Mormon women seek more visible role in church

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — For some Mormon feminists, there can be only one goal on the road to gender equality: ordination to the all-male priesthood. At the same time lots of Mormon women are perfectly comfortable with the roles they believe God assigned to them including motherhood and nurturing.   

Now comes a third and, some suggest, growing group of Mormon women somewhere between these two poles.

They are not pushing for ordination, but they crave a more engaged and visible role for women in the Mormon church. It is a role, they believe, that their Mormon foremothers played. These women point to little changes that would pay big dividends: treating a president of the local Relief Society (the church’s main women’s group) like her male counterpart and assigning her to be a regular speaker at conferences and in worship services; quoting more women in sermons and Sunday School lessons; and selecting more women to speak and pray at churchwide General Conferences.

In the 19th century Mormon women were early suffragettes, forming alliances with national leaders such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. They were the first in the nation to vote and among the trailblazers to pursue professional careers in medicine, business and law.

 But today women have become “the support staff for the real work of men,” said Latter-day Saints activist and writer Chelsea Shields Strayer, “which means we are basically working with only 50 percent of our human capital.”