5 Reasons We Love the NY Times Front Page Article on Mormon Women

Today, you should be reading and sharing New York Times’ front page coverage (and extended on-line coverage, where you can add your own comments) by Laurie Goodstein and Jodi Kantor about Mormon women.

1. It puts Mormon women at the center of the Mormon story, and it puts the Mormon story at the center of American life.  Yes, everyone, that’s us—front page Sunday New York Times, and above the fold in the paper edition that lands on my driveway Sunday mornings.  Not buried in the back pages.  Not a footnote. Those are our faces in the photographs.  Those are our voices shaping the storyline.  We are the authorities. Only one man is quoted in this article—LDS Church PR head Michael Otterson—and he doesn’t materialize until its final paragraphs.  Equality is not a feeling, people.  It matters when women’s voices, perspectives, and words drive the story.  In this important respect, the NYT article is a beautiful inverse of the world of institutional Mormonism, where hymns, General Conference talks, Church meetings, even our Relief Society manuals center around male voices, faces, and perspectives. What would it be like to tell the Mormon story from our perspective, to live in a Mormon world where most of the quoted authorities are women?  Read the article.
2.  It portrays Mormon women as the ambitious, intelligent, hard-working, resilient, dedicated human beings that we are.  This is not how Mormon women have been generally represented in American media for the last 150 years.  We’ve been portrayed as victims and voiceless dupes—of polygamy, of inexorable patriarchy (Sonia Johnson and the September 6), and of bearded madmen kidnappers (Elizabeth Smart).  Not here.  In the New York Times, we are bright, world-travelling, hard working, scripture-studying women with plans to rule the globe.  Yes, our religion has issues.  Every religion has issues.  And one of our issues is that Joseph Smith told early Mormon women that he would make of them a “kingdom of priests” and set into motion some extremely powerful theology in the temple.  Early Mormon women knew this.  But then Joseph died.  And today, Mormonism still has no clear idea of what Joseph meant.  (That’s why I say “Gender equality is the great unfinished business of the Church.”)  The restoration will not be complete until we take our proper place in the kingdom. The women in this article are ready to do that.
3. Because of its balanced, respectful, and thoughtful approach, this article is worth sharing with Mormon (and non-Mormon) friends across the orthodoxy spectrum. It quotes everyone from Linda Burton to FMH’s own Lindsay Park! And in the on-line edition, it features extended quotes from voices we love, like Rosalynde Welch and Kristine Haglund. I also love the central focus on sister missionaries.  This gives the article a hopeful, future-oriented tone, while it still does not flinch from the harder edged realities of inequality in the faith.  Positive and truthful, this article is a conversation starter.
4. Mormon women of color have a significant and visible role in this story.  It’s important that any story about Mormon women not focus only on white women and our experiences.  I love the extended interview with Melissa Ovard, an Asian-American returned missionary who no longer attends church.  Her account of trying to find a spouse post-mission speaks directly to the lingering racism that quietly suffuses Mormon life—“She found that many Mormon men did not want to marry an Asian,” the Times reports—as well as to other thorny aspects of our lives, including the fact that Church policy obliges Mormon women to talk about intimate personal details with male Church leaders from the time we are young.  Ovard shoots straight and stands out.
5. It gets the missionary shift right.  Many of us who hunger for change in the Church felt in our bones that the missionary age change of October 2012 would be a truly big deal for Mormonism. Sitting that Saturday morning on the sidelines of my daughter’s soccer game, I cried over the news for an hour, for reasons I could scarcely articulate.  From what I know, Laurie Goodstein and Jodi Kantor initially did not originally plan to write about Mormon women missionaries, but eventually settled on missionaries and the age change as a central example of how younger Mormon women will have opportunities both inside and outside the Church that will shape the Church’s future, whether the Church knows what to do with us or not.

Oh, and one more reason, the New York Times gives Feminist Mormon Housewives a shout out! Thank you!

FMH folks, what did you think?  Are you sharing?  What kind of responses are you getting?