This meme shows a historical painting of Marie Antoinette with the text "Let them eat crumbs" overlaid.
This meme shows a historical painting of Marie Antoinette with the text "Let them eat crumbs" overlaid.
Picture of Nancy Ross
Nancy Ross
Nancy Ross is an associate professor Utah Tech University, where she has been teaching for 16 years. Her Ph D is in art history, but her current research focuses on the history and sociology of religion. She recently co-edited a book with Sara K.S. Hanks titled "Where We Must Stand: Ten Years of Feminist Mormon Housewives" (2018) and has just co-edited “Shades of Becoming: Poems of Transition” with Kristen R. Shill. She is an ordained elder in Community of Christ and pastor of the Southern Utah congregation and works for the Pacific Southwest International Mission Center as an Emerging Church Practitioner.

Let them eat crumbs! Mormon women and garment changes

Earlier this week, the LDS Church announced that it was creating a new style of garments with “open sleeves.” It has only been a short time since the announcement and all of my social media feeds related to Mormonism are discussing this change. The Salt Lake Tribune collected some initial responses. Jana Riess, a scholar and journalist, has commented on her column at Religion News Service. I see plenty of people expressing joy and relief and also a lot of anger and upset.

Bloggers here at the Exponent have spent so much time discussing garments. It is one of our most enduring topics of conversation here at the blog. Caroline first wrote about them when the blog was in its infancy in 2007. Fellow Exponent blogger April Young Bennett has written about this topic a number of times. We’ve had other permas write and we have a whole bunch of guest posts here. I wrote an article about my experience presenting my research on garments to the Church Correlation Research Division. I’ve been researching garments for the last decade and hope that my book, written with Jessica Finnigan and Larissa Kindred, will be published before too many years go by. Why do we keep writing about garments? Because there are few things as close to our hearts (metaphorically) and our genitals (literally) as garments. For myself, the physical discomfort of wearing garments eventually started to grate, along with other things, on my Mormon faith. I don’t wear garments any more, but I really empathize with whose who still do.

I am upset by these changes for a number of reasons. I’ll give you the top few, all of which emphasize the LDS Church’s patriarchal structure.

#1
This change prioritizes women’s fashion over women’s health issues. I have nothing against women’s fashion. While this change makes many happy, my survey points to the negative impact of garment wearing on vulvar and vaginal health. Its like the church put #MomTok in charge of these changes, because this change is all style and no substance. Instead of tackling big issues for for people with vulvas and vaginas, it went with a small design fix that will make lots of people happy without making garments substantively healthier and safer for our bodies. The patriarchal church has, once again, thrown us crumbs and ordered us to celebrate.

#2
While women often reported feeling unattractive in their garments, men reported that they found their wives unattractive in garments. This design change feels more like “let’s make the women look less frumpy so that garments will be less of an impediment to sex and then men will be happier.” Once again, men’s sexual pleasure is more important to Mormon God than women’s health. (You might also be asking why garments are an impediment to sex, but you’ll have to wait for the book to come out).

#3
Women reported feeling unattractive in their garments, which made it difficult for many to connect with their sexual desire. While shorter sleeves (technically sleeveless) garments may help that, I doubt that many women locate much of their sexual attractiveness in their shoulders. The image of the new garments for women shows a bit (a teensy bit) more shoulder, but still has a lot of fabric covering the body, with significant overlap between the tops and the bottoms. My guess is that this design change amounts to an inch or two (at most) and that most sleeveless tops and dresses will not work with these new garments, while giving the appearance of significant change.

These changes do nothing (or very very little) to address the health issues that women face with garments. What would actually create change would be to create more flexibility on the current mandate, reiterated repeatedly at the April 2024 General Conference, but echoed by myself and others. Mormon women deserve more from their church.

Read more posts in this blog series:

Nancy Ross is an associate professor Utah Tech University, where she has been teaching for 16 years. Her Ph D is in art history, but her current research focuses on the history and sociology of religion. She recently co-edited a book with Sara K.S. Hanks titled "Where We Must Stand: Ten Years of Feminist Mormon Housewives" (2018) and has just co-edited “Shades of Becoming: Poems of Transition” with Kristen R. Shill. She is an ordained elder in Community of Christ and pastor of the Southern Utah congregation and works for the Pacific Southwest International Mission Center as an Emerging Church Practitioner.

3 Responses

  1. Thank you so much for your advocacy with church headquarters around garments. I think it did lead to change; I think that your research is part of the reason church leaders removed the phrase, “day and night” from the temple recommend interview in 2019.

    Unfortunately, they have recently had a change of heart and added “day and night” back in to the instructions. Still, I am glad the phrase is not directly included in the question any more, and has never been part of the temple ceremony. Although with the new flexibility built into the ceremony with voiceovers, the brethren could add it in at whim. I can only hope they never go that far.

    It is such a shame that elderly men who have never menstruated are making such extreme rules governing how women wear underwear. Garments would not be a problem if they were an optional religious practice, with flexibility for women to choose to wear them at appropriate times, instead of having to comply with rules made by males who want women to wear them constantly, but don’t seem to know or care about what menstruating women need in underwear.

  2. You make such excellent points, Nancy. It’s disappointing that when GAs *finally* make the tiniest change, they don’t prioritize women’s health and they do prioritize the male gaze. Ugh!

    Also, I look forward to your book! It sounds fascinating!

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Managers of the LDS Church are consciously well-intentioned and convinced of their moral uprightness. Yet they suffer from distorted thinking about women’s spiritual autonomy that is comparable to that of the clergy hundreds of years ago. Hundreds of years from now, will Latter-day Saints look back at patriarchal rhetoric as irrational, anxiety-driven and oppressive? Will feminists be exonerated like Joan of Arc, who was canonized in 1920? Or, will the Saints still be convinced of the divinity of misogynistic thinking for centuries to come and dwindle in numbers? All I know is that there is a lot of cautionary content for our Church in the European history of witch trials.

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