Hollie Rhees Fluhman - A Place to Belong: Reflections from Modern Latter-day Saint Women

Everyone has a story. This book is a collection of stories of inspiration from women of different backgrounds illustrating how they navigate their twin commitments to faith and to womens issues. This project springs from a deep love and respect for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and for the young women who constitute fifty percent of its future.

For some who struggle, faith and a commitment to womens issues appear incompatible. These essays illustrate the complementarity of the two. Most of us have family members or friends who straddle faith in the restored gospel and a modern world that seems incongruous. Many choose to stay and seek resolution, but sadly, too many leave. This volume of distinctive stories from women of faith provides evidence that there is not just one way to be a covenanted Latter-day Saint woman.

These diverse stories, written by women who inhabit a world lacking easy answers, illustrate to young women the multiple reasons to see that their place is in the Church regardless of their differences, questions, or struggles. The hope is for all young women to see that it is possible to be a thoughtful, confident, and intelligent woman who honors her faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ without compromising her ideals as a modern woman or her covenants with the Lord. We trust that writing about our wrestles with these sometimes competing goals might aid the rising generation in their tasks and choices ahead. In many ways, theirs is the next iteration of a defining struggle for Latter-day Saints: to balance loyalty to the Church and challenges facing all women.

In his address A Plea to My Sisters, President Russell M. Nelson said: My dear sisters, whatever your calling, whatever your circumstances, we need your impressions, your insights, and your inspiration. We need you to speak up and speak out in ward and stake councils. We need each married sister to speak as a contributing and full partner as you unite with your husband in governing your family. Married or single, you sisters possess distinctive capabilities and special intuition you have received as gifts from God. We brethren cannot duplicate your unique influence.

As a preface to that plea, he quoted President Spencer W. Kimball from a sermon given in 1979: Much of the major growth that is coming to the Church in the last days will come because many of the good women of the world... will be drawn to the Church in large numbers. This will happen to the degree that the women of the Church reflect righteousness and articulateness in their lives and to the degree that the women of the Church are seen as distinct and differentin happy waysfrom the women of the world.

His concluding statement sums up the integral and critical influence of women in the Church: My dear sisters, you who are our vital associates during this winding-up scene, the day that President Kimball foresaw is today. You are the women he foresaw! Your virtue, light, love, knowledge, courage, character, faith, and righteous lives will draw good women of the world, along with their families, to the Church in unprecedented numbers!

President Nelson clearly supports strong women who can build the kingdom. Women can find support in the desire for a voice and an amelioration of the inequalities we have faced through centuries of cultural and social injustices. In this volume, when the word feminism is used, it simply refers to a commitment to resolving the diverse issues facing women. The feminism that we speak of is neither critical nor hostile toward the leaders of the Church nor does it pigeonhole women into any one mold. The authors in this book echo the belief of acclaimed Latter-day Saint scholar Laurel Thatcher Ulrich that the principles of feminism are compatible not only with the gospel of Jesus Christ but with the mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Whether a stay-at-home mom or a career woman, single or married, from Salt Lake City or Rome, the women in this volume share how they live their faith through everyday challenges that are uniquely theirs. Their stories show that we can all find identity and dignity in preserving our testimony of the Restoration as well as informing, adapting, and reconstructing our understanding of the gospel to meet the challenges of today.

Intellect and faith are not mutually exclusive but rather work together to create something stronger and more beautiful than either of them alone. For us, being committed members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is as much our identity as being a woman. There are choices to make in every aspect and stage of our lives. Nevertheless, we need not apologize for our faith traditions. Rather, there is power in identifying as both Latter-day Saint and woman.

Ours is a complex history. Many of our female predecessors dedicated their lives to the cause of women in the Church. Why then do so many women in the Church today feel marginalized? The Womens History division of the Church History Department recently produced several valuable historical resources about women. However, there is still a general ignorance regarding womens place in the Church, both historically and presently.

One of our most celebrated predecessors, Eliza R. Snow, instructed the Relief Society, If any of the daughters and mothers in Israel are feeling in the least circumscribed in their present spheres, they will now find ample scope [as members of the Relief Society] for every power and capability for doing good with which they are most liberally endowed.

Snow also encouraged her sisters, Although we are not at present living up to all our privileges, and fulfilling all the duties that belong to our sex, the field is open before us, and we are urged to move forward as fast as we can develop and apply our own capabilities. These calls to action empowered women by encouraging them to take responsibility for change in their respective spheres. Snow located agency in the sisters themselves: The difficulty is in getting the sisters to feel like undertaking it. She sensed women of the Church possessed power to create positive change but worried that they would be their own stumbling block. Our hope is that the stories within this volume will remove that stumbling block.