In celebration of Ordain Women’s fifth anniversary, we sponsored a panel at the 2018 Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City titled “Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Many Voices of Ordain Women.” As we look to the future and a new organizational structure that emphasizes both individual and collective, local and global activism on women’s ordination and gender equality in the Church, the panel not only drew on the past to inform a discussion of our initiatives going forward but also featured the thoughts and experiences of a number of OW executive board members and supporters who share the common vision of a more equitable religious community. The following was presented by OW executive board member, Amy Isaksen Cartwright.
There have been few moments in my life as profound as the moment we entered the grounds of Temple Square to ask for admittance to the Priesthood session of conference in April 2014. It was with a heart full of sincere desire and a hope for better days that I walked with hundreds of other women to say, “we are here, we are ready and we will let the desires of our hearts be known.”
I carried my one-year-old daughter on my back that day, partly out of necessity but mostly because I wanted to be able to share this memory with her someday. It was her birth that really propelled me into Mormon Feminism as I considered what her life would look like as she grew up in the church. I didn’t want her to learn to push down her questions about inequality. I didn’t want her to learn that her lot in life was to answer to men, to please men, to find meaning only in the baring of men’s children. I wanted her to grow up knowing that she was the presiding authority in her own life, not auxiliary to it.
That little one-year-old is now five. She is spunky, tenacious and independent. We no longer attend LDS church services but have been welcomed with open arms into our local Community of Christ congregation. Every week, she and her older brother together collect the offering during our Sunday services. She takes her duty seriously and executes it with pride. Every week I’m filled with a twinge of jealousy and a lot of relief that she has learned early that there is no corner of her life, especially her spiritual and religious life, where she cannot participate in the same duties and responsibilities as her elder brother.
A year ago, I attended a women’s retreat with that same congregation. No men were present to preside over us. We spanned in age from late-20s to early-90s. On the final day of the retreat, we held a worship service run entirely by women from the planning to the presiding to the blessing of the communion. Afterward, one of the women requested a ministration. We all gathered together around our sister. One of the women, an ordained Elder, pronounced the blessing upon her as the rest of us placed our hands on the shoulder of the woman beside us. It was an incredible moment for me—to see women openly and with the blessing of their church—doing all the duties I had only ever seen carried out by men. What struck me most was how very un-subversive it was. It was just women carrying on with their spiritual lives.
Despite having stepped away from weekly services in my LDS congregation, it is a hope for that kind of normalcy around women’s leadership and spiritual empowerment that keeps me active in Ordain Women. When I see my five-year-old daughter participating in her spiritual community to the fullest she can for her age, no bars being placed because of her sex, I hope for five-year-old me of yesterday, sitting in the pews of my LDS church on Sundays, who wonders why only boys can pass the sacrament. I hope for my nieces and nephews that they will grow up knowing that they are equal in the eyes of God and in the eyes of their church.
I continue to hope for better days.
You can listen to the Sunstone presentation:
Stream here or download. For access to more of Sunstone’s 2018 Symposium, visit their website.