Mormon and feminist: Not an oxymoron — a rich history

Corrections and Clarifications: A previous version of this article misstated Martha Hughes Cannon’s religious affiliation. She was a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who practiced polygamy.

Active feminist Mormons: They exist.

According to historians, Mormon feminists have existed for as long as Mormonism has existed.

It's a story some — even within the LDS faith — aren't familiar with.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a religion that not only has deep patriarchal roots within its doctrine, but it also calls for a "patriarchal order" in the home, one led by a father who holds the priesthood. The priesthood is generally defined by the LDS Church as the power and authority to act in the name of God on earth.

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At this time, and despite efforts by some to allow women to hold the priesthood, men are the only gender the church ordains.

Church doctrine says men and women have different but equally valuable roles, but some say gender inequity exists in its structure as well its culture. With gender equity at their core, feminist movements throughout history have examined the role of the woman in LDS scripture, doctrine and culture.

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"There's a lot of Mormon feminists who have written Mormon women's history to show this transformation of feminism throughout history," said Nancy Ross, an assistant professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at Dixie State University.

Ross has published several articles relating to Mormon feminism as an active Mormon throughout her entire life until recent years. She said many Mormons identify as cultural conservatives whose political beliefs align with the Republican Party, and that many of them would be uncomfortable hearing that notable women in the LDS Church participated in feminist movements throughout history.

Ross cited leaders in the church — particularly Boyd K. Packer, the former president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles — who explicitly warned members of the LDS faith of the "harmful" ideology of social movements such as LGBT rights and feminism.

"If you feel you have been raised to believe feminists are the enemy, you don't really want to hear that they're your religious forebearers," Ross said, adding that, as an art historian, she was interested in Mormon women's studies and began researching it as a "very active Mormon."

"As a historian, I don't feel it's wrong to learn about history," Ross said. "I understand that some people write histories that are deceptive, biased or manipulated, and I can handle that. What was hard is that I felt like I had been fed a story from the church all my life of Mormon women's history that was very different from the ones I was reading by legitimate historians."

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Kate Hollbrook, managing historian of women's history at the LDS Church history department, said Mormon women, especially when the Relief Society was formed, have always been proponents of gender equality.

"Women have been very concerned about women's equality, and Mormon women have had a strong sense that they can contribute to the church, to the world, and that was absolutely true in the 19th century," Hollbrook said.

Women and the priesthood

In 1842, Joseph Smith Jr. developed the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, which marked the beginnings of the modern-day women's organization within the LDS Church.

Joseph Smith appointed his wife, Emma Smith, as president of the Relief Society, conducting the organization "in the pattern of the priesthood" with priesthood authority. Historical writings indicate women in the early Relief Society exercised spiritual gifts, held their own meetings separate from the church as a whole, and even ordained other women. Some historians say Emma Smith received the Melchizedek priesthood, as indicated in the minutes of the Nauvoo Relief Society.

However, the LDS Church clarifies on its website that "neither Joseph Smith, nor any person acting on his behalf, nor any of his successors conferred the Aaronic or Melchizedek Priesthood on women or ordained women to priesthood office."

Hollbrook said although she's never seen evidence that women were ordained to priesthood office, women did engage in ordinances and practices that, today, doctrine requires ordination of the priesthood.

"When any organization is new, the roles and definitions are much more flexible," Hollbrook said. "It's been slow changes overtime. Women were performing blessings into the 20th century."

Emma Smith also received "a portion of the keys of the kingdom," according to Carol Cornwall Madsen's "Mormon Women and the Temple: Toward a New Understanding." Emma Smith also encouraged sisters to pursue monogamy and denounce polygamy, directly contradicting Joseph Smith's directive that women should defer against contrary preaching and practices.

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"Women ... maintained a semi-autonomous status until around 1970, and women lost a lot when the Relief Society became fully folded into the LDS Church," Ross said.

According to "Women and Authority: Re-Emerging Mormon Feminism," edited by Maxine Hanks, priesthood leaders began referring to the women's organizations as "auxiliaries" of the church, and in 1908 the Priesthood Correlation Program was implemented to bolster male involvement in church activities.

"Women and Authority" also mentions a female priesthood, which it claims was omitted by the Priesthood Correlation Program. According to the text, Mormon feminists were seen as a counterbalance to the rise of the correlation program.

"In a lot of ways, the autonomy of the women in the church has been limited," said Cammie Passey, an active member of the LDS Church and former Relief Society president. "Any sort of decision you make as a Relief Society body needs to be approved by a priesthood authority. Over time, and maybe even fairly abruptly, the role of women in the church was clearly delineated to be subservient to the priesthood, which seems to go along with traditional gender roles."

How Mormon women helped secure the right to vote

There are more examples of Mormon women and their involvement in feminist movements throughout history. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, a self-identified Mormon feminist and an American historian who has won a Pulitzer prize for her contributions to early women's history, recounted the story of Susan B. Anthony's influence on Mormon women in 1889-1890.

In "A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women's Rights in Early Mormonism," Ulrich describes Anthony's visit to Utah when women were fighting for the right to vote.

During her visit, Ulrich says, Anthony became friends with the leaders of the Relief Society. Their friendship and connection to Anthony led many Mormon women to become bigger players in the national women's movement, and although women in Utah were granted the right to vote in 1870, it was revoked by Congress in 1887. LDS women were working with the radical feminists at the time to fight for national women's suffrage.

Mormon women are the ones to thank for the right to vote, and the state of Utah granted women the vote and the right to hold office in 1895 — 25 years before it was granted nationally.

It was one year later that Utahns elected Martha Hughes Cannon, a polygamous wife and women's rights activist, to serve as the first female state senator in U.S. history.

Cannon was an LDS convert, and as one of Angus M. Cannon's six plural wives, she beat several candidates that year — including her own husband.

Just last month, the Utah State Senate voted to replace the statue of television inventor Philo T. Farnsworth at the U.S. Capitol with a statue of Cannon.

"One hundred years ago, Mormon women and the Relief Society leaders were more on the radical edge of the national feminist movement," Ross said. "It's very cool. Obviously, that has changed over the course of the 20th century."

Ross said by the late 1960s, Mormon feminist historians were doing loads of research that coincided with second-wave feminism.

"They started their own publications because they had lost publications, and they learned more about what Mormon women had done in the past and tried to recover a lot of that work and create discussion where spaces for dialogue for women's issues had been somewhat shut down in the institutional church," Ross said.

By 1993, six feminist historians — often referred to as the "September Six" — were excommunicated from the LDS Church for writing books about women's history that Ross said "challenged traditional narratives" the church had put forward about itself.

Anecdotally, Ross said, the aversion to feminist movements within the church feels ingrained in its culture.

"I never explicitly heard from church leaders, 'Feminists are evil,' but that's certainly a message I heard from church people growing up," Ross said. "Of course we feel like women need to have rights, but (the messaging was) you shouldn't be an activist, or you shouldn't complain about things."

Similarly, Passey said many members likely feel uncomfortable with the word "feminism," although the church has supported suffrage and other movements for the advancement of women in the past.

"We like to think that we've solved those sorts of things, and it needed to happen, we're perfectly fine where we are now, and anyone who rocks the boat or makes waves now is somehow less righteous," Passey said. "We're taught from such an early age that obedience is the best thing, and everything has been figured out for us."

Modern-day Mormon feminists

Today, contemporary Mormon feminism exists mostly online. According to Ross, third-wave Mormon feminism is an online movement that started with independent blogs.

A simple query on a search engine will yield results of several social-media websites and blogs dedicated to feminism within the LDS faith.

Ross' focus in studying Mormon feminism has been relatively specific to online communities. Through her research, she's found many participants in these communities encourage their members to read texts written by women from earlier generations and begin to write their own histories.

Around the same time Kate Kelly, the founder of Ordain Women, was excommunicated from the church in 2014, a feminist group called Feminist Mormon Housewives emerged. On Facebook, it has more than 4,000 followers, and Ross said it's the largest group that identifies itself with the "F-word" in its title.

Ross has found a separate yet very similar group that was grown exponentially in recent years. Aspiring Mormon Women, Ross said, is a group of women who want to network and are either working or attending (or want to be attending) school.

"The group that doesn't claim the feminist label has grown very quickly," Ross said. "There's lots of different groups in this movement. I feel like that edge of Mormon women who identify as feminists or who believe in equality who still attend church is growing."

Ross explained that, because the church does not have a systemized theology whereby there is an effort to reconcile contradictions or seeming contradictions within its doctrine, it's difficult to determine if topics such as feminism are taught doctrinally or culturally. Members of the church oftentimes have their own ideas and interpretations of what doctrine is and what it constitutes, she said.

Within the many groups and spaces along the spectrum of gender-equality beliefs within the church, Ross said, like faith, one's relationship with the feminist movement can change over time.

"A lot of Mormon feminists would say there is plenty of room for us to do better without breaking things that are foundational in Mormonism," Ross said.

"There has to be room for growth," Passey said. "My intent as I engage in these sorts of conversations is not to be destructive. I think there are structures in place that serve a very good and noble purpose, and even with pushing on those structures, it’s not to tear them down but to do it with love and make those structures even better and widen the base so that more people can be connected and loved as part of a community."

Follow reporter Emily Havens on Twitter, @EmilyJHavens, and find her on Facebook at facecbook.com/emilyjhavens. Call her at 435-674-6214.