Finding the Sprouting Seeds: Uncovering Women’s Agency in LDS History

In a well-known anecdote from the late nineteenth century, Relief Society President Zina D. H. Young was asked if women had priesthood authority in the LDS Church. She replied that women should not keeping poking and prodding newly planted seeds; they should just let them grow. Young’s reply suggests that women leaders in the LDS community were self-consciously masking their attempts to create for themselves religious authority. This complicates things for the historian. Catherine Brekus has noted that women’s experiences are not incorporated into narratives of U.S. religious history, in part at least, because historians have trouble finding and expressing women’s agency. So how do we find this agency in a community where women were self-consciously hiding it (not an unusual situation in the U.S. context)? How do we incorporate women’s experiences into larger narratives of LDS history in order to enrich that portrait? In this paper, I track down women’s agency in LDS history by presenting two case studies that use women’s popular literature as sources. In the first case study, I suggest that to fully understand contemporary views of the Mother in Heaven, we have to go back about a hundred years and explore how women used popular poetry to create an image of the Mother in Heaven as a caring parent figure who stood at the gates of mortality. In the second case study, I explore the popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” saga. Meyer’s success is earlier and even better evidence of Mormonism’s integration into mainstream culture than, for instance, Mitt Romney’s oft-referenced, successful presidential candidacy.  Meyer’s work and success express and further this growing integration. In both cases, by using popular, literary sources, we find women as agents in LDS culture and problematize traditional, institutional histories of the Mormon community.