6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that aren’t about mormonism
Picture of Guest Post
Guest Post
Exponent II features the work of guest authors writing about issues related to Mormonism and feminism. Submit a guest post Write for Exponent II.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism

Guest post by Brooke R. LeFevre, a history PhD candidate at Baylor University interested in intersections of women, religion, and medicine.

Last spring, I had the privilege of taking a graduate seminar on women and religion with Dr. Beth Allison Barr at Baylor University, where I am completing a PhD in history. (If you’ve never heard of Dr. Barr before, I’m very excited for you to learn about one of the most important scholars in evangelicalism and women’s religious history. I promise you will love her work.) We read books on topics ranging from Old Testament women to modern American seminaries. It might’ve been my favorite graduate seminar I’ve ever taken, particularly because she framed the entire class around one question: How do women exercise religious authority?

I am the only Mormon in my program. I’m sure my classmates got tired of how often I kept bringing up Mormonism in our class discussions, but I couldn’t help it! I saw so many connections between what we were reading and what I knew or experienced in Mormonism. Many of the books inspired me to think deeply about Mormon patriarchy and the ways that Mormon women have navigated, supported, or pushed back against those structures, and how gender functions to shape the Mormon world. Because of that, I want to recommend several of these books to Mormon feminists and hope that they give us the language and framework to think more deeply about women and patriarchy in Mormon history and culture.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

1. The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth by Beth Allison Barr

Okay, technically we didn’t read this book in Barr’s seminar, but it’s her book and it has profoundly shaped how I think about religious patriarchy. I simply can’t recommend it enough. I wrote a review of this book here and how I saw it connecting with work I had been doing on Eliza R. Snow (and I wrote the review before I had the pleasure of meeting and getting to know Barr personally), if you’d like more.

Barr writes to evangelical women, dissecting the theology touted by conservative evangelicals called “complementarianism,” which maintains that women’s subordination is biblical. Barr explains, “This was my understanding of biblical womanhood: God designed women primarily to be submissive wives, virtuous mothers, and joyful homemakers” (2). As an adult, as Barr began to realize the problems with this theology and that it wasn’t as biblical as evangelicals liked to believe, she stayed in complementarian churches. That was, until she realized, “By staying silent, I had become part of the problem. Instead of making a difference, I had become complicit in a system that used the name of Jesus to oppress and harm women” (6).

The book spans from Paul to the present, starting with the influence of Roman patriarchy on the early church, dissecting Paul’s letters and other scriptures used to prop up complementarian theology. She looks at the medieval period, the Reformation, biblical translations, the cult of domesticity in American history, the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist world, and the development of biblical womanhood. Even though her audience is evangelicals, there’s much that Mormon feminists can learn from her work. She argues, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing Christians that oppression is godly” (173). Perhaps religious patriarchy is one of the worst “traditions of our fathers.”

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

2. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne by Wilda C. Gafney

If you’ve never heard the term “Womanism” before, Gafney’s book is a fascinating introduction. Womanism is sometimes defined as black feminism, but that can be too simple of a definition. Alice Walker, one of the founding theorists, explained, “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.” Womanism encompasses much more than just women’s oppression, but rather all forms of oppression as intrinsically interconnected, and centers the epistemological privilege of black women in understanding and dismantling oppression. Gafney’s book is “womanist biblical interpretation” and centers “a set of interpretive practices, including translation, exegesis, and biblical interpretation, that attends to marginalized characters in biblical narratives, especially women and girls, intentionally including and centering on non-Israelite people and enslaved persons” (3). Since many of these individuals’ experiences and voices are not immediately present in the text, Gafney uses “sanctified imagination,” something she learned from black preaching, “as a type of African American indigenous midrash” (3).

She also describes her work as “God-wrestling,” explaining, “In this womanist midrash I will struggle with God and the text and God-in-the-text explicitly as a religious reader” (5). She further explains that this text is “womanish” in that she is “talking back to the text, challenging it, questioning it, interrogating it, unafraid of the power and authority of the text, just as a girl-growing-into-a-woman talks back to her elders, questioning the world around her in order to learn how to understand and navigate it” (9).

Now, the study of languages has never been my forte. Gafney is brilliant and dissects the original language of the Hebrew Bible and the translation process in a way that often goes over my head. But it’s truly astonishing what she does and how thoroughly she is able to interrogate the text. Next time you’re going through the Old Testament, pick up a copy of Gafney’s book and read it alongside.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

3. The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West by Gary Macy

This book was way out of my wheelhouse as a 19th-century historian, but it was fascinating and may have been my favorite from the semester. Macy begins the book by discussing how current debates about women’s ordination in Christianity often result in historians and theologians speaking right past each other because they ask fundamentally different questions. Theologians often use modern definitions and modern theology about ordination to ask questions about women’s historical ordinations, whereas historians ask questions about “what ordination meant at a particular moment in the past” and “whether they were considered ordained by their contemporaries according to the definition of ordination used at that time” (5). Macy uses a historical approach and uncovers a history that he argues “has been deliberately forgotten, intentionally marginalized, and, not infrequently, creatively explained away” (4).

Macy explains how in the early church, many women were ordained when ordination was seen as fulfilling “a certain function or role or ministry in the church” (76). Ordination was a calling to a specific role in a specific context. However, the definition of ordination shifted in the 12th century and “ordination became tied securely to power rather than to vocation.” Macy continues, “Ordination bestowed a power that could be used in any community at any time. No longer was it a vocation to a particular ministry in a particular church” (106). When the definition of ordination changed, women could no longer be ordained.

How many times have you heard Joseph Smith’s “I now turn the key to you in the name of God” explained away using modern definitions of priesthood and church authority? Do you think it’s possible that as the definition of priesthood has shifted in Mormon history, it has impacted how the institution relates to women’s religious authority? I do.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

4. The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam by Ula Yvette Taylor

Okay, so technically we didn’t read this book in Barr’s class. I read in a seminar on gender and sex in American religious history that I took from Dr. Andrea Turpin, and it was my favorite book from that seminar, so I must include it. Taylor is interested in understanding the Nation of Islam (NOI) from the perspective of women who joined during the mid-20th century, interrogating why women would join such a patriarchal religion. What was the appeal?

She found that one of the great appeals of the NOI, and its patriarchal structure, was the promise of “protection, financial stability, and loving husbands” (4). For black women, who were vilified, subjected to threats of violence, and often victims of abuse, the type of patriarchy promulgated in the NOI promised protection and promoted racial pride. Taylor investigates how women navigated that religious patriarchy, explaining that these women often “found ingenious ways to work within the patriarchal system, indeed, to trump patriarchy for their own ends” (106). While Taylor doesn’t use one of my favorite terms, “patriarchal bargain” (ask my classmates how often I bring this up in our discussions), this is essentially what she is describing. However, she also discusses the cost of this, explaining the abuse that some women in the NOI experienced.

I think we need to do more to understand why Mormon women have supported and continue to support patriarchy, and the careful negotiations they have made to work within patriarchal systems. I wrote about that a bit here, but I think we need to understand what promises Mormon patriarchy makes to Mormon women.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

5. Stained Glass Ceilings: How Evangelicals Do Gender and Practice Power by Lisa Weaver Swartz

This is another book that was not at all close to the topics that I study, but I loved it. Swartz is a sociologist, and her book is a comparative study of Southern Seminary and Asbury Seminary. For those unfamiliar with the world of seminaries, Southern is the most well-known seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and is recognized for its central role in the conservative resurgence and its promotion of complementarian theology (remember the theology that Barr argues is not actually biblical?). The institution’s support of male headship and its stance against women’s ordination is critical. On the other hand, Asbury, with a heritage of Wesleyan Methodism, is known as a much more egalitarian seminary, one that supports women’s ordination.

Swartz’s book is about how gender works in each of these contexts. How does gender shape the experiences, the opportunities available, and the lives of students in these different seminaries? I was fascinated, and surprised, by her findings. Southern was mostly what I expected, promoting very narrow ideals of masculinity and femininity. Asbury, on the other hand, allowed space for a variety of masculinities, but strangely, women felt compelled to fit themselves into only two distinct models of femininity: churchwoman or wife. Asbury, she explained, promotes a rhetoric that she calls “genderblind,” claiming that gender doesn’t and shouldn’t matter in religious contexts. The problem is, however, that gender does matter, and that this rhetoric tends to ignore how gender functions. Swartz writes about talking with administrators at Asbury who were bewildered at how hard it was to attract women faculty members, while women students at Asbury told her how they felt like they didn’t fit in anywhere. Swartz explains, “egalitarian empowerment is mostly enjoyed by those willing and able to conform to an unarticulated set of gendered expectations” (122).

When I started the book, I expected that my experience as a student at BYU would align more with Southern Seminary because of the similarities on gender ideologies. However, I found myself relating to the experiences she told of those at Asbury. While Mormons certainly don’t claim to be genderblind, institutions like BYU that hire both male and female faculty often struggle to attract female faculty, and those that I have interacted with (mostly the male faculty and admin) seem just as bewildered as the Asbury administrators. What they often fail to recognize is how a place like BYU is still very much shaped by powerful and sometimes unacknowledged gendered expectations that put unfair constraints on women faculty and students.

6 Books Mormon Feminists Should Read that Aren’t About Mormonism Feminist Books

6. The Preacher’s Wife: The Precarious Power of Evangelical Women Celebrities by Kate Bowler

Lastly is a book on evangelical women celebrities. Bowler begins her book with a personal note, and the last line might be my favorite of the whole book: “the visible and invisible rules that govern the lives of evangelical women can be mastered and occasionally subverted by those willing to play a difficult long game with handsome rewards and harsh penalties” (xiv).

Bowler’s book focuses on the last few decades. She shapes her chapters around the different roles that evangelical women celebrities can fill, namely preacher, homemaker, talent, counselor, and beauty. She looks a variety of different women and their “search for spiritual authority in an era of jumbotrons and searing stage lights” (5). Even though these women supported complementarianism, they found ways to assert their authority and gain recognition. Their fame was usually in the marketplace rather than in the church, since they were restricted in the roles they could play in church.

However, the authority that these women exercised was highly precarious, meaning that it could disappear if they stepped out of unarticulated boundaries created for them by evangelical culture. Bowler explains, “most conservative women’s careers rested on authority that was associational and, as such, contingent. They could not rule, but they were indispensable” (241). Bowler’s definitions of precarity and contingent power is incredibly useful in understanding how Mormon women navigate and negotiate Mormon patriarchy. Unlike these women, Mormon women do have institutional authority, but that authority is carefully overseen and curtailed by patriarchal authority. Mormon women can exercise influence within the church, but that influence is often contingent upon their willingness to adhere to “the visible and invisible rules” of Mormon patriarchy.

Have you read any of these books? Do you see connections between these works and the experiences and realities of women within Mormonism?

Exponent II features the work of guest authors writing about issues related to Mormonism and feminism. Submit a guest post Write for Exponent II.

4 Responses

  1. I haven’t read any of those books, but now I want to read them all! This past year I’ve started reading books and listening to podcasts by people (especially women) coming out of evangelical churches, and it’s been amazingly interesting and validating. Their teachings on gender roles and sex are so similar to ours, and I had no idea how riveted I would be to every word they say.

    Thanks for the great suggestions!

  2. Awesome post! Excited to add many of these to my list. I did read The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination ten or so years ago. Absolutely loved it. I’ve also read parts of the NOI book. So good. The author does a lot with not a lot of data/sources.

  3. I’ve read Biblical Womanhood and found the depth that is brought to the scriptures so joyfully expansive that I’ve recommended it to LDS people many times. I’ve yet to hear back from any man that he’s read it, but some of the women have. LDS women are so curtailed, second-guessed, dismissed, patronized, and priesthood-splained, that we really don’t have power or influence to do other than nod our heads and say Yes or go AWOL.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Our Comment Policy

  • No ads or plugs.
  • No four-letter words that wouldn’t be allowed on television.
  • No mudslinging: Stating disagreement is fine — even strong disagreement, but no personal attacks or name calling. No personal insults.
  • Try to stick with your personal experiences, ideas, and interpretations. This is not the place to question another’s personal righteousness, to call people to repentance, or to disrespectfully refute people’s personal religious beliefs.
  • No sockpuppetry. You may not post a variety of comments under different monikers.

Note: Comments that include hyperlinks will be held in the moderation queue for approval (to filter out obvious spam). Comments with email addresses may also be held in the moderation queue.

Write for Us

We want to hear your perspective! Write for Exponent II Blog by submitting a post here.

Support Mormon Feminism

Our blog content is always free, but our hosting fees are not. Please support us.

related Blog posts

Never miss A blog post

Sign up and be the first to be alerted when new blog posts go live!

Loading

* We will never sell your email address, and you can unsubscribe at any time (not that you’ll want to).​