I’m sorry to write you so publicly but unfortunately, church procedure doesn’t really provide a way for my voice to reach you. I doubt you’ll even see this, but like many other Sisters of yours in the gospel, I really desire that my pain can reach you. I yearn for you to hear my thoughts. We have heard yours.

“Young women you will be the ones who will provide the example of virtuous womanhood and motherhood. You will continue to be virtuous lovely praiseworthy and of good report. You will also be the ones to provide an example of family life in a time when families are under attack, being redefined and disintegrating. You will understand your roles and your responsibilities and thus will see no need to lobby for rights.” (full video here)

You can’t possibly know what those words and messages of that video mean to women like me. Women pulled to the fringes because we don’t quite fit or feel we belong anymore. Like so many other women, I continue to listen to conferences and firesides, hoping to glean a message meant for me. A message that tells me that I am still your Sister.

Sister Dalton, I am hurting. Thousands of us are hurting. But it isn’t just a hurt that comes from the day to day living in this world. It is a much more direct and pointed pain, a hurt that comes from a church that has promised to protect us.

As a little girl, I was promised that if I lived the gospel, I would be protected.

President Monson has said,

“What will protect you from the sin and evil around you? I maintain that a strong testimony of our Savior and of His gospel will help see you through to safety.”

If I gave my life to the church, I would be saved from the things of the world. I was told that following His leaders would lead me in to His “protecting care.” My sincere faith in this was unshakeable. I have spent the majority of my life putting all of the energy I possess into living the words of the prophets.

Like so many others, the world got in the way. As a teen, I began to question my worth. The messages “the world” was giving me were confusing and dangerous. My reaction? I turned further to the gospel. Still, I became uncomfortable in my skin. I retaliated by being modest and striving to protect my virtue. My body the temple, needed to be physically covered to hide from the world. But nothing seemed to help. I began to HATE my body. I developed a very dangerous eating disorder that will always mark my life. I spent years of faithful fasting and prayer and service to help me overcome this challenge. I believed sincerely that the messages of the world had marred my spirit.

I needed the gospel to protect me. I needed the refuge of God’s protecting doctrine. I believed it could, because I was told it would.

But it didn’t protect me. The lessons and messages I got from the church only further helped fuel my disorder. The manuals in Young Women’s ironically reinforced the very same messages that commercials on TV were telling me. They told me that my body and my appearance mattered. That men were going to constantly look and focus on my body, so I needed to cover up. The manuals taught me that keeping my body “pure” from the hands of anyone until marriage, further showed me that my body was something that could be used to pleased others, including even God. The manuals taught me what a “woman should be,” what a woman looked like, what it acted like, what I was to become: a wife and a mother. Instead of letting me discover who I was and what I should be, I was given very carefully molded examples of “womanhood” through the portrayal of perfectly modest, “clean” and “pure” women in the General Leadership, church videos and manuals. The church gave me a different ideal than the world, but it still gave me an ideal. The church promised to protect me. Instead, it just reinforced the messages of the world, that as a girl, my body was more important and judged, than my spirit or my actions or my voice. No amount of prayer or scripture reading were balm to heal this wound. Diving into motherhood early didn’t help either, it compounded my problems and the pressures I felt to be one thing and look and act one way.

We feel so much pressure as women Sister Dalton, I bet you know of that pressure too. None of us escape it. I would hope God could free us from that pressure with His unconditional love. But at church I’m gifted with just as many, if not more conditions of God’s acceptance that the world puts on me with theirs.

The only thing that has helped to free me of the harmful messages in society is being allowed to deconstruct these messages and help other women along the way not feel tied to this harmful script. I have learned to see the oppression women face in many parts of the globe. I have seen how they are kept down by the rhetoric of their society and it forces them into awful lives of pain and heartbreak. I have seen how the pressures in their society, limit them from seeking their own giftedness. Their world silences their voice, and so often it does this in the name of their god. I have prayed and advocated for their plight. I have tried to mourn with those that mourn.

This has helped me to recognize my own oppression. The oppressions I face are of a world that tells me what I should be, rather letting me be what I am. My oppression comes from the same oppressions women in Afghanistan or on the Ivory Coast feel from a God that tells them their bodies and virtue should be covered and protected, because they are objects to tempt.

I can only think that you must be honestly unaware as to the possible consequences of the instruction you gave women and girls at your fireside last week. By telling women to not advocate for themselves, to not use their voice in this world, (a world that so desperately needs their voice!) is so completely damaging and disappointing. How did we get here?

Our pioneer foremothers used their voices. They agitated. They lobbied for their rights. We are here because of their work. It is every child of Heavenly Parents’ God-given agency that gives them a chance to speak up for their own oppressions. To silence that, to ask or coerce or intimate that a woman shouldn’t do that for herself and for her Sister, does spiritual, physical and emotional damage to the daughters of God.

We are here and we are advocating. Our Mormon scriptures have given us the instruction to ask for what we need. We will not stop advocating or asking, but some women will take your words to heart and will silence their desires. Your words will close their mouths. How terribly sad and tragic that they will see your position of a female example in our church instructing them to silence themselves in the name of obedience to God, rather than allowing them to find it and speak their truth. It is so, so very hurtful.

Please Sister Dalton. Please use your voice to help us use ours.

Your Sister in Christ,

Lindsay Park