Pedestals and PodiumsSample chapter

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Pedestals and Podiums Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights by Martha Sonntag Bradley hardback. 584 Pages. / 156085-189-9 / $39.95 Almost from the beginning, the women's movement has been divided into two factions--those wanting full equality with men (Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul) and those seeking legal protections for women's particular needs (Julia Ward Howe, Eleanor Roosevelt). Early Utah leaders such as Relief Society President Emmeline B. Wells walked hand-in-hand with Anthony and other controversial reformers. However, by the 1970s, Mormons had undergone a significant ideological turn to the mainstream, championing women's unique roles in home and church, and joined other conservatives in defeating the Equal Rights Amendment. Looking back to the nineteenth century, how commited were Latter-day Saints of thier day to women's rights? LDS President Joseph F. Smith was particularly critical of women who "glory in their enthralled condition and who caress and fondle the very chains and manacles which fetter and enslave them!" The masthead of the church's female Relief Society periodical,

Woman's Exponent, proudly proclaimed "The Rights of the Women of Zion and the Rights of Women of All Nations!" In leading the LDS sisterhood, Wells said she gleaned inspiration from The Revolution, published by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Fast-forward a century to 1972 and passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) by the United States Congress. Within a few years, the LDS Church, allied with Phyllis Schlafly, joined a coalition of the Religious Right and embarked on a campaign against ratification. This was a mostly grassroots campaign waged by thousands of men and women who believed they were engaged in a moral war and that the enemy was feminism itself. Conjuring up images of unisex bathrooms, homosexuality, the dangers of women in the military, and the divine calling of stay-at-home motherhood—none of which were directly related to equal rights—the LDS campaign began in Utah at church headquarters but importantly was fought across the country in states that had not yet ratified the proposed amendment. In contrast to the enthusiastic partnership of Mormon women and suffragists of an earlier era, fourteen thousand women, the majority of them obedient, determined LDS foot soldiers responding to a call from their Relief Society leaders, attended the 1977 Utah International Women's Year Conference in Salt Lake City. Their intent was to commandeer the proceedings if necessary to defeat the pro-ERA agenda of the National Commission on the International Women's Year. Ironically, the conference organizers were mostly LDS women, who were nevertheless branded by their sisters as feminists. In practice, the church risked much by standing up political action committees around the country and waging a seemingly all-or-nothing campaign. Its strategists, beginning with the dean of the church's law school at BYU, feared the worst—some going so far as to suggest that the ERA might seriously compromise the church's legal status and sovereignty of its all-male priesthood. In the wake of such horrors, a take-no-prisoners war of rhetoric and leafleteering raged across the country. In the end, the church exerted a significant, perhaps decisive, impact on the ERA''s unexpected defeat. from the dust jacket: "Martha Bradley is uniquely qualified to write about this period of women's history. Her contribution to understanding gender events from national and local perspectives is invaluable, and she admirably maintains a cool tone as she explicates the rancorous and polarizing confrontations of the ERA wars." —Claudia L. Bushman, Columbia University; editor of Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah; author of "A Good Poor Man's Wife: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England "Bradley has written a page turner of a book! Using Utah as a case study, she demonstrates with admirable objectivity the clash of forces at work, identifying the economic realities, religious influences, political conservatism, and radical and moderate feminism that did battle on the field of women's rights. This is a book to be trusted." —Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Brigham Young University, emerita; general editor of the Life Writings of Frontier Women series from Utah State University Press. "The author's life experience and academic credentials make this an unusually significant book. Bradley was raising children at the time of the Utah women's conference in 1977, but she attended and was troubled by the rhetoric she heard. Later she returned to her study of history and women's issues, which prepared her to write this balanced and important work." —Grethe Ballif Peterson, Director of the Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah; past managing editor, Exponent II; founder of the Utah Children's Justice Centers "Those of us who concern ourselves with the roles of women in society and religions can welcome this book. It provides a well researched record of events too often ignored by people of good will. The controversy surrounding women's activities was fueled by political manipulation in high places, which continues to affect attitudes and practices today." —Aileen Hales Clyde, past Regent, Utah System of Higher Education; former chair, Utah Task Force on Gender and Justice; former counselor, LDS Relief Society General Presidency Martha Sonntag Bradley is a professor in the College of Architecture and Planning and director of the Honors Program at the University of Utah, where she has received the Distinguished Teaching Award, the Student Choice Award for Excellence in Teaching, the Bennion Center Service Learning Professorship, and the honorary title of "University Professor, 1999-2000." She taught previously in the history department at Brigham Young University, where she received a Teaching Excellence Award. She has served as president of the Mormon History Association and co-editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Her many books include Kidnapped from that Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists; Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier ; and A History of Kane County.