Say More: At Last She Writes It
No. 7 | January 2024
What Women Don’t Get in our Church
by Cynthia Winward
Note: If you’d like to hear Cynthia read this essay, you’ll find it on At Last She Said It Episode 168, here.
As I sat in a restaurant having dinner with a friend, I lamented to her
how I wish women could have more leadership opportunities in the Church. Her reply was that she liked sleeping in on Sundays and would prefer to have her husband be the one to get up early and attend bishopric meetings instead of her. On the surface this doesn’t sound so bad.
What woman, or man, would want more responsibility? What normal person would want to attend more meetings? I am always up for less work as well, but this isn’t about a willingness to attend early church meetings. It is about women having a voice at every table. It is about the ability to affect decisions that affect women. It is about making decisions that take into account the needs and perspectives of all Latter-day saints, not just the male ones. It is about hearing and being heard, but just as important, it’s about seeing women in charge. It is important to see women lead, not just leading women and children, but all members.
1 Corinthians 12:21 reads, “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” Yet it very much feels like women are told, “we have no need of you in leadership.”
When I talk to Latter-day Saint women who are happy with an all-male clergy, they advise me to listen to this certain talk, or that certain Youtube video, by this or that female church member. They advise me to read this book about priesthood, or that podcast by a woman who so eloquently explains how amazing and forward-thinking we are as a church towards our women—as if my disappointment is a matter of not knowing all the facts rather than the disappointment in those facts. I have thought about the status of women in our church for decades, have they?
Spoiler: if you have to explain equality then it doesn’t exist. Equality would be measurable, factual, and obvious.
Flip the narrative and see how often we have Latter-day Saint men speak to other LDS men about their equality. Do men go on podcasts, write books, and give speeches about their equality? If that sounds silly, it should. A man’s contributions to leadership in the church are obvious. We would never have to convince men through talks, conferences, and podcasts that they’re as needed as women, yet that’s exactly what we do when we try to convince women that they have full equality in the church. Spoiler: if you have to explain equality then it doesn’t exist. Equality would be measurable, factual, and obvious.
In many other conservative Christian denominations they refer to an all-male clergy as complementarianism. There have been some Christians who want to go back to calling it what it is called biblically: patriarchy. I find it interesting that in other Christian churches they tried to soften the derogatory nature of a patriarchal system by calling it complementarianism whereas in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have never had a problem with using derivatives of the word ‘patriarchy.' The word is riddled throughout our ordinances, callings, and our organizational hierarchy. We have no qualms about labeling our organizational hierarchy as being male-led. In The Making of Biblical Womanhood, by Beth Allison Barr, she says:
“Instead of being a point of pride for Christians, shouldn't the historical continuity of a practice that has caused women to fare much worse than men for thousands of years cause concern? Shouldn't Christians, who are called to be different from the world, treat women differently? What if patriarchy isn't divinely ordained but is a result of human sin?”
In an article by Jana Riess, It’s Good for Girls to Have Clergywomen, Study Shows, she says:
“Research has determined “that having women clergy makes a significant impact on the lives of girls. Girls who had direct examples of clergywomen in childhood grow up with higher self-esteem, better employment, and more education than girls who did not.”
If history shows that patriarchy is bad for women, and data shows that girls and women fare better when they can see themselves at every level of leadership in our churches, schools, and societies, then why do Latter-day Saint women and men continue to cling to old ideas that deny history and data?
In a famous speech defending the current status quo for women in the church, a female speaker asks: “'What do we (LDS) women get?' Answer: knowledge, power, revelation, endowment…..We get everything our Father in Heaven has to offer.”
Yes, we get every blessing, but do we get every opportunity? Do we get to use those ‘blessings’ in our wards and stakes? To quote the musical Hamilton, are we in the room where it happens? Where decisions are made? In our church do women make even one decision that can’t be overruled by a man? If the late supreme court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was right, that women do belong in all places where decisions are made, then why do we uphold a system where women are most definitely not in those places?
…it is not wrong for some LDS women today to want a female bishop or even for a five-year old girl to want to pass the sacrament someday.
Telling a woman ‘what she does get’ is like telling women in the 1950s they got every blessing of a career through their father or husband. She was blessed with food, clothing and a home. (Of course we know not all women were provided monetary blessings through men in their life but it’s the best example I could come up with!) Women had limited benefits and opportunities in professions that society allowed for them, such as secretaries and teachers. Of course some women were happy with societal limitations for careers but it wasn’t wrong for some women to want other professions, to serve in politics, and to lead companies. Likewise, it is not wrong for some LDS women today to want a female bishop or even for a five-year old girl to want to pass the sacrament someday.
In that same question of asking women, ‘what do we get?’, I would like to list what Latter-day Saint women don’t get.
Let’s start with the obvious list where women and girls are ineligible due to ordination: Women do not get to serve as a bishop, bishopric counselor, patriarch, stake president, stake counselor, high councilor, temple president, temple sealer, district president, area authority, General Authority, Apostle, or Prophet.
Now to the ever larger list of duties and callings that ‘women don’t get’ despite ordination NOT being requisite:
Girls do not get to prepare the sacrament, nor pass the sacrament, despite neither of these duties being listed in Doctrine and Covenants 20 as Aaronic priesthood duties. For that matter, girls do not even get a section detailing their responsibilities in scripture.
Girls do not get any parallel responsibility at age 11, unlike boys get when they’re ordained. That is a large and embarrassing blank for teenage girls in the organization.
Girls also do not get to collect fast offerings.
Now for women:
Women do not get to extend any callings to girls or women.
Women do not get to have stewardship over boys after age 11.
Women do not get to issue temple recommends, even to young girls they may have stewardship over in their Young Women’s organizations.
Women do not get to help in ward boundary changes. Wards are always aligned by the number of Melchizedek priesthood holders. (Sidenote: According to the Church handbook, 150 full-tithe paying men are required to create a stake, and 20 full-tithe paying men to create a ward. For a branch, the handbook states that four full-tithe paying men are needed to also create a branch. Number of women required to form a branch, ward, or stake? Zero. If no women existed in a stake, it could still exist.)
Women do not get any control of church funds. A woman is not allowed to determine budgets, nor count tithing, nor reimburse other women for Relief Society, Young Women, or Primary expenses.
Women do not get to serve as a ward mission leader. Even though this calling has become optional, still only men can serve if a bishop chooses to fill it. Optional means it may or may not be needed, so why can’t a woman be a ward mission leader? Most likely because women can’t supervise other men. The one exception is that a primary president is allowed to supervise men (sort of) so maybe that’s not the reason either?
Women do not get to serve as a ward temple and family history leader. Just as with the ward mission leader calling, this is also optional now, but even so, women are not allowed if a bishop chooses to fill it. It can be unfilled, or it can be filled by a man.
Women do not get to serve as clerks of any kind. Not as a ward clerk, stake clerk, membership clerk, financial clerk, executive secretaries, etc., despite a clerk never being required to lay his hands on a person’s head and exercise priesthood authority as part of that calling.
Women do not get to serve in Sunday School presidencies. (Yes, there are rare exceptions where women can be the secretary. Apparently a woman taking notes and handing out rolls is female-appropriate in some wards.)
Women do not get to officiate nor pray in a temple endowment session.
Women do not get to decide if a woman has access to saving ordinances. Every temple recommend ever issued to her was done so because a man approved her.
Women do not get to determine a woman's "worthiness."
Women are not allowed to hear, help, or discuss another woman’s sins with her, nor help her, or counsel her through the repentance process, including and especially sexual sins.
Women do not get to interview children, youth, or other women.
Women do not get to judge women in a membership council (formerly called disciplinary councils). A woman is always judged by all men.
Women do not get to add an annotation to a member's record nor can they remove one.
Women do not get to hold their baby during a baby blessing. (A few exceptions have occurred but these are anomalies and not the rule.)
Women do not get to choose their Relief Society president despite this being a women’s organization that only serves women. In the early days of the Church the Relief Society president was elected by other women.
Women do not get final say as a Relief Society president to approve food orders and all other welfare expenditures.
Women do not get to approve the yearly Primary program. She can write it, teach it to the children, but only a man can approve, or disapprove, what she’s written.
Women do not get to preside at meetings. If a male priesthood leader is present it will almost always be announced that he is the one presiding.
Women do not get to perform civil weddings in LDS Church buildings.
Women do not get to conduct funerals in LDS Church buildings.
Women do not get to conduct baptisms.
Women do not get to conduct sacrament meetings or stake conferences.
Women do not get to approve musical numbers for sacrament meeting.
Women do not get to be consulted as to who could be potential new bishops or stake presidents.
Women do not get to name church units. Every ward name, and stake name was chosen by a man.
Women do not get to choose the color and decor of new church buildings. (Usually the stake president makes the choice.)
Women did not get to help write The Family: A Proclamation to the World in 1995. It has had zero revisions since then, despite the exclusion of women in the writing process, yet it is still held up as the leading document on families over 25 years later.
Women do not get to decide to cancel church (for weather, catastrophe, viral outbreaks, etc.).
Living women do not get to be sealed to more than one spouse. There is no limit to how many times a man, living or dead, can be sealed. Five times? Ten times? No limit.
Lastly, women do not get to fix any of these inequalities. Every change for the betterment of women that has occurred is because a man decided to change it. Quite literally, women are at the mercy of men wanting and instituting change. May the men who lead us want more for the women as well.
Note: If you’d like to hear Cynthia read this essay, you’ll find it on At Last She Said It Episode 168, here.
LDS Men, No More Passes for Your Wrong-headed Obedience
by Lisa Torcasso Downing
Editor’s Note: When I first read this piece on Lisa’s blog, Outside the Book of Mormon Belt, I knew ALSSI needed to include it in Say More! I believe her thoughts deserve the widest possible audience. I hope you’ll listen, click over to Lisa’s blog to read the piece again, then pass it on to everyone (men and women) you can think of who might benefit from taking a new look at women’s roles in the Church organization, and considering possible actions within their personal sphere of influence to help move us toward equal voice and representation.
—Susan
Girls Can’t Do That
by Kandis Lake
I was about four or five years old, with two neighbor friends
in my bedroom playing “house” — which naturally transitioned into playing “church.” My stuffed animals were lined up in rows as if they were sitting in pews in a chapel.
I announced that I would now pass them the sacrament.
My two friends, who were sisters, promptly shut that suggestion down. “We can’t do that,” they said, “it’s bad.”
I honestly don’t know if they said the word bad, but it must have been the impression I was given since I tend to remember it that way.
I argued with them because that was just silly. Why wouldn’t girls be able to pass the sacrament?
I don’t know what resolution we came to for our game, but it turns out that my friends were right, girls in my congregation don’t pass the sacrament.
Whether or not they can is up for debate. But they don’t. It’s done only by males, usually teenagers, who are “priesthood holders.”
I never learned as a kid why girls can’t pass the sacrament. I’m not sure if I ever asked. If I did, the answer wasn’t memorable enough to recall now.
Fast forward all these years later, and my daughter consistently asks:
Why can’t girls be bishops?
Why can’t girls be the prophet?
Why aren’t there very many girls in the scriptures?
Why don’t girls give blessings?
She has even insinuated how it makes her feel lesser-than.
The inequality my daughter and I see weighs on me constantly. It’s probably not sustainable for my girls. Sometimes I wonder if it’s sustainable for me. I’m trying to be very intentional and open-minded about the situation and take things one step at a time.
I try not to brush off her concerns with oversimplified answers. I tell her that for a very long time in churches and in society —all over the world, people have thought women should only take care of children at home and not have other jobs. I tell her that isn’t true and that some people are still learning.
We talk about the importance of both women and men being leaders and doing a variety of jobs. I tell her that anyone who doesn’t think girls should be able to do the same things as boys is wrong.
I still don’t think my answers are good enough. Are there any answers that exist that are good enough?
I know the problem isn’t confined to church and that she’ll see inequality in other areas of her life. I hope that what she learns at home and, more importantly, what she knows in her heart holds more weight than anything else.
What if a Relief Society President Attended Elders Quorum?
by Miki Eliza
If you are a woman in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
seeing a man walk into a women-only church meeting is a common occurrence you are well accustomed to.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a teenage girl in a Young Women’s class, if you’re a grown woman in Relief Society, or if you’re attending the Women’s Session of General Conference—if you are female, you have seen a male leader walk in, sit down, and offer comments in your women-only meeting. For some women, the male presence crashes the vibe of a female-centric discussion that was going really well before he arrived; for others, it’s just an awkward footnote that barely goes noticed. Either way, it’s definitely something all women in the Church experience and have some sort of feelings about.
Regardless of intentions, it doesn’t always help.
This occurrence is not always uninvited: Relief Society and Young Women Presidents do sometimes invite priesthood leaders to their class for specific occasions. And, in the instances when male leaders were not explicitly invited, their intentions are almost always to support the women—they are usually trying to be involved and hear women’s perspectives so they can better support the women in their stewardship. I personally know and love many priesthood leaders that have done this, and I know their intentions are only to help; I feel this is true for the vast majority of priesthood leaders.
However, regardless of intentions, there is a precedent at play here that runs deep into our cultural psyche: men can visit women-only classes whenever they like, but women can never visit men-only classes. Men preside over women, but women never preside over men. Men have stewardship over women, but women never have stewardship over men. Men can organizationally support women, but women can never organizationally support men.
So, even if it is with the best intentions, it “hits different” when a man comes into our women-only space. There is deeper context at play than just “a priesthood leader supporting women.” Oftentimes, it makes us feel like we are being supervised, like we are untrusted, like we aren’t fully independent as an organization. Even if some women don’t feel that way, they may still feel a sudden shift in the atmosphere as it changes from a women-only safe space into yet another mixed-gender, male-presided meeting.
It’s worth mentioning that there are stake-level women leaders in the stake Relief Society and Young Women’s presidencies that will sometimes visit their wards’ meetings. However, this still does not quite negate the off-putting feeling many women experience when ward-level men come to supervise our meetings—there are no equivalent female roles on the ward leadership level for one, and despite being in a stake-level calling their role is still actually more limited than a ward-level bishopric member. There is an unspoken acknowledgement that female stake leaders ultimately don’t hold any tangible decision-making power; they report to the Stake Presidency, which is always male.
Would a female leader be welcomed into a male-only meeting?
Flipping the script is often an effective tool to see a situation more clearly for what it is. Imagine: what would happen if your ward’s Relief Society president walked into Elders Quorum? What if she sat down uninvited, quietly observed, and offered comments in response to questions that were directed at the men?
We could imagine that she would likely be stared at, perhaps asked what she wanted; in some way or another, it would be made very clear that she does not belong there. She may even be talked to afterwards by a member of the bishopric asking why she was there, uninvited. If she responded that she simply wanted to observe and provide support just like the bishop does for Relief Society, imagine what the bishop would say in response. Would it be warm praise for her outward-thinking and an open invitation to come again? Or would she be told not to do that anymore because it isn’t her place?
While I hope there are some bishops out there who would react warmly, I feel most would not. Even if they did not react with hostility, it would likely still be escalated up the chain of (male) leadership asking if it is appropriate for a female leader to attend male-only meetings. Eventually, at some level of leadership, she would probably be asked to stop. And that would be the end of that.
It feels like women are in a different class of leadership.
To be clear, I’m not disparaging the act of leaders visiting their auxiliaries. I recognize that it actually can help for leaders to mingle with groups they normally don’t associate with—this is true of any organization, religious or not. It helps people become better leaders when they get to know people on the “ground floor,” and theoretically, this is what happens when members of the bishopric visit the women-only meetings.
However, in our church organization, the leadership dynamic only goes one way: from men to women. While men can officially oversee the women’s organizations, women can never join, support, or oversee the men’s organizations in any official capacity. Thus, women leaders are left feeling like they are in a different class of leadership—one that isn’t allowed the freedom to associate with other groups that are supposedly their equals, but must allow their apparent “superiors” to freely associate with them.
Because of this one-way power dynamic, a male leader visiting women-only meetings can often have a different effect than intended. Women have said it makes them feel:
Untrusted
Supervised
Inferior
Micromanaged
Anxious
Infantilized
Second-class
Dependent
Unconfident
Angry
Uncomfortable
It isn’t that the leader is male; it’s that they can never be female.
When a male leader walks into a women-only meeting, it can feel like a stark reminder of the power dynamic at play, reminding women that they are to be “helped” or “supervised” by men, but that it can never be the other way around. Even when it is a stake-level woman visiting, we all know they still ultimately report to a man, and that the women leaders hold less decision-making power than the ward-level male leaders.
So in other words, the issue isn’t that the ward leader walking in is male; it’s that they can never be female. It would hit differently if women leaders were allowed to visit men-only meetings, or if women could be bishops or in a bishop-equivalent role—but since neither of those things are true, it’s hard not to see male leader visitations as a subtle power flex, regardless of the actual intentions.
So to answer the title question: if a Relief Society president walked into Elders Quorum, I don’t know what would happen, but I do know what wouldn’t happen. The men in the room would not feel inferior, anxious, second-class, micromanaged, or untrusted. There is no reason for them to feel those things; the woman walking in has no actual authority over them.
She has no stewardship there.
She has no power there.
She is simply, there.
Contributors:
Cynthia Winward
Cynthia prefers salty over sweet, TV over movies, and early mornings over late nights. She is enjoying the good life as an empty nester with her husband Paul. Hopefully you also know her as the co-host of the podcast, At Last She Said It.
Lisa Torcasso Downing
Lisa is a member of the Heath Ward in the Heath, Texas Stake. She and her husband are the parents of three adult children and grandparents to two beautiful girls. She blogs about Mormon issues at Life Outside the Book of Mormon Belt .
You can hear Lisa in conversation with Cynthia and Susan on At Last She Said It
Episode 169, here.
Kandis Lake
Kandis is a mom to littles, a bookworm, a writer, and a registered nurse.
You can find more of her thoughts in Say More No. 5, here.
Miki Eliza
I am an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also an LGBTQ+ ally, advocate for women, and an avid asker of questions. Professionally I am a video game developer, and after work I enjoy baking, designing enamel pins, making fairy houses, making some gourmet hot chocolate, and above all, spending time with my sassy little 2-year old daughter!
— Miki Eliza
Read more from Miki in Say More No. 3, here.
In response to women not having any say in the decor of buildings, I am not sure that women even get a say in the design of them. My daughter was recently baptized and this is when we discovered that in our stake center, the men's side of the font has a lovely changing area complete with a large shower (that my husband reported was kindly stocked with shampoo and soap!) The women's side leads into.... The mother's lounge. No shower. No nice changing room with a bench. The mother's lounge that by the way, is one of the worst I've ever seen. One comfy chair and a changing table with hand sanitizer but no sink. It's almost like the men who planned the building forgot about a mother's lounge so they thought "eh, the girls getting baptized don't need a shower or a place to change"
My daughter and I serve as Family History Consultants- and as you pointed out the leader for this has to be a priesthood holder. We actually feel bad for him at times because he’s in way over his head. He’s done lots of his own family history but not on FamilySearch and really hasn’t been able to get up to speed. He relies on us to handle all of the queries. The regular zoom meetings we’re supposed to have are like nails on a chalk board and a whole lot of nothing.