Episode 252 (Transcript): Reclaiming Your Voice | A Conversation with Katie Ludlow Rich
Episode Transcript
Many thanks to listener Anne Totten 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:
KLR: And so when I became increasingly uncomfortable with women’s roles in the church and began to speak up more in relief society, my heart would pound and I would feel all this tension because I could get the vibes of how uncomfortable it made people with me directly. That even though these institutional structural things were not about my visiting teacher or my relief society president or my friends, it was perceived as such. It would become so personal and people would think that any challenge to inequality was a direct hit to them.
CW: Hello, I’m Cynthia Winward.
SH: And I’m Susan Hinkley.
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 Reclaiming Your Voice: A Conversation with Katie Ludlow Rich.
Welcome, Katie.
SH: Hello, Katie!
KLR: So happy to be here. Thank you.
CW: We are excited to have you for many different reasons, but I can’t remember where I heard you speak–on another podcast or… anyway, I just said to Susan, we have to have Katie on. She could talk about wallpaper paste. I don’t even care. Like she’s, she’s so articulate. Let’s just have her come on and name the topic. And so I think that’s kind of exactly how this episode came about is you wanted to tell your story about how you reclaimed your voice. And so we’re really excited to have you on to talk about that today.
KLR: Well, thank you.
CW: Susan is going to lead the conversation today. So go ahead, Susan.
SH: Katie, would you mind starting just by giving us a short, basic kind of intro to who you are? Just so it situates us at the beginning of the conversation for our listeners.
KLR: Yeah, I am a writer and independent scholar of Mormon Women’s History, so I’m the co-writer of the book, 50 Years of Exponent II, which is an original history and selected works from the longest running independent Mormon women’s publication.
And I’m also a ghost writer and developmental editor. I live in Saratoga Springs with my husband and four children, and two dogs and a cat.
CW: Wow. Katie.
SH: Awesome.
(laughter)
CW: Kids, cats, and dogs.
KLR: Yes. Yes.
SH: I have to pause here to give a plug for the book, even though you’re not on the podcast specifically to promote the book, except I think the book will probably come up as it figures into your story.
I have to give a plug for the book because I have to tell our listeners that this book exceeded my expectations in every way. I was excited to read the book just because, you know, I have personal interest obviously in Exponent II and also you know, have known some women through the years who were part of that project.
And so I was excited to sort of read the backstory and all that. What I didn’t anticipate in the book was the essays from across the span of years from all of the women. And to me that was an amazing snapshot of the whole Mormon woman experience in my lifetime. Because if you look at 50 years, that really is–50 years is my lifetime.
SH: From the time that I was, you know, 12 years old and up. I enter young Women’s at the time that Exponent II is kind of starting.
I was looking at my own journey in very many ways. And so for women who have not known whether they would be interested in the book or not, I would say that if you are a woman, if you have been a member of the church, you’re probably gonna find something resonant in this book. And the history was also fascinating. So, anyway, loved it.
CW: That’s what I thought you were gonna actually say, Susan, is for me, the part of 50 Years of Exponent that really stood out to me because I was born in 1974, which I think is the year that Exponent II came back or right around there.
KLR: Yeah, yeah, started publishing.
CW: So for me, it was actually really interesting that the history especially, I mean the essays of course were great, but the history, I was like, I didn’t know this. And I do have to say a little plug for the book is there is a little bit of calling out of names of some famous people that I’m like, Ooh, I didn’t know this!
So, you know, we all love, we all love to spill–
SH: The Juicy Bits!
CW: Yeah. The Juicy Bits, the spilled tea. So, yeah. Anyway.
KLR: Yeah, yeah. Claudia Bushman was Exponent’s founding editor. So they started in Boston in 1974. And you know, there were some general authorities who challenged her to step down as the wife of the current Boston Stake President. And she has been very dignified in how she’s told the story over the years and doesn’t name all the names usually.
SH: Right, right.
KLR: And you know, is very careful in how she talks about it. And we do name the names.
CW: Uh huh!!
SH: Loved it. So that’s our plug for the book.
KLR: Thank you.
SH: Now I wanna get to our plug for you [00:05:00] because I’m really interested in hearing.
Okay. So the journey of reclaiming your voice is pretty much the story of this podcast, right, Cynthia?
CW: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
SH: And also the story of a lot of our listeners based on the interactions that we have with them, they’re in this process of figuring out that they have a voice and how to use it and how to use it effectively, and how it connects them to their own spiritual authority.
So voice isn’t really just the things that you say out loud, it’s everything behind those things also. And so it really is a huge and important part of what we’ve been doing here for the past six years. And so when you said you wanted to come on and talk about reclaiming your voice, I thought there really is no conversation that is more central to At Last She Said It than that. And so I wanna start the conversation today, wherever you would like to start the conversation. How does this story begin for you?
KLR: Yeah. Well first I’ll just say I also love your book and how that helped me really see how all of the things you were just talking about are so central to your project.
SH: Thank you.
KLR: I’ve listened to many episodes over the years, but seeing it in print, all of the care you put into claiming voice, in integrity, in intuition and, and all of these pieces. It just it was really inspiring.
SH: Well, thank you. Voice is really tricky for Latter-day Saint Women. You know, I mean, voice is tricky for women generally, right?
You know, women, there’s a lot politically and you know, every other way attached to women’s voices. So this is not a new problem. It’s not something invented by our church, but it’s deeply ingrained in women’s experiences in our church.
KLR: Yes.
SH: And so within that context, go ahead and start your story.
KLR: So I’ll start, I guess let’s go to January, 2020 when I was getting ready to submit my first guest post to the Exponent II blog. And so I was a stay at home mom with four little kids at this time, and I had never published a blog post or written a personal essay or anything that related to my faith.
SH: Right.
KLR: On social media though, in those previous years leading up to that 2020, I had started to really wrestle with women’s place in the church and with patriarchy and ways that I saw women’s voices being limited. And one of those places was how few women speak in general conference. I think still, through 2025, it’s on average 12% of general conference–of any given semi-annual conference–is women speaking. Still.
SH: That’s actually higher than I thought because it seems to me like recently–
CW: (laughter)
SH: No, it’s because we’ve been getting like three speakers for the past few conferences. I don’t know how many men speak at general conference, but… I don’t know. Okay. 12%. That’s terrible. And also I’m pleasantly surprised.
KLR: Yes. Yeah, I know.
SH: It feels like less.
CW: The bar is low.
KLR: Yes.
SH: So low.
KLR: so low.
KLR: So I had started writing open letters, so 2017, 2018, 2019, just on my personal private Facebook page. Open letters about wanting more women to speak in general conference, which at the time felt so scary. And now it feels so basic to talk out loud about that problem.
But I would get a lot of pushback. And that was from friends and family. When it’s my private Facebook page, and that is also a scary thing. But after my 2019 letter, I got a good sized letter back from a secretary from the first presidency with all of these reasons why more women didn’t speak in general conference.
And to me they felt like very basic self-imposed limitations. That the reasons why women weren’t speaking all had to do with things set up by the general authorities.
SH: Right.
KLR: It was very obvious structural institutional limitations, and all of them were things that could be overcome. And so I wrote a blog post in response to that letter, about the reasons that were given and why those did not need to remain as reasons why. This was a very changeable, solvable problem in order to get more women speaking in general conference. And so we could learn from, you know, a broader range of the spiritual experiences of all of our leaders–their insights and voices.
SH: Right.
KLR: So I wrote this blog post and I had been reading Exponent II’s blog since about 2008, but writing for a Mormon feminist space that might potentially give any room for any criticism, that felt very scary to me. And so I hovered over the send button and I [00:10:00] was just filled with anxiety and I eventually did, you know, press send.
It was accepted. It goes up on the blog, but then the night before it was gonna go live, I did not sleep. I was just—my body just—I was just filled with so much anxiety as though writing about this, this thing that seems so basic that there should be more women speaking in general conference, right? That that could like shake the foundations of the earth,
SH: right? Wow.
KLR: And I started to really question why was I feeling like this? Because what happened after it went live? Nothing.
SH: Right?
KLR: Not a lot. I mean, what happened really was that I received across Facebook and the blog itself, a few dozen supportive comments of women saying, ‘Oh, thank you so much for sharing that. I’ve had such similar thoughts.’ or ‘Me too, I think all of these things as well,’ and I was like, okay, so this thing that ended up feeling so terrifying, that felt so scary to do was not—like the results were just—it stayed within this very supportive community.
And for the first time, I had people responding to me, particularly with community, and so it started making me think a lot about like, why was that so scary? To share anything like that? And I started kind of analyzing what were these self-imposed limiting beliefs that I had about what would happen if I spoke and if I shared my voice.
And there were lots of different reasons, and some of it was about this history that we have of Mormon women, Mormon feminist women being excommunicated from the church for speaking out—a long history.
SH: Right.
KLR: Many women. And so, you know, there’s this idea—and excommunication for different beliefs is a particularly violent act because within our theology, it cuts people off from their families for eternity.
SH: Right.
KLR: Right. It cuts you off from these covenants that we’re taught are essential for our families to be together in the next life. And so it’s particularly violent to excommunicate someone for having a belief like we need greater support for victims of abuse and protection against abuse. You know? To cut someone off for writing about that is particularly violent—So there’s fear that comes from that. And then there’s also this— Are you guys familiar with that concept of enmeshment within LDS culture?
SH/CW: Yes, Absolutely.
KLR: So how family and church become enmeshed in a way where a threat to one feels like a threat to the other.
SH: Right.
KLR: And so I was scared about how speaking publicly about something like that would impact my marriage and my relationship with extended family. Because anything that feels like potentially a threat to somebody’s stance in the church can feel like a threat to the family unless you have a healthy differentiation and relationships that are able to un-inmesh and you know, have closeness and community where you don’t expect to be completely the same.
SH: Mm. Can I ask you a follow up question right here?
KLR: Yeah.
SH: I’m so interested that you, as a result of a social media posts, received a communication from Church headquarters. So are you a super public person who had a huge following? Like how did that happen for you? And then also didn’t that ratchet up your anxiety over posting this because like Cynthia and I have never had any communication from church headquarters like that.
CW: Zero!
SH: Right. So I would maybe have expected it for us just because we’ve been at this so publicly for so long. I’m just wondering… and then I’m also wondering, and maybe this is part of answering the same question: is your extended family, were they all in the church? Like, was your husband on the same page? Maybe some of those relationship dynamics.
KLR: So that’s a great question, and I should clarify that. I would post these open letters on Facebook, but then print it and mail it to Church headquarters.
CW: Oooh!
SH: Oh, okay.
KLR: That’s why they heard. I was, I’m still not such a big influencer that they would probably ever see something I wrote on my personal Facebook page.
SH: Mm, okay.
KLR: So yeah, I would mail it and it felt…that didn’t feel as scary as posting things publicly for friends and family to give me direct criticism.
CW: Interesting.
SH: Yeah. That’s telling.
KLR: And I did get that. I got, you know, dozens of comments from people being like, you know, challenging my worthiness if I were to even ask this question.
CW: Of course!
SH: Right! We know what the responses were.
(laughter)
KLR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And within my extended family, my, you know, my dad, my in-laws [00:15:00] and quite a few siblings-in-law or step siblings or extended family were active church members, cousins, aunts, uncles. You know, I was raised in the church, multi-generational, you know, pioneer heritage.
And so while there were several family members who had left the church, including several of my brothers (I have five brothers) and I think at the time when all this started, four of them had left the church.
SH: Okay.
KLR: So it wasn’t as though there was no one in my family who could understand having questions like this, right?
But there were enough people who I was not trying to challenge my relationship with—you know, a cousin or an aunt or any in-laws—but wanting to look at structural inequality in the church and ask for change.
SH: Right.
KLR: So it wasn’t about the people I loved in my life that I was seeing this problem and wanting to see change, but understanding these dynamics of enmeshment mean that it can feel like the same thing.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Yeah.
KLR: Even though it’s not. So there’s all these scripts that were given. I also, you know, there’s these layers of scripts of being a member missionary and being an example. And because there were family members who had left the church, there were people—when I started, like from the time I was in high school on—who would talk to me, that I had to be the example that brought these family members back.
CW: Ooh.
SH: Okay. Yeah.
KLR: And so these layers of, I can’t even talk about my own beliefs and negative experiences, or I’m risking other people’s eternal salvation. And that is a lot of pressure to put on someone.
SH: Yes.
CW: Was that explicit? That you would—
KLR: Yes.
CW: Oh, okay.
KLR: Seminary teachers and some extended family members who would tell me, ‘you will be the reason this person comes back.’
CW: Oh my gosh.
KLR: And then there was the more general, like every member a missionary idea that was not so specific, but, you know, those pressures. But then there was also some personal trauma living in my body about writing. And this relates to my mom and, you know, I grew up with a mom who—she passed away about 13 years ago.
But she had borderline personality disorder and had some challenges where she could be unpredictable and we could have some punishments that were harsh, harsher than you would expect. And so, when I was about 12, there was an evening where I was watching TV and she came out and I could hear that she was very upset with me and she’s holding this journal that I had, that she’d given me this—it was like a chicken soup for the Teenage Soul Prompt Journal.
SH: Okay? Okay.
KLR: And I had written some things that were somewhat negative about her in there, and she got very, very upset about what I wrote in this journal and kicked me out of the house at 9:00 PM on a Sunday.
SH: Wow.
KLR: Barefoot. And I walked two miles to my dad’s house, and as I got to his street, she was there in the minivan waiting for me.
And that led to hours of yelling and structuring punishments. And, that was the first of three major incidents where my mom would invade things that were just privately written for me that led to really big consequences and that lived within my body.
SH: Sure.
KLR: These moments of trauma where it wasn’t even just what I said publicly, but what I thought and wrote privately for myself, that was at risk.
SH: Right.
CW: Wow. Wow, wow, wow.
KLR: And so there’s these layers and layers and layers to where—so that was right before entering seventh grade. In seventh grade, I won a little school poetry contest where I got to have a poem published in the school anthology, and I had them publish it under ‘anonymous.’ Because this little poem—I didn’t want my mom to see my name on it. And it wasn’t about her, but it became a lot of self-monitoring.
And because of the environment I grew in also, you know, all of this hypervigilance around me, of picking up on how people are perceiving me or kind of the temperature of the room and yeah. You know, monitoring myself or changing myself.
And so, when I became increasingly uncomfortable with women’s roles in the church and began to speak up more in relief society, my heart would pound and I would feel all this tension because I could, I could get the vibes of how uncomfortable it made people with me directly.
CW: Sure, sure.
KLR: That even though these institutional structural things were not about my visiting teacher or my relief society president or my friends, [00:20:00] it was perceived as such. It would become so personal and people would think that any challenge to inequality was a direct hit to them.
(music)
KLR: So all of those things were living within my body. And so as I hovered to press send, can I say something that is really pretty basic? That there are self-imposed limitations keeping women from speaking more in general conference. And really self-evident and the huge differences of male versus female speakers in general conference like. That is not hard to verify as just fact. Yeah. That there’s a massive disparity and there has been forever, since the start of general conference, and it has technically gotten better. ‘cause there were many years where there were zero female speakers.
SH: Right, right.
KLR: And so 12% is actually growth.
CW: (laughter)
SH: Right.
KLR: Huge growth from zero to 12. Huge growth.
SH: Right?
KLR: Yeah. But it’s just verifiable fact that there’s this massive disparity and yet even identifying that, talking about that and asking for change, that could feel terrifying.
KLR: So, you know that post goes live and all I get is supportive comments from this Exponent Mormon feminist community and it taught me that I can survive speaking.
But that was, you know, just my first experience. I then, you know, I started doing more guest posts, and then at the end of 2020, so December, 2020, I was invited to become a perma blogger. And so January, 2021 started as a regular monthly blogger. And for months, you know, before each post would go live, that same kind of thing, this anxiety, this inability to sleep, the getting up at 3:00 AM and like pushing around a few words, like, ‘is this right?’ Like there was like, I had intense, intense anxiety and perfectionism, but it became kind of this exposure therapy that as I kept doing it and got more experience and more comfortable, now a post can go live. And I don’t, don’t even think about it after I press ‘schedule,’ like it’s gonna be fine.
SH: Okay.
KLR: But that took time. And so at the same time though, as I submitted that first guest post, I was doing research at home to start my, like my—I had kind of this five-year plan to enter a PhD program. I wanted to become a historian. And it was time for when my youngest was gonna enter first grade, this idea that I had of when I would start the PhD.
KLR: And so I started doing research at home to hopefully then lead to going to a conference or maybe publishing an article to become a writing sample to enter. So that was kinda my motivation for starting.
And so I was a history—I did a history undergrad and an English master’s at BYU and right before I started the master’s I was a research assistant with Bill Hartley at BYU about the Mormon Trail.
And so I spent a summer going through trail diaries and researching things related to the Mormon trail, and that had really deepened my interest in Mormon history and Mormon women’s history.
CW: I bet.
KLR: And so in the meantime, I had been, you know, keeping up on big major books and articles that came out to a degree and kind of keeping a tab a little bit on and reading Mormon history books, but decided that I wanted to start kind of researching and writing to then try and enter that space professionally.
SH: Right.
KLR: So I had this argument and it really relates to, you know, it’s, it doesn’t seem surprising that I start gaining confidence and reclaiming my own voice as I’m researching Mormon women and studying their voice and making arguments to try and recenter them in their own history.
So the end of 2020, the same week I got my invitation to become a perma blogger at Exponent III got an acceptance to present at the Mormon History Association Conference in 2021 with my first entrance back into anything like that, any academic space since I had finished my master’s in 2011. So the presentation there became my article, “The Shadow Succession Crisis: Challenging the claim that Brigham Young disbanded the Relief Society in 1845.”
So at that conference, you know, I spent at that point, some years researching this piece where there was this, this claim that was just solidly accepted in Mormon studies at the time that in March of 1845—we’re like nine months out post martyrdom—And that Brigham Young says in these, these meetings of all men, like, ‘don’t let the women meet again until I say so. What are relief societies good for? They relieve us of our best men. They relieve us of Joseph and Hiram.’
SH:Right.
KLR: And he’s really [00:25:00] blaming Emma and the women for the things that happened because when they had last met ayear prior, it was all about the conflict around polygamy.
SH: Yep. Okay.
KLR: But the, the challenge though that I saw was that we were basing this claim off things Brigham said to men without any evidence that the women heard what he said or changed their behavior, and that they had stopped meeting a full year before his comments, like their final meetings of the Relief Society were a full year before he said anything.
We have no evidence any of them heard what he said. And when we take that claim, we start focusing on what the man with the most power said to groups of all men. Without looking at what the women did. Did it change anything they thought or did or believed? And if not, then what did they do at that time?
And so recentering this succession crisis era, post martyrdom of Joseph Smith, and looking, what did the women do? How were they engaging with institutional power? How were they influencing the trajectory of the church? And so that was the argument I was working on at this time as I start gaining more confidence in using my own voice and in speaking and in being able to look at my own intuition and not just the messages that have been told to me about why I should not be speaking,
So those felt very intertwined. But then it was at that conference, the Mormon History Association conference in 2021, which was held at the Utah Olympic Park in Park City, Utah. And it’s this amazing facility where there are like these slopes where year round people can do ski jumps. So like, they would go down the hill and like go into either a pool of water or into like these big inflatable things. And so they would go do their aerial tricks or whatever. A really cool space. And so it’s like against this backdrop of people doing those jumps, that you have all these Mormon history nerds meeting and you know, having all these different sessions and presentations.
And it was my first time entering a space like that where people would ask me like, ‘Hey, what are, what are you here to talk about?’ And I would give like the, the very shortest version and they would be. Fascinated.
And I’m like, that is not what happens in my normal life. As like this, like private researcher, I can info dump all day about this issue, but like people, you know, so to find people who have these shared interests was amazing. But then across the courtyard, I see Claudia and Richard Bushman, of course both influential historians.
CW: Right.
KLR: Richard Bushman, best known for his book, Rough Stone Rolling about Joseph Smith.
SH: Oh, yes. Yeah.
KLR: Claudia was, you know, the founding editor of Exponent II and I was this new perma blogger.
And I knew how important that space had been for me in learning how to be able to speak publicly about even really pretty simple and basic things. But how empowering it felt. And then I see Claudia—she just turned 90 last year, so she’s probably like 91 now. And so I see her and I’m like, the founding editor is still here and still showing up to these spaces and the 50th anniversary of Exponent is coming up.
And I’m like, we should do something. And I’m like, maybe, maybe I can do something. And at that conference I met Heather Sendal, who was a fellow blogger at Exponent II.
I knew her from these online spaces, but she had several decades in the organization. So she had been with Exponent since like 1996 when she lived in Boston for a long time. She had been an associate editor of the Printed Quarterly magazine. She’d been president of the board. She was currently serving as historian on the board and as a blogger. And I start thinking like, what, what could a project look like? What, what could I do? And I’m looking at this timeframe of what was still this hypothetical time of entering a PhD program. I’m like, I have a few years until then, I’m like, maybe, maybe we do a book project. I’m talking to my friend Rachel Hunt Steenblik who was living in China at the time, but she was an editor of the book Mormon Feminism. Which was a really iconic book of essays.
And I’m like, how did you guys do this and what could a project look like? And getting ideas from her. And then I meet up with Heather and pitched to her this idea. I’m like, I wanna write a history of Exponent and selected works. And she’s like, she had just started a new master’s program to go back and be a marriage and family therapist. So it was like the month that she started and she’s like, I’m in.
SH: Really?
CW: Wow!
KLR: Yes. Yeah. Like just, she’s like, absolutely. And she had thought for years that she wanted to be part of writing Exponent history, and she’d even [00:30:00] done a book proposal at one point, but then COVID disrupted that particular plan, right?
And a bunch of things got in the way. And she’s like, okay, yep. I will partner with you. And she knew all of the people and had, you know, all of these relationships and experience and personal knowledge and became, you know, a mentor and a guide to help go do this process. And so we then started—we both live in Utah County—and Exponent started sending their papers. Not just the print magazine or what was then a quarterly newspaper, but like. Minutes and financial records and letters and things like that to the BYU archives. So it’s now the L. Tom Perry Special Collections that houses—
CW: The irony!
SH: Yeah, the irony. Beautiful.
KLR: And the irony being, for the audience doesn’t know, that it was new Apostle L. Tom Perry who flew out and met with Exponent and was like, ‘I’m not here to tell you to shut down. That will be up to you. I’m here to caution you. Except for Claudia—Claudia, you need to step down.’
SH: ‘We know you’ll do the right thing…’ (laughter)
KLR: So it’s, yeah, the L. Tom Perry Special Collections that houses the Exponent II records. And so there were decades of all of these like minutes and financial records and, and letters and all of these things to go through. So we had access to that. We did dozens of oral history interviews, and then I went through, and I mean, Heather had been reading for all these years, but I went through and read the entire backlog. I think by the time we published the book, there were 163 issues of the print quarterly that I read through.
CW: Wow.
KLR: And then thousands of blog posts. So the blog had started in January, 2006. And so there was, you know, just this immense database of Mormon feminist thought that we had available to us. And so it was, you know, from all of those sources and all of that research that we did the book.
(music)
KLR: And in that experience, I started learning from kind of these feminist foremothers. And these Mormon women who had so many similar reasons to question their own voice and their own legitimacy and, and to kind of learn from the process they went through to reclaim their voices.
SH: Wow.
KLR: So, a forerunner to the quarterly paper Exponent II, before they started doing that project, it was like in 1970 that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich started gathering friends in Mormon women in the Boston area to talk about the intersection of their lives with the women’s movement that was, you know, just huge then right across the country. But, you know, Boston was a hotspot.
And so they’re talking about all of these issues of, you know, birth control and family planning, and women in the workplace, or staying at home, or, you know, all of these things. And not just the big topics that women were talking about everywhere, but how it particularly intersected with their lives as Mormon women.
And they would get together and fight, and the women talk about like how awful these meetings were. Like how they would just leave with headaches and just exhausted and there’d be tears. You know, there’s all of these things, all these women, like as they’re exploring their frustrations, but it was really powerful for them to have a place where they can go talk about all of this.
SH: Right.
KLR: Because Church Relief Society was not the place to. Deeply wrestle with a lot of those things.
CW: Nope!
KLR: But to have a place where they could. And Claudia is a very project oriented person, and so she was like, we gotta take this energy and, and put it somewhere. And so she pitched to Eugene England (he was editor of Dialogue of Journal Mormon Thought) to do the women’s issue. And they did the 1971 women’s issue, which is called The Pink Issue because it has this bright magenta cover.
And so The Pink Issue was the first—kind of arguably the first published Mormon feminist document in modern Mormonism.
So Claudia has this moment where church historian Leonard Arrington, who was the head of the church history department at the time, he agrees to contribute an essay to The Pink Issue.
CW: Oh!
KLR: And he writes to Claudia and she’s like—and from the archives, we have this letter from Claudia—where she’s like,
“The letter had a strange effect on me, rather than cheering me that we had such able and willing friends, I was terribly depressed that we are all so ignorant. He should obviously be doing the issue. We are turning out Ladies’ Home Dialogue by contrast. How can a bunch of housewives caught between laundry and the dishes turn out anything of literary value?”
SH/CW: Hmm.
KLR: She’s like, we have this professional historian who does this amazing work and like, what are, what are we doing here? But they move forward and they do the issue. And then in the [00:35:00] introduction—After doing all of this and assembling all of this work, Claudia has kind of changed her tune and she says,
“We offer our issue of Ladies’ Home Dialogue without apology. For women eager to do something unique and meaningful, but bogged down with the minutia of everyday life, the pattern of another woman who has surmounted the same obstacles has real worth.
Women have always been valued in the church, but not encouraged to say much. We hope that now and in the future, more ladies will speak out and what is more, be heard.”
To have all those insecurities about like I, I mean, she was a PhD student at the time. She was a mother of six, I believe. Mother of six and starting a PhD program as she’s working on this, you know, has a deep interest in history and, you know, has a very intellectual mind. But just knows that she needs projects that she, she’s very much a mom and she’s supportive of her husband and his career and his church service. But she has a mind and she has things to say and things to think about and, and understands the importance and starts like, you know, providing these opportunities for other women to claim their own voice.
And one of the contributors to The Pink Issue was a woman named Greta Peterson, who her husband was president of the University of Utah for a while.
SH: Right.
KLR: And she in Utah started this thing, the Children’s Justice Center, which was a huge thing to kind of help children who were caught in the legal process of a court case, maybe because of abuse or for custody issues, help give them support and resources and improve their treatment in the justice system. And so, you know, she ended up going on to do all kinds of big things, but when she—she passed away just a couple years ago—when she wrote her memoir, she talked about writing this just a few page personal essay in The Pink Issue as one of the hardest and most important things she did in her life.
SH: Wow.
KLR: She was a mom of, I think she had three kids and she was deeply involved in her community and in the church at the time, but she said of all the things that she had done at that point, this was categorically different.
CW: Mm-hmm.
KLR: That writing something… like everything else she had ever done had been for and because of others. This time she had created an offering that was truly her own for and because of her.
CW: I can see how this is resonating with you, Katie, right? It’s paralleling your life and your timeline that you’ve made for yourself. That that’s, that’s, there’s nothing new. Right, Susan? Like Mormon women’s lives, like there’s,
KLR: yeah.
CW: Oh, I love it.
SH: Right.
KLR: That writing allowed her to know her own mind. And I think writing has this incredible power, and this isn’t about literary brilliance. You don’t have to be a good or impressive writer to allow writing to let you know your own mind. And it doesn’t even have to be public, even just writing personally in your own journal. And what I’ve started noticing recently is like almost everything that I read that gives advice or like wants to be, encourage you to, to have progress and change encourages writing about something. Like I read a book last month called Financial Feminist by Tory Dunlap. And she’s talking about the messages that women get about money and that men get about money and women are told primarily to scrimp and save and be frugal even though they’re given the task to be the primary, like, purchasers for the home. Like women are, have the most marketing directed towards them and carry the burden. Disproportionately for buying.
CW: Yes.
KLR: All the household stuff, the groceries, the cleaning supplies, the birthday presents, the clothes for the whole family. Like disproportionately it’s on women and the marketing is disproportionately towards women, but women are shamed for being spenders. And they’re told, you know, to be frugal and to save. While men messaging about money towards men is about earning more, negotiating, and investing to learn to like harness the power of compound interest. So very different messages. Women are shamed about spending and told not to spend while men are told to go earn more and gain more economic power in the world.
And so she encourages writing about like, what are your first lessons about money? What are your first experiences about money? Can you identify the beliefs that you have about money? And if you can identify what you believe about money, can you change that belief to then change your action and over time become financially empowered?
And you know, so, so that’s just one example, but I’m noticing so many examples as I’m reading that, that how many times they encourage you to either pause and reflect or specifically write, and it could be bullet points, and it could be just paragraphs, it could be nothing that you ever expect to share with anyone else.
CW: [00:40:00] Yeah.
KLR: But by writing, you can identify a belief that you have, and the beliefs that you have are what you live according to. And that belief may not actually be true. And then that becomes a self-limiting belief,
SH: Right?
KLR: So if I believe my responsibility is just to save money, then I don’t even start thinking about the options to earn money. The possibilities, the paths, the small scale, big scale. I don’t even start thinking about that because all I think. My job is to be frugal and save money.
So, you know, there’s so many ways that like I was living under all of these limiting beliefs about what would happen if I wrote and if I shared my voice.
And if I spoke out, and by writing, I was able to start identifying some of those. And then in this project started seeing that this was not rare and unique. I’m not that special actually turns out like
CW: Yeah. Like we were saying, there’s nothing new!
KLR: Yes!
SH: Exactly. We find this out all the time.
KLR: I am like, we all keep discovering the same things.
CW: Oh yeah.
KLR: And then we feel alone in these discoveries if we don’t know about how this experience is the same that Greta Peterson was having the same that Claudia Bushman was having. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich was one of the, also one of the founding mothers of Exponent II. And has gone on to great fame as a Pulitzer Prize winning historian. And coined the term, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history,’ but before that, she was a Mormon mom of five kids who was working on these small projects with her friends and her husband got a job at the University of New Hampshire. And so that’s when they left Boston and they go to New Hampshire.
And so she’s, what the benefit that we gain from that is we know some of the things about that time period because she, Laurel, and Claudia started writing letters to each other. Letters that made it into the archive. And if they had both been in Boston, they probably just would’ve been having in-person conversations. But these got saved. So Laurel enters this part-time PhD history program at the University of New Hampshire. She’s a faculty wife. She gets a discount and she can kind of go slowly at her own pace. And she writes her first academic article, which was called “Virtuous Women found: New England Ministerial Literature 1668 to 1735.”
So she’s, she’s looking at these, these archival documents of, of women who are, you know, whether it’s funeral texts like things said about them at their funerals or if it’s things about their faith in order to enter their churches. And the article she wrote got accepted by American Quarterly, which was a major academic journal.
And you know, they wanted a few revisions, but they accept it. And she writes to Claudia, she’s like
“I got my ‘virtuous women’ paper back from American Quarterly. They like it, but want revisions. Instead of being elated, I was depressed for two days. I think it has something to do with being pregnant and realizing I am ambitious.”
SH: Wow.
CW: Yeah.
KLR: Getting this acceptance and knowing that she can write something that could be accepted by a major academic journal as she’s pregnant with her fifth and final child at the time. And knowing that she’s a Mormon mother of about to be five.
Can I, can I be both? Can I be a scholar?
And it was from that first article that, that saying, ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’ comes from. And that was plucked from that article.
CW: Really?
KLR: Yeah.
SH: When?
KLR Years later, when she won the Pulitzer.
SH: Right, right.
KLR: And a journalist goes back and is looking at her work and, and plucks that. And now it is, you know, it’s on anything you can think of.
SH: Bumper stickers! Uh huh.
KLR: a friend visited The Bahamas and bought me a shot glass with a variation of that phrase as well. With like a pirate Jolly Roger, and a little uncredited quote from Laurel.
SH: Love it.
KLR: So can you be both? Can you dare to be both?
And so I am experiencing this thing of learning to write in a community that will hold that. And hold that space for the complexity.
(music)
KLR: You know, we have these impulses that if anything is a threat to community, it can feel like a threat to our life.
SH: Right, right.
KLR: You know, the anxiety, the fear, all of that, that we may experience like that is a survival.
SH: Yeah. I think that’s hardwired.
KLR: It’s hardwired. Yes. And so I was experiencing the ability to learn that I can write and I can use my voice, and I can not only survive, [00:45:00] but I can find community. That I could find people who shared my same thoughts and questions, or were interested in how I thought differently than them. It wasn’t that I had to think and say the same.
SH: Yeah,
KLR: It was that there was space for difference.
SH: Space to think.
KLR: Space to think, yeah. Space to be different.
And, and that’s one of the things that we found that Heather and I found in, in looking at the history of Exponent II from the very beginning, they prioritized community over ideological purity. That they weren’t expecting women to perform a particular version of Mormonism. That you could be very faithful, believing, supportive of a wide variety of things the church did and, and share that along with something else. Or you could question or challenge or talk about something that was hurtful. It could be, it could be either that, you know, this whole spectrum of belief.
And then they also weren’t enforcing this purity test on your feminism. And so like one of my favorite examples is in a very early issue on the same page, they have these two articles. One being a woman, talking about how she thought that when women have young children, the righteous and correct thing for them to do is for that period of time, stay at home with those children. And that maybe you do something different after, but that she believed that that was the right thing.
And, you know, daycare and women in the workplace was a huge topic at the time. And so this woman is responding from her own perspective that she’s like, you know, women can do all kinds of things, but in that window of time, that’s what they should be doing. And right underneath that was an article that Judy Dushku, one of the founding mothers, interviewed a woman who was a mother and a doctor, and her husband was also a professional.
And they had a partnership model in their marriage where they did hire a nanny daycare for their young kids, but they both felt called to the work that they were gonna do. And so they divided responsibilities at home and that that really worked for them and that they felt like that was the right thing for them. And so they weren’t telling women you need to stay at home, which is messages that they were hearing at church.
CW: Right.
KLR: But they were saying you can. They weren’t telling women, ‘you have to go work in the workplace, that’s the only right way.’ They were letting women experience a spectrum of thought and to express a spectrum of thought. And they were gonna put it there on the same page and not say, not mock one or the other perspective.
CW: Yeah. Not give any caveats about this, that, or the other.
KLR: Yeah.
SH: Right.
KLR: There’s different ways of being a woman and of believing and of living your faith and making room for difference while being in community where you can speak and share and be heard.
CW: I, I’m just sitting here thinking like, in the church organization, have we gotten that much better at being able to display a full spectrum of womanhood? I don’t know that I totally know the answer to that. ‘cause I’m kind of maybe in my own little echo chamber now here with my community. Right? Which is mostly like feminist women where that spectrum really is celebrated.
KLR: Yeah.
CW: Just like, just like what you’re describing, Katie, it’s just so essential. I just. I don’t know. The wheels are turning. The wheels are turning
SH: Well, and I, I hear that and I’m thinking, have we made progress in our ability to hold that kind of space? Because that’s a really difficult kind of space to hold in community, in I think any community that, that would be like the church that has ideological ‘purity tests.’ We have very specific bars, right, for the things that we believe and ascent to and defend. And so I think that we have the kind of community where that kind of space is particularly difficult to defend.
And I say that as a result of having to defend that space myself. For years now, not just with At Last She Said It, you know, we hold an a, a difficult position with At Last She Said It because the people who are too far on this side are mad at us. And the people who are too far on this side are mad at us.
There are a lot of people that we aren’t making happy by trying to allow a bigger spectrum of thought. And I’m just thinking of your typical relief society room. Could those articles exist side by side in your typical relief society room in 2026? I think it would be an atypical relief society where that would be the case.
KLR: We have become so uncomfortable with discomfort.
CW: Oh yes.
KLR: We can’t tolerate discomfort. [00:50:00]
SH: Yes! No! ‘It’s of the adversary,’ right? I mean, it’s contention that we specifically label that way—If you’re feeling those kinds of feelings, then you need to question what you’re doing or what you are thinking or saying, right?
KLR: Yeah. That we kind of teach people what does it mean to feel the spirit and it means only this small section of positive warm in the chest. Everything is peaceful.
SH: Right.
KLR: Rather than the spirit can also be what drives you to challenge inequality.
SH: Right.
KLR: The spirit can be what allows you to feel the anger to recognize harm. That the spirit can drive you to change your life, to change your activities for the betterment of yourself, your family, the world, and that. Anything that’s gonna push you towards change is going to be uncomfortable.
SH: Right. Right.
KLR: And that if we can’t listen to somebody who does or believes differently from us without being overly fearful of difference.
SH: Yeah.
KLR: Like we, we can’t grow.
SH: No, I think discomfort is the growth seed. I think that in our years of conversations, we’ve been able to identify that as a very common denominator for anyone on the larger spiritual journey. And if you are in a religious community that can’t tolerate discomfort, there can’t be individual growth.
KLR: Yeah. And you can’t be in real community either.
SH: Right. Because then no one is showing up whole. Right? I mean, discomfort is, we’re human beings and discomfort is part of that. Discomfort and rubbing up against each other, right? Ideological difference, all of those kinds of things. That’s inherent in the human condition. And so to deny some of our most common human parts, our most common humanness in a shared religious space, really results in spiritual stunting in my opinion and in my personal experience.
KLR: Yeah. Yeah.
SH: I, I didn’t feel allowed to grow.
KLR: Yeah.
SH: In my voice or in my soul. Like, either, either place. Both of those things kind of went underground. You have to keep a lid on that stuff. That stuff is ‘dangerous.’
KLR: Yeah. A lot of the power of writing can be considering, like seeing what do I already believe? And considering are there any other ways of thinking?
SH: Right.
KLR: Are there other ways of being, even if I don’t choose something different?
CW: Yes, exactly.
KLR: Can I challenge my own assumptions?
SH: Yes. How can you choose if you don’t know what the options are? Right? Is it a choice if you haven’t considered the larger options? And I think sometimes when you write, you don’t really know that you did think about something until it comes out on the page and then you say, oh, I didn’t even know that was in there.
KLR: Yeah.
CW: So I have a question, Katie. ‘cause it sounds like from you hitting send on that first Exponent article to kind of getting this project where you’re going to be writing the history of the Exponent, it doesn’t sound like there’s a very big timeframe there, right?
KLR: Mm-hmm.
CW: A couple of years, maybe two or three years. I’m wondering, do you think that’s pretty common for most women? Like once they start using their voice, they take off down that runway? Do you find sometimes women dip their toe in the water, they might hit publish on something, they might get their hands slapped, they pull back in? I’m just wondering how common do you think your story is —not so much about obviously, you know, writing a book. ‘cause that’s a big project. But just like once you use your voice, you’re not willing to go back in the closet.
KLR: Right. Yeah. I do think that there’s power from that. I don’t think it’s uncommon for people to keep gaining in confidence and in gaining in self-trust. Whatever that may look like. Not everyone is trying to be a historian and. You know, all of that. And so that’s not, it’s not gonna be…everyone’s gonna have their own path and what that self-confidence and self-trust comes to look like. I do think that that is a trajectory that is common though, like in a, in a continuing to piece by piece.
For me though, I think part of what helped me continue and keep speaking was, honestly, even a different self-limiting belief: that I believed I was preparing to become a student. And that felt like a safe thing for me to do next. I wasn’t trying to say ‘I am a historian. I am a scholar.’ It was, ‘I am getting ready to apply to become a student.’
And it was in this process of these years. So, you know, that first presentation led to additional presentations and, you know, there’s, there’s so many people who have helped me along the way who have been very [00:55:00] generous with their time and their knowledge and their expertise to help me improve my work and to mentor me. And so it’s not as though I just step out and I do all of this on my own with no help. But, with this community of Mormon studies being as supportive as they’ve been, I was able to publish an academic article that then became an award-winning article.
I was able to publish this book with Heather—Signature Books published us—and it went on to win several awards. And I pivoted as I got closer to the time when—so my youngest is now in second grade, and I didn’t end up applying for the PhD program at that time because turns out my family life is actually still quite demanding.
SH: Right.
KLR: You know, when I have this little baby and I’m thinking, oh, when she enters first grade, life as a mom is gonna be so different. And you know, it is in some ways, but also with all of the combination of reasons of why we feel that it’s the right choice for us to stay in the house that we’re in right now.
And while my husband’s doing certain things with his career, I thought for a while that PhD was the only option. And then along the way I found, oh, I can actually be a writer and a scholar without that. And while there’s still part of me that hopes that there are conditions in the future when I can go do that, in the meantime, I am now a working writer and editor. I’m a ghost writer, and I’m a developmental editor and an independent scholar.
That allowing myself to think I was prepared to become a student actually allowed me to start doing things that developed me, and then I had to like pivot to think, oh, I already am.
SH: Right. Right.
CW: There you go.
SH: I was just gonna say, this process changed the way you think about yourself, it sounds like.
KLR: Yeah. That there were all kinds of ideas of what is okay for me to dream of. What is okay for me to think of, what is okay for me to claim as what I am. I hear from so many people who are like, ‘well, I’m not a writer’ because they’re not, like, a New York Times bestseller or something.
But it’s like, but if you are writing privately, if you’re writing for a small Mormon feminist blog, if you are writing fiction on your own, like all of these, if you are writing, you are a writer. And you can claim that.
And then you can take that next step. ‘I’m a researcher and I do this.’ ‘And I do that.’ Because you do it.
CW: I wonder if this is a particular problem for women, whereas like men, if they write, they say, ‘I am a writer.’ I mean, I’m, you know, being pretty binary there. I don’t, I don’t wanna make it sound like all men are confident and all women are not. But just as you’re saying that, I’m thinking of these workout programs that I do, and the people that write these programs, she says, ‘you know, these are for women who are athletes.’ And she says, women are always saying to her, including me. I’m like, I’m not an athlete. And she’s like, ‘if you get up at 6:00 AM and you go lift weights, you’re an athlete.’
You know what I mean? We’re so quick to say, ‘oh, well that’s not me. I’m not a real writer, I’m not a real athlete,’ whatever. And maybe we just need to start redefining what a writer is, or an athlete, or whatever it is, you know, we all seem to get that imposter syndrome or just diminishing our own talents.
SH: Cynthia, how many times have I heard you say to me and to others, I’m not a writer. Like so many times! You went on a book tour last year! You’re a writer!
CW: I know. Do as I say, not as I do. So true. Caught red-handed!
SH: Exhibit A. Exhibit A, my friend.
CW: Yes. Yes.
KLR: I have your book right here on my shelf! I’m pretty sure you’re a writer.
CW: I need to work on that. Thank you, Susan, for calling me out. So true.
SH: Ah, you’re welcome. Katie, I have two questions I wanna ask you as we are coming to the end of our time.
KLR: Yeah.
SH: Is it okay if we move to those now?
KLR: Sure.
SH: Okay. The first one is, do you have any advice that might help other women who are struggling to embrace their own voice and sort of move into being more comfortable sharing that with the world?
KLR: Begin before you’re ready. Don’t wait until you feel that you can confidently proclaim, ‘I am a writer, I am a scholar, I am this,’ like, begin before you are ready because there’s no way to become confident and to develop your intuition and develop your voice if you don’t start.
SH: Hit send with that shaky finger, right?
CW: Oh, yeah!
KLR: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
CW: That’s good advice.
SH: That is really good advice. Okay. [01:00:00] Before I move to our final question, which I think you probably know what it is, is there anything else that you want to share?
KLR: So, I guess one thing, I mean, we have talked about pieces of Exponent history here that, you know, it started in 1974, but it has changed over time in the sense that it has broadened its mission in that it’s now for women and gender minorities.
And that it started with a quarterly publication, but then in 1983 it added an annual retreat in New England. It happens in New Hampshire every year, every fall. And there is a blog, you know. It started with, you know, a paper that they would literally have to like cut and paste everything into columns in order to then send to the printer and whatever.
Like, you know, it has grown over time and it has expanded and it’s more accessible and there’s more space for anyone who wants to write, we accept guest posts on the blog. And it can be a great, really low barrier to entryway to practice using your voice.
CW: Yeah.
SH: Beautiful.
KLR: That if you just want to, to practice writing about something, we have, you know, lots of guest posts.
We love, we love guest posts. So there’s opportunities within this community to practice using your voice. And to have a space that is supportive that wants to hear from you.
SH: Hmm. Wonderful. Thank you for that. Cynthia, do you wanna bring us home with the last question?
CW: Yes. We love to ask our guests, what do you know, Katie Ludlow Rich? What is one thing that you know right now, today I
KLR: That I can pivot.
CW: Ooh!
KLR: That I can start out on a course and have beliefs about what that course can mean. And as I learn more, I can change what I do. I can pivot and find the next right thing for me.
SH: Hmm. I love that answer.
CW: You just brought me to tears. Seriously, that is so gorgeous.
SH: That is a great answer. And particularly for women, because I think for some reason, I mean, I can only speak for women because I am one, right? I can’t speak for men, but I think women very often consider themselves to be on one path. And the idea that that can be a branching and a changing path that can require you to pivot at any time and that you are allowed to pivot, I think that is so deeply empowering for women.
KLR: yeah.
CW: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
SH: Amazing. Thank you. Thank you so much, Katie. This has been a delight.
KLR: Thank you. I’ve, I’ve looked forward to this for so long, and I just really appreciate the work that you both do and the community that you build. And I have heard, I mean, over the years as I’ve been working in this space, I hear so often from women who are listening to your podcasts or reading your essays and how it gives them permission to think and feel in ways that they didn’t think they had permission to do. And so I just, you know, really appreciate what you are doing and the space you’re building.
CW: Thank you.
SH: Thank you. That means a lot.
Voicemail 1: Hello, Cynthia and Susan. I’ve been listening to your most recent podcast episode about women in authority, and the analogy comes to my mind as I am thinking over some of the experiences I’ve had in callings over the years. It’s as if this power and authority is water, and rather than bringing, you know, a pitcher, or a hose, or whatever it is that my capacity actually is, to the table, the person in authority over me is saying, ‘you can pick between the blue sippy cup or the yellow sippy cup.’
And I’m trying to get their acknowledgement that the choice being offered is infantilizing and doesn’t actually allow me to develop my talents and my abilities and really participate as an adult human. And my feeling is I just wanna push both of the sippy cups back their way and say, no thank you. I will take my capacity somewhere where I can actually make a difference, where I can actually develop my talents and abilities, where I can actually be trusted that if the water spills, I can clean it up and hat’s what it feels like.
It feels like often we’re being protected from any real growth or any real participation in the church context.
Voicemail 2: Hi Cynthia and Susan. I just finished listening to episode 246, “What Women Don’t Get: Part Two.” I actually listened to it twice today. I had to listen to it again. I felt so validated to hear you saying out loud, all these thoughts that have been swirling in my head. Questions about women in priesthood as I’ve tried to study it for years now, the language doesn’t make sense. Do we have it? Do we not have it? Is it really just the Holy Ghost? Is it guidance from God? I definitely feel God’s [01:05:00] power in my life leading me and helping me parent and fulfill callings and just make good choices.
And is that priesthood power? It is power of God being shared with me. It just seems to me that really when you come down to the wire, the only difference in our church is that men are ordained to responsibilities with titles and then they get to make the final decisions. But I think we all are being led with the same power of God, in and out of our church.
And so the whole, ‘do we get ordained to the priesthood’ bit has gotten a little bit ridiculous and our argument of ‘our church is the only one that has priesthood’ kind of is falling flat on its face to be honest. Thanks for all you do.
Voicemail 3: Hi Cynthia and Susan, I just finished episode 246, “What Women Don’t Get: Part Two” and I was activated. That’s probably an understatement. But the timing of the talk that you mentioned by Elder Oaks 2014 when they started talking about how priesthood power is something that women “have” already, which was always a surprise to us. The timing of that talk is very suspicious. A Google search showed me it was in given in April, 2014. Another quick Google search showed me that Kate Kelly of the Ordained Women movement was excommunicated a mere few weeks after that talk was given. So the timing is not coincidental. That talk and the beginning of the word salad rhetoric, meaninglessness of ‘women have priesthood power’ was right then at that moment in time when they were really trying to just stamp out any kind of women’s movement, rising up, demanding equality.
And we’ve been living in the word salad for the last 10 years, and it’s just sad. It’s maddening. I want women to wake up, exactly like your title, what women just don’t get. And just to say that it was an awesome episode. Thank you so much for it. Thanks for all you do.
KLR: Sorry, my dog. We’re probably getting a delivery so my dogs are barking.
CW: (laughter) Gotta love the dogs. At least cats are quiet, right?
SH: Yeah, cats have other problems.
(outro music)
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