Empowerment From a Forgotten Past: What Mormon Women Can Learn From Our Catholic and Protestant Foremothers

When Joseph Smith recounted God’s summary of the Christian creeds as “all wrong” and “an abomination in his sight” (JSH 1:9), he effectively discarded the 1,800 years between Christ’s original church and the Restoration. We Mormons grow up studying the standard works and the teachings of modern prophets, but not many of us know who Saint Augustine or Thomas Aquinas is (much less Hildegard of Bingen or Julian of Norwich) until we take a History of Civ class or have a Catholic friend whose incredulity at our ignorance sends us, chagrined, to Wikipedia.

What a loss this is! Especially for us Mormon women, who can so often feel lost and alone as we navigate a beloved Church that so frequently wounds us. We are blessed to have the journals of our pioneer great-great-great-grandmothers (our spiritual ancestors, even if we are converts or not of European descent), and their voices from the dust are invaluable as we learn who we are and where we might go. But how often have we asked ourselves who their great-great-great-grandmothers were? Those women had been navigating patriarchal Christianity for centuries before Eliza Snow picked up her pen, and a much more noxious patriarchy at that. Who were those women, and what would they tell us, their daughter-descendants, if they could?

Our Catholic Foremothers: Nurturers of the Divine Feminine

As a backdrop, consider what the early Church fathers taught about women. Here are some choice selections:

“In pain shall you bring forth children, woman, and you shall turn to your husband and he shall rule over you. And do you not know that you are Eve? God’s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs down upon you. You are the devil’s gateway; you are she who first violated the forbidden tree and broke the law of God. It was you who coaxed your way around him whom the devil had not the force to attack. With what ease you shattered that image of God: Man! Because of the death you merited, even the Son of God had to die… Woman, you are the gate to hell.” Tertullian, “the father of Latin Christianity” (c. 160–225)

“Woman does not possess the image of God in herself but only when taken together with the male who is her head, so that the whole substance is one image. But when she is assigned the role as helpmate, a function that pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God. But as far as the man is concerned, he is by himself alone the image of God just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together into one.” –Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (c. 354–430)

Within this psychological context (and as an aside, “do you not know that you are Eve?” — ring a bell?), imagine what Mary might mean to women: a trustworthy, righteous role model chosen by God Himself to bring to pass humanity’s greatest work. The priests could go on reciting the Latin liturgies in their cold cathedrals; at home, the entire family gathered to connect with Heaven, and the faces they gazed at as they poured out their hearts were a beautiful Mother and Her Son.

Consider for a moment how it would feel to fill out the female side of the religious pantheon. We Mormons have scores of heroes to inspire us, but if you list them in male/female columns on a paper, women are a bit underrepresented. This does make a difference psychologically and emotionally. We move through our lives in gendered bodies, especially we Mormons to whom gender is so cosmically important. So why are all our role models male?

A personal example: I have given birth four times. Going into labor felt like I was entering the valley of the shadow of death, and for three of those four, I really was. I could have died. And so, as I prepared to sacrifice my body to bring spirits into this world, I sought Heaven’s help in the way I had been taught: I asked for a priesthood blessing. It was beautiful, and I am grateful to my beloved husband and my dear father for laying their hands on my head, and I am grateful to my Heavenly Father for sending His comfort and strength in the name of His Beloved Son, in whom I have faith. At the same time, I am touched to the point of weeping to imagine what it might have felt like if I had been able to call on the women in my life to lay their hands on my head and call on feminine spirits on the other side of the veil to assist me in that act of supreme feminine spirituality.

Our Catholic ancestors enjoyed just such a sisterly communion. European historian Natalie Zemon Davis writes,

“This invocation of assistance occurred informally and privately in a woman’s daily life, and most earnestly during pregnancy and especially during childbirth. Then, along with women in her family and community and her female midwife, prayers of health and safety for both mother and infant were offered to the Virgin and especially to Saint Margaret, patron saint of pregnant women.” (Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, p. 76)

And the heavenly help extended far beyond reproduction: Saint Anne and many others were thought to watch over women in every aspect of their lives.

I am not advocating that Mormon women pray to Mary or the Catholic saints (though I think the practice is beautiful, especially after living in Spain and observing Catholic women’s fervent devotion to their Mother). But I imagine our Catholic ancestors reaching through time to pass on some lessons:

• Be a nun in a cloister sometimes. Take time away to meditate, just by yourself or with other women.
• Don’t accept the dearth of female spiritual heroes. Learn more about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Julian of Norwich, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Mother Theresa, and others. Fill the void with examples of saints from your own life.
• Cultivate a relationship with Mother in Heaven. Start where you are and reach out a little. See what happens.

Our Protestant Foremothers: Literate Leaders of Social Change

Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenburg Castle Church on October 31, 1517, changing Christianity forever. Protestant reformers had a lot to say about gender; it seems Catholic women had gotten too uppity for their taste.

“Thus the woman, who had perversely exceeded her proper bounds, is forced back to her own position. She had, indeed, previously been subject to her husband, but that was a liberal and gentle subjection; now, however, she is cast into servitude.” –John Calvin (1509–1564)

“Eve, who spoilt all… (warrants) this punishment, which falls upon all those who shall become the daughters of Eve. …That is God’s word, and no one can change it. …He commands her to humble herself before her husband. That means that she does not live according to her own free will.” -Martin Luther (1483–1546)

“Do not any longer contend for mastery, for power, money, or praise. Be content to be a private, insignificant person, known and loved by God and me. . . . of what importance is your character to mankind, if you was buried just now Or if you had never lived, what loss would it be to the cause of God.” –John Wesley, founder of Methodist movement (1703–1791), in a letter to his wife

I wish I knew how my foremothers felt when they lost Mary. They were mostly in Scotland, England, and Sweden, and were all Protestants by the time their names made it onto my Family Search tree. But at some point, probably in the 1500’s when Martin Luther’s reforms were sweeping through Europe, there was a mother who prayed to St. Margaret during childbirth… and a daughter who did not. John Calvin forbids these prayers specifically, commenting that women “… groaned and sighed to the Lord and He received those groans as a sign of their obedience” (Davis, p. 88). Indeed it must have been “in sorrow” that women brought forth children (Genesis 3:16).

And yet, though the doctrine of sola scriptura jettisoned Mary and the saints, bringing Eve back into focus in place of Mary, the Reformers’ emphasis on scripture inadvertently provided the key to women’s shackles: literacy. For the first time in history (and providentially, at the same time as the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press), everyday women were taught to read.

Men had cause for alarm; in a German pamphlet, one cleric warned,

“There is no need for women or artisans to take time out from their work and read the Old and New Testament in the vernacular. Then they’ll want to dispute about it and give their opinion… and they can’t help falling into error. Women must be silent in Church, as Saint Paul says.” (Davis, p 79)

And dispute and opine they did. In Geneva in 1538 Marie Dentiere published Defense of Women, leading to a halt in women’s publishing for the rest of the century (Davis, p. 85), but by the mid-1700’s, women’s education was somewhat begrudgingly accepted, albeit within parameters proposed by another Geneva native, Jean-Jacques Rousseau:

“…the whole education of women ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them — these are the duties of women at all times, and should be taught them from their infancy.”

In general, European society was thus progressing from toxic misogyny to a slightly improved form of sexism. And despite the excruciatingly slow pace, women’s emancipation was gaining momentum. In France in 1791, Olympe de Gouges published her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen,” and in England in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft rebutted Rousseau in her seminal work, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” By the 1800’s Protestant countries throughout Europe were beginning to grant women’s suffrage, and in 1848 the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York launched the first wave of American Feminism.

Our Protestant foremothers might reach out to us to say:

• Reading and writing makes you smarter and gives you broader perspective. Learn everything you can.
• Using your voice honors your unique life experience and can lift and inspire others. What you have to say might change the world.

Mormon Women: Heirs to Paradox

Six miles away from Seneca Falls and eighteen years before the famous convention, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was organized by a young Protestant man who inherited, as we all do, the paradigms of his ancestors. The religion he founded was a radically inclusive conglomeration of doctrines: it currently includes both Eve’s condemnation and her exoneration, both Jesus’ words and Paul’s, the belief in a Heavenly Mother and discouragement from talking to Her, emphasis on an unmediated, personal relationship with God and a hierarchical priesthood, and the promotion of female education and the prescription of a woman’s place staying at home. It’s a good thing Joseph Smith pointed out that “in proving contraries, truth is made manifest,” because he handed us quite a pile of paradoxes. Our religion is a beautiful, messy mash-up, perhaps best met with Walt Whitman’s rhapsodic acceptance of complexity: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am vast; I contain multitudes.”

I can hear the voices of our great-great-great-grandmothers speaking to us through the ages. They are proud of us. They are so grateful that we have it better than they did. They want us to trust our conscience and stand on our own two feet. They want us to leave our world and our religion better than we found them. They want us to live with joy. We honor them by doing so.