I Am a Mormon Because I Am a Feminist

Author: Valerie Hudson Cassler (now Valerie M. Hudson) · Published: September 2010, Mormon Scholars Testify (now hosted by FAIR) · URL: https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/testimonies/scholars/valerie-hudson-cassler

One-line: A political scientist and convert from Catholicism argues that Latter-day Saint doctrine on women — a Heavenly Mother, an Eve who did not sin, and marriage as a partnership of equals — makes it “the most feminist of all the Christianities.”

Summary

Hudson Cassler says her testimony came from spiritual experiences, but this essay is about why, as a feminist, she stays. Growing up in the Abrahamic traditions, she argues, it is hard not to absorb “fairly unpleasant conclusions about women” — that the first woman was weak or wicked, that a woman’s body is unclean, that wives should submit, that God is male alone. Decades of studying Latter-day Saint doctrine (which she separates carefully from Latter-day Saint culture, which she says often contradicts it) freed her from those beliefs; she calls it “women’s lib” by conversion.

She makes three doctrinal points first. “God” means an exalted woman and man married together (D&C 132:19–20); Heavenly Father is married to Heavenly Mother, and “the one who’s an eternal bachelor is Satan.” The body is a gift that is kept forever, not a curse. Men and women are equals — “equal does not mean identical” — and she quotes Elder L. Tom Perry: “There is not a president and vice president in a family. We have co-presidents.”

The core of the essay retells Eden as two trees and two gifts. The Fall was planned and was for our progress, so it was a blessing; Eve did not sin and was not punished. The tree of knowledge is the doorway into mortality — a body and full agency — and that gift is given through women: every soul, Christ included and in a sense Adam too, enters mortal life “from the hand of a woman.” The tree of life is the doorway home, the ordinances of salvation and exaltation, which is the gift given through men. So Eve was made second to show the gift of the first tree belongs to women, not because she came from Adam. She quotes Elder Dallin H. Oaks (“we celebrate Eve’s act”), and Elder Bruce C. Hafen, who reads Genesis 3:16’s “rule over” as “ruling with.”

From there: priesthood is “a man’s apprenticeship to become a heavenly father,” not something extra kept from women, who have their own path to becoming like their Heavenly Mother. Pregnancy, childbirth and nursing are ordinances of the first tree and no less spiritual. The Church is “an auxiliary to the family,” and in the family men and women lead as equals — President James E. Faust: “every mother a matriarch as coequals.” Jeffrey R. Holland is quoted on families as the organisation known to exist in heaven. She closes that one of the most feminist acts a person can commit is to share the Restored Gospel, “the strongest, most progressive force for women in the world today.”

The author note from 2010 describes her as a BYU political science professor, co-author of Bare Branches (on the security effects of Asia’s surplus male populations), named among Foreign Policy’s 100 Most Influential Global Thinkers in 2009, and a co-founder of the online Latter-day Saint forum SquareTwo.

Full text

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Connections

• Valerie M. Hudson — the author; her later work on women’s security and state peace (Sex and World Peace, 2012) is the academic side of the same concern.
• Feminism — the essay’s claim is that Latter-day Saint doctrine, read apart from Latter-day Saint culture, is feminist in its foundations.
• Eve — the centre of the argument: Eve as the one who opened the door to mortality, not the one who fell.
• Heavenly Mother — “Heavenly Father is not an eternal bachelor.”
• Plan of Salvation — the “Great Plan of Happiness” as a round trip, with each tree a doorway along it.
• Mormon Apologetics — a scholar’s reasoned defence of the faith on the question critics raise most often: its treatment of women.
• L. Tom Perry, Dallin H. Oaks, Bruce C. Hafen, Jeffrey R. Holland, James E. Faust — the Church leaders she quotes.