The recent General Conference talk emphasized that adults in the church should follow a strict interpretation of the rules around wearing garments. I was disheartened to hear this. I no longer wear garments, but ten years ago this month, Jessica Finnigan and I conducted a survey with 4500+ participants about people’s experiences with garments.
Our three most important questions from the survey were: 1) Why do you wear garments? 2) What do your garments mean to you? 3) How does wearing garments make you feel? We gave a conference paper on our data and later published a book chapter in Religion, Attire, and Adornment in North America (2023) edited by Marie W. Dallam and Benjamin E. Zeller.
On July 21, 2021, journalist Ruth Graham published an article in the New York Times about Mormon women’s challenges with garments. About a week later, I received an email from someone at the LDS Church’s Research Correlation Division asking me about my research on garments.
We met with the Research Correlation Division on Zoom later that fall and addressed their research questions, which were:
What has been the most effective methodology for going after information regarding women’s experience with garments?
What are the primary issues facing women regarding wearing garments?
What proportion of these issues are related to physical issues?
How do garments affect women’s physical health, including discomfort, rashes, yeast infections, UTI’s?
What questions best helped you evaluate these issues among garment-wearing women?
If you were to start over again, how would you do this research differently?
We addressed their questions with these slides that summarize our data.
Having sat with our data for a long time, we suggested the following possible solutions to address women’s challenges with garments:
1. There isn’t a design fix for women’s garments that will accommodate every LDS women’s needs. There needs to be more choice in design and style. We recommend consulting with dermatologists and OBGYNs to identify fabrics and designs that reduce overheating and increase ventilation.
2. This isn’t a problem you can solve with quantitative data alone. Understanding and improving garment wearing for women requires a deeper understanding of the embodied religious experiences of women and the ways in which garments shape those experiences in positive and negative ways.
3. In addition to design changes, consider a different behavioral framework around garments that looks more like the framework for fasting. With fasting, 1)exceptions to fasting are discussed openly and those who need to make accommodations to fasting are accepted as faithful members 2) there is no taboo on discussing fasting, so those who are navigating fasting can easily get advice on how to adapt the practice to their needs.
4. Instead of only a design change, consider a different behavioral framework around garments that looks more like the framework for fasting, including: 1) lift the taboo on talking about garments so that women can give and receive help in navigating garment-wearing with more ease and less judgement 2) in church teaching materials and in church handbooks, emphasize greater flexibility in garment-wearing than is currently understood by members. E.g. some women could wear garments with less cost to their physical health if they did not wear them at night or took regular breaks.
Our final considerations asked church leaders to think also about the following:
1. Many women have positive feelings about the meaning of their garments but their lived experiences with garments is often much more complicated.
2. Many women experience physical, emotional, and spiritual issues related to wearing garments.
3. Current church culture makes it difficult for women to express discomfort with their garments, as there are social and spiritual costs connected to complaining.
4. Women often feel like they must hold these physical, emotional, and spiritual, and costs alone, creating additional feelings of shame and isolation.
5. Women must account for their garment-wearing practices in temple recommend interviews with men who are not likely to understand or empathize. In any other environment this would be identified as grooming for abuse.
6. There is ample evidence that many women have experienced trauma in wearing garments and the LDS Church has not adequately addressed this.
7. As researchers witnessing this devastation, we have experienced secondary trauma that has been destructive to our own faith.
I know that the researchers we met with were thoughtful and receptive to this research and that they passed a summary of this work on to their superiors in the church hierarchy. I just really wish that the church cared more about the experiences of women (and men) who are trying to navigate this demanding practice.
I like the comparison to fasting. I had no “worthiness” issues when I did not fast while pregnant. I had no “worthiness” issues when I did not fast while breast feeding. I had no “worthiness” issues when I developed diabetes and fasting became a problem. I could discuss all these difficulties with others and they accepted that if my doctor says, “don’t fast,” that I am not an apostate heathen if I follow my doctor’s orders. They understood that fasting has physical results on a human body. But garments! Couldn’t talk about it. I was judged harshly. I was expected to overcome whatever the problem was. No matter how bad the problem was, I was just expected to get over it through righteousness, even when the problem was most certainly not caused by unrighteousness, more righteousness and even MORE righteousness would fix it. We are just SO hyperfixated on everybody HAS to wear garments exactly the same way or it is horrible sin on their part. (Except for Marie Osmond on dancing with the stars. She is excused because “costume”. The famous good examples of righteous Mormonism can be excused, but not you for an infection.) Really, it is cult behavior.
I really hope we can keep this conversation going until what we wear as underwear is our personal choice and the leadership get off their cult thinking that they have to control us, and have to police women’s modesty by insistence on frumpy underwear.
When many of our ancestors joined the church they did NOT buy their garments from the church. It feels like over time we have been those frogs in the pot of water that is slowly heating up to boiling. When I first bought garments at the distribution center I paid cash and didn’t need to give any identification. Now the church essentially knows my underwear size and how often I buy them due to the mandate to present my temple recommend when I purchase them.
If I were investigating a church and found out I would be expected to buy my underwear from that church, I would run.
I believe the highest church leaders truly believe that God mandates this, but I’m curious about why they can’t let members buy/make their own underwear as in earlier days. Control issues seem to be at play.
This comparison to fasting is very helpful. Much gratitude to the author of this post for your detailed research and continued advocacy on this issue.
I wear my garments off and on. I kept overheating in the summertime and didn’t realize it started after I had been endowed until after I’d had MRIs and testing to try to figure out why I was having neurological problems (shaking, panicking (not quite attacks) unable to do much more than mow the lawn on a warm day). I was so nervous to not wear them around my mom, but we were having a family reunion and it was gonna be hot. I decided to risk it. She loved me, didn’t she?
She freaked out. Said that stopping wearing garments was the first step on the path to sin. Things escalated, and she nearly disowned me that day. Not just over garments, but because I didn’t respond in the way she expected. It was only after my dad spoke to her that she accepted me back.
I still have trauma from that. Sometimes I can’t wear the garments because of that now. That she would judge my worth on if I wore them. I always wear them when I go be in her presence now, or when I might see her, no matter how hot it might get. It should be this way. Sometimes I feel like the garments are suffocating me. Like they’re squeezing me. Like theyre trying to make me small. Not every day, but often enough. It shouldn’t be this way.
Thank you so much for sharing the story of your research. It’s hurtful to know that they really do know the issues and chose to double down anyway. But we must we keep talking about it to break that taboo.
This was very interesting content. I have always found it difficult to find styles that fit well and doesn’t itch (upon occasion a style doesn’t bug my sensitive skin and fits my frame. It has happened once or twice!) and also matches the weather (rarely except in the winter). For a long time I thought it was a me problem until I actually talked about this taboo topic with people very recently.
And then-
The other day while in the temple my garment top would not stop peaking at the shoulder- in my temple dress! The most covering piece of clothing going from neck to toe! It was just the universe’s way of telling me that garment design is ridiculous. This is not a me problem and never has been.
Something we haven’t discussed is the effect of the garments on sex lives. My husband thought they were unsexy and a barrier. He wouldn’t touch me while I was wearing them which lead to little or no spontaneous sex. I begin to feel extremely undesirable when I wore them which was basically all the time as instructed. Later, one of the reasons he gave for cheating was his girlfriends didn’t wear the frumpy garment but had sexy underwear. He said it was like unwrapping a gift and because they wore them all the time, sex could be spontaneous and fun.