Talk:Mormonism and women

The introduction

Hi COGDEN. My wife is annoyed with the intro on this article with its emphasis on polygyny/polygamy while neglecting influence of women on the Church. She also doesn't like how the intro implies that early Mormons were not Victorians. She would like your wife to help you write this article...LOL. B 00:42, Apr 21, 2004 (UTC)

My wife thinks I'm insane for writing Wikipedia articles. I agree the intro needs some work--it's going to take a lot of work to get this one NPOV and keep it that way, and still deal with all the historical quirks and oddities. I welcome any additions or changes you might have.

This article lists a bunch of issues at the bottom but does not comment on them. As no additional information is provided, and their presentation is ambiguous, I am going to remove them. NR

Hi. The "nevertheless" in the intro paragraph doesn't seem to set apart two conflicting ideas. First you talk about mainstream mormon women in the 19th century, then present day folks on the margins, then mainstream today. Perhaps a different order . . . Chrisvls 15:28, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I agree. I tried to rewrite the intro a little more coherently. COGDEN 00:31, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

Name change

The following discussion was copied from Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement/polls:

Move Women and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Women and Mormonism, and broaden scope to include other denominations.

• Support. This follows the project trend we have lately established. Also, it will be more enlightening to see the progression of women's issues in the various LDS branches. I hope to see (perhaps I will add or invite contributions from others I know) something on the FLDS and modern polygamists. Tom Haws 15:44, Feb 25, 2005 (UTC)
• Support. I can see the advantages, in terms of simplifying the structure of Mormonism pages. However, I want to make sure the article isn't 99% CoJCoLDS, with the remaining 1% being a short statement about the Community of Christ's ordination of women. Personally, I don't know much about feminism from a CoC perspective. COGDEN 23:57, Feb 26, 2005 (UTC)
  • That seems a legitimate concern, certainly. OTOH, if that's the result in the short term, perhaps it at least makes clear there's a need for expansion (along the lines Tom's suggestions, for example), where at present that material has no place to go at all, unless one were to start very short individual articles. Alai 17:16, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)

—Since there is no opposition, I went ahead and made this change. Hopefully someone can fill-out the CoC and Fundamentalist sections. COGDEN 19:15, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

I'm suggesting a move to Women in Mormonism, to keep it in line with other articles of a similar nature, such as those on Christianity, Judaism, or Hinduism. --Leviel (talk) 15:28, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

POV check

{{POV-check|date=December 2007}}
The idea that early Mormonism was "women friendly" seems like it might be original research; is there a reference for this analysis? It also seems like it might be disputed. Based on the information in the article, I could easily see another school of thought describing it as "only slightly less patriarchal than society in general" or seeing no significant difference. -- Beland 03:02, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

Modern feminist concerns about the LDS Church generally deal with the place of women in the Church hierarchy as well as problems relating to sexual abuse and family planning. - this is a very ambiguous statement with no clarification, an some very troubling phrases thrown out very casually. Sexual abuse? By whom, and as reported by what entities? Are you referring to institutional sexual abuse or unrelated acts by individuals? Very weasely.

The relaxation of the Church position against family planning as well as the church's public condemnation of the problem of spousal abuse are seen as major advances. - By whom? What group or groups are monitoring or commenting on this? This is a generalization as defined by Wiki standards. agent032125

This article is really just a stub:

• No citations/footnotes
• No mention of the book "Sacred Lonliness" by Compton
• No mention of recent changes to Relief Society structure/authority
• No mention of the book "Wife No. 19", and a discussion of the large number of women that left the church due to polygamy

So regarding the "OR" questions above, it is not so much that some individual statements are OR or not - the problem is that this article is essentially a stub article in very raw form. It really needs a thorough re-edit. Noleander (talk) 07:17, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Community of Christ

The Community of Christ is part of the Latter Day Saint movement, but is not part of Mormonism. If it is to be included in this article, the article title needs to be changed to not use the term Mormonism, perhaps Women and the Latter Day Saint movement. Either that or remove the CoC material. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 15:45, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

Given the lack of contrary thoughts in the last several years, I have removed that section. -- 208.81.184.4 (talk) 16:14, 8 July 2014 (UTC)

planning an overhaul

Hi, I'm planning to completely overhaul this page. I'm planning to take some organization ideas from Kathryn and M.J. Pritchett's Women in the LDS church institute class. I'm aware that this page needs more "outside" sources... I'll see what I can do, but the most extensive information I've found so far comes from Mormon or ex-Mormon people. Let me know if you have suggestions for sources. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 16:46, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Mormonism and women

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Mormonism and women's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Hammond":

• From Christian theology: T C Hammond (1968). David F Wright (ed.). In Understanding be Men:A Handbook of Christian Doctrine (sixth ed.). Inter-Varsity Press. pp. 54–56 and 128–131.
• From Female education in Nigeria: Hammond, D. and Jablow, A. (1992). The Africa that Never was, Prospect Heights. Woveland Press.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 20:33, 22 August 2016 (UTC)

fundamentalist groups

I added the last paragraph to the Fundamentalist groups section about how women in polygamous relationships feel empowered in different ways. I'm a little worried it comes off as FLDS apologetics--that was not the intention. It was difficult to find a neutral source for the experience of women in fundamentalist communities, but I feel like Palgrave (the publisher) is fairly neutral. To balance it out a little, I mentioned the underage marriages. If you're unsatisfied with the section, let's discuss it. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 21:29, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

External links modified

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citing handbook of instruction

Hi @Epachamo:. I saw that you added quotes from the Handbook of Instruction, and that the source goes to an imgur screengrab. I think that the information you added is important to include on this page. However, I don't think that the Handbook of Instruction fulfills WP:Verify because it is not publicly available. Is there an article or book that discusses this part of the handbook that can be verified? Have other people already discussed citing the Handbook of Instruction and had consensus about citing it? Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:25, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

* @Rachel Helps (BYU): Good question, this has actually led me down a rabbit hole where I've learned quite a bit. While I think it is pretty easy in this internet age to find copies of the General Handbook of Instruction, and I'm pretty sure there are copies of the handbooks in the Special Collections at BYU, I think the crux of what you are saying is that the General Handbook is considered proprietary information by the Church and not releasable to the public, and that the copies of the Handbooks online are dubiously legal. Please let me know if you think I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say. I would be fine with removing the text till this is resolved. I don't know what the best forum would be to have this discussion however. I'll have to research some more. Epachamo (talk) 19:53, 15 September 2020 (UTC)

• @Epachamo: I wasn't making such a sophisticated argument as the books containing proprietary info, just that I wasn't sure if they would be considered something like personal or corporate correspondence that isn't verifiable. But, you're right, there are some copies of the handbook of instruction in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. There's a 1976 General Handbook of Instructions. If the PDF I found from the Internet is accurate, I was able to verify your quote. However, it means that your reference is to the General Handbook of Instructions and not a Bishops Handbook of Instruction (which I couldn't find for 1976). It does concern me that the archive.org links don't work anymore, and state that the info violated their terms of service. I think still, if there is a secondary source that discusses the info, that would be ideal, but I don't have a problem with citing the handbook of instruction as long as its properly cited. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 17:00, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

• @Rachel Helps (BYU): I found a better reference, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23287671, that should avoid any of the above issues, and added the information back in. Epachamo (talk) 00:08, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

• @Epachamo: excellent! The additional info about Young advising women not to be endowed during menstruation is interesting too. Rachel Helps (BYU) (talk) 15:44, 21 September 2020 (UTC)

Improvements

Hi! I saw that this article underwent a major revision in 2016, so kudos to Rachael Helps (BYU), it has some really good/interesting information.

I wanted to suggest a few changes, and get opinions on them. Most of them are about making the article more condensed and friendly to people not familiar with this topic.

Less Technical

Firstly, I worry that this article could be too technical for people who are not familiar with Mormonism. For example, references to sealing in the next life under Polygamy could be confusing to those not familiar with that topic. Working and Responsibility to Children has a number of quotes from LDS Church President's that it might be helpful to introduce as coming from a church president. And it's possible I missed it, but there didn't seem to be an explanation of the Relief Society. It's possible that a topic background section could be helpful.

Re-written introduction

For an article this through and detailed, the introduction seems a little non-neutral and simplistic. Could we add details to make a more nuanced POV?

Rename to Women in LDS Church History

Since there are no mentions of the CoC or Fundimentalists in the section entitled Women in Church History, it makes sense to clarify this section name. A sentence or two could be added to explain that Utah was official LDS Church territory for a time.

Condensing of Clothes

There's quite a bit of information about LDS Church policy on clothes. Some of it is helpful in understanding the church's relationship with women, but some of it feels extraneous, like " A 1959 Improvement Era column counseled teenage girls to keep their clothing clean and ironed"

Expansion of Gender Roles

This sentances seems a little non-neutral: "Ecclesiastically, the LDS Church is firmly committed to traditional gender roles." Instead, maybe we could also give a topic overview by stating some of the key takeaways from the sections on church activity, working, marriage, and clothes, with quotes from The Family: A Proclamation. It might also be helpful to expand marriage to include more information about a women's role in raising children.

Ph03n1x77 (talk) 17:36, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Trans Women (and Men?)

This article repeatedly discusses the LDS's positions on trans women but never men. Would it be correct to change all instances to trans people? The only instance I can think of is that the priesthood wouldn't be open to trans men, but it isn't open to women cis or trans. The literature I am seeing cited doesn't discuss women specifically. Monosyllable (talk) 19:02, 26 October 2023 (UTC)