It ain’t easy being a woman. It wasn’t back in the year 1979 when feminist Sonia Johnson publicly disagreed with the LDS church’s stance on ERA and, for her efforts, got excommunicated.
It wasn’t in June of 2014 when Kate Kelly got excommunicated for founding Ordain Women.
Both cases occurred in the leafy Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.
(What is it about Virginia anyway?)
Today, feminist-leaning LDS women are still talking about the same concerns Johnson wrote about in her book, From Housewife to Heretic. Johnson tried to tell her local church leaders that “their problem, the church’s problem, was not one little Virginia housewife. That getting rid of me would not solve anything. That I was a symptom of a very deep, very ancient, and increasingly painful disease in society and religion, and that unless they became aware of it and dealt with it in some sensitive, realistic ways, the problem of women in the church was going to intensify . . .”
For the record, I sympathized with the church’s position on the ERA, mostly because good-sounding legislation too often drags in unintended consequences.
But we (meaning church members who like the church, believe in it and want it to succeed) made some mistakes that we shouldn’t ever make again.
Case in point:
During the ratification fight for the ERA, the church mobilized members to speak out against the amendment. The church as an institution, as well as individual members, has a right to involve itself. But picture this: a few station wagons of LDS women arrive at a women’s conference, ready to participate in the public square. Once they pile out of the car, “Mormon men with megaphones, whistles, walkie-talkies and signs shepherded Mormon women about, body and soul, telling them when to sit and when to stand, when to come and when to go, what to say and when to say it and especially, how to vote on every single issue.”
Folks, that looks bad.
But what else can you do when the only women you can round up have been taught that home and family are their calling, that they shouldn’t “distract” themselves with matters beyond their own walls?
To be fair, not all of this is the church’s fault. Other books I have read (which we’ll get around to discussing) demonstrate how a few decades of popular culture set up the problem. In the 1940s, World War II pulled men into the military, then called on women to staff the factories that aided the war effort. More than a few women found that they actually liked employment better than dusting their living rooms. When the war ended and the soldiers came home, they needed jobs so they could do what we expected them to do—support their families. America staged a cultural campaign through the ‘40s and ‘50s urging women to return home and spend their vast energies perfecting their pie crust, waxing their floors and having dinner ready by 5:30 on the dot. Don’t worry about what goes on in banks, offices and capitol buildings was the message.
But by the ‘70s, when we needed women who could walk into conventions and know what they were doing, we had to bring them along like kindergartners. We handicapped ourselves.
As to whether knowledgeable women will vote the way the men with the megaphones want them to — well, like I said, stuff that bothered Sonia still bothers women today.
I love that women today know their way around purchasing orders and probate proceedings, around real estate math and speech therapy. I’ll take some of that, but I still want my skillet and my can of PAM. In fact, here’s what I did with my kitchen toys today:
Sunflower Broccoli (even though we forgot the sunflower kernels)
If you weren’t alive in 1979, I’d love to hear what you think of Sonia’s story. Have things gotten better? Or have we just made more messes?
Have you read Pedestals and Podiums by Martha Sonnatag Bradley? It is the most comprehensive book ever written about the ERA and the church’s involvement. She does an excellent job of compiling just about ever contemporary document she could get her hands on, both from pro-ERA people and anti-ERA people. I just picked up a copy of From Housewife to Heretic at a used bookstore a few months ago but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
I have not heard of Bradley’s book. That someone would compile all the documents from both sides is valuable indeed.
I’m just surprised at how many things Johnson wrote about that we’re still talking about today.