guest post contributed by Stephanie Dawson Pack

Today, I’m an angry Mormon feminist.

I’m angry that I was taught my body was shameful, something to be hidden and covered so as not to arouse the men around me.

I’m angry that I was taught to subvert my sexuality, taught sex wasn’t really about me or for me and to grow accustomed to the duty of being used.

I’m angry that the model of my eternal destiny is to embrace eons as side kick, domesticated as an extension of my husband instead of divine in my own right.

I’m angry that in the most sacred space I know, I was taught I was less, that I made covenants to a man instead of directly to God, to bind myself to my husband instead of the divine.

I’m angry that the deity that looks like me has been cast in shadow, that Heavenly Mother merits no more than half a line in thousands of pages of canon, that to come to know her I have to subvert the system rather than work within it.

I’m angry that “wife” and “mother” are the only titles some people ever care that I hold, that my worth hinges on my uterus instead of my heart, that the only degree that’s “essential” for me is an M.R.S.

I’m angry that the words “Mormon” and “feminist” don’t go together, that the radical notion that women are autonomous beings is too lost in pedagogy and praxis that says otherwise.

I’m angry this brainwashing has gone on for generations, that the activist, feminist legacy left by foremothers like Emmeline B. Wells, Amy Brown Lyman, and Martha Hughes Cannon have been put away in the cabinet of history; angry at the scores of women that accept those closed doors, angry that I used to be one of them.

I’m angry for the number of spaces my lack of a Y chromosome bars me from, for conversations that I won’t be a part of, the decisions that will be handed down instead of participated in; angry for the contributions lost to a sea of suitcoats.

I’m angry for the ways my voice has been silenced, that from my infancy I was taught to sit, comply, obey, never stand and speak my truth; angry that the men and women I see interrogating institutional inequities are kicked out and cut off.

I’m angry that I was taught to follow the patriarchal order before my own conscience, taught that safety was in the hierarchy instead of the truths in my heart.

I’m angry these are the lessons my religion taught me about what it means to be a woman.

I’m angry.

I’m angry!

I’M ANGRY!