An "alpha girl" grows up; or why we still need feminism

One year ago my husband and I went to the alter fully committed to nurturing a loving partnership in marriage, a partnership in which we envisioned supporting each other equally in our professional pursuits, sharing housework, and engaging together in social activities that we value. This vision, a wonderful ideal, seemed like the natural way to govern a relationship. I belong to what has recently been termed the generation of “alpha girls” – the highly educated and achieving women who only learn that they can be anything they want, but not everything, when they hit the workforce. And my husband, surely, is an equivalent alpha male. We were both products of an era largely committed to gender equality, whatever that means.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one year of marriage has schooled me in how difficult it is to achieve the kind of partnership we wanted – a partnership that involved mutual support for each other in all areas of life rather than dwelling in separate spheres. I was certainly unprepared for the change in how various people perceived me that came as a consequence of marriage and for how soon cultural assumptions about gender roles – assumptions I naively thought my generation was beyond – cropped up.

Like most upper-middle class young woman today, I was prepped and prime for educational success. Education was an investment in future earning power and citizenship whose importance was emphasized again and again. But marriage changes things. Soon after my marriage, many of the family and friends who had supported me so strongly in my education suddenly seemed to assume that having a career follow that education was simply not so important. My husband was the “primary” breadwinner; my career, if I chose to have one, was “secondary.” I needed to place my husband’s career first, because he would feel the burden of providing. My education, apparently, was not necessarily intended to lead to successful employment in my field; I could find fulfillment in volunteering or working part-time instead. People looked at me differently. Certainly, one day I (or my husband) might choose to stay home or work part-time, but some people seemed to place me on that track already. Despite all the talk of equality in marriage, no one outside of our marriage looked at my husband's future differently.

Unfortunately, under the immense pressure of this ideology, I, a life-long feminist, began to crack. I began to think about my professional goals (goals that really are important to me) as if they were secondary. I began to “support” my husband’s work at the expense of giving full justice to my own. The psychological costs, both to him and to me, were enormous. I felt depressed, resentful, and dependent. My husband felt all the weight of the assumption that he was the family’s primary resource. I did the all the housework, mostly because I was trained to care about it more, but also because I felt it was wrong to ask him to do more work. I sold myself short, and was socially applauded, and miserable, for it. (Okay, this paragraph exaggerates binaries and feelings, but to make a point.)

Of course, there were many people who supported my goals. The people I work with in my field have always been there to develop my talents. But, I also learned that the workplace simply doesn’t easily accommodate two working spouses. Certainly, I feel our church carries a significant amount of blame for these gender ideologies in my life, but it also seems to me a significant social problem that in the secular world we educate our girls to believe in their talents only to force them out of work when they start a family, because we are so slow to evolve workplace policies. This has enormous economic and psychological costs.

Most of the year I felt caught in a bind between those who expected me to put my husband first and between systems that are not designed to accommodate two spouses. The issue of work-life balance is more real than I knew; ideologies about gender roles are still pervasive; the need for feminism is very much alive. Regardless of how the future plays out, I have determined to return my goals to the center of my life and to continue striving for a marriage based on partnership.

The singles ward: one year out

This January marks the first anniversary of my marriage and also my exit from a singles ward into a family ward. Looking back on my time in the singles ward from this vantage point, I find myself waxing nostalgic.

Certainly, there were a number of points about the singles ward that I didn’t like. When in college, I felt the dearth of anyone else my own age in my ward (there were occasionally no other undergraduates); similarly, I often missed having a calling, since there were often not enough to go around to the women in the ward when primary, nursery, and young women’s didn’t exist (that’s another topic). But, mostly, I disliked the humiliating imbalance of women to men that thrust the reality that many of us women would not marry a member of the church upon us every Sunday. My husband tells me that being an older, eligible male in a singles ward is no pleasant task either, since no one understands why they are not married. But people at least assume men have multiple chances.

In many ways, a family ward has eliminated those stresses. Most of the members in the ward are not worried about marriage, there are ample opportunities to serve, and there is a much wider age range of people to associate with. My current calling with the young women has been one of my most fulfilling.

And, yet, I find myself sorely missing the advantages of the singles ward. Mainly, I miss the people and the social events. I expected that married life would be more limited in its social scope than being single, but I have found that it can in no way replace my need for thriving friendships. But, such friendships are much harder to come by in a family ward than in a singles ward. Callings often separate you from other women in Relief Society and duties to spouses call, but the strongest barrier that I have felt has been the divide between those who have and/or stay home with children and those who don’t. Granted, I have made some amazing friends with children, but it is much harder to maintain those friendships than with single friends. Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn’t have a child just to fit in. (Don’t worry, I’m not, yet.)

The reasons for this barrier are pretty obvious: those who work during the day tend to be unavailable for many RS activities or informal get together’s, people are simply at different stages of life with different preoccupations, and children can’t be left unattended. But when I look at the amazing women I would like to know better, I can’t help wishing that some of those barriers were more permeable.

Life in a family ward has been lonely. It has made me wonder often what it means to be part of a community when we are so often, necessarily, wrapped up in our own families. Surely these families come with blessings, but a year into married life I have come to realize that families alone can never, for me, be enough. Never have I felt more the benefits that I derive from interacting with a whole range of people with different perspectives and interests– single, married, young, and old. When I was in a singles ward, I missed the benefits of the family ward; now, I miss my single friends. In both situations, I have found myself frequently wishing that there could only be one ward where both singles and married couples could mingle, wondering what my life would be like if we valued, like Jane Austen, our relationships with our literal and metaphorical brothers and sisters as being inextricably bound up with our relationship to our spouse.

Judgment: a dilemma for individualistic Mormons?

For many years, I have been perplexed by the question of what I am required to do and believe as a latter-day saint. Confronted by a long and often contradictory history of commandments and culture attitudes within the church, the process of sorting out commandments from suggestions was nearly impossible. Finally, I settled on the belief that I am primarily accountable for acting upon only those precepts I have learned by my own experience to be important. While I respect those ideas that I do not now agree with, I have faith that God will hold me accountable only for acting with the best of my ability upon those concepts I personally know to be correct.

I find this position the only consist one I can take with respect to believing church doctrine. Moreover, I like placing myself as the central authority over my own life and beliefs, because I find that this heightens in my mind the significance of the commitments I make. And, yet, people can and do point out that a position that allows one to place on hold some church teachings undermines one’s membership in the church. Do I think there are any commandments that are binding on church members? What does it mean to be a member of the church once one says one’s own authority has more importance in determining one’s life than, say, the prophet’s?

(These are difficult questions, and I’m not ready to give answers. There are some basic commandments like the Word of Wisdom that I believe church members are accountable to try their best to keep (granted, for some, this might not be possible), because these commandments identify us to the world at large and it reflects poorly on the entire community when some members break them. If we choose to be a member of a community, then we should try to respect its standards. But, in general, I think that the purpose of commandments is to help bring out our best selves and that activities that prevent us from developing are those that we need to amend or repent of.)

I raise this observation, because I feel that many of the posts and comments on By Common Consent, particularly Kevin’s excellent “You Make the Call Series,” keep raising again and again the tension between feeling that we are the chief authorities in our own relationships to God and the obedience we owe to church authorities. Because I think most of us on this blog share the belief that our relationship to God takes precedence over another authority’s views about our life, I occasionally sense in some comments and posts the feeling that when we are in positions of authority that we should not judge or interfere with the decisions our acquaintances make.

I want to suggest that our reluctance to interfere with others stems not only from a belief in our individual freedom but also from the way in which perceive judgment. When we speak of judging others, our language typically seems to imply legalistic standards, condemnation, and punishment. But, what if judgment meant not condemning others, but discerning what people stand in need of in order to become their best selves. Such a view of judgment is not punitive, nor does it co-opt individual authority and freedom to determine one’s idea of the good. Instead, it aims to give people the resources they need. We need to practice being discerning judges, resisting the impulse to impose our own ideas on others and developing the capacity to truly look at another.

When people are breaking commandments, it may well be wrong to condemn them or layer them with guilt. But their behavior does seem to suggest that they are struggling with questions in their own lives. Discerning their needs and providing them with resources might well be what they need. In my opinion, to not intervene positively and to offer desired support in people’s lives because of our own fears of condemning others is a service to no one. Allowing people to harm themselves, struggle with questions alone, or break commandments that reflect poorly on the entire community are not answers. Neither is condemnation. But, making a good faith effort to bring out the person our neighbor aspires to be might help.

Nostalgic protests

A phenomenon is occurring at Columbia that interests me for the fact that it is happening at all. Columbia over the last semester as had a series of protests. The first occurred over Ahmadinejad’s visit to the campus. The next began after a noose was found on a African-American professor’s door at Teacher’s College. And, finally, a group of Columbia undergraduates has begun a hunger strike over several demands, including reforming the core curriculum to include more minority writers, creating an ethnic studies department, and expanding ethically into Manhattanville.

As an observer of these events, I perceive them as unified by the response they have received from the students I have spoken to on campus. If the response is not outright hostility towards the hunger strikers in particular – arguments that view the protesters as displacing the voices of the more moderate majority or as a privileged elite with the arrogance to assume that core reform is a significant enough issue to deserve a hunger strike – then it typically dismisses the protests that have occurred as forms of nostalgia. Similarly, when I asked the students in my class who they were protesting when they attended the Ahmadinejad rally, many said they did not know. Although parties formed to protest both the president and Columbia, these students attended because they wanted to experience a protest during their college careers. A friend of mine affiliated with the hunger strikes made their connections to the past more explicit. When searching for a way to express their discontent, they turned to forms that Columbia students used in past decades to successfully cause reforms. Perhaps surprisingly, very few people on campus disagree that the issues are important. They simply dispute the idea that protest is an appropriate form of response.

I don’t wish to judge any of these protests or protesters or comment of the particular issues at stake. However, I am deeply interested in asking what it means that many people now view protest as a nostalgic form whose moment is past. More explicitly, if our culture no longer values protest as a form of action, have we found new models? Or, do we feel that action is no longer worth taking? Do we view actions like protests more as modes of self-therapy for a privileged elite than as activities that can cause impact? Do we have faith that the systems we live within will promote good-enough forms of social justice? Or, is it simply too difficult to articulate a form of action worth pursuing?

I have no memory of the protests concerning gender and race that divided our church. As a younger member, the protests I have witnessed have only been private. The people engaged in these private protests probably feel no less deeply than those who were publicly ex-communicated for their cause, but yet I see no sign of public, member-lead protests against the church recurring in the near future. (Oh, yeah, they just occur in blogs!) Outside of our church, events occur daily that seem to demand our attention: the environment and Darfur to name a few. And, yet, the movement to save Darfur has essentially died. More and more people are now buying green, but we are still left with the glaring problem that the biggest threat to the environment is the global desire to define success as matching the US’s consumer lifestyle.

As I blog, I make sure to carefully guard my rhetoric to censor out any thoughts that might seem less than faithful or polite. When I fail at this task, feelings of shame follow. Despite the fact that I often feel thwarted by institutions, church-run or otherwise, that attempt to prescribe my gender role in society, I find that with every year I inure to the situation more. Content with the knowledge that 75% of my friends share the same liberal opinion on gender roles with me, I morbidly exercise faith that the church and workplace culture surrounding gender will change as this generation of leaders dies off. But, does this mean that I have given up action? And, if I have, does it ethically matter? Would any action I could have taken made a difference within a system?

If protest is no longer a form of action that we find effective, then what other models might we use (if we want to act at all)? And, perhaps more importantly, what are the contradictions in a liberal society and in a Christian church that make our relationship to taking action so difficult?

Why we cannot afford to stay out of political conversations: a response to Mark Brown's post on By Comon Consent

Mark Brown’s latest post, as I read it, makes the argument that because our environment generally produces our political opinions, we should refrain from accusing people with different opinions of “bad thinking” and remove political conversations from church settings in order to prevent internal division. Many of Mark’s points are undeniably wise. Certainly, it behooves each of us to interrogate our own political beliefs, to consistently attempt to learn from those whose opinions differ, and to love those who disagree with us, recognizing that no party is God’s party. But although I can fully join Mark in believing that we would be well served by giving up negative models of political conversation, I must depart from what I read, perhaps wrongly, as Mark’s conclusion to renounce political conversation more generally within the Church.

I wish to offer the alternative argument that any contemporary organization that wishes to remain a significant moral force (and I’m assuming here that one function of an institutionalized church is to prescribe standards for moral action) cannot afford to give up politically oriented conversations, even for the aim of promoting peace amongst its membership. By politically oriented conversations, I’m referring to politics in the broadest sense of the term, incorporating all of the social and economic systems that order our lives, including, but not limited to, party politics.

My disagreement with Mark turns on the question of whether the moral practices a church should prescribe encompass merely localized, interpersonal interactions or extend to a far more global scale. Mark’s suggestion that we give up political discourse in order to promote harmony amongst the membership inherently prioritizes the local community as the body whose needs demand our attention. Local harmony takes precedence over our relationships with people who live far from us but inhabit the same systems we act within. Mark’s decision to prioritize interpersonal relationships seems to me characteristic of mainstream Mormon moral thinking in general. The vast majority of the principles we learn in church and the case studies we encounter there focus on how to properly interact with the people we encounter in our daily lives. This scale of interaction is undoubtedly significant, and perhaps indeed deserves our greatest loyalty, but it is also increasingly inadequate to not consider more global scales of interaction.

With ever increasing frequency, a vast amount of our interactions occur within social, economic, environmental, and technological systems, ensuring that our actions have consequences that impact the lives of people far removed from our local spheres. Although these people are not immediate faces, I would be very reluctant to claim that these people should morally matter less in God’s eyes than my more immediate neighbors. While we do not yet have adequate moral or religious paradigms for helping us conceptualize what our agency might mean when it extends to a global scale, we most certainly have a moral obligation think about this deeply important issue.

While as church members we should make an effort to move beyond divisive political rhetoric, if we want to remain a relevant institution in society and to claim our full potential as moral agents, then we have to extend our discussion of morality to the institutions and systems that mediate our activity, a major one of which is indeed party politics. We cannot refrain from increased inquiry into the political process, because our actions within this system will have consequences that impact the lives of real people in drastic ways. If we refuse to discuss our agency in the context of these political systems, then we do not simply limit our moral influence to the local, but also wrongly deny our own responsibility for events that happen far, far away. While such discussions might promote division, the moral cost of hiding from these conversations strikes me as far too high.

I deeply value our church’s policy of not endorsing candidates, precisely because this policy enables members to continue a conversation about their beliefs and focus on their relationship to God. But if we extend our commitment to neutrality to refraining from all political discussion (a suggestion Mark does NOT make but that I wish to consider), I doubt that this policy would be either neutral or beneficial. Evoking neutrality of thought in a context in which the majority of members are both Republican and committed to conceptualizing morality in a local way would implicitly keep these interests in tact and shut down further conversation.

Ceasing to say "we:" recovering our own spiritual agency

On a typical Sunday my Young Women are asked to imagine how they would act when a non-member encouraged them to participate in any one of the stock activities – drugs, underage dating, or parental disobedience – that we Mormons find outside our fold. These conversations are often surprisingly enjoyable, serving as moments when the Young Women solidify their bonds with each other as they contrast themselves to various others. But inevitably these conversations take a turn into the more disputed aspects of Mormon culture. From minor debates over a topic like the Mormon stance on Coke emerge spaces where a variety of Mormonisms emerge that disrupt the group solidarity our role-plays foster.

Out of these moments of rupture often comes the suspicion that our deepest threats to our “Mormon” identity come not from the world without but from within. What these stories of Mormons v. the world mask is that the deepest challenges to our faith, in other words, often spring from the members we wish to support us or assume censor the version of faith we practice.

It’s easy to repeat the standard complaints about how hegemonic Mormon culture discourages those who question and doubt. And perhaps there is strong reason to complain. Certainly Mormon culture does not discourage questioning; it does, however, often prescribe what types of questions are appropriate to ask. While practical questions that help us reach decisions or overcome obstacles are staples of the Mormon experience, questions that doubt the premise of Church authority rarely receive serious attention. And, yet, that said, it seems to me time to ask why we “dissenting” Mormons often take decided pleasure in playing up our perceived differences from normative Mormons and what our insistence on our difference means for our faith.

Which means it is time to stop using “we.”

I increasingly believe that I have allowed myself to limit my own spirituality and agency by allowing myself to believe that every Mormon I meet is a “representative” Mormon. Whereas I strongly cling to the idea that I practice a unique faith that is personally my own, I generally set my faith in opposition to the “representative” Mormon faith that I assume others practice. I have wondered whether I belong in the church and I have considered in the past leaving, because I felt that I could not conform to what everyone else believed.

These views, I now recognize, were deeply flawed. More importantly, clinging to these views curtails my potential to exercise agency, spiritually develop, and fellowship others. Through these views, I denied other people the same uniqueness I claimed for myself, refusing to look beyond the Mormon label I applied to them. And, more importantly, I outsourced my agency to other people by making decisions on the ground of what I thought other people believed, ceding responsibility for my choices to my flawed understanding of what others demanded of me.

The point I wish to make is that in order to take personal responsibility for our faith and to engage in real dialogue, friendship, and debate with other members, I believe we must stop considering other people as representative Mormons and begin treating them as people of unique experiences and evolving faiths. When people no longer feel the burden of being “representative” and instead claim personal responsibility for their faith, I suspect that a great deal of anxiety, confusion, and loneliness in church will be replaced with surprising friendships and plural beliefs. I believe that missionary work will flourish as people no longer face the anxiety of speaking for the church and can instead respond to a non-member friend (who, mind you, should be treat as a friend and not as representative non-member) with genuine thoughts that spring from one’s own beliefs and experience. I believe that we will no longer feel the immense stress to defend or dissent from church beliefs if we can cease to brand ourselves as Mormons first and individuals second.

But, in the meantime, I have a pointed question for the friend whose doubts have prompted me to write this series of posts: If you leave the church, are you doing it because it no longer speaks to what you personally believe or because of what you think other people think the doctrine is? Are you willing to let other people dictate the choices you make?

Dispersed authority: thoughts on the truth-making process in church culture

Recently someone very dear to me let me know that although he has a strong testimony of God, he has been questioning his ability to participate in the Mormon church, because many of his beliefs in God and experiences have lead him to perspectives that contradict some of the cultural ideas in the church as well as what authorities have said. My purpose in the next few blog posts is not to blame him, but rather to hypothesize that many Mormons can deeply sympathize with his positions. I want to respond to him in these posts by looking at the various concerns that he raises and asking what we as church members can do both to make our church more open to questions and when we face our own doubts. Today, I want to begin to think about the process through which church truths emerge.

One of my friend's concerns is that he has difficulty sustaining church leaders, because these leaders often represent ideas that he finds problematic - particularly ideas about the role of women and minority cultures. However, what I want to ask is to what extent are these leaders actually responsible for promoting these ideas as truths and to what extent do we make leaders responsible for the very complex processes, often beyond their direct control, through which our church as a system raises some doctrines to the idea of truth.

Although leaders say many things, only parts of what they say actually become elevated within our church to principles that the majority of members take as doctrine. Whereas on rare occasions leaders might claim that what they say is revealed doctrine, the majority of the time it appears to be a much more arbitrary process by which their stories gather that type of weight. I want to hypothesize that much of the time, members themselves participate in deciding what messages become authoritative through practices as diverse as continuing to cite certain sayings in sacrament talks or cementing these sayings within the needle point crafts that adorn many Mormon homes.

If this hypothesis is correct, then it leads me to conclude that the process that makes doctrine carry weight is often not isolated to the relationship between an apostle and God, but rather the authority to elevate claims to truth is often dispersed amongst all church members. In that case, I believe that church members must turn not only a historical eye towards some of the "truths" conveyed in church, but also find themselves in a position of immense responsibility as they become agents in disseminating what counts as truth. For me, it is an exciting possibility, and one that makes me think more generously of church leaders, realizing that the claims they make take shape in the complex relationships they have with members of the church.