Episode 175 Bonus (Transcript): Revisiting When Women Are The Problem

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener Alyssa R. for her work in transcribing this episode!

This episode can be found on any podcast app, or can be listened to here on our website as well. All the notes and resources we cited in the episode are found at this link as well:

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SH: Hi, I'm Susan Hinckley.

CW: And I'm Cynthia Winward. 

SH: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things. And the title of today's episode is Revisiting When Women Are the Problem.

This is… okay. 

CW: Moment of silence after that. 

SH: Moment of silence. This is one of those episodes where we're going to go back and take an old episode and give it a new intro. This one's a little different because we're only taking half of an old episode to look at today. So that gives us more time to rant up front, maybe? I don't know, Cynthia.

CW: Well, you just gave our listeners a clue, rant. 

SH: You'll notice on my notes, I wrote “Susan rants”. Susan rants, okay. 

CW: There's a space in here for Susan to rant. 

SH: Anyway, my apologies in advance. 

CW: Way back the original episode for this was episode 117, simply called When Women Are The Problem.And so we're revisiting this and this is a little bonus episode as we are ramping up for season eight. 

SH: It is. And that, that original episode was broken into two parts. And the first part was about women being complicit in their own marginalization. 

CW: Yeah. 

SH: And it has some great stuff in it, I think. 

CW: I think too. 

SH: When I re-listened to it, I was like, “wow, I forgot we had all this great stuff in here.” It's awesome. So if anyone is interested in hearing or revisiting women being complicit, which was the setup for the part of the conversation that we're going to use today, then I would urge you to go back and listen to episode 117.

CW: Right. 

SH: It's all on there. 

CW: It's all there. But today we're chopping it up, adding new thoughts to what's current, what's going on right now in the spring of 2024 in Mormondom. 

SH: Right, right. 

CW: I don't know. What is going on? 

SH: Well, I mean, okay, here's why we chose this episode, because the second half of it, the part we're going to address today, was talking very specifically about ways that women shut each other down.

CW: Uh-huh. 

SH: Right? And that women hold each other back. 

CW: Right. 

SH: Some of those things. And so, I don't think that I need to tell anyone why that might feel expedient in this moment but it did. That conversation felt resonant for us in what we've been experiencing the past few weeks. And so that's why we thought it was worth revisiting again in an updated context. 

CW: And for anyone who's been living under a rock, I'm guessing most people know, but for the few people that don't, right? We had the Relief Society broadcast  for the 182nd birthday of the Relief Society and then the subsequent social media brouhaha. I don't even - I don’t even know - the absolute crazy town. What happened there? Crazy town. I think in a good way, right?

SH: Mmmhmm. Mmhmm. 

CW:  How many women jumped on and women like us, Susan, I don't know. Progressive thinking, leaning women who see equality issues in the church for women jumped on and shared all their thoughts. And then… And then came the response. So first we had all of us, progressive women, feminist women, whatever, I don't want to label people, but just anyway. We were all sharing our ideas.

SH:  And that, yeah, wait, and let me stop you right there because that's when you and I jumped on and recorded an episode.

CW: Correct. 

SH: About the initial event. 

CW: Exactly. Okay. 

SH: And now you're going to say, and “then what happened?” 

CW: And then the second wave came, which was a response from the defenders. 

SH: Right. Right. 

CW: Shutting us down. And so there have been all kinds of social media posts from chaplains, from attorneys, from women who are like, “everything is perfect in the church and I have never felt undervalued and never felt unequal and never - “.  and it's like, okay, but that's not really addressing the organizational problems that we're talking about. You're talking about your own feelings and experiences and we're talking about problems with an organization. 

SH: Right, but also I feel like many of us, yes, we're highlighting problems with the organization, but we were also bringing our own feelings and experiences to it. 

CW: That's true. 

SH: And offering those. And that's where I'm going to start a little bit of my rant today. There's nothing that irritates me more than having my feelings and experiences thrown back at me. And I feel like that, like the response to this was this gigantic dustpan. Someone came in with a dustpan and broom and swept up all of the feelings and experiences that had been thrown out on the floor by women in all of this and tried to clear those away and just dump them over in the corner. That's what I feel like happened. We had the cleanup crew come in after, right?

CW: Yes. 

SH: And so that's why we're grabbing our mics again. This is a bonus episode, again, largely unscripted in the ways that our first one was. And so, our apologies for that, but just a bonus, folks, move along if you don't want to hear Cynthia and Susan unplugged. But this is our response to the response.