Women at Church: 10 Years Later

Twelve years ago I spoke to a Latter-day Saint conference. As I was speaking, ushers went up and down the aisles, gathering notecards upon which members of the audience were writing down questions they wanted me to answer during the Q&A period. After I finished my prepared remarks, I was handed the stack of notecards while still standing on the stage. I looked down at the notecard on the top of the pile and read to myself what was written there, “You are an apostate.”

What had I said that so angered some people in that audience? Here was the thesis of that talk: “There is a tremendous amount of pain among our women regarding how they can or cannot contribute to the governance of our ecclesiastical organization and we need to pay attention to that pain.”

At that point in 2012, I had already spent years gathering and studying the stories of Latter-day Saint women. I had founded the Mormon Women Project where we published lengthy interviews with hundreds of LDS women from around the world. I had written numerous articles, conducted surveys, participated in panels and attended conferences. I had been recommended by the Church’s own public affairs office to speak that day.

But in 2012 when I gave that talk, one thing was clear: there was still a lot of work to be done in acknowledging that the Church is by definition a patriarchal organization, meaning we function within a structure that objectively gives greater responsibility, authority and visibility to men over women. We as a people were not yet comfortable acknowledging that favoring men diminishes the women in our community, limiting their contributions to decision making and administration, overlooking their perspectives and hindering their personal growth.

Two years later, in 2014, I turned my original 2012 talk into a full length book, Women At Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact which was published exactly ten years ago this summer. The thesis here was similar: “This book is predicated on a single belief: That there is much more we can do to see, hear, and include women at church…We are not doing all we can to fully recognize and utilize women’s unique voices, experiences, opinions, and abilities; it is imperative that we do better.”

I spent the first third of the book addressing mainstream members who may not have ever considered the impact of our patriarchal organization. We swim so entirely in the waters of patriarchy that many of us do not see the extent to which our organizational structure, the language we use, our understanding of God, our quoting of spiritual authorities, our visual representations in our meetings, and the stories of our scriptures center the experiences and viewpoints of men.

At that time, there were many who felt discussing these facts was unfaithful or dangerous. I tried to speak to that audience, encouraging compassion for the cognitive dissonance modern Latter-day Saint women experience straddling both their church community and the other communities of their lives. I encouraged us to name patriarchy—to acknowledge how different its goals and rules are from every other system that governs us in this country, in this day. Even for those who believe that our patriarchal organization is aligned with divine will and should not or will not ever change, wrestling with its existence and its impacts is imperative for intellectual honesty and spiritual integrity.

The cover of the book, a magnificent painting by Caitlin Connolly represents the tension that is inherent in many Latter-day Saint women’s lives: adherence to obedience often held in tension with personal agency; the actualization of ourselves in the world contrasted with the roles we play within the church. These dissonances are a fact of existence for a large number of women in the church today.

I believed then, and I still believe, that we as members of the Church have more agency than we realize to shape our experiences at the local level. We can look for what is NOT in the handbook just as often as we look at what is in the handbook. And so the second half of the book is dedicated to specific handbook-approved ways we can all do more to amplify the voices and visibility and contributions of women in our local wards and stakes. The church organization may be textbook patriarchy, but we can all work to blur the lines on the local and personal levels.

Even though legions of women before me had highlighted similar points, there was something about that book, how I said it or the cultural zeitgeist that lit a particular fuse: The original 2012 talk was read online hundreds of thousands of times, and Women at Church was hailed by commentators as one of the most important Latter-day Saint books of the 21st century.

So what has changed in the ten years since Women at Church was published?

For me personally, the past ten years have been both encouraging and heartbreaking.

There is the part of me that loves to celebrate the wins, the part that recognizes that every small improvement we make softens the ground and plants the seeds for future growth. And there have been significant reasons to celebrate over the past ten years. I’m sure you’ve noticed these as I have.

Just to highlight one recent example, up until a couple of weeks ago, I would have said there has been no meaningful change in the visibility of women in our local experience; sacrament meetings can still entirely consist of male participants without a single woman visible, participating or even needed. But recent changes to the handbook indicated that the Young Women should now take a visible role in setting the tone for Sacrament Meeting by serving as official greeters. This is the first effort I have seen to officially introduce women into the fabric of our Sacrament Meetings. Many thoughtful bishops have been doing this informally for years - such as my own bishop who insists high councilors bring a female stake leader when they speak in our ward - but this is the first time there has been an assigned role for girls or women in our Sunday worship.

Let’s celebrate that. Through small official adjustments like this, I’ve seen an openness and willingness to engage in this conversation that didn’t exist ten years ago. Rather than calling me an apostate, I bet a lot of you have tried something in your wards or callings to increase the visibility and participation of women - you’ve scheduled women to close sacrament meetings, rather than always letting a man have the final word. You’ve made a point of quoting women — leaders or even just your neighbor — in your lessons and your talks. You’ve welcomed mothers to hold their babies while they are blessed, and you’ve invited the Relief Society presidency to teach Elders’ Quorum.

No calling is too small to center women and women’s experiences. In my ward, I make the program every week. I make an effort to put paintings of women on the covers, and I seek out lesser known female artists. Just last week, a woman in my ward bore her testimony about how much it meant to see a woman who looked like her on the cover of one of our programs. In a black and white FedEx copy.

Additionally, you may have listened to the excellent podcasts or followed the range of Instagram accounts that center women’s experience in the church, outlets that didn’t remotely exist ten years ago but which now offer value analysis and provide communities of like-minded people who let us know we are not alone.

For me, as someone observing the conversation around women at church for almost two decades now, this has been the greatest shift of the past ten years: more open hearts, greater willingness to see things from others’ perspectives, and deeper imagination when it comes to our personal stewardships. We seem to understand better that we no longer need to buy into patriarchy hook line and sinker, or else walk away in anger. We’re more curious about the idea that naming patriarchy, examining it, questioning it, studying its impact on our lives actually leads to a bridge between those two extremes: a way of navigating our membership in the Church that is healthy and flexible.

This shift has been especially apparent among our women. Ten years ago, I noted that it was our women, more often than our men, who pushed back on the need to openly and honestly talk about women’s position in the church. I heard all of the common refrains: “Why would I want more responsibility? I have all the influence I want through my husband. Men have priesthood and women have motherhood.” I estimated that I heard from men sympathetic to my message about four times more often than I heard from women. I understood that it could be painful to confront the reality that all of the love and appreciation and praise and talk of angel motherhood we enjoy is not equality. To recognize that shying away from church governance because you’re a woman is the only time in the church where doing less, being less, contributing less, is considered admirable. Being put on a pedestal lifts us away from the grounding gravity of self-worth. But there is a new kind of women’s voice now, a voice that rose up in the tens of thousands recently to push back on an Instagram post that felt out of touch with the dissonance we live with. There is a voice now that recognizes that visibility isn’t vain, that contribution isn’t corrupting. This is exciting.

In the absence of institutional parity, so many individuals have worked to honor their own vision of Zion by taking small but powerful action. This has been extremely moving to watch. For all of you who have sought to elevate a sister, wife, daughter or friend, I thank you. As the mother of three daughters, I thank you. As someone who has watched countless loved ones step away from the church because they don’t see the very best of humanity reflected in our practices, I thank you. I believe that the Savior Jesus Christ, he who upended the gender norms of his day and elevated women in revolutionary ways, thanks you too.

But there’s the heartbroken part of me too. It’s the part of me that recently read the beautiful 50th anniversary issue of the Exponent II magazine and considered the context of its founding in 1974. It’s the part that recognizes that when it comes to gender parity, the chasm between what our children experience at Church compared to what our children experience in every other sphere of their lives, is probably greater now than it has ever been. We are so steeped in patriarchal practices that we may not even see how bizarre we appear from the outside or how much these practices hurt our missionary work and the fabric of our community. Just last month, one mother wrote in an email, “How do I explain away a sexist organizational structure that strikes all my children as blatant, ridiculous, and almost comical?”

I have been personally heartbroken over the past ten years by the stories of local leaders—men and women—who have tried things, specific things I advocated for in my book, such as letting the ward’s female leaders sit on the stand in sacrament meeting or calling a woman to plan the sacrament meeting programs—and I have watched these things be shut down from higher level leadership. My own daughter was called to be a co-sunday school president in her ward, only to have the title later revoked by a stake president. While the bishop’s impulse to call her to this role and his communication around the calling was done with the utmost care and consideration, she was crushed. Not because she coveted a title, but because she recognized the larger significance of this single small instance of change. I mourned with her and I have mourned with all of you.

One of the most pernicious and frustrating elements for me is the phenomenon of “leadership roulette”—one man will let a woman do something, while another man will not. Here in Utah, wards across the street from each other can have entirely different vibes when it comes to governance of women. The emotional whiplash of “will he allow this” or “can she do that” is part of what is so exhausting for all participants.

When I was 14, I decided to go on a weekend youth temple trip even though I was having my period. At that time, Young Women were not permitted to participate in baptisms for the dead if they were menstruating, even if they used a tampon. I went on the trip anyway, in faith and praying that something would happen to help me participate in the ordinances. I remember falling to my knees in gratitude when the temple president granted me permission to still do baptisms. To me it was a miracle, and a bedrock experience of my young testimony.

With 30 years’ perspective, I see lots of things that should have been different about this situation. We may think we’ve solved some of the ways a young girl asking an older man for permission to use a tampon was wrong. But one thing that hasn’t changed is the potential for individual decision-makers to shape the outcome of seemingly banal situations that have much larger repercussions on young testimonies.

Although I continue to believe deeply in the power of administrative changes to introduce our community to a more equitable, sustainable and holier way of doing things, they alone do not eradicate the pervasive gender bias that informs everything from how we perceive God to who can lead a meeting. Our fundamental preoccupation with gender and its determinate nature here on earth and in the hereafter is negatively affecting our membership retention rates, our missionary efforts, the unity of our families, the potential for women and men to fully experience the challenges and blessings of this life, and the shepherding of our children.

And yet I am here. And you are here. Why? Why do I remain sacrificially committed to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when it sometimes breaks my heart? Why do you? Perhaps more importantly, HOW do you do it?

As a woman, it is holy but painful work to disentangle the gospel of Jesus Christ from the sexist practices that shape church participation. It’s never easy, but I have a lot of practice at this point navigating my commitment to Jesus Christ with my engagement in the institutional church. And in my best moments, when I am able to take off the lens of womanhood that colors so much of my church experience, I am able to see so much beauty.

I see echoes of rituals that have existed for thousands of years, connecting me to people who also tried to devote themselves to something beyond this mortal life.

I see people I would never seek out otherwise, stretching me to develop kindness and warmth that doesn’t come naturally to me.

I see people aspiring to healthy, happy family lives, which, as the only child of a single mother, I deeply admire and try to emulate. From my perspective inside the church, I can see that being told that wifehood and motherhood mean nothing is just as damaging as being told wifehood and motherhood mean everything.

I am, however, uniquely privileged to have the tools I need to shape my womanhood in fullness outside of the church. When confronted with that balance between obedience and personal revelation, I absolutely favor my agency more often than others may be comfortable with. I was raised in New York City by a woman who thrived in her professional career. I have always been encouraged to develop my academic skills, my business skills, my musical skills to a level that was never hindered by concepts of womanhood. From my perspective as someone comfortable in the outside world, I can see that being told wifehood and motherhood mean everything is just as damaging as being told wifehood and motherhood mean nothing.

For my entire life, my church membership has been only one of several pillars that has shaped my choices and sense of self. I’ve differentiated myself from my church membership in consistent and important ways. It’s allowed me to choose faith, to choose what kind of member I want to be. For that I am extraordinarily grateful.

In contrast, Latter-day Saint women generally are coming out of generations of expectations that have consciously and subconsciously stripped us collectively of those self-actualizing and differentiating skills. My dearest hope is for Latter-day Saint women to be given the structural and emotional support to actualize themselves fully, outside of any prescribed roles.

Let’s welcome the opportunity to wrestle with the great unfinished work of the Restoration. Let’s put the fear aside. Let us build that bridge between blind acceptance of patriarchy and leaving our community altogether. Let’s prepare our own hearts so that when we are given a different way, a higher way to interact as men and women, we are ready for it. We rejoice when it comes because it feels inevitable, so right. This collective work within our community is vital - your participation here is vital. As author Jim Kwik says, “Life is like an egg — if it is broken by an outside force, life ends, but if it is broken by an inside force, life begins.” The same is true for the church. Great things begin on the inside.

This essay is adapted from an address delivered on Sep 7, 2024 at Restore: A Faith Matters Gathering, viewable below.

Neylan McBaine is a non-profit leader, marketing executive and passionate advocate. As the author of three books and TEDx presenter, Neylan has been called a “uniquely important” “change agent” in Utah and within her faith.

Art by Caitlin Connolly

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