by Marianne Monson

I just returned from Utah, where I spoke at BYU and area schools about my work writing women’s history. It is a place that always elicits a mixture of emotions for me. I grew up in a conservative LDS family, where our religion was the most defining feature of our family life. While my parents were born in Utah, I was born in Boston and spent most of my childhood in California and Chicago. So, while I visited family in Utah regularly, it always felt both foreign and familiar, a reaction I still have today.

I graduated from BYU, but only spent four semesters on campus in part because I never felt totally at home. Perhaps as a six-foot-tall redhead I felt physically different in a place that puts a high value on traditional female beauty. Perhaps as a passionate young woman who knew she wanted a writing career in the 90s when the church still openly discouraged women from pursuing careers, this was the also a part of the disconnect.

Speaking in Utah this past week was a dream come true in many ways—an opportunity to revisit those spaces and speak directly to young students who might also feel they don’t belong.

One of my favorite moments of the trip came unexpectedly, though, when the professor who invited me asked if I wanted to attend a storytelling event for girls and women. Reyna Aburto opened the event by talking about current negative outcomes for women in Utah. Utah has some of the highest rates of depression among girls and women. It continues to have one of the highest gender wage gaps in the country, and one of the lowest rates women serving in top business leadership positions. Women in Utah are at higher risk of sexual assault and domestic violence than in many other states.

The wellbeing of Utah women is, of course, impacted directly by the LDS church and its practices. The sobering statistics about Utah women stand in direct contrast with the words of J. Anette Dennis, a church Relief Society leader, who said recently at the organization’s anniversary: “There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of, that has so broadly given power and authority to women.” The outcry in response to her statement on social media was swift and dramatic, as thousands of women called out the hypocrisy.

My frustration with the lack of female spiritual power in the church is compounded by the fact that in earlier eras, women played much more central roles in the organization, and their power was utilized in a way that has been slowly eroded. This historical context reinforces the position that things do not have to be the way they are now. I’ve read the diaries of women like Eliza R. Snow and Emmeline B. Wells and know that the spiritual power and authority they enjoyed as they gave blessings and more fully participated in leadership positions brought them the very satisfaction that eludes many of the women of the church today.

As a young woman, I didn’t have the statistics to back up the distrust for female strength and intelligence in Utah’s culture, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t aware of it, or that it didn’t impact my decision to spend most of my life outside of the state.

She Can, I Can, was a free storytelling event put on by Utah Valley Women Leadership Collaborative. The event opened with a tabling event for women-focused organizations in Utah County. Reyna Aburto was our host, a Nicaraguan-American woman who fled civil violence in Central America and joined the LDS church in California. She earned a degree in computer science and worked in the industry for decades before serving as the second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency (2017-2022).

Aburto introduced each storyteller, who ranged from a young woman who spoke about navigating bullying and the loss of friendships at school to a woman in her sixties who spoke about the process of telling her family she intended to divorce her oppressive husband. One of the most powerful stories was from a newly married woman who spoke about an LDS patriarch who told her that her career might be important “if her husband died,” and the subsequent years of trying to undo the impact of his words.

During the final part of the event, participants began writing their own stories to workshop with other women. As someone who spends a lot of time telling stories, I was unprepared for how impactful it would be to share a story with other women. I shouldn’t have been surprised—I know the research behind the bonding that happens when we share stories in vulnerability, but knowing research is never the same as experiencing something in real time. This event reminded me that safe havens can be created from physical space in real time.

While everyone is firing away at the LDS church, meanwhile women in Utah are doing incredible work to improve things on the ground. They have sort of sidestepped the church entirely, and the fact that Sister Aburto is involved is amazing. She’s breaking new ground just as she’s done her entire career.

For the first time, I felt like I might want to be in Utah to join forces with these women. For the first time I felt like I actually could belong.

I applaud Reyna Aburto and the other organizers of Utah Valley Women Leadership Collaborative for a beautiful, transformative event. I also applaud them for not waiting for the LDS church to make sweeping organizational changes before working to improve outcomes for Utah’s girls and women. Change typically doesn’t come from inside archaic institutions until it begins and swells on the streets outside of them. Here’s to all those joining in that chorus.

Marianne Monson is a women’s history author known for unearthing remarkable stories of incredible women. She graduated from BYU and writes from a 100-year-old house in Astoria, Oregon. www.mariannemonson.com