guy sajer wrote:You’ll take me on? Ooh, that sounds kind of randy.
There seems to be a marked lack of air in here. *cough* *cough*
I’d bet that if we took a representative cross section of rank and file active faithful in the US, a non-trivial percentage of women would have at least a college education or a college degree. Maybe not a majority, but a non-trivial percentage. BYU, to take one case, produces thousands upon thousands of reasonably well-educated Mormon women. Where’s their collective voice? Nowhere to be heard.
I don't consider the vast majority of women who attended BYU to be visionaries, crusaders, or in any way extraordinary leaders. They are followers by definition. Were they not followers, they'd have attended a different university. The movement you posit needs leaders, and they won't come with a BYU label attached.
This is always a risk inherent in collective action. This kind of threat, for example, is one thing that kept workers from organizing for so long. But organize they did, and it revolutionized labor. If a core of women did organize and did press concerns/demands, it would put the Church in an awfully awkward position, and it might just work. It takes a courageous core, but I see nothing like that happening. The women in the Church are far too passive to do this.
This will not happen. The entity is too widespread and too diverse. There is no common ground on which to build.
That so few LDS women see themselves a marginalized is a major part of the problem. They ARE marginalized by any reasonable definition. Were they treated equally in another other phase of their lives (e.g. the workforce), they would likely be well aware of their marginalization. That they can be so clearly relegated to second class status and not take notice says something, and what it says is not flattering.
What it says is that they are unenlightened, and that darkness is deliberately kept in place by our leaders, both male and female. When we have women leaders like our present Relief Society General President, we have leaders who deliberately blind us. (Lord, save me from women who think pressed white shirts say anything about the character of the child's mother) Those who are blinded are not to blame for their blindness. They do not know what is deliberately kept from them.
I have seen no meaningful change in women’s status in the LDS Church. What you’re mentioning is window dressing and tangential to the real issue—the status of women, their rights and privileges compared to men.
*sigh* Guy, you know I love you, but you are not a woman(thank God), so how would you know what is meaningful and what isn't? Women praying in Sacrament Meeting is a BIG deal. Women having authority over men (thinking: Primary) is a BIG deal. Women wearing pants to church and to the temple is a BIG deal. Just because you don't see those changes as a big deal to you doesn't mean they aren't a big deal to women.
Many of the women who do stand up represent a cliquish elite who have done nothing to broaden the appeal of their “movement.” They have not tried, from what I’ve seen, to reach out to the rank and file but are content to gather in elitist, intellectual venues such as, in times past, Exponent II. Their influence will always be limited and non-effective until they make genuine effort to broaden and craft their message to the rank and file. As it is, the rank and file view them as whining feminists.
Now I've never thought of this in exactly this way, and I agree with you. However, the reaching out to the rank and file is problematic at best: anything that is viewed as contrary to the current leadership is immediately suspect, yet anything that agrees with the current leadership is useless. Catch 22, and I have no idea how to get around it.
It takes leadership, willingness to take risk, and a strategy to reach out to broad audiences. Who’s going to take this on?
Especially since there is no paycheck involved. Virtually everyone has to make a living, so this kind of tilting at windmills always takes a backseat and is relegated to wishful thinking at best.
By the way, love ya Harmony
Back at ya!