Brigham Young the Feminist?
Posted on Nov 10, 2011 by Trevor in Religion
Did you know that Brigham Young was a feminist? Ok, he probably wasn’t really, at least not by today’s standards. But I ran across a very interesting statement he made:
As I have often told my sisters in the Female Relief Societies, we have sisters here who, if they had the privilege of studying, would make just as good mathematicians or accountants as any man; and we think they ought to have the privilege to study these branches of knowledge that they may develop the powers with which they are endowed. We believe that women are useful not only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make beds, and raise babies, but that they should stand behind the counter, study law or physic [medicine], or become good bookkeepers and be able to do the business in any counting house, and this to enlarge their sphere of usefulness for the benefit of society at large. In following these things they but answer the design of their creation.
– Discourses of Brigham Young.
Selected by John A. Widtsoe. 1941, 216–17
That’s more progressive than anything you’ll hear even today, 150 years later. Now, in all fairness, Brigham said these words during the Church’s polygamy era, and so you can imagine that having all of those plural wives be stay-at-home mothers wouldn’t work out so well. 🙂
Still, I’d love to hear this kind of stuff from the pulpit today. Want to know something interesting? In 1997, in the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church manual, we studied select statements from Brigham Young. (I’d say we studied Brigham Young, but that would be making a mockery of the truth. The manuals weren’t intended to be biographical or historical.) The above statement was in the manual in chapter 19, “The Relief Society and Individual Responsibility”. The manual oddly omits the last sentence of that statement. It seems like it was possibly culled because it doesn’t line up with the Proclamation on the Family. This is most unfortunate, because my suspicion is that we’ll eventually get to a place where a statement such as Young’s will be repeated from the pulpit in General Conference. I think the Proclamation locks us arbitrarily into 1950s notions of family and gender roles, and we’ll soon see that this is as outdated and worthy of the dustbin as sexist and racist attitudes of the past.
