|
Introduction: The Sonia
Johnson Speech That Blew the Lid Off of Mormon Maledumb's Secretly Organized
and Dishonest Efforts to Defeat the Equal Rights Amendment
Sonia Johnson—the courageous, outspoken and excommunicated torch bearer in
the ultimately futile battle over passage of the Equal Rights Amendment--was
expelled from the Mormon Church largely because of bold and unapologetic
remarks she made in a speech to the American Psychological Association (APA)
in New York City on 1 September 1979.
Entitled “Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church,” her
speech was an unparalled and powerful expose’ of the blatantly illegal,
immoral and behind-the-scenes lobbying efforts by the LDS Church to prevent
passage of the ERA in legislative statehouses across the country.
Linda Sillitoe--Mormon author, investigative reporter, poet, reviewer and
mother of three children--explains in her analysis “Church Politics and Sonia
Johnson: The Central Conundrum” (Sunstone, Vol. 5, No. 1,
January-February 1980), how Johnson’s stunning unmasking of the LDS Church's
anti-woman battle plan triggered severe anxiety attacks among its male
leadership.
Sillitoe notes that, in Johnson’s remarks before the ABA, she spoke from
"pain" and "anger," which were subsequently taken
"as polemic and harsh" by many faithful Mormons.
http://www.sunstoneonline.com/magazine/searchable/Issue19.asp
Reactionary Mormon Response
A typical Mormon reflexive jerking motion to Johnson's speech came from--not
suprisingly--a LDS male in West Jordan, Utah, who wrote:
In the case of ERA, the Federal government has lobbied for its
ratification, the Church against it. I think it all boils down to whom do we
trust?
The government or those whom we sustain as Prophets, Seers, and Revelators?
Who do we consider the wisest--the President of the United States or the
President of the Church? Whose motives, goals and objectives do we align
ourselves with?
While it's true that members of the Church have a right to be pro-ERA, it is
clear to me that this is the same as our right to smoke, drink, be inactive
or withhold any contributions to the Church. It is not similar to our right
to be a Republican, Democrat, Independent or whatever.
The Church says it is a moral issue, the world says it's political. Who do we
believe?
Sonia Johnson and others apparently feel that the Church's opposition to
[the] ERA is a "patriarchal panic" based on a chauvinistic desire
to keep women under the thumb of men in the Church. The First Presidency and
Council of the Twelve have stated their reasons for opposition and we do them
a terrible disservice in discounting their statements and suspecting instead
various unholy ulterior motives.
Besides having the right to be wrong, Church members have the right to
inspiration from the Holy Ghost (assuming personal worthiness). I submit that
we should exercise that privilege rather than the former and find ourselves
in peaceful agreement with those whom the Lord has charged with the great
responsibility of leading us aright.
http://www.sunstoneonline.com/magazine/searchable/Issue21.asp
A Feminist Voice Against Male Dominance and Abuse
Sillitoe reviews how Johnson’s speech served to starkly publicize the
cunning, covert and conspiratorial efforts of the LDS Church to defeat the
ERA, as well as how her remarks highlighted the Church’s relentless
oppression of Mormon women:
The APA speech describe[d] the Mormon anti-ERA lobby in Virginia and the
Church's opposition to the Amendment, then broaden[ed] to the discussion of
problems among Mormon women. Citing Utah's alarming statistics on depression,
"premaritally pregnant" teenage brides, teenage suicide, and rape,
Sonia Johnson insist[ed] that "our sisters are silently screaming for
help." The next paragraph continue[d]:
"Because Mormon women are trained to desire above all else to please men
(and I include in this category God, whom all too many of us view as an
extension of our chauvinist leaders), we spend enormous amounts of energy
trying to make the very real, but--for most of us--limited satisfactions of
mother and-wife-hood substitute satisfactorily for all other life
experiences. What spills over into those vacant lots of our hearts where our
intellectual and talented selves should be vigorously alive and thriving are,
instead, frustration, anger, and the despair which comes from suppressing
anger and feeling guilty for having felt it in the first place."
Sillitoe then draws attention to "the key paragraph of the speech
[which] center[ed] on [Johnson’s] cause," as laid out by Johnson:
"But women are not fools. The very violence with which the Brethren attacked
an Amendment which would give women human status in the Constitution abruptly
opened the eyes of thousands of us to the true source of our danger and our
anger. This open patriarchal panic against our human rights raised
consciousness miraculously all over the Church as nothing else could have
done. And revealing their raw panic at the idea that women might step forward
as goddesses-in-the-making with power in a real--not a 'sub' or 'through
men'--sense, was the leaders' critical and mortal error, producing as it did
a deafening dissonance between their rhetoric of love and their oppressive,
unloving, destructive behavior."
Sillitoe notes that “[c]opies of the ‘Patriarchal Panic’ speech abound
throughout Mormondom,” adding that it was even distributed to the studentbody
by Associated Students at BYU.
http://www.sunstoneonline.com/magazine/searchable/Issue19.asp
A copy of Johnson’s no-holds-barred rallying cry for women’s rights currently
resides in Idaho’s Boise State University’s Albertsons Library, where it is
part of a collection donated by the Boise Chapter of National Organization
for Women’s (NOW).
According to the university’s website, members of that chapter assembled the
collection “during the final years of the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights
Amendment, 1976-1982” and included in it documentation of “the role of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in opposing the ERA and the excommunication
of ERA advocate Sonia Johnson by the LDS Church.”
www.http://library.boisestate.edu/Special/FindingAids/fa204.htm
Johnson’s speech was anything but conciliatory. To the contrary, it was
defiant, accusatory and emboldening.
Indeed, Sillitoe describes it thusly:
[It was] the extreme, not the norm, of Sonia Johnson’s utterances and yet
it identifie[d] clearly the heart of what ha[d] become her dilemma. It is in
this speech that she crosse[d] the line between equal civil rights and the
patriarchal system of the Mormon Church, a border also blurred by the Church
by identifying the ERA as a moral issue upon which the Church [was] taking
political action (in harmony with the July 4, 1979 statement of the First
Presidency which explain[ed] that moral issues, so identified by the First
Presidency and Council of Twelve, may be ‘worthy of full institutional
involvement’). Thus it is no more possible to remove Sonia Johnson's
promotion of the Equal Rights Amendment from a Church context than it was
possible for her to remove the anti-ERA petition from her ward lobby.
As Sillitoe notes, it was Johnson’s speech that, in fact, provided the final
impetus for the decision of Mormon Church patriarchs to excommunicate her
from its ranks.
At her trial, Johnson was accused by her inquisitioners of having
"publicly taught that the Church is dedicated to imposing the Prophet's
moral directives upon all Americans; when it is the doctrine of the Church
that all people are free to choose for themselves those moral directives
dictated by their own consciences."
Mormon court prosecutors were referring to the following indisputable points
of reality that Johnson made in her provocative remarks to the APA:
The political implications of this mass renunciation of individual
conscience under direction from “God” are not clearly enough understood in
this country. The Mormons, a tiny minority, are dedicated to imposing the
Prophet's moral directives upon all Americans, and they may succeed if
Americans do not become aware of their methods and goals. Because the
organization of the Church is marvelously tight, and the obedience of the
members marvelously thoroughgoing, potentially thousands of people can be
mobilized in a very short time to do--conscientiously--whatever they are
told, without more explanation that "the Prophet has spoken."
But Mormon anti-ERA activity, though organized and directed through the
hierarchy of the Church from Salt Lake down through regional and local male
leaders, is covert activity not openly done in the name of the Church.
Members are cautioned not to reveal that they are Mormons or organized by the
Church when they lobby, write letters, donate money and pass out anti-ERA
brochures door-to-door through whole states. Instead, they are directed to
say they are concerned citizens following the dictates of their individual
consciences. Since they are, in fact, following the very dictates of the
Prophet's conscience and would revise their own overnight if he were to
revise his, nothing could be further from the truth.
Johnson’s unpardonable sin (at least to the covered eyes and ears of
Mormonism's patriarchal and predatory prevaricators) was to blow the whistle
on the Brethren’s secret political designs to torpedo the ERA.
Yet, according to Sillitoe, this is what Johnson had, in fact, been doing all
along:
In those paragraphs [of her APA speech] Sonia Johnson [did] what she did in
virtually every public statement and interview: breaking the story that
Mormons for ERA were determined to make public--that the Mormon Church [was]
opposing the Equal Rights Amendment through organized lobbies in various
states. By quoting that statement which contain[ed] the central purpose and
tactic of Mormons for ERA, I believe that the excommunication letter
rebut[ted] the "news" and implicitly denie[d] the validity of the
contention. Thus the central pivot between embracing the Church as a whole, politics
included, and the division of the spiritual and political Church, justifying
allegiance to one aspect and opposition to the other aspect [was], after all,
encapsuled in the findings of the court.
http://www.sunstoneonline.com/magazine/searchable/Issue19.asp
*****
The Text of Sonia Johnson’s Courageous Pro-ERA/Anti-Patriarchy Speech
Below is the nearly complete text of Johnson’s remarks before the American
Psychological Association in September 1979. (Nearly in the sense that the
copy of Johnson’s speech in my possession is a typed manuscript which appears
to have been photo-reproduced many times, thus resulting in occasional
illegibilities at the top of some of its pages. However, despite these
relatively small and infrequent gaps, the meaning of Johnson’s message is not
lost).
Johnson’s public exposure of the "panic" seizing Mormon male
leadership in the face of rising calls for gender equality became an
inspiring cry in Mormonism’s pro-ERA underground--particularly, of course,
for women who to this day continue to be suffocated by the Brethren’s
patriarchal grip.
PATRIARCHAL
PANIC: SEXUAL POLITICS IN THE MORMON CHURCH
September 1, 1979
Paper presented at the American Psychological Association Meetings, New York
City
Sonia Johnson, Ed.D
Chair, MORMONS FOR ERA
Sexual politics is old hat in the Mormon Church. It was flourishing when my
grandparents were infants, crossing the plains to Utah in covered wagons.
Although different generations have developed their own peculiar variations
on the theme, I believe my generation is approaching the ultimate
confrontation, for which all the others were simply dress rehearsals. Mormon
sexual politics today is an uneasy mixture of explosive phenomena: the recent
profound disenfranchisement of Mormon women by Church leaders, the Church’s
sudden strong political presence in the anti-ERA arena and the women’s
movement.
Saturated as it is with the anti-female bias that is patriarchy’s very
definition and reason for being, the Mormon Church can legitimately be termed
"The Last Unmitigated Western Patriarchy." (I know you Catholics
and Jews in this audience will want to argue with that but I will put my
patriarchs up against yours any day!) This patriarchal imperative is
reinforced by the belief that the President of the Church is a Prophet of
God, as were Isaiah and Moses, and that God will not allow him to make a
mistake in guiding the Church. He is, therefore, if not doctrinally, in
practice "infallible"—deified. Commonly heard thought-obliterating
dicta in my Church are "When our leaders speak, the thinking has been
done" and "when the Prophet speaks, the debate is ended." They
forget to mention that the debate probably never even got started since in
the Church there is little dialogue or real education. Indoctrination is the
prime method of instruction because obedience is the contemporary Church’s
prime message.
The caliber of character forged by this "education to obey" is
illustrated by an encounter we had two summers ago [1977] in Lafayette Square
after the national ERA march in Washington, D.C. Several of us were accosted
by two Brigham Young University students, former missionaries for the Church,
who tried to tear down our MORMONS FOR ERA banner. During the ensuing
discussion, they solemnly vowed that if the Prophet told them to go out and
shoot all Black people, they would do so without hesitation.
Another example: Under the Heavenly mandate against the Equal Rights
Amendment, Mormons in Virginia last winter [1978], wearing their EQUALITY
YES, ERA NO! buttons (a typical boggling example of patriarchal doublethink),
lobbied not only against the ERA but against ALL bills for women—many of
which were models of their kind.
The political implications of this mass renunciation of individual conscience
for direction from “God” are not clearly enough understood in this country.
The Mormons, a tiny minority, are dedicated to imposing the Prophet’s moral
directives upon all Americans and they may succeed if Americans do not become
aware of their methods and goals. Because the organization of the Church is
marvelously tight and the obedience of the members marvelously
thorough-going, potentially thousands of people can be mobilized in a very
short time to do—conscientiously—whatever they are told, without more
explanation than "the Prophet has spoken."
But Mormon anti-ERA activity, though organized and directed by the hierarchy
of the Church from Salt Lake down through regional and local male leaders, is
covert activity, not openly done in the name of the Church. Members are
cautioned not to reveal that they are Mormons or organized by the Church when
they lobby, write letters, donate money and pass out anti-ERA brochures door-to-door
through whole states.(1) Instead, they are directed to say that they are
concerned citizens following the dictates of their individual consciences.
Since they are, in fact, following the dictates of the Prophet’s conscience
and would revise their own overnight if he were to revise his, nothing could
be further from the truth.
In addition, Mormon women, who make up most of the anti-ERA Mormon army (and
the leaders refer to it as an army in true patriarchal style 2), are advised
not to tell people that the men of the Church have organized them, but to
maintain that they voluntarily organized themselves. "People won’t
understand"(3), their male leaders explain which in patriarchal
doublespeak means: "People will understand only too well that this is
the usual male trick of enlisting women to carry out men’s oppressive
measures against women, hiding the identity of the real oppressors and
alienating women from each other."
So many of us in the Church are so unalterably opposed to this covert and
oppressive activity that one of the major purposes of MORMONS FOR ERA has
become to shine light upon the murky political activities of the Church and
to expose to other Americans its exploitation of women’s religious commitment
for its self-serving male political purposes.
The reaction of the Church fathers to the women’s movement and women’s demand
for equal rights has produced fearful and fascinating phenomena. In the
mid-1960s, Utah’s birthrate was almost exactly the same as the national rate
but by last year [1978] it was double the national average—evidence of a real
patriarchal panic, a tremendous reaction against the basic feminist tenet
that women were meant by their Creator to be individuals first and to fulfill
roles second—to the degree and in the way they choose, as men do. In almost
every meeting of the Church (and Mormons are noted for [next several words
illegible] "good" Mormon woman, acceptable to the Brethren and
therefore to God; messages calculated to keep women where men like them best:
"made" (4) (created) to nurture husband and children, housebound,
financially and emotionally dependent, occupationally immature, politically
naïve, obedient, subordinate, submissive, somnambulant and bearing much of
the heavy and uncredited labor of the Church upon their uncomplaining
shoulders.
Encyclicals from the Brethren over the past ten years [1969-1979] such as
those which took away women’s right to pray in major Church meetings (this
right has since been restored but women will not be safe from the Brethren’s
capricious meddling with our inalienable human rights until we attain
positions of power and authority in our Church); to control our own auxiliary
money and program and to publish our own magazine for communication among
ourselves have put women under total male control, requiring us to ask
permission of men in even the smallest of matters. These rulings—which have
seriously harmed women’s self-esteem, lowered our status, made us bootlickers
and toadies to the men of the Church and destroyed what little freedom of
choice we had—those rulings reveal the depth of the Brethren’s fear of
independent, non-permission-asking women, the kind of women which are
emerging from the women’s movement. And it is no accident that they were
enacted just as the feminist tide in the United States began to swell.
But we have other, more direct, ways of knowing how badly threatened and
angry our brethren are by the existence of women who are not under their
control. In April [1979], we hired a plane to fly a banner over Temple Square
in Salt Lake City during a break in the world-wide Conference of male leaders
being held in the Tabernacle. The banner announced that MORMONS FOR ERA ARE
EVERYWHERE. A reporter phoned the Jody Powell of the Church [Jody Powell was
then-President Jimmy Carter’s White House press secretary] to ask how the
Brethren were taking this little prank and was told that they found it
"amusing." Then the Jody Powell-person suggested that the reporter
put a cartoon in the next day’s paper showing our plane flying over the Angel
Moroni atop the Temple (as the actual newspaper had) but instead of a
trumpet, picture Moroni brandishing a machine gun. One does not need to be a
psychoanalyst to understand how “amusing” the Brethren found our "little
prank." (5)
More recently, when an Associated Press reporter interviewed President
[Spencer W.] Kimball on the subject of uppity Mormon women, the Prophet
warned that Church members who support the Equal Rights Amendment should be
"very, very careful" because the Church is led by "strong men
and able men . . . . We feel we are in a position to lead them
properly." (6) The threat here is open and clear. We had better be very,
very careful.
[Illegible] the men at the head of the Church are strong and the patriarchs
have for millennia crushed those women who escaped from their mind-bindings.
President Kimball is further quoted as saying, "These women who are
asking for authority to do everything that a man can do and change the order
and go and do men’s work instead of bearing children, she’s just off her
base" (7)—a truly appalling revelations of ignorance about the realities
of women’s lives.
But perhaps the image of greatest terror crawled from the psyche of Hartman
Rector, one of the General Authorities of the Church, in response to my
testimony before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights:
In order to attempt to get the male somewhere near even, the Heavenly
Father gave him the Priesthood, or directing authority for the Church and
home. Without this bequeath, the male would be so far below the female in
power and influence that there would be little or no purpose for his
existence. In fact, [he] would probably be eaten by the female as is the case
with the black widow Spider. (8)
Given this view of women, it should come as no surprise that despite the
carefully calculated public relations campaign which portrays the Mormon
Church as the last bastion (and probably the inventors!) of the happy family
and fulfilled womanhood, all is not well in Zion: all is particularly not
well among Zion’s women.
In recent years, considerable hue and cry has arisen over the subject of
depression among Mormon women, inspiring a spate of documentaries and
articles. (9) The Salt Lake Tribune in December of 1977 quoted local therapists
as stating that up to three-quarters of their Mormon patients were women and
that the common denominator was low self-image and lack of fulfillment
outside the home. (10) This depression is endemic and begins at an early age:
the incidence of suicide among teenaged females in Utah is more than double
the national average and rising. (11) Seven of 10 teenaged brides are
“premaritally pregnant” and 40 percent of Utah’s brides are teens. (12) The
proportion of teenage marriages in Utah has been greater than for the nation
each year since 1960, which might partially account for Utah’s divorce rate
being higher than the national average. (The time of the beginning of the
increase is also significant, as I have pointed out earlier). Alcoholism and
drug abuse among women are problems in Mormon culture, as are child and wife
abuse. In the last 14 years, rape in Utah has increased 165 percent and the
local index of rape is 1.35 percent higher than the national average. (13)
Add to this the significant fact that attendance at Relief Society—the
Church’s women’s auxiliary—and at the Young Women’s organization meetings has
dropped off drastically nationwide.
What all this says to the patriarchs is anyone’s guess—they are either afraid
to talk with those of us who are alarmed at their opinions and treatment of
women or they do not consider us worth their time. (14) But what it says to
those of us who have survived being Mormon women is that our sisters are
silently screaming for help and that they are not only NOT finding it at
Church, but that at Church they are being further depressed and debilitated
by bombardment with profoundly demeaning female sex-role stereotypes. Their
Church experience is making them sick.
Because Mormon women are trained to desire above all else to please men (and
I include in this category God, whom all too many of us view as an extension
of our chauvinist leaders), we spend enormous amounts of energy trying to
make the very real but—for most of us—limited satisfactions of mother- and wifehood
substitute satisfactorily for all other life experiences. What spills over
into those vacant lots of our hearts where our intellectual and talented
selves should be vigorously alive and thriving are, instead, frustration,
anger and the despair which comes from suppressing anger and feeling guilty
for having felt it in the first place.
Last summer [1978], a Utah woman wrote to Senate Hatch of Utah: “A sea of
smoldering women is a dangerous thing.” And that’s what the Mormon patriarchy
has on its hands: a sea of smoldering women. Those whose anger is still
undifferentiated, who do not realize how thoroughly they are being
betrayed—their rage is exploited by Church leaders who subvert it into
attacks against feminist causes such as the Equal Rights Amendment, making
scapegoats of women and their righteous desires, identifying women as the
source of women’s danger (a patriarchal tactic for maintaining power that has
its roots in antiquity) and trying to distract us from recognizing that where
our real danger as women lies, and always has lain, is in patriarchy.
But women are not fools. The very violence with which the Brethren attacked
an Amendment which would give women human status in the Constitution abruptly
opened the eyes of thousands of us to the true source of our danger and our
anger. This open patriarchal panic against our human rights raised
consciousness miraculously all over the Church as nothing else could have
done. And revealing their raw panic at the idea that women might step forward
as goddesses-in-the-making with power in a real—not a “sub” or “through
men”—sense, was the leaders’ critical and mortal error, producing as it did a
deafening dissonance between their rhetoric of love and their oppressive,
unloving, destructive behavior.
I receive phone calls and letters from Mormon women all over the country and
each has a story or two to tell: how two Mormon women in one meeting
independently stood and spoke of their Mother in Heaven, how they met
afterwards and wept together in joy at having found and named Her; how a
courageous Mormon woman is preparing to make the first public demand for the
priesthood. “The time has come,” she says calmly, “for women to insist upon
full religious enfranchisement.” This statement is the Mormon woman’s equivalent
of the shot heard ‘round the world!
Our patriarchy may be The Last Unmitigated but it is no longer unchallenged.
A multitude of Mormon women are through asking permission. We are waking up
and growing up and in our waking and growing can be heard—distinctly—the
death rattle of the patriarchy.
Sonia Johnson
[former address and phone number deleted]
[Endnotes]
1. "New York State women’s meeting: 8,000 converge on Albany: local
woman creates fracas." The Daily Times, Mawaroneck, New Jersey,
July 1, 1977.
The local woman who created the “fracas” was a Mormon, Sherlene Bartholomew,
from the Westchester Ward in Scarsdale, N.Y., who would only say that she was
"a member of a loosely-organized group of mothers of small
children." The article goes on:
Later, in a private interview, Ms. Bartholomew continued to insist she was
not affiliated with any organized group. Yet in the next 90 minutes or so
during which we accompanied her . . . she came in contact with a dozen or so
women who greeted her by her first name, many of whom refused to identify
themselves.
From the “Supplementary Data Sheet” regarding the Albany International
Woman’s Year Conference, sent to "all Bishops, Branch Presidents and
Concerned Members" by a New York Stake Relief Society Presidency:
The First Presidency [includes the Prophet and two counselors] urges full
attendance and participation. Elements capable of destroying family unity . .
. must be opposed. We should act as individuals—as citizens and residents of
New York State—and not as any church or organization.
From the recorded and transcribed minutes of the first organization meeting
of the Potomac Regional Women’s Coalition (later known as the LDS Citizen’s
Coalition), at Vienna, Virginia, November 8, 1978, p. 13:
If you go to your state senator and say that he should be against the
Equal Rights Amendment because the Prophet is against it, your are going to
get nowhere. That may be why we are against it, but when you trying to
convince a legislator, you better talk his language, not yours.
2. From the Virginia organization meeting minutes, p. 17:
You have got to take this seriously as a calling . . . When the call
comes, you march with your forces. In other words, you are being made a
general of a force.
3. From the Virginia organization meeting minutes, p. 2, Regional
Representative Julian Lowe speaking:
Experience shows that if the Brethren are out beating the bushes it looks
like, in the eyes of some, that we are trying to keep women subservient [note
the word "keep"] and it is far from that. This is the exact
opposite of what we’re trying to do but it is always interpreted that way.
Why don’t I quit while I’m ahead. [!]
4. Wertz, William C., Associated Press "LDS President opposes
ERA, encourages women to be wives," The Rexburg [Idaho] Standard,
Tuesday, June 19, 1979.
Quoting President Kimball: "The woman wa made to be the wife, the one
who teaches and trains the children."
5. Oral communication.
6. Wertz, William C., Associated Press "LDS President opposes
ERA, encourages women to be wives," The Rexburg [Idaho] Standard,
Tuesday, June 19, 1979.
7. ibid.
8. Correspondence from Hartman Rector to Teddie Wood, August 29, 1978.
9. A few of these are:
--Degn, Louise, "Mormon Women and Depression," KSL [Salt Lake] TV
commentary, February 17, 1978.
--Cardall, Duane, "The Three Faces of Depression: Teenage Suicide,"
KSL TV documentary, February 10, 1979.
--Burgoyne, Robert H. and Burgoyne, Rodney W., "Belief Systems and
Unhappiness: the Mormon Woman Example," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon
Thought, 1978, 3, 48-53.
--Associated Press Provo, Utah, "Depression Among Y Students on
Rise, Health Director Notes," Salt Lake Tribune, March 14, 1979.
--Warenski, Marilyn Patriarchs and Politics: the Plight of the Mormon
Woman, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). See especially Chapter 4, pp.
81-106: "Double Dose of the Double Message."
10. Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, "Utah Women: A
Profile," June 1978, p. 42.
11. Cardall, Duane, "The Three Faces of Depression: Teenage
Suicide," KSL TV documentary, February 10, 1979.
12. Associated Press, Logan, Utah, "Utah Weddings 40%
Teens," Salt Lake Tribune, April 8, 1979.
13. Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women, "Utah Women: A
Profile," June 1978, pp. 23-46.
14. Recently, when a Stake President in Provo, Utah, suggested to the
Regional Representative that a woman speak in Stake Conference about women in
the Church, the Regional Representative replied, "We can’t have a woman
talking about women in Conference."
This fear—and disdain—is, I believe, prevalent among men in the Church and
has accounted in the last few months for a truly incredible phenomenon: a
book entitled, WOMAN, published by Deseret Book, which has as its
authors 15 male leaders of the Church—not a single woman!
*****
Conclusion: Sonia Johnson Had Amazing Heart for the Battle but Will the
Mormon Church Ever Change?
Sonia Johnson was a courageous, outspoken and inspiring advocate in the cause
of equal rights for the millions of oppressed women of Mormonism. She
reminded people everywhere of the power of purpose that comes through
individual commitment. As she herself declared:
We must remember that one determined person can make a significant
difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course
of history
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/sonia_johnson.html
Nevertheless, can genuine gender equality be realistically achieved in the
Mormon Church’s permanent patriarchal prison? Jessica Longaker, in her
analysis, "The Role of Women in Mormonism," offers a decidely grim
assessment:
The Mormon Church of today is still clinging to the beliefs of the
nineteenth century; ideas which are becoming more outmoded every day. A few
women in the Mormon Church are trying to make a difference but they are
usually swiftly excommunicated . . .
In Mormon magazines, which are full of advice for women from the heads of the
Church, the message has changed in response to the feminist movement. In
1964, advice on marriage and divorce was fairly dispassionate; by 1972, these
topics were addressed with increasing panic and harshness. . . . Feminists
are described as “the Pied Pipers of sin who have led women away from the
divine role of womanhood down the pathway of error.” . . .
Obviously, the Mormon Church is not going to alter its views on women in the
immediate future. It is questionable whether it is even possible for
Mormonism to equalize the roles of men and women because the oppression of
women is so integral to the religion. Men and women cannot truly become equal
in the Church, for the basic tenets of Mormonism are so fraught with sexism
that equality would change the religion beyond recognition.
https://www.exmormon.org/mormwomn.htm
One should never forget the heroic and lasting contributions of Sonia Johnson
in the fight for equal rights. In that fight, she has been a rare and shining
light in the dark cell of the Mormon Gulag. In the end, Sonia Johnson
reminded those who viewed her struggle against patriarchy of the inherent
power, dignity and justice of the feminist movement.
But the brutal, costly, inhumane war of thought control and emotional abuse
waged against millions of women by the guards of Mormonism’s patriarchal
concentration camp continues unabated to this day—and will into the
foreseeable future.
So the question arises: Why spend the rest of one’s life fighting to reform
an unreformable beast?
Perhaps those lingering behind the Mormon Church’s electric fence should
seriously consider making a long-overdue break for personal emancipation--and
encourage as many of their fellow inmates to join in the rush to at last
breathe free.
|