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In recent my months the scales have begun to fall from my eyes regarding feminist issues. I hesitate to use that word, because there is a lot of baggage with it, but for lack of a better word I will use it. I have just begun to see how pervasive the problem is, both in LDS culture and society-wide. I am seeing it every day in our speech and our actions. I am fighting daily to remove 50 year habits. Some of it is minor semantics, but the cumulative effect is staggering.
On a personal level, I am seeing how the concepts of ‘chivalry’ and ‘breadwinner’ and ‘protector’ that I had prided myself on, actually can enslave women, especially if their society predisposes them to accepting and relying on that ‘chivalry’, by denying them the experiences that would help them grow. I am getting an inkling about how that nurtured dependency plays a role in depression among LDS women. Conversely, the gender roles really create dependencies for men as well.
With new ears, I am astounded with our daily reinforcement of gender roles. The walls are still high, especially in the LDS church. They are maintained and re-mortared by leadership and lay, by male and female.
I see how powerful women are demonized by the less secure, both within and without the church.
I am mortified to think how patriarchal our local and central church leadership still is and what a better organization we would be if women had real participation and power. I feel that it is really lack of courage to forge a new direction that is impeding this, based on a cultural context of male leadership, rather than any real prophetic reason why it couldn’t be.
I believe that there is little vision within the church of education for women, with the purpose of lifting, fulfilling, enlightening and preparing for rewarding careers. More often, education in LDS Society focuses on a woman’s access to eligible men or of necessity for simply making a living.
Anyway, this is just the tip of the iceberg. It was washing over me like a tsunami. The personal loss for not becoming more enlightened earlier is boggling my mind. I was just interested to hear the viewpoints and perspectives of my staylds friends on the subject.
cwald posted something really profound a while ago. It’s titled “A New Perspective on Woman and the Church”and the link is: http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1824&start=0&hilit=woman silentstruggle wrote:…I feel that it is really lack of courage to forge a new direction that is impeding this, based on a cultural context of male leadership, rather than any real prophetic reason why it couldn’t be…
This is exactly what I believe as well. CULTURE. CULTURE. CULTURE. It’s sad, and I hoped that the “one and only true church” would have made the necessary “course corrections” by now, however, recently I have just accepted the fact that I really don’t see things changing much in my life time. I’m not sure what to say about the topic of feminism, only that I feel bad for those who struggle with it, especially within the church
Like anything else, I think feminism has good and bad aspects to it. Some men associate it with man-hating, and there are some extremists that go down that road, but I think positive feminism is about women receiving fair pay, decent conditions, and being treated with respect. Another bad form of feminism, IMHO is when women ape the worst aspects of masculinity, e.g. going out in packs on the town and drinking a lot of alcohol and generally misbehaving themselves.
I agree with you about how “the gender roles really create dependencies for men as well.” This is certainly true, and this is what I’m getting at. We need to create a situation where there is no hate, exploitation or inequality. We know men and women are different in certain regards – ones that go beyond cultural conditioning – but they are two halves of our species.
Both genders have their faults, and I think one of the mistakes of western feminism is to assume that if you have enough female bosses things will change. Well, when this has happened, things have not changed for the better. In fact, women have made political decisions as bad as any a man could make – Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher were both war mongers for example, and in spite of their rule, women still continued to receive unfair pay and mistreatment in Israel and the UK. So, tokenism, maybe even positive discrimination are not necessarily the way to go. The whole needs to be lifted, not just parts of it.
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