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, Lorie Winder Stromberg.
Throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, independent LDS forums and publications, such as Dialogue, Sunstone, the Sunstone Symposia, Exponent II and the Mormon Women’s Forum, provided invaluable, though by their very nature limited, public platforms for the discussion of Mormon feminist issues. However, the Internet was a game changer in terms of its ability to reach a much broader audience and facilitate feminist activism through online organizing, discussion lists, blogs, and websites. Many believed its reach and transparency would also protect Mormon feminists from the excommunications and institutional retaliations of the past that tended to dampen feminist activism and led Salt Lake Tribune religion writer Peggy Fletcher Stack to ask in 2003, “Where have all the Mormon feminists gone?” (Peggy Fletcher Stack, “Where have all the Mormon feminists gone?” Salt Lake Tribune, Sunday, October 5, 2003)
What Stack overlooked in her article was that Mormon feminism was establishing itself online. The process, however, was not seamless, nor would the Internet’s scope prove to be universally effective in uniting the Mormon feminist community or protecting individual feminists from institutional reprisal. A significant split in the Mormon feminist community emerged between those who wanted more expansive opportunities for women in the Church, but stopped short of advocating for significant structural change, and those who called for full structural equality and were willing to risk institutional reprisal. Female ordination was the flashpoint.
We officially launched Ordain Women on March 17, 2013. In an essay about its birth, I wrote, “For most of us, Ordain Women began with a simple acknowledgement—I’m a Mormon, and I believe women should be ordained. This realization came long ago for some and much more recently for others. It was a bold assertion in a patriarchal church where the lay priesthood and its attendant administrative and decision-making authority were seen as a divine power bestowed only on men in the faith, enabling them to preside over church and home. The theological and practical arguments that supported such an acknowledgment had been constructed by a handful of Mormon feminists over three decades. However, a significant social movement could not coalesce around the issue of women and priesthood ordination in Mormonism until a profound shift in attitudes and expectations about gender equality emerged—one sufficient enough to create a critical dissonance between Mormon women’s lived experience and LDS cultural norms. There also had to be an effective, far-reaching social platform to facilitate communication and collaboration among enough of those troubled by the dissonance that they, through an alchemy of personalities and social networks, were compelled to confront it.”
Sites like Feminist Mormon Housewives and Exponent II provided hospitable forums to facilitate that profound shift, even when many Mormon feminists were unconvinced or afraid to consider the question of women’s ordination. There were also established platforms that helped us reach a receptive audience. When several of the well-respected Exponent bloggers responded positively to my email soliciting some of the first Ordain Women “I’m a Mormon and I believe women should be ordained” profiles, OW gained immediate credibility in the Mormon feminist community. Further, the bold sincerity of the initial profiles uploaded to our website—which now number nearly 700–combined with a reasonable, Mormon-friendly website, a carefully crafted message that had been honed during the fall of 2012 in preparing the FAQ for “All Are Alike unto God,” and a commitment to activism proved to be more compelling than even we expected. Word of Ordain Women spread rapidly throughout the Mormon blogs. The website received nearly 10,000 discrete hits in its first 24 hours.
At our first in-person action the following October, nearly 200 women and men walked with us to Temple Square to ask for admittance to the priesthood session of general conference. We were turned away, one by one, at the doors of the Tabernacle. We wore our Sunday best and waited reverently in line, while men and boys barely out of grade school were ushered past us into the session. The images were poignant. They, of course, went viral.
Over the last 40 years, my feminism has always been activist, and much of it has been devoted to advocating for women’s ordination in the LDS Church. I remain concerned about how gender inequality negatively impacts all of us and convinced that the fundamental inequality of an all-male priesthood within Mormonism is such that anything less than ordination for women is insufficient. Too, an exclusively male priesthood policy seems at odds with what I understand to be foundational to Mormonism itself, namely, the expansive belief that God does not hoard power as if it were in short supply or reserve it for an elite few but shares it liberally and makes it available to all.
I still believe Mormonism at its best can help liberate rather than subjugate women and other marginalized groups. However, it must be held accountable when it does not. Inequality cannot go unchallenged. As Mormons, we are called to a moral activism that holds us responsible for our choice either to perpetuate inequality through silence and inaction or to work vigorously for justice and equality. I see Ordain Women as collectively continuing the work for gender equality until the Church fully reflects the radical inclusiveness of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Note: Much of this material is taken from two essays I wrote for publication:
“The Birth of Ordain Women: The Personal Becomes Political,” Voices for Equality: Resurgent Mormon Feminism, Gordon Shepherd, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Gary Shepherd, eds., Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015, 3-26.
“On Agency, Advocacy and Amplification,” in Where We Must Stand: Ten Years of Feminist Mormon Housewives, Sara K. S. Hanks and Nancy Ross, eds., 2018, 300-303.
You can listen to the Sunstone presentation:
Stream here or download. For access to more of Sunstone’s 2018 Symposium, visit their website.