girls for YWs. I have even heard of attempts to include YW in the Visiting Teaching program to serve alongside their mothers as the boys do their fathers. What great ideas! I am sure there are many more. Could you help us be innovative in finding, diffusing and legitimating ways to include the YW in ward life? That would be incredible!

On Resource Allocation

We all agree that our girls needs significant development, and that means resources. Please examine the issue of budget inequality between Young Women and Young Men organizations. The general feeling among many families with daughters, as well as with many leaders in YM and YW, is that too often the YW receive significantly less funding than YM on a per child basis. Current guidelines in the manuals restrict fundraising for YW much more than for YM/Scouts. Significant inequalities in funding feel wrong and go against our proclaimed value of gender equality within the church. Honestly, I don’t know how widespread this issue is within the church. A careful and honest study/assessment of funding practices at the ward level to clarify the issue is something that only someone in your position could commission. If there are not major, systematic issues, then wonderful! We can put this concern to rest and you could use this study to help motivate the few wards out of step with church practice to better manage their resources! However, I suspect you will find that these inequalities are more systematic than you and the other church leaders would like.

I am sure I could go on but really those five things above are what I most worry about when I think about sending my daughter into the YWs organization. Their time in those years is so precious and important. The family time we have with them at those ages can be stretched and rare. I love the gospel and I love the church. I want my daughters to have good experiences and feel equally valued and supported as the Young Men in coming closer to Christ, serving, and preparing for their next stages in life. I think addressing the areas I mentioned above would go a long way to taking what is a wonderful program and making it even better for my daughters.

Yours in Christ,

Ryan

[Authors update: Many of you in the comments have suggest I send the letter to Pres. Oscarson. My understanding is that we are asked to refrain from sending personal correspondence to General Authorities. I assume that this includes the YW General President. This is one of the primary reasons I posted it online instead of sending it directly to her office. I hope posting it publicly is taken in that spirit not one of disrespect. The other reason, of course was to spur more general discussion of our hopes for the YW program.

On That note, the comments so far have focused mostly on the modesty portion of the letter. This seems to be a real area of concern for many people like it is for me. Please lets keep that discussion going. I would be interested in hearing more of your thoughts on some of the other areas such teaching YW leadership etc. Some people have shared some wonderful examples of how wards are doing this. Sharing such as this is really helpful! Thanks!]