Yesterday, as I was tying “Dad! Tags” on bottles of Dad’s Root Beer to be distributed in my ward for Father’s Day, something occurred to me: There’s an abundance of church rhetoric that conflates womanhood with motherhood but none that similarly conflates manhood with fatherhood. A quick search on lds.org seemed to validate my impression.
Not surprisingly, Sheri L. Dew’s “Are We Not All Mothers?” immediately popped up. It remains the quintessential example of the way Mormons conflate womanhood with motherhood. “Just as worthy men were foreordained to hold the priesthood in mortality,” Dew asserts, “righteous women were endowed premortally with the privilege of motherhood. Motherhood is more than bearing children, though it is certainly that. It is the essence of who we are as women. It defines our very identity, our divine stature and nature, and the unique traits our Father gave us.”
My search confirmed that fatherhood is certainly among the many important roles men inhabit within the context of Mormonism. But there’s the essential difference: Unlike motherhood for LDS women, fatherhood—and the church rhetoric surrounding it—doesn’t circumscribe Mormon men’s ability to function in a number of other capacities.
The idea that women have motherhood and men have priesthood has been employed throughout our history as an excuse for denying women ordination and more expansive participation in our religious community. Rather than questioning the inequitable system they inherited, men and women of good will tried to make sense of it. As a result, the rhetoric surrounding motherhood became bloated in order to avoid confronting the blatant inequality of an all-male priesthood.
As we celebrate the fathers in our lives who have loved and nurtured us, perhaps it’s time as a church to examine our rigid assumptions about fatherhood and motherhood and how those assumptions affect our ability to thrive within our religious community. More often than not, I suspect we will find that many of the distinctions that divide us are ultimately unjustifiable.