Women, Children, Marriage

I think that one of the things about the LDS Church that slowly aggravated me more and more was the role that the women are supposed to occupy. They said it was a women's calling to have children. It was a woman's calling to be a wife and a mother. Though they also said it was a man's calling to be a husband and a father, they let the men also be breadwinners and the ones who served full-time missions. They encouraged young women to go on missions, but only if they were not married.

When I was younger this didn't bother me. As a child, I preferred it when my mother was in the home, not when she was working.

But there was a bigger picture. After a while, my mother became the breadwinner. She had no choice but to work. She had a career picked out already because she had gone to college and determined that she liked a certain profession. She had even gotten experience in it before marrying.

Despite the fact that the children all felt more secure when mother was home, there was no way to beg off of reality. Reality was there no matter who wanted what. And ironically, right after Ezra Taft Benson made the big speech about women staying home with children, that was when my mother went back to work. It seemed that the Ezra Taft Benson speech was not properly timed. Throughout the eighties and nineties, more and more mothers went back to work. It seems that two income families were doing better and better in the new economy.

I think that the LDS Church's lack of realism was quite stunning. No one really asked if all of this mother stay home stuff was possible and what to do if it wasn't. And it is really clear that women do well in the workplace, too.

What is worse than this, however, is the push for all of the young people to get married. When this happens, people who are not ready to get married get married and suffer. And young men, as well as young women, suffer. There is a backwards view that they have to get married or they will not inherit the highest place in heaven, and so it is best to make them marry when they are young.

Well, a lot of these young marriages break up. At Brigham Young University, the divorce rate was at least eighty percent. And young people could never finish their schooling and keep up a marriage. I remember being that young. I thought I was supposed to get married myself. But I was really bored with all of the young men. There were a few I liked, but I never liked the young men who thought that being Mormon enough to please their parents was the thing to do. I could detect the pleaser disease in the young men more easily than I could in the young women.

What was it like to be at a private religious university? I would say that it was kind of boring and not a very good education. I started to get educated, but the world view was too narrow to help my meagre sense of reality. It seems that my sense of reality needed work first. At a certain point I was very unhappy and couldn't even see that there were other ways to live. I really could have quit school and gone elsewhere, I now realize.

Well, back to the roles of women. After I attended school, I noticed that a friend of mine had a lot of difficulty with child birth. And after two very difficult pregnancies, she decided that she still needed to have another baby, even though the first two nearly killed her. I was frightened for her and realized that her only identity was as a childbearer, and nothing else.

I began to sense that making women solely mothers and childbearers was not only boring and a total pain in the neck; it was dangerous on a physical level. It is as if the most current thought on women is from the nineteenth century. Women can't be happy or survive on this attitude.

I never wanted children. Though I was given to believe that if I did it was a righteous desire. And during the time of my life when I tried the hardest to live the LDS Church's teachings, I never got a desire to have children more than in a shallow, passing way. I was a little envious of the young mothers and their cute offspring, but it was mostly jealously and envy.

At this point, I wonder if it would kill LDS Church leaders to just acknowledge that women have full, well-rounded personalities like men do. A lot of women I have known have enjoyed working, earning money, and becoming independent and living on their own. Women and men are both made happy by accomplishment, independence, and social contact with the outside world.

My own mother never told me she wanted me to get married. She wanted me to get an education. And so far, I have followed my mother's lead much more than I will ever follow the teachings of the LDS Church.