Evolution of Ideals for Women in Mormon Periodicals, 1897-1999

Abstract

An important locus for mediation of a religious movement's self-defnition and relationship with secular society is found in its definition of gender roles, especially in definition of ideal roles for women. Content analysis of Mom=on periodicals reveals tension between accommodation and resistance to secular gender norms with a shift from advocation of women's participation in extra-domestic activities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to insistence upon women's primary, even exclusive, obligations as wives, mothers and homemakers in the 1970s and advocation of inconsistent ideals in the 1 980s and 1 990s. Findings are discussed with reference to Mormonism's changing response to its sociocultural environment. In the last three decades the Mormon Church has taken a public stand as a defender of family values. In its opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s and 1980s, the excommunication of Sonia Johnson - president of Mormons for the ERA - and more recently, the excommunication of feminist scholars and intellectuals in the mid-1990s, publication of the Proclamation on the Family, and public support for proposition twenty-two in California, the Mormon Church has taken a position as protector of the traditional heterosexual nuclear family. Central to the Mormon articulation of the ideal family is definition of ideal gender roles. Recent scholarship on Mormon women indicates, however, that ideals for women have been far from monolithic over the course of the movement's history. Historical research demonstrates that in Mormonism's early decades women participated in expression of gifts of the spirit, most importantly healing and conferral of blessings by the laying on of hands - practices now reserved exclusively for male priesthood holders (Newell 1992a; Barber 1992) and participated in an autonomous Relief Society (the Church's women's organization) in which women elected leaders and controlled an independent budget (Newell 1992a, 1992b). Scholars and Church leaders disagree about whether Mormon women were ever allowed to hold (have conferred upon