Episode 208 (Transcript): Patriarchy 101 | A Conversation with Amy McPhie Allebest

Episode Transcript

Many thanks to listener, Adrianna Colon, 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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TEASER INTRO WITH MUSIC–

AA: Men don't just have easy lives. And I'll say they don't. That's true. Men do not just have easy lives and women have hard lives because of patriarchy. Men have all kinds of hardship in their lives. It also doesn't mean that all men have positions of power or leadership. And you can even see this in the church, right?

Like the leadership structure of patriarchy always is: a small group of men who have authority over all the other men for various reasons, men are excluded, from positions of leadership for many reasons, but it excludes all women because they are women.

INTRO–

CW: Hello, I am Cynthia Winward.

SH: And I'm Susan Hinckley.

CW: And this is At Last She Said It. We are women of faith discussing complicated things, and the title of today's episode is Patriarchy 101, a conversation with Amy McPhie Allebest. Welcome, Amy.

SH: Hi, Amy.

AA: Hey, I'm so excited to be here.

CW: Oh, we are so excited to have you today.

SH: I mean about time, right, Cynthia?

CW: Right. How is it our podcasty paths have not crossed yet when our topics cross paths all the time, I feel like.

AA: They do.

CW: I have to admit, Amy, sometimes when I listen to your podcast, I'm like, well, dang it, I want to have that person on my podcast now. But really, I would just want to talk about the same things that you did with them.

So there's kind of no point really in doing that. So that just shows me how much I love your work. So thank you so much for being you. And the topics that you put out there. Why don't you go ahead? I mean, the title is probably pretty obvious, but why don't you go ahead and give our listeners just a quick snapshot of who you are and what brings you to this topic of patriarchy 101 today.

AA: Sure. Well, I do have to say the feeling is mutual. I feel like we are always high fiving each other, like across the arena, doing the work that we're doing. Right? Really respect and admire you two. And super excited to talk today. Yes, who I am. Let's see.

I grew up in Denver most of my life. I'm the oldest of five children. That's a huge, like formative part of who I am. I love to take care of people. I grew up reading a ton and ton, a ton of books kind of just being at home, taking care of my younger siblings. There was a lot of need in my family for a lot of involvement on my part as the oldest sibling.

And so I was just home a lot, taking care of little kids and reading and doing music. So those are some formative things. I went to BYU, met my husband as a cute little 18 year old. We were both freshmen. We both went on missions, wrote to each other for three years. Got married while we were still in school, got pregnant a minute later and I graduated from BYU, which I was thrilled about, pregnant already.

And then we had four kids. We raised them mostly, kind of lived most of our adult life and raising our kids in Northern California in the Palo Alto area. My husband went to business school and I was at home with the kids for 15 years. And The church was the most important thing in my life and my family, of course, and very devout and very deeply emotionally and intellectually engaged in the church.

And at the same time, just encountered a lot of personal pain points growing up in the church that I didn't really have language for. And like many women, those started to come in to focus kind of going in waves of Oh gosh, that's getting really painful. And so I'd push it away and then it would just come in a wave again and I'd have to reckon with it, push it away.

And then finally, kind of a couple of things coincided. My kids were all in school and I was feeling a lot of intellectual longing kind of to get back into kind of the adult world. And so I kind of on a hope and a prayer applied to Stanford for a master's degree not having worked and thinking there's no way I'm gonna get into Stanford, but I kept writing all throughout while I was at home with my kids, and I just thought “Maybe my writing could get me in” and miraculously it did. I got to go to Stanford for my master's degree And right around that time that was also when I was really needing to kind of say, okay, I have to reckon with these pain points around gender inequity in the church.

And so I just started thinking about it and talking about it a lot more. I didn't really do any scholarly work, but some personal experiences cultivated in me writing an essay called “Dear Mormon Man,tell me what you would do,”

CW: Ooh and we're gonna get there.

AA: Yeah We'll get there in a minute probably if listeners do know who I am It might be because of that essay because -

CW: For sure.

AA: I published it just as an act of like, phew, I needed to get that off [00:05:00] my chest.

And I didn't think anybody would ever read it.

CW: Really?

AA: But my, Oh no, nobody knew who I was. I was just. I was just a mom and I had, I just barely started my grad work at Stanford, but I didn't have any sort of public presence. I wasn't on Instagram. I don't know. But my mission trainer, with whom I was, and she's still a dear friend of mine, she posted it in a private Facebook group that was like -

I don't remember which one it was actually, but she asked if she could publish it. I sent it to her. I'm like, I just finished an essay and I published it. Like nobody would read it, but she's like, Ooh, can I share this? And she did. And then it just kind of caught fire. So that was an interesting experience, - that was in 2016.

And then around the time that I was graduating with my master's, I just still had so many questions about patriarchy. That I decided to educate myself. There's a long story version, but I'll tell the short story version, which is I bought 20 books on how patriarchy came to be, was writing tons of notes, just really, I needed to understand who, what, why, when, where, how, all of the questions about how patriarchy developed, like taking a bird's eye view way more like kind of transcending any one religion, but just like globally.

CW: Absolutely.

AA: And a friend of mine said. As long as you're doing all of that work, you should just talk into a microphone so other people can benefit from it. And I was like, Oh, okay. Well, do you want to read the first book with me,my friend Malia Morris? And she said, Yeah, let's read it. So we both read The Chalice and the Blade, talked about it.

And she's like, we're doing a podcast, let's do this. And so that's how I started the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast, which is now also a YouTube channel. And we have, social media. So I'm just sharing what I'm learning, kind of in real time.

CW: I have to say, I really love I really appreciated your early episodes, Amy, where it was kind of like a book club where you had a good friend on with you and you kind of went through the history, right? In fact, I think it was when you talked about Mary Magdalene, I think you had spliced that back in.

AA: Yeah.

CW: Is that right?

AA: Yeah.

CW: Like you went through this chronology and then you're like whoa, gospel of Mary. And then we have to splice that back in. And anyway, it was so meaningful to me as a podcaster.

I think we were starting out at about the same time as - well to just hear another woman in this space, kind of go through the chronology of patriarchy it was a true education. So that's my spiel for listeners. If nothing else, go listen to Amy's first, I don't know Amy how many of your first episodes were like the book club kind of chronology?

AA: The whole first year was, the whole season one is chronological with, you're right, one exception which was Mary Magdalene and I, once I discovered that I was like, oh we have to put that in. It's gonna be out of order but I just made a note of it.

CW: It was gorgeous.

AA: But yeah, and I do think people do. I do have, I want to put a plug in for this because people do listen to about the first eight episodes and they're like, oh my goodness This is like these are all of my questions being answered and then sometimes people fall off and then they don't get to later in the season where we talk about women of color writing and that's for me really a tragedy and like really critical.

So I would say if listeners are, of course, like time is precious. And if you're like, oh, I don't have time to listen to all of them, do the first few and then hop back in a few later. If you're like, eh, I'm kind of bored with the early 20th century. You do need to come back in, in the 1970s and 80s when Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa are writing.Cause that's really critical to do too. Anyway.

CW: No, totally agree. And I loved your Audre Lorde episode. I was on the Provo trail and I'm just like fist bumping in the, anyway, it was so good. Thank you. Okay.

SH: And probably texting me.

CW: Probably texting Susan with the episode. You gotta listen, but anyway, this isn't about Cynthia's “aha” moments.

This is about Patriarchy 101. So actually Susan is going to lead us through our discussion today. So take it away, Susan.

SH: Well, I mostly want to listen to Amy talk to us today because we've got the expert, but this just for a little context, a little framing. This season, we have been talking about zooming out and trying to get the bird's eye view to sort of understand where a personal spiritual life, or church life, and/or where they fit in the context of everything else, right? And so we wanted to revisit patriarchy as part of that I appreciated in your introduction Amy when you used the phrase of not having language for something I feel like very often Latter Day Saints may have some vague feelings, and for some women, not so vague about the experience of patriarchy in our church, but don't have the language to really talk about it with other [00:10:00] members.

And so we were hoping to have you on today to sort of help us, give us the 101 Boot Camp Patriarchy version so that women are prepared to have these conversations. I think there are a lot of members who never think about it, men and women, actually, right, it just like never has occurred to them to think about it who maybe, misunderstand the word patriarchy and have all kinds of negative associations with it when they hear it who, just assume it's divinely appointed somehow and maybe is something unique to our church, right?

As a result of being the True church that was restored to the earth. And so there, there's all this stuff around it. We just want to untangle some of that. And when I was looking for a way into this topic, I thought about a quote I love from Beth Allison Barr. And she said this, “Patriarchy looks right because it is the historical practice of the world.”

Yeah. And so that is sort of where I want to start with framing this conversation. This is much bigger than just our church.

Right? And I wanted to, by way of introducing your work a little bit and kind of where your beginnings on this really were. I wanted to revisit “Dear Mormon Man” that you mentioned in your introduction.

Can you give our listeners a thumbnail of that piece? I'm not, I mean, there may be two people who haven't read it, right? But for those two people, and for those of us for whom it was actually years ago that this came out, can you refresh our memory a little bit about that piece and the impact that it had and sort of how it has fueled your work since?

AA: Sure. Yes.

Yeah. Like I said, I mean, these were issues that would really trouble the waters internally for me for years, but it just grew and grew. And yeah, in 2016, maybe I'll just tell how it felt, like kind of the play by play of how it felt. I was just going about my life and this very normal thing happened in my ward.

I was just kind of bulldozed in this decision that happened in the ward, but it was not it honestly was not a huge deal, but for whatever reason when it happened, like a group of men in leadership just really discounted my feedback and my - kind of my voice just wasn't heard.