Earlier this year I took my girl scout troop to tour Texas Instruments (TI) in Lehi, Utah. It’s a huge manufacturing plant for semiconductors used in electronic devices, and a very enthusiastic female employee spent two hours touring the facilities with us while giving a presentation about why girls make excellent engineers. My own dad is an MIT trained aerospace engineer (a rocket scientist) who worked on missiles, and during high school I attended a summer engineering program at Utah State University. Strangely enough, I remember standing to the side during all of the engineering challenges and letting the boys do everything (even when I thought they were doing a terrible job). I probably had the smartest dad in the room and the best DNA for engineering, but I barely participated because I was convinced engineering was for boys.
Thankfully, our tour guide at TI told my girls repeatedly how great it is to work in STEM fields (like engineering) as women because they would always have job security, make good money and be able to support themselves.
Outside of attending that summer engineering program during high school, I don’t remember ever being encouraged to pursue engineering by any adults in my life growing up. It was quite the opposite, actually. I was warned against pursuing a career of any kind following Ezra Taft Benson’s harsh disapproval of women working for pay outside of the home. Every single woman I interacted with in my small Utah town relayed these messages to me until I graduated from high school.
After graduation, boys were instructed to focus on their missions, and girls were instructed to focus on marriage. I heard that from my friends, youth leaders, in seminary, at church, at firesides, my patriarchal blessing, again at BYU, and probably even in my regular high school classes because I lived in Utah. I heard it from everyone I loved, and everyone who loved me. Instead of marriage though, I really wanted to go on a mission. Not only would it be an adventure away from Utah, it would allow me to postpone getting married and having kids for at least a few years.
One Sunday as a senior in high school I’d just left my church building when a very powerful feeling overcame me. I felt that Heavenly Father wanted me to get married next, not wait and go on a mission in three years. I thought to myself reluctantly, “Well, I guess this is the spirit preparing me to meet someone.”
Looking back on that moment now I think, “Oh my gosh, that wasn’t divine revelation! You’d just had seventeen lessons in a row about how you needed to get married and make babies, and your brain was finally giving in to the overwhelming pressure.”
The next fall I went to BYU and avoided boys completely because I was afraid dating would lead to marriage, which would lead to the most terrifying situation of all – being pregnant! I was not excited about motherhood, but if an honorable returned missionary picked me out, I felt like I’d be obligated to marry him. Since any righteous man and woman could make it work, and God wanted me to find a righteous man quickly, I chose to hide from anyone who could ruin my dreams of doing literally anything except getting married and pregnant. I was only 18 but didn’t feel like I could date just for fun, because all of the adults in my life had worked hard to make marriage the singular priority for me. None of them suggested choosing a serious career path or looking at what different jobs paid, even just as a backup plan in case no returned missionary ever picked me as his bride.
I eventually gave in and dated a nice freshman boy, and he became my boyfriend before leaving on his mission. Going through old photographs recently, I found pictures of us together on our way to church in the summer of 2000. This is me at age (barely) 19, and him at age (almost) 19. We’d both graduated from high school and finished our first year of college. Coincidentally, his dad was also an engineer. Educationally and career wise, we were still equals at this point.
After this photo he left on his mission, then I met and married my husband (and didn’t go on a mission), graduated from BYU, worked for a couple years, and quit to become a stay-at-home mom to three kids.
This boy served his mission, married his wife, graduated from BYU with both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering, and never quit his job while also becoming a dad to five kids.
We’re both 42 now – but he has a marketable, high paying job with two decades of experience in his field and can be employed anywhere he wants to live. I have a worthless degree from twenty years ago that no employer cares about, and relatively little work experience beyond self-employment.
That night at Texas Instruments with my girl scouts turned unexpectedly emotional for me. I met female engineers who encouraged the girls to pursue engineering simply because they’d be good at it and love their jobs, and not just as a backup plan in case they weren’t pretty enough to snag a man.
As we left, our tour guide gave the girls Texas Instruments shirts with pink sleeves, designed to recruit teenage girls into future engineering jobs with their company. I took this picture in my closet later that night. I needed a photo of the shirt and my daughter didn’t want to put it on for me, so I just used myself as the model instead.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake thinking about that picture of myself with my college boyfriend in the summer of 2000. I still had a world of possibilities open to me back then, but I saw none of them because the voice of a dead man had blinded me to any of them. Wide awake at midnight, I opened the selfie of me in my daughter’s shirt and zoomed in on the wrinkles around my eyes. I kept thinking about that 19-year-old wrinkle-free face and imagined it was her in the shirt in 2000, not 42-year-old me (with lots of wrinkles) in 2024. I know it was a weird insomnia activity, but after staring at that picture long enough I got out of bed and cried for a solid hour – about not being an engineer.
The next day I thought about how weird the night had been, and how I probably need more therapy. I mean, has anyone else ever cried at midnight over not having a job that they didn’t even care about eight hours before?
Fortunately, social media has made my world much more expansive and within days of my own midnight sob, I came across a post in an online LDS women’s career group expressing a very similar experience. The author even describes having “a good cry” and feeling “ridiculous” about it, which described exactly what had happened to me. Her original post (and all of the screenshots I share below) have all identifying information removed and are shared with permission of the authors. I highlighted the words in yellow that jumped out to me personally from the original post below.
Each of the following comments come from a different woman responding to the woman’s post from above.
Finally, here is an emotional TikTok video from a creator who attended Rick’s College thirty years ago. She tells a story that felt so much like my own that I wanted to include it in this post. Like me, she talks about the boy she was dating at 19 – a talented musician just like her – and how painful it was to reconnect with him twelve years later. He’d created a successful music career while she’d been too busy with babies, diapers and housework to pursue anything of her own.
As mothers, we can love our children while not always loving what we gave up to be stay-at-home moms. As a community, we can also mourn the loss of the artists, scientists, creators, doctors, researchers, teachers (and rocket scientists!) we’ve collectively missed out on by pushing so many women into domestic labor only. I would’ve loved the opportunity that most LDS men seem to take for granted, which was the ability to have both a family and accomplishments, goals and ambitions outside of the home. I hope the next generation of girls can forge a different path than mine was able to. (Texas Instruments has some really cute shirts in Lehi if they want to go grab one!)
(PS: For a different perspective on women and careers, check out this guest post from Ashli Carnicelli: Letting Him Prevail – Exponent II. Ashli followed inspiration to give up a promising opera career for a more family friendly option. I asked her to let me post it directly following mine to share more perspectives of Latter-day Saint women.)
Thank you. I have had many “what if” and “if only” moments about my lost opportunities as a smart, ambitious girl who chose to follow the words of a man who did not know her and had he really had some insight into the future would have encouraged her to get a career, be able to support herself and her family, and follow all of her dreams.
I remember being told that if I did pursue a career I would live to regret it and be very sorrowful (or something dumb). I was really good at listening to church leaders, so I said, okay. 🤷
I also remember a girl I met at a freshman honors week thing at BYU before school started in the fall of 1999. She was from Schenectady, New York and told me she was going to be a doctor. She already had her undergrad classes mapped out, and I believed her because she did seem super smart. I also thought, “You’re going to really regret that someday!”, like a total judgey dufas who had zero classes of my own planned out and no idea what I wanted to do educationally.
And now, I bet she’s a brain surgeon and I am the sorrowful one. Dang it! The girl from Schenectady had it figured out, not me.
I’ve had these same thoughts and feelings. As a teenager and young college student I really wanted a career. But I pushed that aside to create a family as instructed by church leaders. I have worked as a teacher for a bit, and am now in graduate school. In many ways I am so lucky because my husband has a great job that supports us all very well. But often I will look at what he has accomplished and know that I would’ve done at least what he has done and more if I had been given a path to do it. But I wasn’t. I love my family. I made the choices I did and own them and having made them, wouldn’t go back and change them. I only wish I would’ve been more empowered when I was young to make choices better for me.
It’s difficult when your family and children already exist, the last thing you want to do is be ungrateful for them, (or let them hear you sounding ungrateful and hurt them in some way). Yet you can’t get over the hurt of what you didn’t get to be in your life if you aren’t allowed to grieve what might’ve been. It’s complicated and hard.
Thanks for the validation and understanding. I know I made the best choices I could with the best information I had. I do not want my kids to feel less than or unwanted. They are the greatest people! I chose a good husband, despite my naiveté, at 21. I wouldn’t want to lose any of it, but I feel so much grief over the loss of my self. I have 20-40 more years before I lose my mind/body if the world is good, so I am trying to make up for lost time. I wish I could’ve been empowered to do both like others were, or even empowered to try. However, career was always supposed to be a backup plan, just in case, you know, I didn’t get married. Not “the plan.”
It took me fifteen years of depression, and reaching a point of not wanting to exist (death won’t fix it if the eternities is just more “increase” and being silent and invisible like Heavenly Mother is portrayed!) to finally acknowledge I should never have been a stay at home mom. Meanwhile, I am in the incredibly vulnerable position of not being able to financially support myself and recognizing how much of a massive power imbalance this creates in my marriage. My oldest is 15 now and I’m considering a career for the first time in my life after realizing there had never been a need for me to suffer so much. Motherhood doesn’t have to mean staying home. And don’t get me started on all the pressure to “do a job that works with your kids schedule”. The only jobs that do that are in schools. And guess what, people who like kids and being with them all day generally like being home with their own. It’s just a different version of the same singular skill set. Men would lose it if we demanded they all do the exact same job the exact same way. Oh, you wanted to be a musician? Sorry, you have to be an accountant. But we do this to every single woman in the church without blinking an eye.
Except being an accountant sounds more fun than cleaning up other people’s poop and getting yelled at all day – plus there’s a 401k, coworkers, work trips, a paycheck and bagels on Fridays.
I’ve tried to explain to people in the church how much much pain I feel over missing out, and often the response is just confusion. “Don’t you love your kids?” “Isn’t your family more important than anything else?” Yes and yes! But I had to give up so much to have a family, and my husband did not.
I was in college when ETB gave those talks about women staying home. I pushed against the idea for a while, but I knew that if I didn’t eventually relent and play the role assigned to me, I would not be accepted by my extended family or community — and maybe not by God, either. At the time I felt like I was really holding out by waiting until I was 26(!) to have a baby. I tried to stay on a career path with part-time work, but even that had to take a back seat to family needs at time.
Now I see men who were once my peers thriving, and although I’m happy for them, it breaks my heart to understand what I missed out on. Their daily lives are interesting, and their experience allows them to contribute meaningfully to society. Plus they have wonderful families. I feel the loss every day.
On my wedding day (at 21), someone close to me told me not to wait to have kids like she had, because it took her a long time to get pregnant and she really regretted putting it off. I did the math and she had a baby 3.5 years after getting pregnant – at age 23! I can’t understand how this felt like it took a long time and she was late becoming a mother – except in her worldview it was. Twenty six is not old at all in the normal world – but it feels old in the church.
Correction (because I’m on my phone and can’t edit comments from here) – she had a baby 3.5 years after getting married, not pregnant. (Obviously. 😅)
Why don’t you become an engineer now? You are still young and could go back to school and do that or any career you want. Life isn’t over. Pursue your own dreams and follow your heart. Listening to other people and letting them make decisions for you just leads to misery. I heard the same message. I just thought it was stupid and sexist and didn’t listen. I sat at the MTC and listened to Benson say women shouldn’t go on missions and thought – wow – well, I’m going anyway. My bishop told me, in the return interview, now it’s time to get married. I remember thinking – “To who? It’s not like there is a line of men at the door.” So, I just ignored it. Went to law school and had a career and kids. I’m very happy. Time to face that the Mormon church is no place to raise a daughter.
I don’t really want to go back to school in my forties and then start at the very bottom of a company with 22 year olds. I think more than mourning a specific field of study or career, I mourn the missed opportunity to have had something of my own all these years.
I started out at BYU as an engineering major. I loved math and science. But all the messages I received were to pick a major that was more accommodating to motherhood and working from home. So I listened to everyone else and chose accounting. My last semester at BYU I knew accounting was the wrong choice for me. But then I had children and life happened. I worked part-time for fifteen years in a field that I hated.
When my youngest child was in school I also went back to school. Seven years and a ton of work later I had a MS degree in Machine Learning. Almost all of my professors were younger than me and my peers were close to my oldest child’s age. Now I finally have a job that really interests me. But I lost 20+ years of experience, and I will never get that back.
If you really want that degree and career you still have time. But I do understand that it will never be the same as if you had started there in the first place 20 years ago. It is a tough pill to swallow. It makes me angry that many men don’t have the same difficult choices that we do. But I will never, ever again listen to other voices besides my own when making such life-altering, important decisions.
I also had big plans as a college student that nearly got squashed by prophetic counsel. Luckily, I had a husband who told me how dumb it was to forgo my dreams and supported me all the way through medical school by doing housework and childcare as well as bringing home a paycheck. Meanwhile my parents would end all of our phone calls with, “no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” I have been a full time physician for 16 years now and regret nothing except for all the guilt I have felt over those early decisions. My sons have lived a life where both parents have a career and are involved at home and are now supporting the dreams of their own wives. Teaching the boys to support with time, housework and childcare is just as important as teaching the girls to reach.
Your post and everyone’s responses make me so ragey! I got as far as acceptance to a master’s program at a prestigious university, with the offer of a research assistanceship. Then I bore my first child and mistook the postpartum maelstrom of emotions as a message from god that I needed to become a SAHM. All those messages from Kimball et al., about devoting my life to being an housewife, bubbled to the surface of my consciousness. I had justified pursuing a career as a married woman with a baby on the way because I knew some LDS women who had careers. But then I remembered church leaders saying it’s best to follow the rules and not try to be an exception. Had two more kids because I was trying to be righteous. Divorced my husband due to DV and supported my family as a medical transcriptionist because I could work from home. After being out of the workforce there was no way I could pay for childcare and rent at the same time. Things really went sideways when they were teenagers. I was a good-enough parent when they were younger but the situations that arose during their adolescence required expert parenting. I tried to get family counseling from church (couldn’t afford to pay for counseling), but the bishop only offered judgement.
Fifteen years out and I’ve leveraged my medical transcriptionist experience to a career in nursing. It was the quickest way to a good career from where I was at. I would never have chosen it otherwise. I’ve since learned that I have high-functioning autism. Every day at work I have to pretend to be someone I’m not. It also explains my inadequacy as a parent. One of my kids has no contact with me. Another has only limited contact. Not because I was a horrible, abusive mother but because I just didn’t know how to parent. When regretting the career and life I could have had, I can’t even take comfort in the family I raised. My life motto now is Smash the Patriarchy!
I am almost a full generation off from most of the reply’s, both reply’s quoted in the original post and responding to the OP. But the feeling are the same. We got such strong messages to be full time mothers and nothing else. I saw my own mother struggle with trying to get even part time work in what she loved. I was told by everyone around me, even school, that women just couldn’t be doctors, only nurses, they couldn’t be air plane pilots, only stewardesses. With the jobs women could have, all low paying, dead end jobs where like my mother’s experience, the men you trained were promoted over you, it really was a lot of sacrifice with little reward to even try to have a satisfying career. I was really good at science and math, but even my teachers discouraged me, with cracks like, “you’re really good at math. Too bad you’ll never use it for anything but doubling recipes.” And then my attempt at college ended with the expectation that I course I would drop out of college and marry. It was unthinkable that I might make any other choice. So, at 19, I dropped out and got married. The guy I was in love with simply expected it, took it for granted that of course I would.
Then, fast forward 28 years and that same guy who just unthinkingly expected me to end any thought of my own career is yelling at our daughter, “no daughter of mine is going to drop out of college to get married.” I told him he was a swear word, swear word hypocrite. Only I didn’t leave out the swear words. It seems just fine to expect total sacrifice of career for a wife, but men want more than that for a daughter they love. So, we can’t exactly say that men don’t see the sacrifice their wives make so they can happily have family and career, because they don’t want their daughter to make that same sacrifice for some other guy. They know it isn’t the best way to be happy.
I made it back to college and got my degree and MS the hard way, juggling a husband and three children while following my husband around with his military career. But it is still hard to have any kind of career when for you as wife/mother everyone’s needs come before your own. So, my husband was the rocket scientist while I never stayed more than a few years in any job.
As a teenager, I always secretly worried my desire for education/career meant that God was preparing me to 1.) be alone forever or 2.) be a young widow (because why would you need a career if you were married?!) My aspirations felt foreboding.
I also relate so much to your avoidance of boys and fear around dating – I worried the spirit would tell me to marry someone I hated and I wouldn’t be able to say no and still be right with God.
Thank you for writing this and sharing it!
I totally understand the weird paranoias you’re talking about! I remember dating my husband in a BYU ward but wanting to go on a mission and wait until I was older to get married, but older girls in my ward (late twenties) warned me that if I didn’t take what God was offering me right then I’d probably never get married at all. If you reject a gift from God (a man) when you’re a sophomore in college, your only option from then on is loneliness and then a spot as a polygamist wife in heaven, I guess.
Abby I could not love you more. Thank you for sharing your story and your experiences and being vulnerable. All of the hugs for the hard and all of the high fives for the moments of clarity and hope for the future!!! ❤️❤️❤️🫶🏻🫶🏻
Abby thanks for sharing. These stories are so sad and painful. I think everyone benefits from people being encouraged to follow/chase/pursue their dreams/desires whether educational/career or otherwise. I hope we have made and will continue to make progress in this area. Thanks for shining a light on it.
Submitted to early. I hope to inspire/encourage my daughters to fully explore their dreams/desires and wish I could go back in time and do more for the women in my life to push/challenge them to do the same. Thanks everyone for sharing your wisdom and life experience I have no doubt the legacy of your stories will have a positive impact on the next generations.
I feel like the third talk to the young women was my whole teen hood even though I began the YW program a decade after it was given.
I can hear it being taught almost like it was yesterday.
I took it seriously and it really shaped me and shackled me.
Ever heard of Mormon Women’s Whiplash?
This article made me think of it: of the double standards the church set when they told women to stay at home and raise families (and sacrifice their careers, educations, and identities to do it), only to make a career woman the face of the “I’m a Mormon” campaign years later.
That, and only calling career women who worked outside the home to the women’s general auxiliary presidencies and boards.
The “I’m a Mormon” campaign got some well-deserved backlash for that, and I do think we’re seeing more pushback from women, RE: careers and working outside the home. General authorities have been lamenting a demographic winter that’s set into the church with family sizes being smaller and again, more women graduating from college, purusing advanced education, and having careers.
I do think the hypocrisy of telling women to give up everything to stay and home, only to reward and recongize the women who went against that counsel, have contributed heavily to that pushback.
And honestly, it’s well deserved.