Many thanks to listener Kathryn Lee for her work in transcribing this episode!
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JR: … And even having Dallin Oaks say in General Conference that when young women are dressed provocatively, they are becoming pornography to the men around them. That is hard to come back from if you are a young woman who is already growing up in the church and feeling very exposed, sexualized.
An interesting irony of modesty rhetoric is that the idea is to protect women’s sexuality, and it does that; but it also makes them hyper-aware of their sexuality and the power of that sexuality because they are cast in this role of being temptresses to men.
SH: Hello, I’m Susan Hinkley.
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 Let’s Talk About Women Leaving the Church, a conversation with Dr. Jana Reiss. Hello, Jana.
JR: Hello. Thank you for having me.
CW: Woo! Welcome.
SH: Yeah, we couldn’t be happier. I’m sure that you need no introduction for the majority of our listeners and you’ve, of course, been a guest on At Last She Said It before. But would you mind taking a pause here right at the beginning just to give a maybe short bio? Something that gives some context as to why we’re having this conversation today?
JR: Sure. So I am a senior columnist for Religion News Service. I’ve been working there since... Well, it’s been 14 years, so 2012, and I am also the co-author of a forthcoming book with Benjamin Noel, my research partner. The book is called “Leaving Mormonism,” and it’s about who leaves the LDS Church in the United States and why.
That’ll be out in March from Oxford.
SH: Okay. Cynthia’s gonna lead us through the discussion, so I’m just gonna turn it over to her right here.
CW: Well, we were so excited to have you on to talk about young women leaving Mormonism. So we want to hear all the details about that and what your research shows.
But in preparing for this episode– well, okay, this has nothing to do with necessarily the episode, but the last couple of months, I’ve been buried in the diaries of Carolyn Pearson, and what kind of-- I mean, I’ve had a lot of epiphanies. A lot. But one of the epiphanies I’ve had is, “Is what we’re seeing now, Jana, cyclical?”
Because Carolyn talks about some of these exact same things, and I just wanted to read one quick diary entry from April 26th, 1992. It’s from a conversation she had with Aileen Clyde, who was the second counselor in the General Relief Society presidency from 1990 to ‘97. And she says this: “Aileen went on to say that since 1980, the statistics for women’s attendance at church have gone down for the first time in church history.
“Not a huge jump, but consistently down. The brethren’s emphasis on getting the priesthood in a strong place has worked. The men’s statistics are up, but not the women’s. It has had a dastardly effect on the women.”
So I would assume that Aileen Clyde, as someone who was in the General Relief Society presidency, had access to that data.
Either someone did the data and passed it on to the women and said, “This is a problem,” or something... But I guess that’s my question to you to start out. Is this cyclical, Jana? Have we been here before? Do you even have access to what the data would’ve been that Aileen was referring to? I don’t know.
JR: So the short answer to the last part of your question, “Do we, as a public, have access to the church’s internal research about its members?” The answer is no.
CW: I figured...
