A question about mission age from my 10yo daughter…

This is my conclusion. The church demands less of women because men are there to protect women, and women don’t have to be independent or achievement oriented or contributors as leaders in the church. It’s so-called benevolent sexism. We tell men they are total crap constantly, that they are porn addicts who need to overcome their craven perverted minds to be worthy of the sweet lilting flowery females. Girls aren’t expected to do anything but passively stay chaste, and if they do they are “entitled” to a worthy male priesthood holder who is obligated to financially support her and their offspring for life. They just have to wait and wait, passively, until someone scoops them up and takes care of them. To me, that’s not being a full person, an adult. But you won’t hear many talks in General Conference taking the women to task for not living up to high expectations beyond the borders of the kitchen or nursery. I consider it a waste of 51% of our bright minds and brilliant missionaries. Women haven’t been told they need to prepare to be the equals of men because the pedestal they’ve been placed on prevents them from being addressed at all.

From the actual announcement, I believe the Church leaders would like to have the age set at 19 for both men and women. However, there are multiple countries where young men have required military service that would conflict with a mission if young men waited until 19 to serve. Therefore, they have been allowed to serve at 18 for a while now. The change to 18 as the minimum for all young men (with an explicit statement to finish high school regardless of age) was to equalize the age world-wide for young men, with an explicit statement that 18 should not be considered the new “required” age for young men, and the age was dropped to 19 for young women to make the “standard age” the same for both men and women.

Of course, in our culture, many people will ignore what President Monson actually said and view righteousness in terms of how young someone is when they serve, but I thought the actual announcement was clear about the intent to equalize the suggested minimum mission age for all, while equalizing the absolute minimum age for young men.

Unfortunately, many people focused only on the age change and ignored completely the rest of the announcement. It must be incredibly frustrating to be one of the Q12 and FP.

From the actual announcement, I believe the Church leaders would like to have the age set at 19 for both men and women. However, there are multiple countries where young men have required military service that would conflict with a mission if young men waited until 19 to serve. Therefore, they have been allowed to serve at 18 for a while now. The change to 18 as the minimum for all young men (with an explicit statement to finish high school regardless of age) was to equalize the age world-wide for young men, with an explicit statement that 18 should not be considered the new “required” age for young men, and the age was dropped to 19 for young women to make the “standard age” the same for both men and women.

Of course, in our culture, many people will ignore what President Monson actually said and view righteousness in terms of how young someone is when they serve, but I thought the actual announcement was clear about the intent to equalize the suggested minimum mission age for all, while equalizing the absolute minimum age for young men.

Unfortunately, many people focused only on the age change and ignored completely the rest of the announcement. If must be incredibly frustrating to be one of the Q12 and FP.

Thanks Ray, come to think of it, that rings a bell. I remember reading it and then hearing the reaction the following Sunday and thinking ‘hang on, he didn’t say… oh well.’

Where’s the original announcement? I’ll go take a look.

Hawkgrrl,

Were you at my stake conference this weekend?

Had a whole talk about how our wives are already perfect and we need to make sure we honor them and take care of them and all that stuff. This in a talk copiously quoting BKP too. Even when quoting JS it was like “BKP once quoted JS as saying…” I was going nuts.

Fortunately the area 70 speaking later corrected his claims that women are perfect and “a temple worthy women is always better than a temple worthy man”.

Now I love my wife and don’t doubt she’s better than me in many, many ways. But its because she isn’t a lilting flower. She would never be happy as a full time stay at home wife/mom with me serving her. And I would never expect it of her.

On the original topic… I think they missed an opportunity. At least in my mission the sisters, on average, worked harder and baptized more. Mainly because a mission is optional for them. They always seemed to be there because of their testimonies, not cultural expectation. I really think 18 is too young but whatever the age I think it should’ve been the same and serving for the same amount of time.

But I don’t think this change was some great revelation. Just a realization that a lot of boys decide not to go in the year after high school.

I like Ray’s explanation but for me its not quite enough. When I heard this announcement my feeling was “dang, they almost got it right” hehe.

On the bright side the RS in my ward did a special SM last month. All 3 talks and both prayers were done by women. That was a first.

Here is a link to KSL where Elder Holland responds to similar questions. I’m not sure the answer will satisfy your daughter but it is what we have. I think if nothing else it gives hope that the door was left open for future changes.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=295&sid=22445486

My daughter came up to me this evening and said:…”Dad, we learnt about mission age at church today and that they had recently made it younger.Why do girls have to wait a year longer than boys? And why do they get to go for less time?…And when they changed it, why didn’t they make it equal?…Do they not think girls are as good as boys?”…I had no answer that I could offer that made any sense to me…I told her: “I don’t know why. I will try to find out for you.

From the actual announcement, I believe the Church leaders would like to have the age set at 19 for both men and women. However, there are multiple countries where young men have required military service that would conflict with a mission if young men waited until 19 to serve. Therefore, they have been allowed to serve at 18 for a while now. The change to 18 as the minimum for all young men (with an explicit statement to finish high school regardless of age) was to equalize the age world-wide for young men, with an explicit statement that 18 should not be considered the new “required” age for young men, and the age was dropped to 19 for young women to make the “standard age” the same for both men and women.

They specifically asked Elder Holland about this and he said “one miracle at a time” and people laughed about that answer. Personally I think the real reason is mostly because the main thing they want to see out of women is simply for them to get married in the temple and start having children as soon as possible which hasn’t changed as long as I can remember. So to me the age difference mostly looks like an indirect way of encouraging women to still consider marriage first but then if they’re not already married or engaged by the time they are 19 and want to go on missions now they can go ahead and get it over with much sooner than before and move on to focusing on the real task at hand from the typical Church leader’s perspective (getting married and having children).

There’s more to it than that for the men because Church leaders are especially concerned about them being strong (loyal, obedient, etc.) members for life and successful in their careers among other things. I think they feel like women are already much less likely than the young men to go off the deep end (from their perspective) and completely fall away from the Church between 18 and 19 and that’s one reason why they liked the idea of the young men being around other missionaries constantly earlier than before instead of being around some of the “bad” influences at college/work and left on their own to make important potentially life-changing decisions before receiving some of the heavy duty correlated training and reinforcement geared around being good Mormons provided by the mission experience. So to me it looks like it never was about equality to begin with as much as simply what Church leaders think is best and most likely to produce the results they want to see.

DA, we disagree, since the easiet way for the Church to try to get young women married as young as possible would have been to remove the option to serve missions in the first place – and since there hasn’t been any kind of official or semi-official pressure for young women to marry in their teens in quite a few years, at least. Also, for those who are inclined to attend college (which still is the official push from the top), this change means most young women will attend for a year until they are 19, planning on going on a mission, going on a mission, returning from a mission and not start looking at marriage seriously until they are at least 21…From a purely stastical standpoint, I think it’s almost impossible to make a strong argument that allowing all young women to serve a mission at 19 is going to descrease the average marriage age in the Church – or even keep it even with where it is now. I honestly can’t construct a solid argument for anything except that the average marriage age will increase.

I’m not saying they want to push it that hard or that this change will actually succeed in lowering the average marriage age, just that it looks to me like they definitely wanted women to still at least consider marriage first as an option and only think about serving a mission after it appears that isn’t going to happen anytime soon either way. I’m sure they saw that more women weren’t getting married until they were in their mid-twenties or later anyway and thought it wouldn’t hurt to lower the age limit because of that.

If anything I think the old age limit hurt women’s chances of getting married in the temple compared to 19 because some sister missionaries will become increasingly independent and used to being single the longer they wait and some will eventually start to feel increasingly anxious about being alone the older they get and end up settling for “unworthy” men as a direct result of this. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a major side-effect of this change turns out to be more Church members meeting the person they eventually marry on their missions.