Amy Hoyt

Women within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [LDS] offer an instructive lens through which to view how maternal practices, specifically childbirth and raising children, shape traditional religious women and contribute to their religious devotion.  Drawing upon an ethnographic study, this essay explores how maternal practices are religious practices that act to alter the interior of women, particularly women from an American LDS community I worked with. As such, they are pedagogical tools that contribute to subjectivity, or personhood, and have the potential to transform women into more pious subjects. After introducing the LDS church, and the ethnographic and methodological specifics of my study, this essay will: examine pedagogies of maternity as religious praxis and explore the ensuing theoretical implications; analyze notions of agency and subjectivity, and reflect on the pedagogies and transformative gifts of parenthood.

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. That sense of crisis in the lives of boys lay at the surface of an even deeper cultural upheaval taking place within Mormondom. Tensions with religious outsiders and the U. S. government over the practice of polygamy had led to a standoff in the late 1880s. If the Saints wanted to continue to practice their religion and maintain ownership of church property (including the temple that stood at the center of their worship), they had to give up polygamy, the religious practice that distinguished them from others and marked them as obedient followers of an ancient marital pattern that they believed was ordained of God. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS Church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasizing the moral and value systems they shared with their middle-class Protestant contemporaries while simultaneously maintaining their distinctiveness.

The liberal influence within feminist theory has led to an emphasis on the theoretical category of agency because it has been typically understood to demonstrate freedom. Thus, the feminist theoretical concept of agency has been debated for years.  In order to work through some of the problematics of the feminist theoretical category of agency when applied to the lives of traditional religious women, I conducted an ethnographic study of American women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Latter-day Saint women offer an interesting framework in which to examine agency because they adhere to an unapologetically patriarchal religion and they use the category as an indigenous concept, although there are some key differences between the LDS view of agency and the way in which the term is generally used in feminist writings. Since a majority of traditional women’s behaviors are grounded in sustaining, not resisting, religious prescriptions, the feminist theoretical use of agency needs to be reconceptualized.

Women’s participation in traditional religions is often explained in terms of their victimization and/or their opportunities for empowerment. This paper seeks to use Mormon women as a framework in order to explore some of the consequences of this phenomenon and to advocate for the creation of multiple, complex spaces where traditional religious women may be understood beyond the paradigm of victim/empowerment. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, otherwise known as the LDS or Mormons, maintains a cosmology that is based upon highly differentiated gendered practices. A belief in a female deity, Mother in Heaven, and a related belief that all pious Mormon men and women have the ability to become gods and goddesses in a post-mortal existence are central to
the Mormon gendered cosmology. Despite these beliefs, Mormon women generally resist feminism because they perceive feminism to be at odds with motherhood and family. Ironically, their belief in a female divine and their potential divinity strengthens their commitment to interdependence
through maternal practices and kinship.