This Music Monday highlights a song our 19th-century Mormon feminist foremothers sang, “Woman ‘Rise,” written by L. L. Greene Richards. The suffragist anthem was often sung in Relief Society. It was also featured in the Utah Woman’s Suffrage Songbook and in the Young Women’s Journal, which became the official publication of the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and was published monthly from 1889 until 1929.
Embedded in the otherwise empowering song is a notion that was prevalent both in the early LDS Church and Christianity more generally, namely, that women somehow continue to be punished for Eve’s transgression in the garden. Logically, such a notion should never have had a place in Mormonism. If we believe, as the Second Article of Faith asserts, “that men will be punished for their own sins and not for Adam’s transgression,“ then it follows that women should not be punished for Eve’s. Like many of our Mormon foremothers, I look forward to the day when there will be full gender equality in the church and our communities.
Woman ‘Rise” is sung to the tune of the familiar hymn “Hope of Israel.”
Woman ‘Rise
Freedom’s daughter, rouse from slumber;
See, the curtains are withdrawn,
Which so long they mind hath shrouded,
Lo! thy day begins to dawn.Chorus
Woman, ‘rise! thy penance o’er,
Sit thou in the dust no more;
Seize the scepter, hold the van,
Equal with they brother, man.Truth and virtue be they motto,
Temperance, liberty and peace;
Light shall shine and darkness vanish,
Love shall reign, oppression cease.Chorus
Woman, ‘rise! thy penance o’er,
Sit thou in the dust no more;
Seize the scepter, hold the van,
Equal with they brother, man.First to fall ‘mid Eden’s bowers,
Through long suffering worthy proved,
With the foremost claim thy pardon,
When earth’s curse shall be removed.Chorus
Woman, ‘rise! thy penance o’er,
Sit thou in the dust no more;
Seize the scepter, hold the van,
Equal with they brother, man.