Are Mormons Feminists?
A look at midwives, Mormons, and polygamy
For a practice that has been around for so long, midwifery is a nebulous concept to many citizens of the modern world. Defined by the Midwives Alliance of North America as “trained professionals with expertise and skills in supporting women to maintain healthy pregnancies and have optimal births and recoveries during the postpartum period,” midwives have functioned as the primary care providers for women in the pre-, peri- and post-partum periods for the majority of human history (MANA; “Midwifery,” Volume 3 Issue 1).
Over the past eighty years, however, midwifery has been largely overtaken by the rise of obstetrics and gynecology. Emphasis on the technocratic model of childbirth has been associated with its diminished significance as a defining, transitional, and spiritual process. At a time when negotiations between the biological and psychological aspects of childbirth are ongoing, examining the roles of religion and motherhood is paramount to deciphering the social underpinnings driving the differing forms of care for expecting families.
The state of Utah is inextricably tied to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As a Salt Lake City native, the LDS church has played a pivotal role in my community. Friends, colleagues, and family alike conform to the teaching of this renowned faith, and as the nation’s fastest-growing state in terms of population, it seemed to me that exploring the relationships between historical and present-day midwifery and the Mormon church would provide valuable insight in the roles of womanhood, motherhood, and childbirth. I found that early LDS emphasis on women as divine healers combined with the practice of polygamy eased both role conflict and role strain on women, which allowed them to pursue medical careers, often via midwifery as an entrance point. To understand my conclusions, we have to delve into the history of the human race and the Mormon faith.
Anthropological studies suggest that for as long as Homo sapiens have been around, women have been assisted during childbirth. This shouldn’t be surprising, given the nearly universal experience of long, painful labor we as women are taught is necessary to the experience of bringing life onto the planet. As humans, the delicate balance between the sizes of our skulls and the widest opening a female’s pelvis can offer has been pushed to its maximum. Classically, birthing attendants were female in an attempt to keep “women’s secrets” within their own sphere, untouched by man. The shift towards gynecological and medicalized treatment of childbirth tracks the infiltration of men into the female sphere of knowledge and the overturn of “women’s secrets,” as multiple historians and classicists have shown.
Mormonism’s relatively recent genesis in the 1800s, however, historically places it after the foundation of contemporary obstetrics and gynecology had been laid. Nonetheless, colonization and expansion on American soil was still very much an ongoing process, and most women were living in rural communities, meaning midwives were the primary overseers of childbirth. These trends carried over into the establishment of Mormon culture.
Controversial in the present day, the church’s first founders both preached and practiced polygamy. To the vast majority of Americans, the LDS church’s dalliance with polygamy is unsavory, to say the least, and continues to be a defining characteristic of the church in public opinion despite its official discontinuance over 120 years ago. Further stigmatizing the Mormon church in the modern day is its strong support of traditional gender roles. The foundational unit in the Mormon church is the nuclear family. That is to say, the family serves as the foundation upon which LDS principles are built. In a now-canonical speech given by then-prophet President Gordon B. Hinckley in 1995, he states:
By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.
-A Proclamation to the World, 1995
Understanding this basic tenet may help us understand how motherhood may have become more of an obligation than a right or a choice for Mormon women. The puritanical obsession with female chastity and virtue runs throughout LDS teachings, as can be seen in the aforementioned speech: “We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity…will one day stand responsible before God.” To nail this point home, the first presidency of the church has made their stance on the roles of women clear, which may be summed up in this simple statement from Elder Boyd K. Packer, who says “Some roles are best suited to the masculine nature and others to the feminine nature.”
This sentiment can be traced back to the most fundamental of differences between man and woman: the ability to bear children. As a child growing up in the Mormon church, I would often ask my father why I would never be able to hold the priesthood. Defined by the church as “the power and authority that God gives to man to act in all things necessary for the salvation of God’s children,” the priesthood is exclusively granted to men and bestows the right to lead, both within the house of God and the family. Time and time again, I was told that women were inherently closer to God than men because of their ability to guide spirits to earth via childbirth. The Priesthood was man’s way of being connected to God — a compensatory mechanism at best, and if women were given the Priesthood, our closeness to God would far outweigh that of men.
This framing of power as the righting of an inherent imbalance between women and men is insidious. It tricks men into believing they are entitled to hold more “earthly” power while guilting women into bridling their capabilities and re-routing them into prescribed motherhood. Further, it equates a biological mechanism with a predetermined spiritual calling, restricting the sum of a woman’s societal contribution to her birthing years and the sum of her value to her child birthing ability. At its foundation, the rhetoric used by leaders of the Latter-day Saints pitches sex-bounded divisions akin to the “separate but equal” sentiment that arose out of Plessy vs. Ferguson. Needless to say, separate conditions are inherently unequal, regardless of how you slice it.
With all of the above evidence and analysis pointing towards an internalized misogyny baked into the foundation of the Latter-day Saints, the church’s stances on the role of women, childbirth, and thus midwives are pretty straightforward, right? Unfortunately, the answers aren’t that simple. Taking a closer look reveals surprising opinions and practices underlying the bedrock of Mormonism. External criticism and forced migration of the faith in the 1800s fostered a culture of staying within the group for the majority of needed services, including childbirth. Similar to national trends, midwives were the primary care providers up through the early twentieth century, and, similarly to midwives in previous centuries and communities, Mormon midwives held exceptional levels of agency, acting as leaders of both general and women’s health within their communities.
The calling of a midwife in the context of the Mormon church was an official one: midwives were both called and ordained, identical to men who were called to serve the church in various leadership positions. I found four particular case studies of Mormon midwives throughout the course of my research, and an examination of each of their lives and practices offers a glimpse into the role of midwives, child birthing customs and, more generally, women within the Mormon church.
Patty Bartlett Sessions (1795–1892) was both a Mormon convert and a pioneer. She kept detailed accounts of the births she attended (totaling up to around 4,000) and her financial transactions for over 20 years, offering historians a cornucopia of details about birth rates, practices, and a glimpse of the lives of early Western settlers. Zina Young (1821–1901) was also a convert to the LDS church, but unlike Sessions, inherited the practice of midwifery from her mother. After raising her children, Young studied obstetrics and was instrumental in founding the Deseret Hospital in the Salt Lake Valley — she even served as the president of the hospital for twelve years.
While also acting as a prominent midwife during her time, Romania B. Pratt (1839–1932) also holds the titles of the first Mormon woman and the first woman in the state of Utah to hold an M.D. Despite having five children, she left home to pursue a degree at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Upon her return to Utah, Pratt spent her time working as a midwife and teaching other women the practices of both medicine and midwifery. Ellis Reynolds Shipp, a contemporary of Pratt, also left her three children to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. When she returned, Shipp founded the first school of nursing and obstetrics in 1879.
The amount of freedom documented for these women doesn’t align with what I expected after learning about the previously-discussed ideals of Mormon womanhood. When contemplating how this kind of flexibility could flourish in the face of such flagrant sexism, I realized that, unlike other communities, the medical separations between men and women extended beyond gynecological care. Male physicians did not attend to women at all in an attempt to keep the purity of the female sphere untouched. This extreme separation of male and female spheres in medicine created a societal vacancy for women in medicine. In fact, the pressing need for female medical professionals was openly acknowledged by leadership of the church. Brigham Young helped fund the education of Romania B. Pratt.
Having community backing at a time when women pursuing higher education was not a norm definitely explains some of the boost seen in the number of women getting degrees in the Mormon church near the turn of the century, but this fails to fully explain exactly how a faith that puts such emphasis on infant care would let its anointed workers deviate from the status quo.
The simple answer is polygamy. By having multiple female caretakers in one family, the overall burden of the household work was dispersed, reducing the role strain on any particular woman. All four of the women described above were in plural relationships. Patty Bartlett Sessions and Zina Young were two of Joseph Smith’s many wives. In fact, many wives took multiple husbands as well and split their time between households. The fluidity of these relationships allowed both Romania B. Pratt and Ellis Reynolds Shipp to “pass” the duties of motherhood onto their sister wives while they pursued their degrees.
Another potential catalyst for the inclusion of women in the medical field within the Mormon church is the predetermined role of women as healers and caretakers. Unlike the general western population, which began to exclude women from medicine because of its technical difficulty and ability to stain a woman’s virtue, Mormons embraced the innate female tendency to nurture. In this light, sending women on to cultivate a prescribed gender role makes perfect sense. Why let man take over a domain in which women are clearly superior?
Utah’s admission into America as an official state was contingent upon the LDS church officially condemning the practice of polygamy. Wilford Woodruff, the third president of the LDS church, conceded in 1890, and Utah was accepted as the 45th state to join the United States in 1896. Utah’s formal acceptance into the states also pulled its inhabitants into the larger fold of American culture, which was not as progressive in terms of supporting women in medicine. Nationally, by the early 1900s, significant numbers of women were choosing hospital births over homebirths, in part spurred on by the belief that medicalized births posed fewer risks to both mother and child. The LDS church’s active support of women pursuing careers in medicine both socially and economically ceased, shifting favorably towards the nationally accepted gender role of homemaker.
This shift can perhaps be best understood through the laying on of hands, a practice used to invoke the Holy Ghost during spiritual or healing rituals. Women and midwives in early Mormonism routinely performed the laying on of hands during medical visits and childbirths. Today, however, the laying on of hands is restricted to those who hold the Priesthood; in other words, men. This retraction of healing power from women reflects the movement of women into hospitals to give birth.
Today, over 96 percent of births in Utah are planned in-hospital — one of the lowest rates in the nation — displaying how thorough the transition to hospital births became. An analysis done by the Utah Women & Newborns Quality Collaborative found that between 2013–2015, of the planned out-of-hospital births, 3.7 percent were transferred to the hospital for emergency services. The study also found that older white women who had partial or complete college educations showed higher rates of out-of-hospital births. When reflecting upon this trend, however, it is important to remember that an estimated 91 percent of Utahans are white. Further, caesarean sections account for 32 percent of all births in the state, one of the lower rates nationally. This is all to say that for a culture known for its radicalism, modern Mormons exhibit remarkably similar approaches to their fellow Americans when it comes to childbirth practices.
So what can we conclude about the relationship between the practices of Mormonism and midwifery? Midwifery’s prevalence in early Mormonism reflected its prominence in 19th century American society, but its significance was unique in its ties to female education and empowerment. Midwifery paved the way for ambitious women to pursue medical degrees, and ironically enough, the practice of polygamy removed societal barriers preventing women from committing to their studies by allowing sister wives to take care of children.
This, of course, is not to say that the church of the mid to late-1800s had a concrete grasp on the concept of feminism, lest we forget the first and foremost obligation of the Mormon woman to bear children or the obvious inequalities intrinsic to the practice of polygamy. The church did, however, display an early progressivism that, whether intentional or not, was halted by the 1890 Manifesto outlawing polygamy, which changed the trajectory of equal rights in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and assimilated their practices into those more characteristic of larger twentieth-century American society.
