Introduction
1. The Uses of History
2. A Brief History of the Equal Rights Amendment
3. The Poising of Nation and Church to 1972
4. The Arguments and the Allies
5. Goals of the International Women’s Year
6. Planning Utah’s IWY Conference
7. Turmoil, June 1977
8. The National Convention
9. Utah’s Delegation
10. Anti-ERA Activism in Key States
11. Trouble in Virginia
12. Death Throes of the ERA, 1980-82
13. A Case Study
Epilogue
Illustrations
Appendices

1. Chronology: 1848-1983
2. Utah IWY Conference Schedule
3. National IWY Resolutions, 1977
4. Utah Task Force Recommendations
5. LDS First Presidency Statements on the ERA

Notes

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INTRODUCTION

This is a story which has had strange and potent intersections with my life. In June 1977, I was a young mother with three children—my blonde wonder ready to begin kindergarten in the fall and two adorable daughters who were one and two years old. Purely by coincidence, I bumped into the women's movement the day I attended the Utah International Women's Year (IWY) Conference in Salt Lake City.

For me it was a stunning, shocking, stupefying day. From the beginning, I felt as if I had stumbled, then found a precarious new balance standing on a narrow bridge with dangerous drops on either side. It was a day of confusion and chaos--women crowded into hot rooms, often outnumbering the available seats. The aisles were an obstacle course of strollers in which babies fretted in the heat or slept in sweaty exhaustion. The din of speakers trying to make themselves heard, audience members responding and talking among themselves, wailing children, and the overflow noise from other rooms was mind numbing. It was one of those days when you're confronted head-on with how much you don't know.

The noise continued to wash over me as I stepped into the balloting booth. Confused, I read over the list of resolutions on the ballot I was supposed to vote for or against, but I realized I had not even begun to think about what my position as a woman in the world should be. Again I wanted—more than anything else, it seemed—to understand what it all meant.

That moment had a profound impact on my life which I vividly, even sensorially, recall, a moment that forever marked my life—a moment of "before" and "after." I became a feminist although I did not yet know what that implied. More than a decade would pass before I could begin to say understood the women's movement and even longer before I felt it was making a difference in my own life. But for my young, naive self, that warm June day was as defining a moment as I had ever experienced.

In the twenty-five years since then, I have heard other women speak of the eleven years between 1972 and 1983 in much the same way. For many of us, it was the decade when we were students or young mothers or were undertaking our first jobs. We were still shaping our lives. Perhaps we were more alert then, or focused on what mattered—on what held out the promise of meaning—but we knew this was deeply important ever when we were not exactly sure what "this" was. Women were talking about changing the world, and we believed we could have something to do with it.

At the same time, many of my friends seemed unaffected by what was going on around us. From what I could see, their lives proceeded as if nothing was in the air, as if their lives had absolutely nothing to do with those "other lives over there." In hindsight, the disconnection is remarkable to me and I have always wondered why feminism touched only some of us, why it does not seem to matter at all to many young women today.

For me, the time evoked memories of childhood. I am the only sister in a family of three brothers and I grew up headstrong and spirited, euphemisms of course for stubborn and difficult. I had all four adjectives thrown at me in various tones of voice and confess that I usually responded in kind. My mother and I squabbled endlessly over insignificant things. Still, my parents made me feel treasured and valued. The women's movement, on the most personal level, was a sturdy reminder that we women are powerful and talented, with hearts big enough to save the world. The messages of distrust and disrespect from other quarters were simply wrong.

Fifteen years after Utah's IWY conference, I delivered a paper in October 1992 on my experiences there at the LDS Church's Brigham Young University. This paper was based on a series of interviews my students and I had conducted with women who had helped plan the IWY conference, who had attended the conference themselves, or who were delegates to the national convention. The room at BYU was packed with women, many of whom I recognized. There were several women from the LDS Relief Society general board including Aileen Clyde, my personal heroine. Most of them I did not know; and I assumed, somewhat naively, that they were there because they were interested in the story. I was wrong.

After sociologist Marie Cornwall and I had delivered our separate papers and opened the session for questions, the room exploded into bedlam, it seemed to me. Accustomed to the traditional civility of academic discourse, I was surprised and dismayed. Women in the back and at both sides stood up and shouted sneering questions and criticisms that pierced the air like spit balls. I began to feel irrelevant to this exchange that seemed in some ways to be scripted. I felt as if I were disappearing into the wall behind me, and wished I could. The anger, the division, the bitterness, and the suspicions surrounding the IWY conferences and the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) were being reenacted in front of my eyes. I found out later that many of these women had come to our session with the express purpose of disrupting it. Some had sent letters to the university president complaining about the topic and challenging the research money granted to support the research.

It would be seven years before I picked up this research again. It had proven to be a sort of hot potato each time I had touched it, and each time it had raised fresh blisters. But the story is compelling enough to draw me back again and again, demanding that I pay attention, that I find out what it had meant.

The issues seemed to be crystal clear to those in the pro and con camps. However, it is important to acknowledge the great range of responses among Mormon women. Some chose to become politically involved, join coalitions or committees, march at demonstrations, or lobby sessions of the legislatures. But far more women did nothing. The silence, which is like the apparently unruffled surface of a lake as storm wind build, is noteworthy. For thousands of Mormon women and other women throughout the country, the campaign against the ERA seemed simply irrelevant and uninteresting. They could not see its impact on their own lives which, for the most part, were contented and focused on practical tasks. The messages they heard coming from their church matched their own sense of their position in the world, particularly the Mormon world but they failed to perceive a threat and chose to not do anything at all. Why fix what was not broken?

Others faced the fight against the ERA as a sort of short-time assignment, not all that different from an assignment to show up at the church's Welfare Center for a day of canning apples or tomatoes. They supported the battle because they were asked to do so by church leaders whom they respected and, more importantly, obeyed, if called upon to do so. The church's concern about the position of women was a great comfort to them, an assurance in a world of change that they did not necessarily choose to understand or address. This was certainly true for me.

Good, faithful, intelligent women fell into both categories. Women worthy of anyone's respect, whom I greatly respect, willingly, even eagerly, accepted the church's position, supported the anti-ERA campaign or other church programs impacting the lives of women, and found ways to weave this narrative into their own personal stories or narratives that explained their lives.

Today, in many ways, the situation regarding women is less straightforward than it had been back in the 1970s. Those of us who still care about feminism inhabit a world that is seemingly indifferent. In some quarters, feminism is treated with more derision than devil worship; many others simply could not care less. Under the illusion that enough has been accomplished, that the position of women is good enough, many women and men alike seem to go about their lives without ever giving feminism a second thought.

Others are afraid to let their feminism show. As a teacher, I have heard students undercut their own positions on gender issues by prefacing their opinion with the little apology, "Now, I'm not a feminist, but ..." as if that means they would be crazy or off center if they were—that they would not be someone one could trust. At a recent conference, a middle-aged scholar prefaced her remarks with a similar disclaimer: "I don't want you to think I'm a feminist, but ..." What is it about feminism that creates such avoidance?

It has been disturbing to me, at this point midway through my life, to hear students, colleagues, even friends equivocate about women's rights. Perhaps the most damaging backlash, the result of the decade-long debate over the ERA, is the enduring stigma that still brands and dismisses the strong, bright, and articulate young women just emerging into the world. Identifying one's self as a feminist, as one did in the 1970s, can be risky business.

In 1979 Utah journalist Linda Sillitoe wrote a personal reaction to the excommunication of Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson that raised another important issue.¹ Johnson, a Mormon mother with Cache Valley roots, was the founding president of Mormons for the ERA. Sillitoe decided to title her personal, privately circulated rumination "Don't Use My Name." A strong woman herself, but thinking of her own church membership, job, and family, Sillitoe reflected on what it meant to try to purge the bitterness over the injustice she had witnessed. The title was also drawn from dozens of interviewees who expressed strong feelings on the issue but masked themselves in anonymity for fear of retaliation. Might they suffer the same fate as Johnson and other women who spoke out? Might they be shunned by their local congregations? Might they be expelled from their church as Johnson was? They were not ready to take the chance. Sillitoe called this phenomenon the "invisibility factor," an idea she felt was key to understanding the psychology that ran through the 1970s and which continues to drive some women's (and men's) reactions to feminism.

Sillitoe noted the contradiction in being invisible: "The author cannot sign [her name], and to me that is the ultimate irony: that a statement of fear, love, and immobility must remain immobile—because of fear, and love." To understand how Mormon women felt about Sonia Johnson and her excommunication, Sillitoe spent hours on the telephone. "Interestingly," she wrote, "virtually every Mormon woman I have spoken with has assessed her own vulnerability, no matter how 'closet' a feminist and/or ERA supporter she might be—and none of them have been 'Sonia Johnsons.' Many softly blamed the bishop for their reticence, either because they were such good men or such unpredictable or vindictive men, whichever. Regardless, they felt endangered by the power the bishop held over them. They felt vulnerable."

The "general ignorance of the facts surrounding Sonia's excommunication" also surprised Sillitoe, who noted the "painful polarization" that pitted ERA supporters against supporters of the church, dividing families, friends, and wards and also, for some, defining their relationship to God. Despite a level of ignorance about the ERA itself, LDS church leaders relied on the collective force of obedient members who wielded tremendous political power in several key states—a power that reflected not the actual number of resident Mormons but the church's ability and will to mobilize the faithful to express the church's position through political action.

Although Mormon critiques of the ERA often read like legal arguments, church leaders from the beginning labeled the debate a moral issue—even while focusing almost exclusively on the appropriate role of the federal government, the use of law, and the meaning of the Constitution. True for the growing troops of the Christian Right that talked of "moral issues" but based its reasoning on legal arguments, the Mormon Church was joining a larger movement sweeping the country, reacting against the social change threatening the traditions on which America stood.² The Mormon pronouncements were often prefaced by an appeal to free agency (i.e., free choice), but the implication was that a "good woman" would see only one real choice: to obey her inspired leaders and reject the ERA. The alternative was rebellion against the church or even against God and would certainly end in social and possibly ecclesiastical consequences. The result was that many ties of love and many years of conditioning tugged women in the direction these statements were intended to point them. Some feminists among the church membership were torn, feeling that theological beliefs nurtured by the church pointed them in the direction of fuller opportunities for women: the value of free agency, the ideal of eternal progression that did not accept social restrictions, woman-centered loyalty rooted in strong mother-daughter relations, and a love for the ideals of the Mormon women's Relief Society organization. But even those who moved into feminism because of the strength of their belief in Mormonism did so over daunting barriers of loneliness, agonized soul-searching, fear, and anger.

Interest in the ERA periodically resurfaces. The amendment died in 1982, but supporters continue to try to breathe life into the cause by lobbying the U.S. Congress and state legislatures. In the 1970s opponents of the ERA warned of dire consequences if it passed: co-ed bathrooms, women draftees, and the repeal of spousal support laws. Ironically, these social changes occurred without the ERA, including co-ed college dorms, women fighting beside men in Desert Storm, and alimony laws that are gender-neutral where need, contribution, and support issues are considered.

Mine is a generation that watched Billie Jean King trounce Bobby Riggs on the tennis court. Raised on Donna Reed and the Brady Bunch, we have taken notice of the subtleties of the Cosby Show as women began wearing suits to work and speaking from positions of power, expanding traditional roles to include more than tending husbands and children, to include public lives. Career opportunities, school funding, and sexual harassment became focal points of popular attention. Activists gave up on the 1970s issues of the ERA and reproductive rights—after all, Roe v. Wade was the law of the land, with access to first-trimester abortion—and turned instead to the hot-button issues of child support, protection against domestic violence, stalking, and better justice in rape cases. Sexual abuse, a devastating plague that fell unequally on girls under eighteen, was no longer shielded by the secrecy surrounding unspeakable crimes. Political action committees helped elect more women to office. Female representation in legislatures shifted significantly.

As a result of these societal shifts, some now view the ERA as a historical relic, obsolete and irrelevant. With women sitting on the Supreme Court, running companies, and playing professional sports, the ERA might seem unnecessary. But for others, federal legislation remains essential. Even as a symbol, the amendment holds great potency. From the first, ERA supporters have asked the question: How much value and respect does the United States show women?

In the late 1990s, two states, Iowa and Florida, passed amendments in their state constitutions that, for the first time, included women. The ERA was re-introduced into the Illinois and Virginia legislatures and debated by the general assembly in Missouri. While the original debate over the ERA was raging in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the time a professor of law at Columbia University but soon to become the second woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, asserted that without a federal amendment there would not be an incentive to change laws that discriminate on the basis of gender. Writing in the 1973 issue of the American Bar Association Journal, she noted that despite the passage of the Pay Equity Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, and Title IX of the Education Act, hundreds of laws at both the state and federal levels continued to discriminate according to gender.

Court cases such as Reed v. Reed (1971) and Frontiero v. Richardson (1973), which Ginsburg helped to argue, caused legislatures to reconsider laws that differentiated on the basis of gender. Soon the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that, under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, laws containing gender-based classifications must have a demonstrably rational basis. In Craig v. Boren the Court raised that standard so that gender discrimination would have to be shown to be substantially related to important governmental interests. Finally, as a Supreme Court judge, Ginsburg wrote the court's majority opinion in Virginia v. U.S. (1996), stipulating that gender-based discrimination requires an "exceedingly persuasive justification." The majority opinion struck down the barrier that had kept women from attending the formerly all-male Virginia Military Institute. Despite these advancements, gender discrimination is not as widely prohibited as discrimination based on race and ethnicity. The Fourteenth Amendment helped many but not all Americans. Without an amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing the equality of women, laws protecting women's rights could still be amended or even repealed.³

However, this book is not a treatise on the continuing need for an Equal Rights Amendment. Rather, it traces the high-voltage intersection of two national trends—feminism and the Christian Right, with a focus on Mormonism—during a vivid decade in American history.

Nationally-known African-American feminist writer bell hooks indicates how nuanced the status of women in the United States is:

Many women do not join organized resistance against sexism precisely because sexism has not meant an absolute lack of choices. They may know they are discriminated against on the basis of sex, but they do not equate this with oppression. Under capitalism, patriarchy is so structured that sexism restricts women's behavior in some realms even as freedom from limitations is allowed in other spheres. The absence of extreme restrictions leads many women to ignore the areas in which they are exploited or discriminated against; it may even lead them to imagine that no women are oppressed.⁴

The goal of feminism, according to hooks, has been to ensure that all people enjoy the same range of choices as those in the most privileged class. This can only be accomplished through a reordering of society to replace alienation, competition, and dehumanization with "intimacy, mutuality, and camaraderie."⁵

Besides the battle over the ERA, the formation by the United Nations of a commission to study the status of the world's women engendered the so-called International Women's Year and stimulated a worldwide discussion on the status of women. In the United States this included a series of statewide conferences and a climactic show-down in Houston, Texas, the country's first national conference on the status of women since the battle for suffrage two generations earlier. A survey conducted in advance of the Houston meeting by the National Organization of Women indicated that the ERA, reproductive rights, and other controversial feminist ideas would be endorsed overwhelmingly at the conference. And they were. But the conservatives, who sensed a liberal agenda, reported that they felt invalidated and excluded. In fact, the decade was one of profound division among women over issues that impacted their lives directly. The lingering effects are with us still.

Much of this turbulence fell during the administration of LDS President Spencer W. Kimball, a gentle and beloved leader, twelfth president of the American-based church of 3.2 million members worldwide at that time. The Los Angeles Times ran a feature story about him in 1974 where he attained leadership at age seventy-nine. Kimball, who was born at the end of the nineteenth century, said he felt called to counter such social ills as "the loosening of the marital bonds and juvenile delinquency." The church had always stressed the importance of the family unit in its faith structure even though the ideal family unit in the nineteenth century was polygamy. Thus, social change had affected the Mormon people in a particular way. "We try to be not of the world," President Kimball told the Times, "but it's impossible to be entirely unaffected by it. We have some broken homes, some divorces, some immoralities at times. We try to handle it." He emphasized that the LDS woman, within the family, was not a second-class citizen. "While we stress the importance of the woman's role in the family life, which is basic, we don't make them servants, and we don't force them to work, or to leave off all the other things. ... They are cultured, and in many cases they've studied." Young women, he said, were allowed to become missionaries when they turned twenty-three, compared to nineteen years of age for young men, although "they are not encouraged to do so," he acknowledged.⁶ He said he himself was married to a strong woman, Camilla Eyring Kimball, who despite her traditional lifestyle of family care, gardening, baking bread, and bottling vegetables was also well-known for her intellectual curiosity, insatiable reading, and steady accumulation of university courses.

Less than three years after the Times article, the Salt Lake Tribune published a piece headlined "BYU Women Oppose ERA, Survey Says, Men Prefer 'Pretty Faces.'" This disconcerting survey of women students at BYU revealed that 76 percent opposed the ERA but that 86 percent said they had been the victims of sexual discrimination. Shirleen Jones from Pingree, Idaho, worried about the negative side effects of the ERA. "It might take women out of the home," she said. Gretchen Pike of Pelham, New Hampshire, said: "Women belong in the family, supporting their husbands and raising their children, not going off being selfish and thinking of themselves." A poll of the men was especially telling. When asked about their ideal mate—the girl they wanted to marry—100 percent said physical attractiveness was vital. When asked, "What is the first thing you look for in a girl?" they responded variously, most emphasizing "a good figure and a pretty face," while three said "intelligence" and four said spirituality or a "strong testimony" were important. Dean Brown of Culver City, California, explained; "It is said that if given a choice between marrying an ugly girl with a good spirit or a cute girl with no spirit, marry the cute one because you can give a girl a good spirit, but you can't give an ugly girl good looks."⁷

Several years earlier, the LDS magazine for adolescents, in an article titled, "What Is a Girl Good For?" proposed that this was a question "the young woman of today asks":

One hears a lot of talk about what today's girl is good for. One sees the word in print. But opinions vary greatly. Girls are counseled to marry and have families—to fulfill the measure of their creation. But if they do, they are charged with adding to the problem of the population explosion. They are taught the same subjects as boys in school and trained to compete with them in the world of commerce. On the other hand, they are reminded that their place is in the home. What is the truth? The dichotomy can be disconcerting.⁸

In this gendered discussion, author Elaine Cannon explained:

One thing of which an LDS girl is certain is that her role in the Church and in life will always be different from that of a boy. She has not been given the priesthood. God's power is not used through her exactly as it is in men. But a girl does have a power. Hers is the power to bear children, yes, but also to love, and with heart and hand to comfort, teach, and train, to heal and care for both old and young, man, woman, and child alike, wherever her service may take her.

Thus, service rather than leadership was ultimately what a "girl is good for."

Perhaps this kind of language and imagery should not sadden me, but I confess that it does. Is not service part of being human? Should service not be what boys are good for? The evident difficulty in identifying what a "girl is good for" injures women and men alike. Women are good for everything, not because someone finds the words to tell them they are, but because it is already in them to be so. Most importantly, the discourse about the position of women in the Mormon world was argued with rhetoric which failed to satisfactorily explain the difference.

Women of my generation grew up in households with mothers whose sense of self was tied to 1950s obligations of perfect womanhood. To those of us following them, the messages by which our mothers lived seemed contradictory and even destructive. Consider, for example, Fascinating Womanhood, Helen B. Andelin's advice for the perfect woman, a book that sat on the bookshelf in our family room next to Steinbeck, Faulkner, and recordings of Mario Lanza. Like the other books, I took down Fascinating Womanhood and read it. I watched eagerly to see if my mother asked my father for help because he was "stronger." I had seen her move a piano by herself and knew she could do anything she set her mind to. But I was suspicious of her every move for a while.

The LDS Church News, published weekly, celebrated Andelin's willingness to speak out against "women's liberation" in a day when other religious women seemed reticent to challenge the more experienced public debaters of feminism. Andelin was the mother of eight children, three at BYU or on LDS missions in the 1970s. "In feel strongly that the women's lib movement will fail," she told the Church News. "Everything they stand for is against the basic role of women. They want to do away with this woman's place in the home, yet without the structure of the home, the whole nation would be weakened." She questioned feminism's position on individual freedom, which argued that wives and mothers lose freedom by choosing to be full-time care givers and homemakers. "We need woman power in the home," she asserted. "If a woman will stay in the home and make a career out of it, she has the ability as a mother to make the world a different place."⁹

Andelin said she had come across a series of booklets written in the 1920s called "The Secrets of Fascinating Womanhood," with ideas about how to manage happier marriages. She combined these insights with her own background in Mormonism and experience as a wife and mother to begin holding seminars for women. Soon her seminars were overflowing with as many as 170 eager disciples at a time, and church members clamored for her how-to advice for a happy marriage. Her resulting book, Fascinating Womanhood, fit well with other conservative attempts to protect the American family in the wake of the Cold War and with the Mormon spin on what had been called the cult of true womanhood.¹⁰ Andelin portrayed her ideal woman as one who knew how to keep her man happy by making him think he was stronger and cleverer—that she should pretend to wilt and expire in the absence of his manly protection. For many women troubled by an unfulfilled marriage or the specter of rising divorce rates, Fascinating Womanhood promised to create unbreakable bonds of domestic romance. For many other women, troubled by the deceit and manipulation they were asked to deploy, Fascinating Womanhood was asking them to compromise their integrity in the name of the family.

A student editorial appearing in December 1977 in the University of Utah's Daily Chronicle captured this failure to take women seriously. The anonymous writer, who described herself as a "Houston observer," blamed the media for failing to present the truth of the women's movement. "The media has made every attempt to make a sham of the women's movement either by reducing it to a ridiculous group of bra burning malcontents or militant man-hating tigers." She criticized the press for distinguishing between "pro-family" Utahns and anti-family feminists when the latter were equally family friendly. With convenient sound bites, society had effectively boxed up women into tight little packages that didn't leave any room for individuality, personal expression, or growth. Both sides did it.

What I offer in this book is my own vantage point in the continuing debate over the rights and responsibilities of Mormon women, a debate that is politicized, despite being conducted largely in a church setting, and one in which rhetoric has played a supremely important role. I hope my insights prove to be useful in clarifying of one position and a positive contribution to that debate.

This project has benefitted greatly from the tremendous resources found in various archives and historical libraries. Clearly, women knew this decade carried significant weight. Many knew they were making history and acting on a national stage. They kept their records. Many women gave their files to the Utah State Historical Society, the University of Utah, or Brigham Young University. Thus, an immense and thorough record of these events is readily available for research. Many of the relevant files planned for disposal by the LDS Church archives ended up at the University of Utah's Special Collections and are therefore also available for the use of researchers.

Beginning in 1992, several of my students and I interviewed women who have been a part of this story. These interviews are still in my possession on tape and in typescript, although not yet in a finalized form. They are destined to become part of the documentary record in the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. In my source notations, these are designated as part of the "IWY Project." The voices captured in these interviews lend additional power to the narrative, otherwise drawn from official documents, newspaper reports, and secondary sources; and their vivid sensorial memories add an important element to these events. It was not infrequently that my students and I sat with someone who, in remembering these painful years, allowed tears to flow unchecked while she recalled what had occurred—what she had cared about or worked for and what had changed or not changed since that time. The interviews were sponsored in part by support from the BYU Women's Research Institute and the University of Utah. They represent a balance between conservative and liberal voices, professional women and stay-at-home mothers, students and elderly women. Every attempt was made to be fair in the choice of women to interview and whose voices would contribute to this narrative. Many of the women we interviewed gave us their personal files, shared their letters and journals with us, and gave us the boxes of books, pamphlets, and papers they had saved all these years. Again, they knew these records were important, that they had helped shape history. It has been one of the rich rewards of researching this history that so many of the players are still alive, have continued to play public roles, and have reflected seriously on the significance of that decade.

The documentary record includes a huge outpouring of official publications from the LDS Church, but it has not been easy to detect the personal input of individual church leaders. Spencer Kimball, for example, made only infrequent mention of the church's campaign against the ERA in his journal.¹¹ There are almost no personal responses available from other significant players on the General Authority level. That part of the story is left for someone else to write.

As important as the events beginning in the late 1970s is the historical context for these developments, which is why nineteenth-century views of women and female activism, both nationally and within the LDS Church, are the subject of the first chapter in this book. Opponents and proponents of the ERA have both used Mormon history to prove their points. It is important to know the historical relationship of Mormon women to their church and their early participation in the women's movement, as well as how the church interpreted a woman's role and the issues that were important to both. The second chapter describes the efforts by national activists in passing an equal rights amendment beginning in the 1920s and continuing to the 1970s.

I found that, in key ways, the campaign against the ERA was a battle fought rhetorically with alternative imagery portraying the role of women, the nature of woman, and the potential impact of an equal rights amendment on the position of women in the world. Chapter 3 analyzes the rhetorical arguments, media, and discourse employed in this struggle, particularly the rhetorical stance of the Mormon Church in its anti-ERA campaign of the 1970s.

The next several chapters span the years between 1972 and 1983 and detail the campaigns, including the anti-ERA effort organized by the Special Affairs Committee of the LDS Church in Iowa, Florida, Nevada, New York, Virginia, and other key states in the ratification effort. These chapters focus as well on the mid-1970s when IWY conferences were held internationally within each participating nation and in each state of the Union. The final chapters focus on the efforts of individual Mormon women to organize in opposition to the church's official position in such organizations as Mormons for ERA (MERA); the story of MERA's most prominent leader, Sonia Johnson; and one women's group in Utah, the Alice Louise Reynolds Forum, which provided an outlet for those who were reevaluating their lives as LDS women in the wake of the decade's disturbance and the church's campaign.

Ironically, I can fully relate to both of the opposing points of view. I spent fifteen years as a "stay-at-home mother" and the next several years to the present time as a professor. My sense of a woman's life is that it is rich with choices, complex with competing pulls on her time and energy, but that it also holds out rich rewards. It is true that the LDS Church's campaign against the ERA was one of many. In important ways it mirrored the efforts of others—Protestant religious groups, conservative political action committees, and special interest organizations that first formed to fight the ERA and then transferred their attention and focus to other issues on the American political landscape. I will not anywhere in this book say that this campaign was wrong, but will instead try to understand how it worked and the impact it had on individual women's lives, the position of Utah in the context of Mormonism and Utah society, and the long-term implications of such a campaign on the women's movement more generally. In large measure, this was a war of words. But they were words that ripped apart women's lives, threatened to destroy their self-respect or dignity, and that divided women from each other in profoundly important and meaningful ways. Originally motivated by fear of change, one of many deep and weighty transformations was that women became afraid of each other. Rather than searching for common ground, this was a time when women pulled apart, believed the rhetoric of suspicion and alarm, and contributed to the dichotomies that separated feminists from more traditional women and rendered them powerless at reaching reconciliation.

It has been thirty years since the ERA was passed by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. I have heard countless women speak of that period as if it were their coming-out party. Regardless of where each woman positioned herself, it was a time of social upheaval and change. It forced Americans to examine the ways we relate to each other as men and women, our relationship to the law, the ways we build community, and our options in negotiating marriages and raising children. Many women had experiences similar to mine through events like the IWY that caused a sea of change in their lives. Set adrift, women rewrote their scripts or took decades to begin to process and consider what it had meant for them. For others, the turbulence of the change and the violence of the backlash made them cling more tightly to traditional religion and family structures as a source of stability and meaning.

The willingness of the women to share their stories made this book possible. For many, these stories were intensely personal and painful. Other women have chosen to keep their stories private and untold. For those who shared, I value their gifts and respect both the giver and the responsibility that comes with hearing. Their stories will become part of the reader's understanding as we all find our lives inextricably linked. What we women did, separately and together, impacted all of us.

Among many to whom I am indebted are first of all the staff of the University of Utah's Special Collections archives in the Marriott Library. They were particularly helpful in passing on box after box of rich materials for my perusal. They were infinitely patient as I repeatedly exclaimed:

"Can you believe this?" or "Look at this!" Much of it was really too good to believe—exactly on topic. I was deeply moved by the sense of historical significance that prompted women such as Linda Sillitoe, Sonia Johnson, Sharon Kreigher, and Kathryn MacKay to save their correspondence, the pamphlets they picked up at various demonstrations, and their personal notes. They knew the importance of this story.

Lavina Fielding Anderson's fine ethical and moral sense is evident throughout this manuscript through her editing, her friendship, and her leadership. She is an endless source of inspiration and wisdom. The Signature Books team made the final stage of the production of this book a grand ride. Ultimately, they make it happen, and they always make it excellent, rewarding, and right.

As always, my children also made this book possible. The first three were babies when this story began, and the last three are now adults, my friends and strength. It was perhaps necessary that I complete this project—despite the many disruptions and temptations to push it aside—because of these children: my two amazing sons—Jason and Patrick—my four powerful daughters—Elizabeth and her husband Mark, Rachael, Emily and Jerol, and Katelyn—and the woman my son Jason married Sharley; the woman with whom Patrick may some day make his life; grandchildren Aspen, Dylan, Kristin, the beautiful new baby girl, Stella Rose; and the others who will come. For me, the women's movement was about making a rich, full life possible for every one of us. It is a journey that is still incomplete.

4.
THE ARGUMENTS AND THE ALLIES

While the motives of its supporters may be praiseworthy, [the] ERA as a blanket attempt to help women could indeed bring them far more restraints and repressions. We fear it will even stifle many God-given feminine instincts. It would strike at the family, humankind's basic institution.

—LDS First Presidency, 1976

When the ERA passed both the House and Senate in 1972, ratification appeared to be a fait accompli. The Senate vote of 84 to 8 signaled what most saw as a deep-rooted national consensus, a natural result of the social revolutions of the 1960s. The student revolt, the push for civil rights, and the subsequent cultural revolution signaled a willingness to depart from tradition. Changes of all sorts seemed not only possible but highly desirable. Past institutions no longer had an automatic advantage. Under the leadership of Betty Friedan, the women of NOW captured the spirit of progress and advocated legal and societal changes because "women can and must participate in old and new fields of society in full equality or become permanent outsiders."¹ Moreover, NOW demanded that the Constitution work for women. "WE BELIEVE that the power of American law, and the protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution to the civil rights of all individuals, must be effectively applied and enforced to isolate and remove patterns of sex discrimination, to ensure equality of opportunity in employment and education, and equality of civil and political rights and responsibilities on behalf of women, as well as for Negroes and other deprived groups."² No one was talking about counter-revolutions. However, anyone attuned to the cyclical nature of history may have noted that momentum for the ERA coincided with the end of the exhausting, expensive, and inconclusive war in Vietnam, which should have portended a conservative backlash opposed to socio-economic reforms.

Within this broad context appear the moves and countermovi defenders and opponents of the ERA. The era's trajectory show its Congressional passage and early ease in passing state scrutiny left feminists and politicians unprepared for the conservative backlash which appeared with such fury and force that proponents were stunned—knocked off balance and left fumbling for some new strategy to maintain an equal rights agenda. But for opponents, the women's movement itself had come to be seen as a threat to their most cherished institution: the nuclear family. The ERA became the symbol of what was wrong with society. Stopping it would halt disintegration, purify moral turpitude, clarify political chaos, and redeem ill-advised legal change. In short, by rejecting feminism, according to these conservative groups, one challenged the heart of the national liberal agenda that had been gathering force since the 1950s.

At first ERA boosters reacted in a scornful and dismissive way. Rather than accept the fears raised by conservatives about unisex restrooms and decriminalization of rape and engage people in mutually respectful dialogue, liberals saw these boogeymen as too ludicrous to even deserve a response. The further entanglement in anti-ERA rhetoric topics of homosexuality and abortion indicated that for traditional women, these seemed to be part and parcel with the era's aim of allowing women the right to make their own choices. Whether such arguments were true or not was irrelevant. What was true was that this language and imagery employed by opponents revealed that traditional women felt vulnerable in having to move beyond conventional female roles and consider a wider spectrum of respectability.

One historian of the ERA commented on "the profoundly irrational beliefs" of the opponents, while at the same time ignoring the sometimes equally irrational beliefs that powered the era's proponents. She was absolutely correct in saying that these beliefs may have been "non-negotiable. Two value systems, two world views, two cultures suddenly impacted, but only one side knew it back in 1973."³ Nowhere was this description truer than for Mormonism's women as the national debate over ratification began in 1973.

Feminists pitted against homemakers, Mormons against Mormons, conservatives against liberals, heterosexual marriage against homosexual union. These dichotomies were seemingly irreconcilable. Demonized by ideas or labels that burned like cattle brands, feminism was the catch-all for modem society's woes, the scapegoat for citizens who were apprehensive about what the next change would be. Women struggled to decide for themselves who they were in the context of a new world they did not recognize and almost certainly did not trust.

The Mormon Church was not quick to engage in the battle, but was nevertheless relentless once it committed itself; for many of its women, its direction was a lifeline. The unwavering position of the church is evident in the many public speeches, articles, and circulars distributed at the time. However, only by probing this body of discourse—what it said, what it did not say, and what meanings emerged out of familiar patterns—can one understand the true underlying message.

In undertaking a rhetorical analysis of the church's arguments, the first theme of note is the identification of the ERA as a "moral issue." Equally important was the message—one lost on most outsiders—to heed the "living prophets," which meant to obey the church's leadership—the General Authorities and especially the First Presidency. The backdrop to the anti-ERA statements was the emergence of the so-called Priesthood Correlation Program, simultaneously implemented during the1970s, much to the detriment of the church's women's programs. Also of significance was an unexpected alliance between Mormonism and the Religious Right, a surprising development considering the usual theological disagreement and even hostility between Mormons and other conservative religions.

The Rhetorical Construction of ERA Arguments

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described rhetoric--that is, language, whether written, verbal, or visual—as a particular means of persuasion. Contemporary writers who study the uses of rhetoric suggest that it is "the art of manipulating the soul of the hearer through language, whether informative, persuasive, or poetic," and as "a means of so ordering discourse as to produce an effect on the listener or reader." Rhetoric is thus "called forth by the exigencies of a problem within a situation in which an audience can mediate change." Finally, it can be "the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents."⁴

Importantly, rhetoric—this particular type of carefully chosen language—is not simply communication but rather the use of language in a way to evoke a desired result. It is a premeditated act of persuasion—an attempt to mobilize one's audience in a particular direction on a particular issue. Rhetoric is contextual and therefore must adapt to changing times; and this means that by noticing shifts in rhetorical strategies, one sees, among other things, how women fit into Mormonism at various historical moments. The LDS Church's official policy statements regarding women had cultural, political, and social significance as well as profound weight in the fight against the ERA.

Suppressed gender conflicts are implicit, and ideas about government, theology, and social systems are embedded in the church's story about women—a story that has taken on mythic dimensions. The assumptions underlying church documents reveal a system of ideas about the role of women and their position in the Mormon world, the significance of their relationships with men, and the theological relation between gendered "duties" and salvation. The church's statements were written squarely within emotional norms, using familiar vocabularies, and marking boundaries between Mormon and non-Mormon thought with coded language and connotatively freighted terms. The arguments presented instructed women about how they should feel, which experiences to value, and which to shun. They portrayed the ERA as a threat to the sacral world and gave instructions on how to combat those threats. The rules and behaviors governing the everyday lives of Mormon women were situated in a cosmic battlefield of salvation and condemnation—infinitely comforting to some women seeking certainty, infinitely troubling to others who could not dismiss the questions raised by the ERA.

The central rhetorical concern on each side of the verbal battle over the ERA was its potential for change. No one doubted that the amendment would initiate seismic shifts in the cultural landscape. Supporters welcomed these promised changes for their potential to better women's lives, enhance their personal relationships, improve their ability to care for their children, and open doors to economic and professional opportunities. Opponents saw the same changes as threatening to women's worlds, destabilizing family life, and leaving women without needed economic and legal protections.

Official instructions to Mormons to eschew the women's movement in general and the Equal Rights Amendment in particular delineated the tasks and roles necessary to produce both happy and secure families and eternal salvation. Historian Vella Evans suggests that after 1970, the church "retreated deeper into the sanctity of home and motherhood while much of the rest of the nation . . . accepted expanded options for women."⁵ Apostle Thomas S. Monson linked "women's liberation" with woman's "deception," pointing to such things as "free child care" and "equal employment" as the obvious "evils of the woman's movement."⁶

Peter James Caulfield, a student of the ERA, suggests that the LDS Church was able to rhetorically exploit "some latent fears and anxieties vis-á-vis several ERA-related issues, e.g., fear of freedom, fear of physical limitations, and fear of physical danger (for women) and fear of loss of power and fear of competition (for men)." At the same time, "pro-ERA forces either underestimated or chose to ignore these same potential fears and anxieties and made [other] rhetorical choices."⁷ According to Caulfield, both pro- and anti-ERA rhetoric took advantage of an existing mindset to reinforce assumptions already held:

1. The Equal Rights Amendment represented at least a symbolic challenge to traditional sex roles, which had not only the sanction of centuries, but which crossed virtually all racial, cultural, and religious boundaries. Such a profound challenge contained, in and of itself, great potential for eliciting fear and emotional reactions in many people.

2. Anti-ERA forces accurately perceived and effectively exploited this fear, as well as nostalgia for a more stable, less confusing, safer past felt by many men and women in their audiences.

3. Pro-ERA forces . . . tended to focus their rhetoric on rational, economic arguments and to skim over, trivialize, or altogether ignore the most fear-intensive issues.⁸

How did the LDS Church build its arguments against the ERA? Its response was more specifically to the larger women's movement and the image of feminism rather than to the ERA itself. The ERA was the symbolic battleground over feminism in what Caulfield calls a "process by which secular issues become 'moral' [and] 'spiritual' concerns may be manifest, showing how authoritative discourse may define and form the official Church response [while at the same time] establishing certain constraints that the leadership feels compelled to follow, and afterwards how member response may require the leadership to reevaluate a particular issue."⁹

Identifying Moral Issues

The most important positioning strategy was the church's decision to declare the ERA a "moral issue." Without access to official minutes or personal reminiscences by church leaders, it is impossible to reconstruct the. thinking and discussion of the First Presidency, which consisted of Presidents Spencer W. Kimball, N. Eldon Tanner, and Marion G. Romney. However, it is evident from their statement of October 12, 1978, that for them, the amendment created uncertainty about the future and changing the position of women, thereby threatening the family.

How to distinguish between "moral" and "political" was a fuzzy concept. Members were not invited to participate with leaders in making these decisions. The institutional advantage was that it allowed leaders to determine what was moral without the need for consistency or justification. During the early 1960s, for instance, African-American activists attempted to convince church leaders to take a stand in favor of civil rights, but the First Presidency declined to do so until late 1963, insisting that it was a strictly political issue. President Hugh B. Brown of the church's First Presidency walked the tricky line of supporting the policy of not ordaining black men to the priesthood but also stating his conviction that discrimination on the basis of race was immoral. At the 1963 general conference he said:

We believe that all men are the children of the same God, and that it is a moral evil for any person or group of persons to deny any human being the right to gainful employment, to full educational opportunity, and to every privilege of citizenship, just as it is a moral evil to deny him the right to worship according to the dictates of his own conscience. . . . We call upon all men, everywhere, both within and outside the Church, to commit themselves to the establishment of full civil equality for all of God's children.¹⁰

Without clearly defined criteria for differentiating moral from political issues, such distinctions depended solely on the judgment of the leadership.

On numerous occasions, LDS leaders stressed that only the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—the two highest governing bodies of the church—could declare a subject to be "moral"— hence worthy of full institutional involvement. Without such a declaration, church members were counseled to use care in distinguishing between what they could do as citizens under the Constitution and what the church could do as an organization.¹¹

In the nineteenth century, Mormons participated freely in local politics with the often counterproductive habit of bloc voting, allowing a dominant position in Illinois politics in the 1840s but contributing to the assassinations of Joseph and Hyrum Smith. Abstaining from political involvement seemed less an option in nineteenth-century Utah, especially after it became apparent that most federal appointees in Utah Territory entertained considerable hostility toward the Mormon system. However the dismantling of the church's political party in 1893 as a condition for statehood and a history of bad experiences in trying to control Utah politics convinced the church that heavy handedness could be politically and socially costly. On most issues, according to political scientist and BYU professor David Magleby, the church "has remained neutral, admonishing its members to study the issues and vote according to their conscience."¹² In 1951 a member of the First Presidency said:

The Church, while reserving the right to advocate principles of good government underlying equity, justice, and liberty, the political integrity of officials, and the active participation of its members, and the fulfillment of their obligations in civic affairs, exercises no constraint on the freedom of individuals to make their own choices and affiliations. . . . Any man who makes representation to the contrary does so without authority and justification in fact.¹³

According to Magleby, the church rarely takes an official stance on candidates or political issues even though its substantial political power, particularly in Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Nevada, would allow it to significantly affect elections. In addition, the church wields significant influence through its business and corporate interests. Politically, the church "has been most visible . . . in discussions of moral issues," Magleby writes, and the church's policy on the ERA sparked what he characterizes as "significant local organizing by private Church members acting on their own accord against the amendment in Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, and Virginia. Not all Church members opposed the amendment. Some had spoken publicly in support of the amendment before the Church position was announced."¹⁴

In an instructional letter to general, regional, and local church leaders on April 1, 1974, the First Presidency of Elders Kimball, Tanner, and Romney wrote that

the Prophet Joseph Smith [founder of the LDS church] has said: "It is our duty to concentrate all our influence to make popular that which is sound and good, and unpopular that which is unsound." While exercising no constraint on the freedom of individuals to make their own choices as to political parties, candidates and issues, the Church urges its members as informed citizens of the respective countries to be actively involved in supporting candidates and issues which will protect liberty and strengthen the people who are governed. Freedom demands continuing responsibility.¹⁵

Although the presidency did not specify a particular issue in relation to this counsel, it seems likely from the context of the times that they had the Equal Rights Amendment in mind. The responsibility of which they reminded members was to be informed of current issues and sensitive to relevant counsel by church leaders. Still, the final decision about how to act, as this letter reinforced, was left to an individual's personal conscience after study, reading the scriptures, and prayer. This was the church's official policy throughout most of the 1970s.

The argument about whether the ERA was moral or political underwent significant refinement through the decade, mostly in the direction of stronger official statements responding to challenges and counterproposals from those who disagreed. On October 12, 1978, the First Presidency again wrote to the church's general, regional, and local officers—although this list did not include the female auxiliary heads at any level—specifically addressing the Equal Rights Amendment and declaring it a "moral issue." The First Presidency affirmed the church's historic respect for women and conviction that they not be discriminated against, but found that "the matter is basically a moral rather than a political issue; and because of our serious concern over these moral implications, we have spoken against ratification, and without equivocation do so again" (see Appendix D).¹⁶

The lapse of six years between Congress's passage of the ERA and this First Presidency statement meant that Mormon authorities had not rushed precipitately into the fray. Rather, they advanced step by step, gradually increasing the authoritativeness of statements and the level from which they came. At this point, however, the only level they refrained from summoning was a joint statement of the First Presidency ar Twelve Apostles or a revelatory document submitted to a general conference for canonization.

The justification for such a strong position was carefully laid out March 1980 in the church's clearest articulation of its position on the ERA. It quoted an earlier policy statement of June 29, 1979: "Strictly political matters should be left in the field of politics where they belong. However, on moral issues, the church and its members take a positive stand. Latter-day Saints must ever be alert and united in fighting any influence which tends to break down the moral and spiritual strength of the people." The church had sometimes intervened on issues affecting church members, but "the many and varied circumstances in which our Church members live . . . make it inadvisable for the Church to involve itself institutionally in every local community issue. These challenges are best responded to by members as they meet their obligations as citizens—preferably in concert with other like-minded individuals." Even more importantly, the statement asserted: "Only the First Presidency and the Twelve can declare a particular issue to be a moral issue worthy of full institutional involvement."¹⁷ This established a precedent for involvement in select issues of the church's choosing, spelled out who among the leadership had authority to make that decision, limited church involvement to matters the church deemed to be moral, and reasserted citizen action in politics.

Almost certainly for most Mormons, a First Presidency statement was authoritative on any issue, but it was also considered necessary when previous church leaders had seemed to have made contradictory pronouncements on a topic. For some Mormons, a church statement was to be weighted against ultimate principles and the individual was to decide how it squared with issues of equity and justice. But there were far fewer such Mormons. In addition, in a long history of authoritative statements from the male leadership, women were only occasionally consulted but had to live in the particular situations created by such statements.

Rhetorically, the Mormon discourse was one of cause and effect, of promise and warning, drawn from the larger national debate. Across the country, anti-ERA forces spoke with a carefully articulated point of view that warned consistently, though often vaguely, of dire negative consequences to women and the safety of their families. In the case of STOP ERA, this strategy was symbolized by the position taken by Phyllis Schlafly. The same arguments filtered down to Mormon audiences: vulnerability to a military draft (a telling issue, given the nightmare of Vietnam jungles); the destabilization of domestic relations, linked to the rising rates of divorce and illegitimate pregnancy;¹⁸ and tension between federal and state authority. Those who advanced such arguments cast themselves rhetorically as defenders of cherished values and characterized their opponents as militant, bra-burning, radical man-haters who insisted on abortion on demand.

ERA supporters tended to be less cohesive and spoke in a variety of voices ranging from intemperate to reasoned but often stressing the probable social, economic, and educational benefits of the amendment. They cited the gradual historic emergence of women from non-personhood and oppression to the present, stressed the values to children and men of a more egalitarian society, and portrayed themselves as champions of equality for all women, including women of color and the poor.

Aristotle counseled that, in structuring persuasive public speech, one should find "common places" in which to locate arguments, making them accessible and acceptable. It is not surprising that pro- and anti-ERA forces claimed a proprietary interest in domestic relations, the proper role of government, morality, and social cohesion. Caulfield identified ten themes over which women on both sides wrestled in their public discourse:

1. The nature of men and boys.
2. The nature of women and girls.
3. The structure of the family.
4. The role of religion.
5. The role of law.
6. The nature of morality.
7. The economic situation of women in relation to men.
8. What is just or unjust with regard to women and men.
9. The nature of opponents.
10. And the past, present, and future in relation to all of the above.¹⁹

For most Mormons, the living prophets had answers to all of these questions. The official statements and public addresses given by church leaders between 1976 and 1980 linked the appropriate roles of men and women, girls and boys, to God's will as manifest in human creation. Anchoring traditional Mormon ideas about the differences between male and female and the meaning of those differences in biblical tradition, men were to be protectors and wage earners while women were to be nurturers and supporters, dependent on their husbands for financial support. Boys and girls were to be trained to do and expect the same. The stability of the family, the most basic institution of society, depended on it. Divorce, homosexual marriage, and nontraditional families were proof positive of the efficacy of this point and were linked to virtually every social ill—juvenile delinquency, teenage pregnancy, poverty, and religious apostasy. In fact, religion rather than social mores or currents was the only true and legitimate authority. Those who looked to secular structures were misguided and inevitably would end up with heartache. From the official Mormon position, localized legal solutions to questions about equality best served the needs of nuclear families. What advanced the good of families, most simply, in the context of the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment was the moral good. The opponent was a gaggle of feminists, representing the fears and anticipated disasters that would follow a Constitutional amendment altering the status of women in American society.²⁰

Authority in Mormon Discourse

It is important to understand how Mormon women heard these LDS statements from various levels of the church organization over the next decade. In addition to basic scriptures—the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price—the church's general authorities are considered to be a source of modern revelation when they speak under inspiration of the Holy Spirit during semi-annual general conferences and other forums. The conventional position of faith was that such instructions are to be taken as God's word with the binding force of ancient scripture.

Throughout the 1970s, several themes running through the body of official church literature created boundaries between Mormons and the secular world, including sharper behavioral guidelines and specific responses to political situations. In 1984 sociologist brothers Gary and Gordon Shepherd published an analysis of the themes addressed in LDS general conference addresses from 1830 to 1979. The burden of church leadership, they asserted, was to "identify and articulate the sources of people's discontent, to define courses of remedial action, and to mobilize individuals to become personally committed in pursuit of a common cause." To keep the church relevant to the member's experiences, it was imperative to continue this tradition, and rhetorical persuasion attempted to create and maintain "definitions of reality which simultaneously disparage alternative definitions."²¹ Because of the belief in revelation and the nature of priesthood authority embedded in the organizational structure, such "definitions of reality" have had profound significance:

The ultimate source of Mormonism's unity and sense of uniqueness lies in its transcendent religious beliefs: the belief in its own sacred history as God's chosen people, in its own sacred community as the Kingdom of God or one true church, and in the sacred guidance of its authoritarian leadership. The fundamental task of Mormon leadership is, in fact, to preserve these beliefs.²²

The alternate waxing and waning of various rhetorical trends over time reflects tensions within the church, conflicts the leadership has addressed, and steps enjoined upon members to ensure greater strength and unity. For example, themes such as building of the Kingdom of God (or Zion) on Earth and a preoccupation with the Utopian nature of Mormon society were routine subjects during the nineteenth century. So were descriptions of doctrines and practices that distinguished Mormons from other churches, especially the second coming of Jesus Christ and millennialism. Both themes virtually disappeared after 1920, the decade when "modern Mormonism" made an accommodation to secular authority.²³ In contrast to these time-bound topics, the Shepherds found that "personal morality" has been a favorite subject of church speakers and has had an expansive meaning that includes sexual morality, family values, and decisions about lifestyles that impact the family. The changing conditions that seemed to threaten morality elicited repeated warnings to avoid risky situations, dangerous practices, and temptations from unworthy individuals. The Shepherds found that the family received its most intense emphasis during two specific time periods: 1890-1919 as Mormonism negotiated its passage out of polygamy and 1950-79. They concluded:

Today the Mormon nuclear family, rather than Zion or the Kingdom of God, appears to have become the major sociological frame of reference for conference speakers. The Mormon Church is portrayed as serving the basic needs of the family, and the family in turn is defined as the basis of the Church. Traditionally family life (in which the father is head of the house, children respect and obey their parents, and parents set a proper example for their children while inculcating the basic principles of their religious faith) is legitimated as a divine institution which must be strengthened as a bulwark against what are perceived to be the disintegrating forces and immoralities of the modern secular age.²⁴

With the termination of public support for new plural marriages in 1890, followed by Utah statehood six years later, Mormonism moved during the early twentieth century from the status of sect to that of a church. German sociologist Max Weber described a sect as a marginal religious movement whose members see themselves as functioning separate from, and in opposition to, secular society. A church, on the other hand, functions as an accommodating body.²⁵ This distinction provides insight into the relationship between religious identity and a church's response to secular society. The idea of a church as an accommodating body demonstrates how groups allot religious authority on the basis of gender. Moreover, sects typically exhibit radical departures from traditional values and mores. But as a sect changes and adapts, it becomes more of a mainstream church. So likewise "do its margins and its concepts of marginality."²⁶

In an important analogous case, sociologist Laura L. Vance in her Seventh-day Adventism in Crisis argued that during this process of moving from sect to church, the status of Adventist women shifted, but not in the direction of greater opportunities. When the Seventh-day Adventist church was organized in 1863, women initially held leadership positions and contributed significantly to the formation of community. But over the next several decades, women lost leadership positions as Adventism became less radical and more mainstream. This retreat during the same period when the women's rights movement was gathering momentum moved Adventism to the conservative end of American society where women were concerned. In short, between 1863 and the beginning of the twentieth century, Seventh-day Adventist women lost power, influence, and position, which were part of the cost of becoming a church.²⁷

Nine Major Mormon Anti-ERA Documents

Even before the Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress in May 1972, the LDS church viewed the women's movement with suspicion and attacked the proposed changes feminists were advocating, calling Mormon women back to their home responsibilities. The church took a highly conservative position with three cautious concessions. First, abortion was permissible in instances of rape or incest. Second, despite the primacy of a mother's influence, especially on preschool children, the church, after some hesitation, determined that single mothers should be employed and, as much as possible, self-sustaining. Third, the church intensified its long history of encouraging education for young women even though, as one feminist wryly remarked, it still subscribed to the "mattress theory"—that education was something to fall back on in times of need rather than as part of a life plan that combined marriage, children, and careers.

Except for these concessions, the church's position was firm. The duality of viewpoints that saw women as properly making individual choices for themselves when victimized, in need, or in aspiring for personal growth versus the limited ideal role for women influenced the debate over the ERA. However, as the issue became increasingly entrenched in church policies, programs, and doctrines, the polarization became agonizingly sharp, especially when the amendment was sent to the states for ratification.

One can best see the progression of thinking about these issues in the nine documents the church produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. In these documents, the church established its position and advertised it to the membership. These were, first, an address by Relief Society President Barbara B. Smith and an unsigned editorial in the Church News, which seemed to test the waters before the issuance of two First Presidency statements (with variations), an unsigned but lengthy pamphlet inserted in the Ensign magazine, an editorial by a church public relations director, an interview with Apostle Gordon B. Hinckley, and two addresses by church apostles.

Barbara B. Smith address, 1974

The opening salvo was fired by the smallest gun, at least in terms of constitutional authority. On December 13, 1974, only two weeks after publication of survey data showing that most Utahns favored the Equal Rights Amendment, Barbara Bradshaw Smith spoke to a large gathering of students at the LDS Institute of Religion adjacent to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Chosen to make the church's first public statement against the ERA, she called it "so broad that it is inadequate, inflexible and vague; so all-encompassing that it is non-definitive"—a quotation from the church's in-house position statement of November 1974 (see chap. 5).²⁸ According to one observer, Smith's statement was neither definitive nor bold, but one of "cautious restraint due to the fact that the amendment was up for a legislative vote in January of 1975."²⁹

Agreeing that social wrongs against women needed to be corrected, Smith cautioned that the ERA was the incorrect approach because it would "nullify all laws covering the gamut of domestic relations in such matters as financial liability of a father to support his wife and children, or the awarding of custody of children in divorce actions, which now provide favorable treatment for women." Moreover, the ERA would mandate the military draft of women and deny the right of privacy, according to her prediction. Instead of this "blanket" approach, she said, she would recommend trusting state legislatures and courts to protect women.

The rhetorical strategies in her address reflected the same approach laid out in the church's official policy the month before. It would be the pattern in church publications from that point forward. First, a mental picture "of dire consequences was suggested whereby the balance of traditional family life and the good of individual women would be disrupted. The image of women in combat was an even more frightening picture at the time. Smith focused on what were said to be structural inadequacies—that the amendment was too vague or too broad, implying that it was weakly considered. As law, it may have been well intended, but was poorly designed and based on faulty premises.³⁰ This reasonable rather than emotional appeal lent credibility to Smith's position, suggesting that she had a privileged or superior understanding of the issues.

Although the logic of having the head of the women's auxiliary speak on a woman's issue might seem unexceptional, it was highly symbolic for Mormonism. The church was situating a woman to establish the rhetorical pattern for defending traditional values and roles for women. Throughout the 1970s, Smith would play an increasingly difficult role: acknowledging the realities of women's lives, including some of their unmet needs, while representing the official church position. The mother of seven, she had never been employed outside of the home, but her extensive executive experience in church service prepared her for this leadership role. Much of what she would do during those years centered on mobilizing women who were inexperienced in political processes, unfamiliar with political issues, and generally unaware of the significance of the rhetoric or the reality behind the debate. It was a difficult position, but she managed it by taking a position of unequivocal loyalty to the official stance.

Fifteen months later, the church's next public statement appeared in the annual "women's" issue of the Ensign—the March edition, based on the Relief Society's founding in March 1842. Subtitled "Special: Women and the Church," this 1976 issue included two rhetorically significant messages. The first was from church president Spencer W Kimball, who described the "promise and potential" of the Relief Society as that of an increasing service in the home and the community. The second was an interview with Barbara Smith.

To President Smith, the Relief Society was evidence that God valued the contribution of women and had included them in his plan for the earth. "In periods of eternity when the gospel flourishes," she commented, "the women were and are organized for righteous purposes. This great Relief Society movement is a part of the restoration of all things promised by the prophets of old." Calling the Relief Society a "movement" rather than an organization or an auxiliary positioned it as parallel to the women's liberation movement, which was by itself an interesting rhetorical strategy. She defined a two-fold purpose for the movement: "compassionate service" and "programs of ongoing education."

Responding to a question about her position on the ERA, she quoted the church's position statement: the amendment was "inadequate, inflexible, and vague; so all-encompassing that it is nondefinitive." The ERA, she asserted, is "a confused step backward in time, instead of a clear stride forward into the future." Stepping out of the rhetorical stance established by the First Presidency, she captured with her own language the hope of LDS women in the face of the changes threatened by feminism. Within the Mormon context, she wished the best for women in leading lives of power, influence, and participation; but she wanted such achievements to occur within an appropriate arena as proscribed and approved by the church hierarchy and sustained by doctrine:

I will always support—as I believe the Relief Society and the Church have always done—pieces of legislation that improve and protect woman's right to development of her full potential as a contributing member of society. I want women to have social, financial, and legal rights; I want each woman to be a valued individual, creative, and with as many options as she will develop. I want to see a woman become the best woman, the best citizen, responsible and anticipating, both in her own country and in the kingdom of God, the best homemaker, the great individual she is capable of becoming. I want her to be self-confident, trained, a great participating partner in life, but I want to be sure that the bill enacted will provide for these things to happen. The Equal Rights Amendment is not the way.³¹

Rhetorically, her arguments were well suited to persuading her audience that it made good sense to oppose the amendment. Only by opposing it would they see her dream materialize of a civically active, informed homemaker who was loyal to her church, her family, and her country. How could anyone argue?

Church News editorial, 1975

When the ERA was first presented to the Utah legislature in January 1973, it failed by eighteen votes.³² Proponents marshaled forces to submit it in the January 1975 legislative session when its chances of success seemed stronger. Interestingly, the church-owned Deseret News published a poll on November 15, 1974, which asked: "Are you in favor or not in favor of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment?" Sixty-five percent said they were in favor of passage. Among LDS respondents, 63.1 percent supported the ERA.³³ The poll seemed to galvanize the LDS general authorities into action. Before the church entered the debate, the ERA had significant support in the legislature. But on January 12, 1975, when an editorial appeared in the Church News in opposition to the ERA, everything changed. This was the first in a series of statements over the next five years that would officially establish the church's opinion, lay out the arguments, and justify involvement in a political campaign because of the moral questions involved.

Beginning by referencing the organization of the Relief Society in nineteenth-century Nauvoo, Illinois, and establishing the church's position "in the forefront of those who have taught the dignified and exalted place of women," it described the church's programs to enhance women's status "as daughters of God" and its support of legislation that would "safeguard the welfare of women, the home and the family." Aligning itself with the protectionist camp, the church asserted that women over time had received "special protection and the status properly due them" including "equality of opportunity in political, civil and economic spheres."

The editorial's effect was to retroactively legitimize three statements, it quoted. These were the public positions of the immediate past president of the Relief Society, Belle Smith Spafford, the current president, Barbara B. Smith, and a secular source--the Nation's Business. Structured in a way to appeal to logic, sentiment, conviction, and loyalty, the editorial asserted that men and women are different because God made them so. "Each has his or her role. One is incomplete without the other."³⁴

It was significant that the editorial quoted a national business periodical in order to anchor the church's position. The editorial agreed with the Nation's Business that the amendment was "unnecessary, uncertain, undesirable." Continuing, the editorial further quoted: "It seems . . . highly doubtful that the people desire any such thing as 'unisex' in their law. But if five more states ratify the pending amendment, that is what the people will get."³⁵ This was an argument that, over time, would be refined, coded, and finally included in pamphlet literature, public addresses, and other more informal sources to circulate throughout the church.

Irene Fisher, head of Utahns for ERA and the League of Women Voters, reported at a press conference that four independent polls in January showed thirty-four legislators in support of the amendment, thirty-two opposed, and nine undecided.³⁶ According to Fisher, the numbers were negatively affected by the editorial in the Church News. Speaking at the same press conference, Lowell Bennion, a highly respected Mormon educator and community activist, noted with uncanny prescience that the only statement that could affect public policy was one from the First Presidency.³⁷ His intent was to offer reassurance that the church had not officially opposed the ERA. However, the LDS church was moving slowly but surely to close that loophole.

In Logan, Utah, the Herald Journal saw the church's stance as a death knell for the ERA. "The Mormon Church's attack on the Equal Rights Amendment hit the Utah Legislature like an artillery shell—scattering in all directions and killing any chance of ratification."³⁸ Straw polls just before the legislative session opened indicated that the ERA was only a few votes short of passage.³⁹ A week later, support had evaporated. Tarnished as "not only imperfect but dangerous," the amendment came before the House of Representatives only to go down, 21 to 54. Utah became the second state that week to defeat the ERA, along with Georgia.⁴⁰

First Presidency statement, 1976

It slowly became apparent that Barbara B. Smith, though the highest-ranking woman in the church, did not have sufficient authority to maintain a united front among Mormon women. On October 22, 1976, the First Presidency issued its first direct, public statement backing up Smith's efforts to identify the ERA as a moral issue, proclaim the church's opposition, and marshal members to fight ratification. Apparently vague warnings against unknown social changes had not been effective, so the statement presented a more specific goal for preserving the family: defeating the ERA. The First Presidency instructed Latter-day Saints to "join actively with other citizens who share our concerns and who are engaged in working to reject this measure on the basis of its threat to the moral climate of the future." If the ERA were ratified, the First Presidency—Elders Kimball, Tanner, and Romney—predicted, it would undoubtedly lead to further interpretations that could "demean women rather than ennoble them, and that would threaten the stability of the family which is a creation of God." Exactly how such demeaning family destabilization would occur was not spelled out, nor did the letter claim prophetic vision regarding future disintegration.

Nevertheless, the statement allowed little room for supporters to reply. The church had preempted the claim of moral guidance for the faithful, and this was sufficient for most members. Still, others looked for a sign that this was God's word and not political meddling.⁴¹ The statement first appeared in the Church News, which many Salt Lakers receive in their daily newspaper; it was then published verbatim in the December Ensign magazine, which reached the national LDS audience.

The four themes addressed by the First Presidency, which were destined to be repeated over and over again in the coming months, were that the ERA (1) strikes at the heart of the family, (2) renders social relationships ambiguous, (3) nullifies laws protecting women, and (4) ignores the natural differences between men and women. This seminal statement reads in full:

From its beginnings, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has affirmed the exalted role of woman in our society.

In 1842, when women's organizations were little known, the Prophet Joseph Smith established the women's organization of the Church, the Relief Society, as a companion body of the priesthood. The Relief Society continues to function today as a vibrant, worldwide organization aimed at strengthening motherhood and broadening women's earning and involvement in religious, compassionate, cultural, educational, and community pursuits.

In Utah, where our Church is headquartered, women received the right to vote in 1870, fifty years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution granted the right nationally.

There have been injustices for women before the law and in society generally. These we deplore.

There are additional rights to which women are entitled.

However, we firmly believe that the Equal Rights Amendment is not the answer.

While the motives of its supporters may be praiseworthy, ERA as blanket attempt to help women could indeed bring them far more restraints and repressions. We fear it will even stifle many God-given feminine instincts.

It would strike at the family, humankind's basic institution. ERA would bring ambiguity and possibly invite extensive litigation.

Passage of ERA, some legal authorities contend, could nullify many cumulated benefits to women in present statutes.

We recognize men and women as equally important before the Lord, but with differences biologically, emotionally, and in other ways.

ERA, we believe, does not recognize these differences. There are better means for giving women, and men, the rights they deserve.⁴²

The rhetorical strategy and evidence presented here would become routine during the next five years. Notice that the statement begins with credentials in women's issues in the respectable history of LDS involvement with the Relief Society, the church's female arm, which the statement says was formed to strengthen "motherhood" and extend the influence of women into the community. In citing Utah's record as one of the first states to give women the vote, the church positions itself at the center of the earlier women's movement as a champion of gender rights, claiming for itself a sort of authority to judge the appropriateness of legal issues involving social inequities. The statement establishes, as well, the church's position on the differences between men and women, asserting "God-given feminine instincts." The picture of the future if the ERA were passed is one of damaged families, cancellation of the benefits of law, and women left in precarious and vulnerable positions socially with their feminine attributes "stifled." Against this dismaying image, the unequivocal "We firmly believe the Equal Rights Amendment is not the answer" rings prophetic—words of priesthood leaders utilizing logic coupled with religious emotion and stated as an article of faith. Without question, the statement evoked a powerful response among the church's faithful.

The First Presidency's invocation of "feminine instincts" appealed not only to nature but to theology. This theme—unavoidable gender differences inviolably linked to salvation—runs through other rhetorical arguments that will be subsequently employed. Perhaps just as important in terms of the political environment was the fact that this belief marked a boundary between Mormons and outsiders. It established the church as the defender of women in the context of God's plan for them, including the right of married women to be financially supported. Feminists felt patronized, while traditionalists felt protected.

Apostle Boyd K. Packer speech, 1977

The fourth rhetorically important document appeared only a few weeks after the First Presidency statement. On January 8, 1977, Apostle Boyd K. Packer spoke to a meeting sponsored by opponents of the proposed amendment in Pocatello, Idaho.⁴³ The Church News reported the event and the Ensign published the address. Elder Packer, saying his intention was to present how he "thinks" and "feels" about the ERA, chose his language and imagery carefully. He said that "of course" the church engages in public issues that are "basically moral and spiritual. This is that kind of an issue," he said about the ERA, locating the topic within the field of the Mormon gospel. Still, most of his arguments drew on logic rather than emotion, acknowledging that there were inequalities between men and women, but reiterating that the ERA was not the means "to remedy them." He read the official statement of November 1976 in full, then added his interpretation.

Packer included an emotional strategy to attract his listeners' attention by telling the story of a child sick with the highly contagious but not serious disease of chicken pox. A neighbor family, wanting to get the inevitable over quickly, exposed their son to the sick child. Unfortunately, the first child had smallpox, not chicken pox, and the second child died. Packer warned: "How often it is that our solutions become problems."⁴⁴ He applied this to Title IX of the Education Amendment Act, one of fewer than forty words, he noted, that had nevertheless resulted in "regulations put together at sublevels in the bureaucracy [which] amounted to about 20,000 words!"⁴⁵ In much the same way, the ERA would be interpreted in ways no one could foresee, he argued.

The apostle then delineated key issues that would become central to the campaign against the ERA and the women's movement in general, some of which had already been defined: The ERA violated God-ordained differences between men and women, moved the power of interpreting the laws on sex discrimination from the states to the federal courts, and threatened the integrity of the family. Although he attempted to present these dispassionately, the same ideas would become a source of fear and anxiety over the next few years, mushrooming in importance and rhetorical power. Regardless of whether they made sense or were realistic, the arguments would become accepted as true and would be further embellished with more layers of rhetorical flourishes.

As the church's representative, Elder Packer's main objection nevertheless seemed to be that too much power would be granted the federal government. "The bigger the government becomes," he said, "the more lost we are as individuals. Somehow, always under the notion that our rights are being protected, webs are combined with threads, and threads are added to strings, and strings are fashioned into cords, and cords into ropes, and ropes into bonds."⁴⁶ He felt the gradual shift of sex discrimination cases from state to federal courts had already led the country down a rosy path and that the ERA would compound the problem with "anti-family and unisex values" that would "deprive lawmakers and government officials alike of the right by legal means to honor the vital differences in the roles of men and women."⁴⁷

This last theme was already central in the church's opposition to the ERA. "When God created male and female," he asserted, "He gave each important differences in physical attributes, in emotional composition, in family responsibility. We must protect and honor the vital differences in the roles of men and women, especially in respect to the family." The problems the ERA sought to resolve, Elder Packer said, were not in the rights of women per se but "the strength and stability of the American home—in the spiritual and moral and emotional health of families."⁴⁸

Reaffirmation by the First Presidency, 1978

The church took a different approach on May 25, 1978, when it issued a press release titled "Reaffirmation of the First Presidency's Position on ERA," which appeared in the Church News and Ensign.⁴⁹ The immediate purpose of the news release was to respond to the proposed time extension for ratification, which the church called "tampering with and an abuse of the process of amendment." It reiterated the church's position that "men and women [are] equally important before the Lord and the law," then answered three frequently asked questions. Why had the church become involved? It was because the leadership "believe ERA is a moral issue with many disturbing ramifications for women and for the family as individual members and as a whole."

What were the church's objections to the ERA? Here the news release provided an updated version of the church's 1976 statement. Resorting again to legal arguments, the church stressed that women's rights would most successfully be guaranteed "individually under appropriate specific laws." The ERA was not, according to this line of reasoning, "the proper means for achieving those rights." In fact, building on the extreme predictions that had become part of the rhetorical approach, the church foresaw a "unisex" society in which there would be "an increase in the practice of homosexual and lesbian activities, and other concepts which could alter the natural, God-given relationship of men and women."

Other themes raised against the ERA, although not particularly different from the previous church statement, included the amendment's "deceptively simple language" and how it would "strike at the family" to create "ambiguity to the family structure"—meaning the family structure wherein a man presided over wife and children. The ERA failed to recognize biological and emotional differences in men and women, the statement continued, and "could nullify many accumulated benefits to women and children" in present statutes.

The third question, apparently asked by news media, was what alternatives were desirable for women beyond being a wife and mother. In response, the church emphasized "free agency," a strategy articulated for the first time in an official statement:

Latter-day Saint women, from the beginning of the Church and continuing today, know how deeply the Church encourages them to exercise their free agency. They also know that in the Church, or in any organization or activity for that matter, free agency must be coupled with responsibility. Individual freedom without such responsibility leads to chaos. Latter-day Saint women are strongly encouraged to develop their individual talents, to broaden their learning and to expand their contributions to activities such as religious, governmental, cultural, educational, and community pursuits.

The statement concluded with the procedural argument about tampering "with and abus[ing] the process of amending the Constitution," although it provided no explanation for this extraordinary statement. More importantly, the statement linked abuse of the amendment process with the predicted social reordering if the ERA were adopted: "We express confidence that this nation is sufficiently strong and fair to be able to resolve problems of inequality and unfairness to women, or to any other group in our society, without abusing the amending process of our most basic document, the Constitution, as outlined above, and without undermining our most basic institution, the family."

Closely related to this "Reaffirmation" was a May 24,1979, First Presidency letter to the chair of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. In it, the church asserted its public position and then added some secular arguments designed to appeal to a general sense of justice. The letter offered that the ERA would "divide and polarize this nation," that "it is unfair to the interests of women," and more interestingly that it "lacks the powerful consensus of that very large majority of people in the United States." Accordingly, extension of the ratification deadline would prove to be "deeply offensive to any sense of fairness."⁵⁰ Appealing to respect for the higher public good, the church predicted that the ERA would split the country and threaten its legal foundations, privileging one faction or the other. The church drew on imagery rooted in the Federalist Papers for this argument. Fair procedures, as protected by the Constitution, should not be distorted for the benefit of a single party over the interests of the group.

Public relations editorial, 1979

Although the sixth statement holds none of the authoritative power of the earlier official statements, it indicates how persuasive the viewpoint had become. In a brief editorial appearing in the Royalton Guard, a newspaper published near Cardston, Alberta, Canada, on November 28, 1979, Randall V. Douglass, a local public communications director for the church, clarified what he said were misconceptions about the church's position. This was a week before the excommunication of Sonia Johnson on December 5. Douglass opened with a statement of the church's "profound veneration for the Constitution of the United States of America" and the importance of safeguarding one's Constitutional rights, as well as a "deep and everlasting commitment to the preservation and strengthening of the family, including its individual members." Quoting Relief Society President Barbara Smith, he wrote: "We don't oppose equal rights for women. We want women everywhere to have full social, financial and legal rights. We want each woman to be a valued individual, creative, and with many options as to how she will develop. We would like to eradicate laws and practices unfair to women and men, while still keeping laws that provide for their special needs." As Smith herself had insisted: "ERA is not a panacea for all that remains to be accomplished . . . . It would lock the U.S. Supreme Court into making decisions which might be harmful to women."

Douglass closed with a reference to suffrage, stating that Mormon women "were given the religious vote" from the first. Curiously, instead of referring to political suffrage or citing the successful battle of nineteenth-century Mormon women for voting rights, he cited voting privileges as a manifestation of church membership, a technique that nevertheless had a dual rhetorical effect. First, for the non-Mormon audience, this made the LDS Church seem liberal, as a church that had always included women in its governance; but second, for Mormon readers, it overlaid the political ballot with the ecclesiastical "vote," a perfunctory ritual lacking any real impact on church governance but with the possible implication that this was something church members should approve in the same way—by vote of confirmation, in which there is rarely a negative vote cast.⁵¹

Douglass's editorial is a good example of the power of rhetoric to present a rewritten historical consensus. In the nineteenth century, Mormon feminists like Emmeline B. Wells and Zina Diantha Huntington Young engaged in the women's movement with full confidence that they were not only fulfilling their God-given role to build a better world but that they were also contributing to the kingdom of God. Suffrage, for the nineteenth-century Mormon woman, was part of a larger design that included economic and social reforms in search of the just society. So positive and, in fact, noble was this pursuit that Eliza R. Snow called on Bathsheba Smith and others to travel throughout the church preaching the gospel of women's rights. While some Americans criticized women like Susan B. Anthony, branding them "masculine" and "crude," Mormon women admired them and fostered their friendship.

Even though Douglass could have seen the 1970s women's movement as part of this honorable religious and political heritage, he chose to appropriate the historic form by acknowledging women's ability to vote in religious congregations with men. By changing the content from personal and social betterment to defense of the home and family, this interpretation—by Douglass and by the church in its various statements—obliterated one of the chief concerns ofMormonism's foremothers: the quest for equality with men. It positioned feminism as a new development, possibly no older than the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This simplistic understanding tarnished feminism's goals as wholly sinister and evil. The small gr