Imagination, Agency, and Belonging

Review of Claudia Bushman's "I, Claudia: The Life of Claudia Lauper Bushman in Her Own Words"

“All we ever write is an autobiography.”—Claudia Bushman

When I was a graduate student, I once noticed a small, framed quote perched on my advisor’s bookshelf. Situated in front of books chronicling the American West, it read: “So often our lives are shaped by past events we did not choose.”

As someone who has wrestled with questions of historical agency, the sentiment stuck with me. So did its lyrical cadence, which has the lilt of a William Carlos Williams poem. So much depends on structures, systems, and families we have been born into; so much depends on the opportunities we can grasp; so much depends on the way we face the challenges and blessings that come our way.

Reading Claudia Bushman’s I, Claudia: The Life of Claudia Lauper Bushman in Her Own Words reminded me of that phrase on my thesis advisor’s bookshelf. Perhaps I made the connection after seeing the opening page of the autobiography, which shows a portrait of Claudia Bushman (with waves of gently coiffed white hair), smiling invitingly in front of an impressive bookshelf. Or perhaps I made the connection through reading about Claudia’s¹ own wrestles with the limitations and latitudes of agency, space, and time. Regardless, I thought about that phrase as I read Claudia’s memoir: So often our lives are shaped by past events we did not choose. Claudia’s own life is a testament to how she allowed love to transform what she did not choose for herself, and how she shaped her life through her decisions. Grounded in the church of her birth, she has, time and again, chosen to love and serve that community—even at times when it has not loved her back.

The power of agency is ever-present in Claudia’s autobiography. The woman is a doer in every sense of the world; she makes extraordinary things happen. She seems to have a gift of materialization: her imagination manifests in the creation of events, community, and fun in the most marvelous ways. Her autobiography is filled with examples of what she calls “projects.” From helping with her mother’s musical projects in San Francisco to co-founding Exponent II with other Latter-day Saint feminists in the Boston area; from organizing a statewide release of ladybugs for Delaware’s bicentennial to pursuing a doctorate degree in American Studies while raising a family, Claudia’s willpower, creativity, and determination are extraordinary. She remarks that her “projects come as visions, suggested by clues of various kinds that I have stored away in my mind,” and the projects described in I, Claudia do have a sort of revelatory quality to them (I Claudia, 195).

Although Claudia demonstrates agency in a very individual sense—as a woman on a mission with the means and ability to enact change—agency, however, involves more than just the power of the individual. In a 2011 address, “Mormon Women and the Problem of Historical Agency,” the religious scholar Catherine Brekus argued for a view of agency not just as individual but as “relational and social.” Claudia Bushman seems to understand this intuitively, and agency—the power to act within social, communal, and spiritual structures—illuminates her various works. She recognizes that she could not accomplish her projects alone. They come together with other people; they are realized only in community. Claudia found willing hearts and hands in her LDS communities for these projects, with “everyone consecrating talents to produce an admirable whole” (I Claudia, 235).

In the chapter “Four Projects,” Claudia describes four monumental endeavors she took on while living in New York City. These included organizing a living nativity scene in the lobby of the LDS meetinghouse in Manhattan; planning the Manhattan New York Temple Youth Jubilee at Radio City Music Hall; chairing the Harlem Bridge Builders; and erecting a statue of Joseph Smith in New York City for the two-hundredth anniversary of his birth. Any one of these projects could be the crowning achievement of any one person’s lifetime; the fact that Claudia dreamed up three of them (she gladly participated in, but did not create the Harlem Bridge Builders) within the span of ten years seems, to me, nothing short of Olympian.

But Claudia’s projects don’t only dazzle, they are also deeply intimate. I was especially moved thinking about the living nativities she envisioned and then organized with other eager members of New York City wards. As ward family members took turns embodying the Holy Family, their devotion to the Christmas scene touched the hearts of individuals who stopped on that busy corner of Columbus Avenue during a hectic (sometimes joyous, often lonely) time of year. On the other side of the window panes, ward members who participated in the live nativities still carry those memories in their hearts. Claudia’s dedication to community projects shows that agency—especially used in building and improving relations—has the power to “bring to pass much righteousness” (D&C 58:26–28).

Still, despite the various accolades that accompany Claudia’s accomplishments, an undercurrent of melancholy flows through the book. Part of what makes agency problematic in historical frameworks is that agency has limits. And though limits and opposition make agency possible, Claudia obviously wrestles with the pains of certain limitations on her individual, familial, and societal dreams. Her maxims hint at this. Two of her self-described favorite maxims: If I didn’t quit, I could never go on and If you keep up, you’ll never get ahead suggest a pragmatic approach to life’s limitations.

But the refrain that haunts me—repeated in multiple chapters— is her confession: “I wanted to be somebody.” Claudia does not shy away from the difficulties of being the wife of a respected academic and religious leader. After recollecting their family’s move from Belmont, Massachusetts, to Newark, Delaware for her husband’s academic career, Claudia remarks that husbands “move from something to something and wives move from something to nothing” (I Claudia, 181). This comment directly references the travails of being a “trailing spouse” in academia—uprooting one’s home, family, and career prospects for their spouse’s career. But her comment also reflects feeling lost and unrecognized in the hierarchies of career, academia, and church callings. Being a bishop’s wife, she recalled, is “a job without a job description” and entails taking on, often single-handedly, “family situations that should be shared” between husband and wife (I Claudia, 171, 177). For Claudia, it came with other painful sacrifices. When LDS church leadership took measures to quell Exponent II in the 1970s, they specifically asked Claudia to step down as an editor because of her husband’s calling in the stake presidency. She complied but acutely felt the loss of leading the intellectual, sisterly community. “It was just great to be somebody,” she wrote of her days as the editor for Exponent II.

This echo of “It was nice to be somebody” troubles me, especially as someone who shares some similar demographics with Claudia: an American Latter-day Saint woman with a PhD in History who is a “trailing spouse.” I do not believe anyone reading Claudia’s autobiography would think for a moment that Claudia was never not somebody. But those nagging doubts feel familiar. There is a tension in wanting to be recognized and in channeling ambition for the good of the community. But there is a larger, structural issue that bothers me more. Claudia’s fear of not “being somebody” speaks to institutional, societal, and national failures of imagination. When success is viewed as one’s place in a hierarchy, when efficiency is trumpeted as theology, and when people are valued for their position rather than viewed as essential members of the body of Christ, we all suffer. Indeed, instead of idolizing worldly ideas of power, this and future generations must imagine (and then create) a world more aligned with the principles of “persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, meekness, and love unfeigned” (D&C 121: 41–43).

Envisioning that better world might begin in our hearts and minds, but the earthly communities we build must realize its fulfillment. Claudia embodied this ideal by building those earthly communities wherever she lived. For most people, places become a shorthand for identity. Phrases such as, “I’m a Chicagoan,” or “I’m a Londoner” signify characteristics, attitudes, and histories. While Claudia is a native San Franciscan, she embeds herself wherever she goes, enabling her to call many places home.

Claudia has a tremendous love of and respect for place; her descriptions of the various loves and homes of her life are sensually vivid. While reading, I could imagine the feel of fog from the harbors of wartime San Francisco; I visualized the tony, leafy suburbs of Belmont, Massachusetts; and I could almost smell the books in Claudia and Richard’s Upper West Side apartment. Reading Claudia’s autobiography, there is no doubt that each place she writes about shaped her intellect, her thoughts, her soul, and her future. Places take on an almost character-like quality; they, too, seem endowed with agency. She correlates the dedication and “birth” of the LDS Cambridge Ward chapel in 1956 with the birth of her first child. “I became a mother here,” she writes (I Claudia, 107). Chapels, especially, serve as symbols for Claudia’s sense of belonging within the Church. She recalls, in warm tones, the San Francisco Sunset Ward’s chapel, a “three-story white stucco building with Spanish accents” that had been “built with the dreams of visionaries, the pennies of poor Saints, and the blood of my father who was then the bishop of the ward” (I Claudia, 37). The Sunset Ward chapel was truly a communal space—both to commune with God and to join in community with other Saints.       

Claudia values the formative aspects of her Church community, including the traditions and stories she learned as a child, the lessons in public speaking, the big events, and the roadshows. And she misses its richness, the “active church of my youth” (I Claudia, 25). She recognizes that community is built in those hours of preparing meals together, sewing costumes for a play, or conversing in the hallway between classes. Activities matter, as they provide opportunities for members of the Church to practice discipleship and become friends. Claudia’s emphasis on place challenges readers to recognize the value of local histories, to consider what is lost in the name of progress, and to actively build community in our given corners of this earth.

The more experience I gain, the more I believe that love takes courage. (Even the Latin root of the word “courage” comes from cor, or “the heart.”) Love takes risk. There are no guarantees that the people, institutions, or places we love will love us back—let alone in the ways we desire. Claudia takes the risk to love over and over again. Love animates her scholarship and her discipleship.

“Given the chance,” Claudia wryly remarks at the end of her autobiography, “I may create a whole new life” (I Claudia, 288). What would that life be? So much would depend upon the circumstances, of birth, family, tragedies, and serendipity. And yet. So much would depend on the woman. Claudia has already revealed so much to us that I think we can allow her to have some mystery in these imaginings of a “whole new life.” But I have no trouble imagining that whatever life she leads—real or hypothetical—she would fill it to the brim with belonging, wonder, and beauty.

Megan Armknecht is an Associate Editor for Wayfare. She currently lives in Bangkok, Thailand, where she has switched her favorite seasonal hot cocoa for iced hot chocolate this Christmas.

Art by Margaret Keane (1927-2022).

1. I have made the choice, common in feminist scholarship, to use the first names of individuals in this piece rather than their last names.