• Grocery shopping
• Vacuum
• Mop
• Volunteer to cure ballots
• Clean out the garage
• Write Exponent article
• Spend an hour translating Hebrew homework
• Figure out how to safely get rid of old paint
• Contact the thrift store to schedule a pickup

That is my to-do list for this weekend. Some of it is done. What’s left is just a few hours of labor, nothing too big. I don’t even have to leave my house to finish the list.

Yet even though it’s a long weekend, the tasks on that list feel impossible. The weight of the election results added to the struggle that is getting to the end of the semester and the challenge every time I try to engage my feelings with the church, and I am mentally and emotionally spent. I am numb.

You see, the real issue isn’t that to-do list. It’s the other one that’s always on my mind, that will never have anything crossed off, and the best I can hope to do is work through each task, bit by bit, trying to control it if I cannot resolve it. How, after Tuesday, do I stop myself from looking around at strangers and wondering if they voted for the man who doesn’t think I deserve human rights or equality? What do I do with the grief and rage and profound despair that I am presently holding at bay because I know when I stop, those emotions will crush me?

How do I stop feeling betrayed knowing that white woman showed up for Trump? Again? With the effects of the fall of Roe v. Wade crystal-clear in headlines?

I can’t put into words what I’m feeling. Instead, I’m using this space to share the words and story of a foremother. I’m reading “The Woman They Could Not Silence” by Kate Moore, the story of Elizabeth Packard, a housewife and mother who, in 1860, was committed to an insane asylum by her husband. Evidence of her insanity? Speaking for herself. Thinking differently from her husband. Challenging his autocracy. Refusing to be submissive to men. It’s the same sort of evidence used to call women hysterical, too emotional, mouthy. Unfeminine. Dangerous.

These ideas kept being pulled to the front of my mind this week because, well, women today who act like Elizabeth are still called those things. Women are still at risk for refusing to submit. We are still being told that men know what’s best, particularly white men who claim authority from a higher power. The details have changed. The story hasn’t.

“You have a right to your opinions if you think right.” (29) (emphasis mine)

Elizabeth’s husband said this to her as he was packing her away to the asylum. The ridiculousness of his statement would be laughable if he didn’t believe it, and the results of that belief weren’t so dehumanizing. You may speak, he said, but only with the words I give you. That makes her a puppet, not a free human.

How many times have I heard a similar message? Seek revelation–but only if it confirms what the church teaches. Ask questions–but only certain questions and there are right answers. Believe in Heavenly Mother, but do not make her the equal of Heavenly Father.

“A peace based on injustice … is a treacherous sleep whose waking is death.” (31)

When confronted with a mob at the train station, Elizabeth refused to walk. She did not put up a fight, but, she tells her husband, she will not help him imprison her. She would not submit to him. Two men carried her inside.

There is a well-known protest slogan: No justice, no peace. True peace cannot exist alongside injustice. It is not merely a lack of contention; this just means somebody has submitted. Contention is not always of the devil. There are things, I would argue, that our divinity requires that we contend against: racism, misogyny, war, violence and yes, injustice. Jesus contended against those things while on Earth.

“She truly believed ‘submission is no virtue.’ Another day, another chance to show that she was sane. Because she knew this whole enterprise was simply her husband’s attempt to ‘secure her submission.’ With typically shrewd insight, she wrote ‘that class of men who wish to rule women, seem intent on destroying her reason.'” (44)

Elizabeth’s first night in the asylum was hard, but she still believed she could make men see reason—if not her husband, then the asylum superintendent. Elizabeth was an intelligent, well-read woman who thought critically, asked questions and challenged authority. She claimed her own authority to think and act on her own. A woman making such a claim needed to be silenced. What if other women also started asking questions—asking why they had to obey their husbands, why the scriptures were always interpreted in such a way to make them second-class, why they could not hold the priesthood.

“Records show the women even made their own restraining jackets.” (68)

This is the line that struck me the most. The author pulls it out of the previous paragraph—just 10 words seemingly dropped into a discussion about how the women were allowed to sew. These women used their hands and skill to create the tools that bound them, that gave men power to bind them.

I ask you: how many women help to uphold the patriarchy? How many of us have? I have. I wrote an op-ed in college about how feminism was too radical because I perceived it as being anti-motherhood. I went on a mission and told women they really were equal in the church. I’ve taught lessons and given talks and wrote in my journal words that I wish I could take back because now that I have learned to think critically and not simply parrot back what was taught to me, I realize they are wrong. I’ve judged women for their clothes, their behavior, their choices.

I do not sew, but I arguably have helped to make my own straitjacket for years now. Removing it is requiring everything I have along with the hands of so many others who are slowly helping me to be free of the restraints I didn’t realize I had on for the longest time.

“Yet her feelings [of being alone, manufactured by the asylum doctor] were the fruit McFarland hoped to harvest, the censorship all part of his idiosyncratic interpretation of moral treatment. HIs idea was that once patients were completely isolated from family, as he’d instructed, he would then step into that void. McFarland thought the ideal way to treat insanity was for him to become ‘the dominant and good spirit’ in his patients’ lives: the higher power from which they were to take their every direction.

“Although leading psychiatrists advised strongly that hospital staff should not treat patients with ‘feelings of superiority,’ McFarland believed the opposite. In his opinion, he was the patients’ superior, and the quicker they came to appreciate that ‘his judgment is a safer guide for [them] than [their] own conscience, the better. He wanted the patients under his control to ‘shape [their] manner of living, in all its minutiae, to the hourly prescription of [their] superior,’ the latter a word he used interchangeably for doctor. This shaping of their lives extended to the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the activities they pursued, and–most chillingly–to the very thoughts they thought.” (97)

Imagine being told that you can’t trust your own sense, that someone else knows better than you about your own life, your feelings, your thoughts. Imagine hearing that God was not the higher power, but a man was, and what that man said should hold more weight than any other authority. Imagine having a man tell you what you could wear, what you could eat and drink, how you could spend your time.  

Just. Imagine.

“It shall be one of the highest aspirations of my earth-life, to expose these evils for the purpose of remedying them. It shall be said of me,’ She hath done what she could.’” (151)

I read this the Sunday after the election, well into the doom spiral. It gave me a tiny flame of hope amid the despair—hope for me, hope for the country, hope for Elizabeth. I haven’t finished the book yet; she is still in the asylum, still isolated from her children, still with no way out. But she has recognized that she is a threat to the status quo or the superintendent would not be trying so hard to silence her.

My benediction today: May you be a woman who cannot, who will not be silenced. May you speak up when you can and write the words down when you can’t speak. When you struggle to find the right words, use those that aren’t quite right for now.