Martha S. Bradley-Evans - Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights

Pedestals

and Podiums

Utah Women,
religious authority,
and Equal Rights

Martha Sonntag Bradley

Signature Books Salt Lake City 2005

A Smith-Pettit Foundation Book

to Bob

Grow old with me and be my love

Jacket design by Ron Stucki

2005 Smith-Pettit Foundation. Published by arrangement with the copyright holder. All rights reserved. Signature Books is a registered trademark of Signature Books Publishing, LLC.

www.signaturebooks.com

Pedestals and Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights was printed on acid-free paper and was composed, printed , and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bradley, Martha Sonntag .

Pedestals and podiums : Utah women, religious authority, and equal rights / by Martha Sonntag Bradley.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-56085-189-9

1. Mormon womenUtahPolitical activity. 2 . Equal rights amendmentsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 3. Feminism Religious aspectsChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints History20th century. I. Title.

BX8641.B73 2005

305.486893792dc22

2005051718

Contents

Introduction

This is a story which has had strange and potent intersections with my life. In June 1977, I was a young mother with three childrenmy blonde wonder ready to begin kindergarten in the fall and two adorable daughters who were one and two years old. Purely by coincidence, I bumped into the womens movement the day I attended the Utah International Womens Year (IWY) Conference in Salt Lake City.

For me it was a stunning, shocking, stupefying day. From the beginning, I felt as if I had stumbled, then found a precarious new balance standing on a narrow bridge with dangerous drops on either side. It was a day of confusion and chaoswomen crowded into hot rooms, often outnumbering the available seats. The aisles were an obstacle course of strollers in which babies fretted in the heat or slept in sweaty exhaustion. The din of speakers trying to make themselves heard, audience members responding and talking among themselves, wailing children, and the overflow noise from other rooms was mind numbing. It was one of those days when youre confronted head-on with how much you dont know.

The noise continued to wash over me as I stepped into the balloting booth. Confused, I read over the list of resolutions on the ballot I was supposed to vote for or against, but I realized I had not even begun to think about what my position as a woman in the world should be. Again I wantedmore than anything else, it seemedto understand what it all meant.

That moment had a profound impact on my life which I vividly, even sensorially, recall, a moment that forever marked my lifea moment of before and after. I became a feminist although I did not yet know what that implied. More than a decade would pass before I could begin to say I understood the womens movement and even longer before I felt it was making a difference in my own life. But for my young, naive self, that warm June day was as defining a moment as I had ever experienced.

In the twenty-five years since then, I have heard other women speak of the eleven years between 1972 and 1983 in much the same way. For many of us, it was the decade when we were students or young mothers or were undertaking our first jobs. We were still shaping our lives. Perhaps we were more alert then, or focused on what matteredon what held out the promise of meaningbut we knew this was deeply important even when we were not exactly sure what this was. Women were talking about changing the world, and we believed we could have something to do with it.

At the same time, many of my friends seemed unaffected by what was going on around us. From what I could see, their lives proceeded as if nothing was in the air, as if their lives had absolutely nothing to do with those other lives over there. In hindsight, the disconnect is remarkable to me and I have always wondered why feminism touched only some of us, why it does not seem to matter at all to many young women today.

For me, the time evoked memories of childhood. I am the only sister in a family of three brothers and I grew up headstrong and spirited, euphemisms of course for stubborn and difficult. I had all four adjectives thrown at me in various tones of voice and confess that I usually responded in kind. My mother and I squabbled endlessly over insignificant things. Still, my parents made me feel treasured and valued. The womens movement, on the most personal level, was a sturdy reminder that we women are powerful and talented, with hearts big enough to save the world. The messages of distrust and disrespect from other quarters were simply wrong.

Fifteen years after Utahs IWY conference, I delivered a paper in October 1992 on my experiences there at the LDS Churchs Brigham Young University. This paper was based on a series of interviews my students and I had conducted with women who had helped plan the IWY conference, who had attended the conference themselves, or who were delegates to the national convention. The room at BYU was packed with women, many of whom I recognized. There were several women from the LDS Relief Society general board including Aileen Clyde, my personal heroine. Most of them I did not know; and I assumed, somewhat naively, that they were there because they were interested in the story. I was wrong.

After sociologist Marie Cornwall and I had delivered our separate papers and opened the session for questions, the room exploded into bedlam, it seemed to me. Accustomed to the traditional civility of academic discourse, I was surprised and dismayed. Women in the back and at both sides stood up and shouted sneering questions and criticisms that pierced the air like spit balls. I began to feel irrelevant to this exchange that seemed in some ways to be scripted. I felt as if I were disappearing into the wall behind me, and wished I could. The anger, the division, the bitterness, and the suspicions surrounding the IWY conferences and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were being reenacted in front of my eyes. I found out later that many of these women had come to our session with the express purpose of disrupting it. Some had sent letters to the university president complaining about the topic and challenging the research money granted to support the research.

It would be seven years before I picked up this research again. It had proven to be a sort of hot potato each time I had touched it, and each time it had raised fresh blisters. But the story is compelling enough to draw me back again and again, demanding that I pay attention, that I find out what it had meant.

The issues seemed to be crystal clear to those in the pro and con camps. However, it is important to acknowledge the great range of responses among Mormon women. Some chose to become politically involved, join coalitions or committees, march at demonstrations, or lobby sessions of the legislatures. But far more women did nothing. The silence, which is like the apparently unruffled surface of a lake as storm winds build, is noteworthy. For thousands of Mormon women and other women throughout the country, the campaign against the ERA seemed simply irrelevant and uninteresting. They could not see its impact on their own lives which, for the most part, were contented and focused on practical tasks. The messages they heard coming from their church matched their own sense of their position in the world, particularly the Mormon world, but they failed to perceive a threat and chose to not do anything at all. Why fix what was not broken?