Nancy Ross

The 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of religious feminism in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, particularly around the issue of women's ordination. We pose three models for understanding this development -- publics/counterpublics (Fraser 1990; Pritchard 2015; Mansbridge 2017; Warner 2002 and 2021), social movement mobilization (Shultziner and Goldberg 2019), and network formation (Chaves 1996; Castells 1997; Everton 2018) -- and explore how these models apply to our case study. Drawing upon oral history interviews and archival documents, we document how RLDS women created independent publications, grassroots consciousness-raising groups, feminist classes and conferences, and Women-Church-inspired worship to reimagine priesthood within their church. We conclude that all three theoretical approaches provide complimentary vistas on our topic, but the lens of a counterpublic offers the most capacious view of our topic, one capable of integrating the other two. Furthermore, we suggest that the RLDS example featured in his talk is simply a manifestation of a larger late twentieth-century American “feminist religious counterpublic” formed across many religious denominations and groups that held a shared feminist imaginary.

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Mormon feminists have face over 40 years of fear of excommunication, the loss of family and social relationships for their advocacy for gender equality in the LDS Church. The history of punishment has repeatedly pushed mormon feminist conversations underground, spoken only in small safe circles, but the creation of the blog Feminist Mormon Housewives in 2004, began to bring the discussion into the digital, and into a public space. The last 10 years have produced numerous online communities related to Mormon feminism. In the last two years these groups have moved from online discussion to offline activism, including wearing pants to church day, asking for women to pray in all church meetings, and public calls for female ordination. Many Mormon feminists continue to face formal and informal discipline This presentation will address last three years of refining methodologies and research methods to capture the complexity of online Mormon feminism. We will address how we first identified the the community using snowball sampling methods, and how we have evolved random sampling methodologies. We will address how we have worked to establish legitimacy within the community. We will discuss how we gathered and have analyzed historical digital documents. We will discuss how we have tried to expand existing sociological understanding of conservative non political religious social movements.

In The Angel and the Beehive, sociologist Armand Mauss chronicled how leaders and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS/Mormon) made changes to fit into White Evangelical American society in the twentieth century, a process that Mauss described as assimilation. 1 In parallel to the LDS story but unanalyzed by Mauss, the leadership of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church/Community of Christ) invested in a similar "assimilative" process, but drew closer to mainline Protestant norms, including ideas about expanding women's roles in the church and in society. These competing trajectories pushed the two Restoration churches farther apart in belief and practice. 2 By the end of the twentieth century, the most obvious marker of this distance was the passage of a resolution at the 1984 RLDS World Conference that permitted the ordination of women.

Educators of art history have become more critical of the discipline in the last decade. Many of us have revisited the notion of canon and diversifying the curriculum to make it more reflective of global art history.1 Faculty have made changes in what we are teaching, but the conversation around how we teach has not progressed to the same degree in our discipline. Many instructors still speak about slide tests and memorization as though those assessment methods and expectations are still the norm, the tried-and-true way to teach art history. In the last handful of years, there have been open discussions in social media across many disciplines about alternative pedagogies, including contract grading and spec grading, apart from content, that aim at creating an equitable environment focused on learning rather than ranking and maintaining hierarchies of privilege. One such approach is
ungrading. According to scholar Clarissa Soresen-Unruh, the term ungrading
“suggests the opposite of grading, [and] has long been associated with the idea of purposefully eliminating or minimizing the use of points or letters to assess student work.”2 The term ungrading has a wide range of applicabilities and Susan D. Blum noted that faculty who implement ungrading do so in a variety of ways.3 For many who implement ungrading, quality feedback replaces grades for student assignments.4

The abstract is published online only. If you did not include a short abstract for the online version when you submitted the manuscript, the first paragraph or the first 10 lines of the chapter will be displayed here. If possible, please provide us with an informative abstract.

The diverse beliefs of Mormon feminists are not a point or set of points on a line between two opposing ideals. Contemporary Mormon feminists, who largely gather and interact within social media, have their own goals, which are both wholly feminist and entirely Mormon. Mormon feminists are interested in dividing the divinely-inspired essence of Mormonism from its conservative American cultural influences. Mormon feminists question religious practices and seek to know if they are reflective of God’s requirements for salvation, parsing doctrine and culture.

This paper addresses how a particular religious social movement, Ordain Women, uses memes to further their cause in social media. Ordain Women is an organization of Mormon feminists who advocate for the ordination of women to the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons/LDS). Ordain Women’s direct (in-person) actions have been covered by national and international news outlets in 2013 and 2014, but the majority of the advocacy and work that Ordain Women does is online and in social media.
There is a small but growing body of blog posts and scholarship on the use of internet memes, but little on the idea of memes as art. Ordain Women uses memes to further its cause. In particular, graphic designer Jerilyn Pool created a series of memes in March of 2014 that challenged the double standards at the heart of denying women ordination in the LDS Church. The images and text of the memes both represent and critique the patriarchal nature of Mormon culture. These goals and the visual nature of memes place them firmly within the realm of contemporary art and they are therefore suitable for study by art historians. The Ordain Women meme show how memes can be used for educational purposes by social movements and not just as propaganda.

"In this article, the author draws on her experience teaching an undergraduate art history course using student-built interactive data visualizations to explore the social relationships of 20th century women artists. This approach increased student engagement despite the conservative environment of Dixie State University. Students learned to critique secondary sources, used digital tools to find results, and engaged in transformative learning advocated by critical pedagogy (Freire et al. 2000). This evidence supports the argument that digital tools and methods should be used not only in advanced scholarly research, but in undergraduate classrooms as well.
"

Mormon feminists are those that identify as such, as there is a stigma and a price to pay for identifying as a Mormon feminist. Broadly, they divide into two groups of people: the Second Wave of the movement includes those who have participated in Mormon feminism from the 60s through to the 90s. Third Wave Mormon feminists are the younger generation who largely participate in the movement online. This conference paper, delivered to the Mormon Social Sciences Association at Utah Valley University in February 2018, is a work in progress that looks at Mormon feminists through these two waves of the movement.

Juanita Brooks is best remembered for her historical work on the Mountain Meadows massacre. The recent biography by Levi Peterson addresses the progress of her academic work, but her feminism receives much less attention. Her personal correspondence shows that she engaged in certain practices that Mormon feminists would recognize today, namely assisting others in negotiating questions of faith that arise from historical issues and encouraging women to seek personal fulfillment in a addition to home and family. Juanita Brooks referenced this role her the story of the cowboy, recorded in the pink issue of Dialogue, but an examination of her personal correspondence reveals how she engaged in this process. Her letters shows how prominent teachers of religion sought her out as a kind of unofficial Mormon­ faith­ crisis negotiator or spiritual advisor, an unusual position for a Mormon woman to occupy in the mid to late twentieth century.

In this conference that will focus on the theme of practice, this paper will discuss Juanita Brooks’ practice of her Mormon feminism and how some of those practices are familiar to Mormon feminists today. In addressing the Western History Association’s theme of expanding horizons, this paper will look at the way in which Juanita Brooks, a respected historian, reached beyond her role as an academic researcher to offer advice on matters of faith to those experiencing tension between history and belief.

"In all areas of Medieval Studies, it can be a challenge to engage students when the Middle Ages seems long ago and far away. I think that this is especially true for American students who are not surrounded by the physical evidence of medieval history like their European counterparts. Recreating elements of history that relate to our various disciplines can offer students a chance to connect with locations and times that seem distant from their life experiences.

In my Medieval Art History class this semester, we engaged in an unusual learning project. My students and I recreated an early medieval baptism that might have taken place in the Neonian Baptistery in Ravenna using Annabel Wharton’s article “Ritual and Reconstructed Meaning: The Neonian Baptistery at Ravenna” from The Art Bulletin (1987) pp. 358-375. I got the idea from the guest post “Recreating Byzantine Architecture and Liturgy in the Classroom” by A. L. McMichael on my blog (experimentsinarthistory.blogspot.com). Some students played the parts of bishop, priest, deaconess, and neophyte while others marked out the size of the font in masking tape on the floor, prepared slides of the mosaics, and collected props.

Students learned about the variety of literal and figurative roles that medieval people engaged as the baptism progressed. At each stage, we stopped and discussed how those roles were reflected in the mosaic scenes around the baptistery. This helped students to understand how early Christian art was an echo of early Christian ritual. In a reflective writing assignment after the recreation, students reported that this was an effective way for them to learn. Several students explained that when they read the article, they did not make the appropriate connections or understand the drama of the ritual but they did make these connections during the recreation. Students then applied what they learned from the baptism experience to other buildings and rituals we covered later in the course."

The representation of bishops, priests, and deacons in Early Christian mosaics is a settled issue. Early Christian writers recorded the standardized liturgical vestments that they wore, a visual symbol of their spiritual and administrative authority. The scholarly literature does not record any such special clothing for women, even though there is a growing body of literature that strongly suggests that women were ordained in the Early Church.

If women were ordained, then they likely had their own vestments. It is possible that a number of extant representations of women in the Early Christian period are actually ordained women, but scholars today do not recognize them as such because of purges of the idea in the later Middle Ages. There are similar elements in a number of representations of women in Early Christian art that could point to ordination. An understanding of their ordained status would shed light on numerous representations of Early Christian female saints, martyrs, and others. This paper will explore the connections between the visual and written sources regarding the ordination of women to further an understanding of the iconography of holy women in Early Christian art.

The Early Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna are a well-traveled area of art history. Nevertheless, several topics remain untouched. The most curious of these is the issue of gammadia, or markings on the clothing of those represented in the mosaics. These markings generally take the forms of Greek letters, which were placed on the clothing of human and divine figures to indicate their place in the celestial hierarchy. Gammadia appear in Christian mosaics, wall paintings and illuminated manuscripts dating from the third through ninth centuries. The figures displaying gammadia are almost exclusively male, except for a long line of female martyr-saints in the mosaics of the Basilica of St. Apollinare Nuovo. These female saints on the north wall of the church stand opposite opposite a mosaic of male martyr-
saints on the south wall whose clothing reveals different gammadia. This paper will discuss the use of gammadia on men's and women's clothing in St. Apollinare Nuovo, its reception by early Christians and the artist's conception of heaven as a place divided by gender.

The 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of religious feminism in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, particularly around the issue of women's ordination. We pose three models for understanding this development -- publics/counterpublics (Fraser 1990; Pritchard 2015; Mansbridge 2017; Warner 2002 and 2021), social movement mobilization (Shultziner and Goldberg 2019), and network formation (Chaves 1996; Castells 1997; Everton 2018)  -- and explore how these models apply to our case study. Drawing upon oral history interviews and archival documents, we document how RLDS women created independent publications, grassroots consciousness-raising groups, feminist classes and conferences, and Women-Church-inspired worship to reimagine priesthood within their church. We conclude that all three theoretical approaches provide complimentary vistas on our topic, but the lens of a counterpublic offers the most capacious view of our topic, one capable of integrating the other two. Furthermore, we suggest that the RLDS example featured in his talk is simply a manifestation of a larger late twentieth-century American “feminist religious counterpublic” formed across many religious denominations and groups that held a shared feminist imaginary.

Jennifer Awes Freeman presents a compelling case for the reinterpretation of the image of the Good Shepherd in early Christian images and texts. Many art historians, including Theodore Klauser, Henry Chadwick, R. Grigg, and Robin Jensen, have discussed images of the Good Shepherd as representing the humility and modesty of the early grassroots movement of Christianity. This traditional interpretation juxtaposes this early humble shepherd imagery with the later imperially-sponsored images of Jesus-as-emperor situated on a throne within the spaces of church apses. Awes Freeman charges that these interpretations assume that the Good Shepherd is a Christian invention and overlook understandings of shepherd imagery from the ancient world. The author draws on the work of Thomas F. Matthews, specifically The Clash of Gods (Princeton University Press, 1993), to challenge prevailing scholarship. She argues that early Christian writers were employing an image and idea of the Good Shepherd that drew on earlier understandings of this imagery, which "carried connotations of divinity and empire" (p. 4) and was not associated with the humility and modesty that inform current interpretations. Instead of housing a static and straightforward anti-imperialist meaning, the Good Shepherd changes meaning over time and includes conflicting meanings related to power and violence. This book situates the Good Shepherd within the art and literature of the Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman worlds and demonstrates the flexibility and fluidity of the image and its meaning through the Early Middle Ages. This is an ambitious project of recontextualizing a familiar image type across several thousand years of history and several thousand miles of geography. She describes the particular cultural and geographical meanings of the Good Shepherd through time and place, offering appropriate context without getting lost in any particular contextual tangent. Awes Freeman succeeds in presenting a compelling case for reinterpretation that remedies this literary and art historical oversight. This is no small feat and offers an important model for scholars looking to do similar work in tracing the development of a particular artistic theme. Chapter one examines the ways in which Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Israelite rulers styled themselves in relation to shepherd imagery, which emphasized the king as a shepherd who brought justice to the people (Mesopotamia), guided souls (Egypt), and was divinely appointed (ancient Israelites). The connection between kings and shepherds appears in literary and art historical sources including the Sumerian King List, the Epic of Gilgamesh, stelae, cuneiform tablets, statues of rulers, numerous inscriptions, and the Hebrew Bible. Chapter two examines shepherds as guides of the people in ancient Greece and Rome, drawing examples from the Iliad, the Odyssey, Plato's Dialogues, Livy's History of Rome, the New Testament, mosaics, sculpture, and other archeological finds. Chapter three looks at the theme of the "shepherd-victim as lawgiver" (p. 79) in the early Church, drawing on examples from early Christian art, hymns, Augustine's City of God, and writings about emperors. Chapter four examines Old English, Carolingian, and Romanesque art and writing to lay out a case of the Good Shepherd as "guide, protector, and judge" (p. 122), using art and literary examples. While few scholars could claim expertise in the many languages and cultures covered in this chapter, Awes Freeman demonstrates remarkable dexterity in surveying the relevant scholarship, much of it from the last decade, that describes and explains the examples she uses. She offers grounded examples that support her themes without losing the thread of a coherent narrative. Still, such an all-encompassing project tracing a single theme through history is likely to contain flaws in specific translations and to overlook important conversations that exist regarding the particular examples offered. It is a hazard of such a project. Nevertheless, the author creates her argument with care and through diligent citation. The book will hopefully prompt new discussion around the meaning of the Good Shepherd and inspire other scholars to resist inherited wisdom and recontextualize the things we think we know about early Christian art and ideas.