Turning to the Mothers: Mormon Women's Biographies of Their Female Forebears and the Mormon Church's Expectations for Women

Abstract

As the dissident voices of Mormon women themselves are lately making clear, female Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) are subject to a rigorous-and, many would say, unrealistic and limiting-set of expectations. They are assigned a clearly subservient role in their church (they may not hold most major church offices, for instance, and they are taught that they may not achieve the highest degree of glory in the afterlife [the Celestial Kingdom] unless they are sealed in marriage in the Temple through Temple Ordinances). Yet they are expected to be paragons of their faith, accepting without question the church's insistence that motherhood is the highest calling for a woman, that working outside the home is undesirable, and that selfish is the worst accusation that can be leveled against them. In quasi-Victorian language, church leaders exhort women to be spiritual guides for their families: You provoke us to good works, and . . your encouragement and unwavering faith are often all we have to keep us in the path of right. . . . I can truly testify that your inspiration and faith become our buckler and shield. .... From Father Adam down through the ages, men have needed to be inspired by the steadying influence and purifying power of women.1 For some Mormon women, the church's demands that they be always selfless, always virtuous lead to serious disorders born of guilt, as recent studies of depression and drug abuse among Mormon women indicate.2 Others, though, obviously find healthier ways of with the burden of expectations that their church places on them. One of these ways, my research in Mormon culture and Mormon women's writings suggests, is that classic human strategy for dealing with pressure: Mormon women tell true stories, which shape the past in ways that help the tellers cope with the stress of the present, ways that challenge, in this case, what their church demands of them. Ironically enough, one of the main vehicles for coping stories that Mormon women apparently employ is that classic genre of orthodox Mormon literature, the laudatory ancestor biography. I first became aware in 1983 that something odd and perhaps subversive is going on in many ancestor biographies that twentieth-century Mormon women are writing when, with the assistance of a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, I collected an archive of vernacular history from Southeast Idaho-place histories, family histories, autobiographies, and biographies written by nonprofessional writers. Most of the works in the collection have not been published previously and were not written for the collection; they were written for friends and descendants and were in the possession of the writers or their relations when I sent calls for donations to every local paper, every television and radio station, every church (LDS and non-LDS), every old persons' home, and every historical society in Southeast Idaho (not quite such a huge task as it may seem, given the area's small population). In response to that request, some 775 documents were donated, totaling about 6,000 pages. Of the total, 158 are biographies of men, and 95 are biographies of women. The collection is now housed, in duplicate copies, in the archives of the Oboler Library at Idaho State University in Pocatello and the Idaho State Historical Society Library in Boise. As a non-Mormon, I was struck at first with the formulaic surface of the LDS ancestor biographies among the works in the collection (approximately two-thirds of the 253 biographies