IAAMF Part I: Don't Be a Dummy!

My second semester at BYU I took Intro to Women's Studies with Boyd and Hayley.  We were talking about women's experiences at church.  I raised my hand and told a story about how I was recently in Sunday School and the teacher asked for a girl to write for him on the board because we didn't speak in tongues.  I felt offended not because it was assumed that girls have better writing but because of the "they don't speak in tongues" part. After I shared the story a guy in my class raised his hand and told me that my teacher probably meant something different than I interpreted.  The professor stopped him and told the class that this was an important experience.  Here was a man rewriting a woman's experience.  He wasn't in my Sunday School class and more importantly he hadn't lived my life with my different background experiences that could have led to what I felt that day.  Regardless, it wasn't the intention of the teacher that mattered but how I had felt in the situation.  It is with this story in mind that I want to talk about my time as a female in the LDS church.  And these experiences matter regardless of how they were intended.  In addition, I know that my experience as an LDS woman has been different from every other LDS woman.  Some women have felt way worse than I have and some have never had an issue.  That doesn't make one of us wrong, it means that we had a different experience.

Because of my dad's inactivity and some other weird sh** that happened (my mom's parents deciding that my grandma was the heir to the Portuguese thrown and also the anti-Christ, who was ordained second only to Christ before coming to earth and thus must experience all sin so she could tell Christ while sitting on the judgement seat that she knew how something made someone feel because she had experienced it--the bishopric didn't believe my mom when she told them and it wasn't until her brother-in-law in a different state called the Bishop and backed up my mom's story that she was believed.  My grandpa was in the bishopric at the time and when he was released he and my grandma moved to AZ, where they promptly got their temple recommends back) my mom took a break from carting all three of her super young kids to church by herself.  I was inactive until I was 10, when my mom was visited by the missionaries and told them to come in and baptize her kids.  They promptly did.

My mom bought me a new dress when we went back to church.  It was lavender and made out of some stretchy material.  There was a side slit in it, but it didn't go past my knee at all.  More importantly, it was a tank top sleeve but came with a meshy floral sweater that I wore on top of it.  My mom thought I was modest, and I liked my outfit.  But the other girls in my primary class told me that I wasn't modest.  It wasn't that my mom had bad judgement, in fact she always made sure my stomach wasn't showing, or my shorts/skirts were too short, or that if I wore a sleeveless shirt something else was worn on top.  Thus my dress was modest.  Here I was, the new girl, being made fun of for not being modest.

I moved to Arizona shortly thereafter, to a small Mormon town.  No one wanted to befriend me, except the kids two doors down that were also not very strict Mormons and one very kind, sweet and quiet girl in my first ever Young Women's class.  Here there were more modesty issues.  It was okay for the guys to pass the Sacrament in jeans, but one night I went to my first mutual activity and was told to go home because I was wearing capris.  When I entered Young Women's my leaders gave me a present:  a velvet long sleeved shirt that was much too big for me and a matching long skirt.  While I was excited for new clothes, I was embarrassed as well.  I felt weird wearing them to church in front of the women who had given them to me.  I felt strange that my clothes didn't seem good enough and that was why I was given a new church outfit. 

I think it is important to mention that my dad didn't move with us.  My mom moved us hoping to get a divorce and find support within a Mormon community.  Our bishop in California agreed with my mom.  He said that because my dad was abusive she needed to leave.  When my mom went to our new bishop he told her that divorce was 100% unacceptable, and that if she decided to get a divorce the church would not be there to support her.  She begged him to talk to her old bishop, but he refused telling her "they may do things differently in California, but here we don't divorce."

Don't Be a Dummy!