This paper was initially written sometime in 1996 or 1997 and was intended as a chapter in a dissertation I was doing on the culture of early Mormonism. As I have said elsewhere, that dissertation, for a variety of different reasons and unfortunately, didn't come to fruition. I revised it as part of that dissertation in the early 2000s and lightly more recently.
While most faithful Mormons and faithful Mormon faith historians would want to attribute Mormon gender notions and gender roles to “revelation” most twentieth and twenty first century scholars have tended to see primitive Mormon gender ideologies, cultures, and structures as the products of broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces in the nineteenth century, all materialist explanations that became prominent in the social sciences and humanities since their rise as disciplines in the nineteenth century.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, for instance, argues that the Burned Over District, that area characterized by religious revivals stretching from Utica, New York to northeastern Ohio, the geographic space in which Mormonism arose, was characterized by two broad social movements that originated as a result of the economic changes afoot in the region, economic changes that largely had their source in the building and operation of the Erie Canal. According to Smith-Rosenberg the Erie Canal stimulated both a middle class movement characterized by Evangelicalism, merchant males, middle class husbands who worked outside the home, a cult of domesticity in which women took care of husband, children, and home, and a radical movement populated by young, mobile, and relatively “poor” individuals who were more experimental in their gender and marriage forms and who as a result stood outside the dominant middle class culture of male capitalist merchants and female homemakers and moral mediators. Smith-Rosenberg numbers the Mormons, the Shakers, and the Oneida Perfectionists amongst these experimental religious and ideological revolts against “bourgeois ideology”.
There is a fundamental problem with Smith-Rosenberg’s argument, however. Apart from categorizing Mormonism, Shakerism, and the Oneida Community as radical and noting that they all reconstructed the nuclear family, Smith-Rosenberg has very little to say about how and why the same economic forces constructed the very different gender cultures and social structures of celibate Shakerism, shared marriage Oneida, and polygamous Mormonism.
Other analysts of primitive Mormonism have emphasized the impact of American politics on Mormon culture. Klaus Hansen, for instance, notes that primitive Mormonism had a democratic quality to it. Mormonism, Hansen notes, emphasized the ministry of all male believers. All Mormon males, he writes, had priesthood “callings”. For Hansen the male egalitarianism of Mormon priesthood culture and social structure was a reflection of the broader political and economic contexts of the male “egalitarianism” of Jacksonian America with its extension of the franchise to all White male men.
If Mormons were influenced at all by the egalitarianism some see as common in Jacksonian America it was an egalitarianism that was patriarchal and hierarchical, however. The revelations contained in the
Doctrine and Covenants make it clear that God’s Church was to be led by males, guided by revelations received by a male “prophet, seer, and revelator” and led by a male king, Joseph Smith, the Church’s authoritative and virtually all powerful “President” and “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator”.
Still other scholars see Mormonism as an extreme form of hierarchical authoritarian patriarchalism. Charles Sellers, for instance, who, like Smith-Rosenberg, takes a largely economic approach to forces bringing about economic, political and cultural change in the Burned Over District, sees Mormon patriarchal masculinity as a response to a nineteenth century Christianity undergoing feminization. Smith’s church, he writes, appealed to males obsessed with a loss of honor and power. Smith, he says, wove a patriarchal fantasy out of the shame and desperation associated with powerlessness, poverty and the associated loss of his family honor. For Sellers Mormonism’s appeal was not its doctrines but its patriarchal utopianism and communalism.
The problem with Sellers’s economic factors give rise to social psychological approach is similar to those associated with Smith-Rosenberg’s argument. Why, if poverty and powerlessness were at the heart of Mormonism did Mormonism take the form it did while other social movements of the poor took different shapes? Was it the fight for Smith family honour that made Mormonism Mormonism? The other major problem with Sellers’s analysis is that his depiction of the Mormon prophet as a fraud and a trickster and his suggestion that LDS theology, with its patriarchalism, resulted from a kind of “male panic” caused by the economic dislocations in family structure brought about by the transformations wrought by the Erie Canal, borders on if it doesn’t cross over into caricature, something that may tell us more about the ideologies underlying some more polemically oriented academic analysis than it does early Mormonism.
While economics, politics, geography, and demography matter, and they matter very much, particularly economics, when one is exploring the birth of social and cultural movements one has to go beyond economics, politics, geography, and demography, and engage and explore the culture of social and cultural movements because it is culture and the meanings, symbols, and rituals associated with culture, that is at the heart of the social and cultural construction of social and cultural movement identity and community. Given this it is unfortunate that many if not most of the explorations of the birth of one social and cultural movement, Mormonism, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, have centred on the economic forces—the rise of the Erie Canal—the political forces—theocratic and hierarchical Mormonism as a reaction to Jacksonian “democracy”—and geographic and demographic forces—Mormons as New Englanders who consciously or unconsciously sought a return to New England Puritanism.
While broader demographic, geographic, economic, political, and institutional contexts like the Erie Canal, Jacksonian democracy, and New England Puritanism reborn surrounded and undoubtedly impacted both old and new “religious” movements in the Burned-Over District, Mormons did, for instance, come from specific class or status and gender backgrounds, Mormonism did arise in specific geographical contexts and migrated into the ever expanding and contracting frontier, Mormons did have to make a living within a economy in transition from agrarian to mercantile forms, Mormonism did arise in a political culture experiencing the impact of democratization and reactions to greater democratization, and Mormonism did arise and grew in areas with specific institutional and non-institutional frameworks, these facts don’t come close to telling the whole story about Mormon origins or the origins of Mormon identity. Any analysis worth its salt has to address the issue of why Mormonism and other social and cultural groups, religious or otherwise, in the Burned-Over District and beyond impacted by the same demographic, geographic, economic, political, and institutional forces gave rise to both culturally
similar and culturally
different social and cultural movements. It is, in my estimation, cultural differences which allow us to get at the heart of the question as to why some seekers joined the Mormon Church, others the Shaker community, others the Oneida Community, others the Adventist Church, and still others the “Christian” Church.
The only way we can truly begin to understand why some individuals became Mormons, others “Christians”, others Adventists, others Evangelicals, and still others anti-revivalists is through an attentiveness to the culture of each group which arose in the Burned-Over District, to the historical pedigrees of these cultural movements, and to the ways these cultural scripts framed group responses to broader social, political, economic, and cultural issues. Religious systems are, after all, interpretive systems which give meaning to the world around them and the events that occur in that world.
In this paper I want to move beyond economic, political, geographic, and demographic approaches to Mormon gender and explore what primitive or early Mormonism’s sacred texts, the
Book of Mormon and the
Doctrine and Covenants, tell us about the gender identities Mormonism created and how these gender identities were manufactured. Sellers, by focusing on Smith and Smith’s making of Mormonism, was, at least in part, I think, on the right track. It was, Joseph Smith, the male “President” and “Prophet” of God’s one true church who, in the final analysis, made Mormon men and Mormon women. Because Mormonism placed such a significant emphasis on the authority of Joseph Smith regarding him as its authoritative “Prophet”, “Seer”, and “Revelator” the Mormon belief in Smith’s authority had important consequences for Mormon culture and on individual Mormon lives and distinguished Mormonism from other social, cultural, and religious groups around them.
When Joseph Smith, the Mormon “prophet, seer, and revelator”, created a “new” or “novel” version of Christianity in the 1830s and 1840s one of the things he manufactured out of old cultural and social wine initially in the Burned Over District and then beyond in Missouri and Illinois was “new” gender roles for newly made Mormon men and women. Smith was able to create a distinctly Mormon culture because religious seekers and later faithful Mormons believed that he, Smith, was their “prophet”, “seer” and “revelator”. They believed that an angel had given him the
Book of Mormon and that God had given him the power to “translate” it. They believed that Smith received authoritative divine communications from on high for his new church and that they, when they joined the new church, had to take these “revelatory” commandments seriously and try to harmonize their lives with these divine commands because they were, they believed, divine commands.
The “sacred texts” that Smith claimed he “received” and in some cases “translated”—the
Book of Mormon and the
Doctrine and Covenants—tell us much not only about what Smith and the early Mormon faithful thought about doctrinal issues like baptism, church organization, and the “gathering to Zion”, doctrinal issues that are at the heart of the
Book of Mormon and the
Doctrine and Covenants, but also about gender and gender roles, about, in other words, notions of maleness and femaleness in the newly formed primitive Mormon community of the 1830s and 1840s.
In the
Book of Mormon, a collection of documents, which, according to Mormon tradition and legend, were written by and about remnants of the House of Israel that had immigrated to the New World, and that had been given to Smith by the Angel Moroni to translate in order to show the Jews and Gentiles that Christ was the Eternal God, was first published by Smith in 1830 in Palmyra, New York. In the
Book of Mormon men and women are husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, civilized or heathen, rich or poor, saints or sinners, righteous or unrighteous, free or captive, gathered or scattered, white or dark, and saved or damned. In the
Book of Mormon God’s people have relationships with God, with each other, and with the Church and its leaders.
Book of Mormon men are authors of holy books, chiefs, judges, kings, rebels, warriors, priests, governors, disciples, teachers, prideful, circumcised or uncircumcised, husbands, fathers, and sons.
Book of Mormon women are toilers, spinners, concubines, whores, wives, mothers, daughters, and child bearers. Sometimes, according to the records contained in the
Book or Mormon, God’s people fall into iniquity thereby separating themselves from God or his Church leaving only a few holy men behind to call sinners back to saintliness, a narrative, by the way, clearly drawn from the Bible Smith read.
While the
Book of Mormon was important in the lives of the early Saints it was not the
Book of Mormon that would serve as the template around which Mormon men and women would try to construct their lives. For most of the faithful the
Book of Mormon was simply proof that their “Prophet”, Joseph Smith, was God’s “Prophet” and that he was restoring the apostolic church to the earth after an absence of over a thousand years. Instead it was the divine revelations contained in the
Book of Commandments and its successor the
Doctrine and Covenants which addressed how God’s church should be structured and how God’s people should live their lives that served as the guidebook, as the “catechism”, for how Mormons should think, live, and act in the world and what they might expect in the next world beyond the veil.
The
Book of Commandments and the
Doctrine and Covenants, published in Jackson County, Missouri, “Zion”, in 1831 and Kirtland, Ohio in 1835 respectively with additions added to the 1835 edition in 1844, contain revelations received between 1823 and 1844, revelations generally read to the assembled faithful in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, revelations which engage doctrinal issues such as the nature of true baptism, the nature of the “gathering to Zion”, the nature of the celestial kingdom, the nature of “eternal progression”, the form the coming apocalypse which will destroy the governments of the world will take, the nature of Church government, the importance of mission work and calls for Mormon men to undertake it, and, as this last aspect of the revelations makes clear, notions of what constitutes “proper” gender roles in the newly restored Church.
Central to primitive (and to contemporary) Mormon understandings of manhood and maleness and the structure of power within the Mormon community are the revelations concerning the Mormon priesthood in the
Book of Commandments and the
Doctrine and Covenants. The Mormon priesthood structure developed between 1829 and 1835 and consisted of two priesthood forms restored, according to Mormon ideology, from the biblical past through Smith to the present day Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthoods.
The Aaronic priesthood, which governed the temporal affairs of the church and whose members were usually regarded as descendents of the “sons of [the Tanakh patriarch] Aaron”, was restored in 1829 when John the Baptist appeared and laid hands on Smith and his second in command Oliver Cowdery forgiving them of their sins. The Melchizedek Priesthood, a priesthood organization whose genealogy went, according to Smith, back to the priest who, according to the Old Testament book of Genesis, blessed the Hebrew Patriarch Abraham, was restored in 1830 when Peter, James, and John, laid hands on Smith and Cowdery making them Melchizedek high priests. Through this laying on of hands these three apostles of Christ gave Smith and Cowdery the authority to confer the Holy Ghost upon believers once they were baptized and made the Melchizedek Priesthood the body governing the spiritual affairs of the Church making the priesthood the basis of all “legitimate” power in the Church.
Each Latter-day Saint male was “called” to serve in priesthood offices with specific duties and specific powers in the early church. A trinity of “callings” characterized both the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods. The Aaronic Priesthood consisted of “priests”, “deacons”, and “teachers” while the Melchizedek Priesthood of “elders”, “seventies”, and “high priests”. In the earliest days of the church “elders” were empowered to baptize, administer the sacrament or communion, bestow the Holy Ghost, ordain other priesthood offices, bless children, and take the lead in meetings. “Priests” had the same duties save for bestowing the Holy Ghost, blessing children, and ordaining elders. “Teachers” and “deacons” assisted the “priests” and watched over the Church to ensure that it was strong. They differed from “priests” in that they lacked any ordinance powers. Although “priests” could ordain “priests”, “teachers”, and “deacons”, only “elders” could issue a license authorizing “each ordained person to perform the duty of his calling”. In the absence of “elders”, first “priests” and then “deacons” were empowered to lead meetings.
The restoration of these priesthoods did not, as I mentioned, occur simultaneously in early Mormonism. Revelation was continuous phenomenon in primitive Mormonism. Prior to the restoration of the Melchizedek Priesthood the Mormon Church did not have the intense hierarchical character it would later come to assume. This church of “priests”, “deacons”, and “elders” was led by its “First and Second Elders”, Smith and Cowdery respectively. They presided over General Conferences which met annually to discuss both the spiritual and temporal affairs of the church and which “sustained” the leadership of the “First and Second Elders” of the church and Quarterly Conferences, which were much like the quarterly conferences of contemporary Methodists, where Mormon “elders” gathered together to do “what business needed to be done”.
This more democratic and egalitarian phase of the Mormon Church didn’t last long. In 1831 Smith received a revelation which revealed that he alone was to be the sole medium of revelation for the Church as a whole. Other revelations, including that restoring the “Melchizedek Priesthood” followed between 1832 and 1835 and made Mormonism even more hierarchical than it before. Eventually only high priests of the “Melchizedek Priesthood” could take their place in the highest offices of the restored church of Jesus Christ.
Collectively known as the General Authorities, the highest officers and their offices in the church include the “First Presidency”, the “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles”, and the “Presiding Bishop”. At the head of this restored church stood Joseph Smith, as “President”, “Prophet”, “Seer”, and “Revelator” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As God’s representative on earth Smith administered the church, chastised it, revealed new revelations to it, and dictated to it how God’s kingdom was to be built. By his authority regulations were established and subordinate appointments were made. Smith as president was the legal “trustee in trust” of all properties the church owned and had title to. He was the supreme authority in religious, political, civil, and economic fields. To help him in these duties he chose two other “high priests” to be his counselors forming, in the process, the “First Presidency” of the church, the church’s highest governing body.
The “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles” stood next in power and authority to the “First Presidency”. Chosen by Smith and hence, by God, since it was believed that God worked through Smith, the Twelve had oversight over missionary work. In the early days of the church they were sent by the “Prophet” into all corners of the world to preach the restored gospel. As a part of their oversight role they made decisions about church government, finances, colonization, and other affairs of the church.
Next in power and authority to the “Twelve Apostles” was the “First Council of the Seventies”. The “Council of the Seventies”, consisting of the seven “presidents of the Seventies”, was responsible for directing the missionary work of the church.
Last but not least among the “General Authorities” was the “Presiding Bishop”. The “Presiding Bishop”, “called” like other church leaders by God through “the Prophet”, looked after the temporal financial affairs of the church and was responsible for the operations of the “law of consecration and stewardship” and later the “law of tithing. Like the “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator” the “Presiding Bishop” “called” two counselors of his choosing to assist him in his duties. He also appointed a “Deacon’s Quorum” to assist him in taking care of the poor, the needy, and the infirm and to help him keep in touch with local “bishops” who, beginning in Nauvoo in the 1840s, presided over sections of that city.
Beyond the “General Authorities” an important and powerful body in Mormon Nauvoo in the 1840s was the “Council of Fifty”. The Council included amongst its members a number of high-ranking males including Joseph Smith, all of the Apostles, and a few sympathetic non-Mormons, some of whom had access to the corridors of power in Washington, DC. Smith called the Council a “living constitution” and it performed several functions in Mormon Nauvoo. It performed governmental functions sending petitions to Congress seeking redress for attacks on and confiscation of Mormon property in Missouri in the late 1830s, campaigned for Smith after he announced he was running for President, and sent delegates to the Republic of Texas offering to help it achieve American statehood. Additionally, in a “kingdom” rent with dissension over doctrinal novelties like plural marriage it attempted to establish order, consensus, and obedience to the church hierarchy. In the long term, the Council was apparently meant to supplant the political, economic, and social arrangements of Jacksonian America with its individualism, egalitarianism, and progressivism and to help usher in God’s millennial reign over the earth (
Doctrine and Covenants 28:9 (September 1830), 29:7-8 (September 1830), 57:3-5 (July 1831)). The Council’s function, in other words, was to rule the world until the end times when Christ would come again and established his kingdom on earth.
Another important “calling” and figure in the early church, though not today, was the “Church Patriarch”, an office and calling Smith traced back to the Hebrew patriarchs of old. Smith appointed his father Joseph Smith Snr. first patriarch of the Church on 18 December 1833. His “calling” was to give special blessings to church members. He also often provided members with information about what biblical “tribe” they belonged to. Smith Snr. was succeeded as Presiding Patriarch by his eldest son Hyrum pointing up the importance of the notion of lineal descent in Mormonism, a notion again that was traced back to the Hebrew patriarchs of old. Like his father Hyrum gave special blessings to Church members.
Power within primitive Mormon culture and the Mormon community, by the way, was not only hierarchical in nature. It was also spherarchical in form. The power of a bishop, for example, was delimited to a specific geographical territory. The sphere of power of the Mormon prophet extended to the entire church.
If the priesthood with all its biblical terminology and imagery—Smith was clearly reading his Bible—was the central interpretive and organizing symbol of maleness and male roles in early Mormonism the “elect lady” revelation of July 1830 and the Relief Society that came out of it were the central interpretative and organizing symbols for femaleness and female roles in the primitive Mormon Church. It is the “elect lady” revelation which was the bedrock from which primitive Mormon women's understandings of themselves and their roles in the early Mormon community sprang.
When Smith created the female “Relief Society” in 1842 he read the “elect lady” revelation before the entire female organization just as he read revelations before the gathered male priesthood. In the “elect lady” revelation Emma is called by Jesus through Joseph Smith to be an “elect lady”, a “comforter” to her husband, Joseph Smith, a “scribe to the Prophet”, Emma was one of the scribes who recorded Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, an “expounder of Scriptures”, an “exhorter” to the Church, and an editor of “sacred hymns”. In her “calling” to the presidency of the Relief Society, in the words of Joseph Smith's “Illinois Journal”, Emma fulfilled the “elect lady” revelation.
Though the “elect lady” revelation focused on Emma’s “callings” the fact that Smith read the revelation before the newly formed Relief Society, suggests that the “elect lady” revelation was not meant simply meant to indicate to the gathered sisters that Emma was the “elect lady”. It also suggests that the revelation was to serve as a kind of proto-constitution for the “Relief Society” itself. In 1842 Smith proclaimed the Relief Society “...a kingdom of Priests ...[to whom]...the keys of the kingdom are about to be given.” Joseph Smith thus “set apart” or “ordained” the President of the society, his first wife Emma, and her two councilors giving them the “keys” to administer to the sick and comfort the sorrowful. The Relief Society, like the male priesthood organization, had its teachers and deacons and it had its “ordinations”, “gifts”, and “keys”. In thus mirrors the male priesthood organization of the church.
The meaning of the statements Smith made to the “Relief Society” have been very controversial and contentious particularly in the context of the professionalization of Mormon Studies and a growing feminism within the contemporary Mormon community since the 1970s and the resulting struggle over the meaning of Mormonism and what it means to be Mormon in the contemporary Mormon Church. Mormon historian D. Michael Quinn argues that evidence shows that Smith set apart the “Relief Society” as a female priesthood organisation. Jill Mulvay Derr, Janeth Cannon, and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, on the other hand, in their semi-official history of the Relief Society, argue that the “Relief Society”, while autonomous, was to operate within the order of church government, i.e., under the direction of the male “Melchizedek Priesthood”. For Derr and her colleagues, the “Relief Society” was patterned after the male Priesthood rather than organized as a female version of it. Though we may never know for sure which of these readings is correct, the evidence seems to indicate that Quinn is right about the “Relief Society” being the female counterpart of the male priesthood structure after all Smith’s “Journal” for 1842-1843 indicates that the “sisters’ of the Relief Society would come into possession of “[p]rivileges, blessings, and gifts” of the “Priesthood”, but that Derr, Cannon, and Beecher are correct about it operating under the authority of males in the church. While certain “callings” in the “Relief Society” parallel those of the male priesthood structure, they certainly were not as broad as those of the male priesthood organization. Nor were they as powerful. Nor should we forget that it was a male, Joseph Smith, who specified that and how the “Relief Society” should be organized and “laid hands” upon its female leader, Emma Smith, transferring power and authority to from him to her in the process. In other words, it was through Smith’s charismatic and patriarchal power and authority that Emma gained her position in the “Relief Society” and her power an authority to “lay on hands”. Mormon women, in other words, are rather like the Mormon conception of the Mormon female God “Mother-in-Heaven” whose primary role seems to be a helpmeet and comforter to her divine husband, “Father in Heaven”.
Whether the Relief Society was the female priesthood or not the Relief Society would become the most important female organization in Mormon society and culture. From its founding in Nauvoo the “Relief Society” sought to aid the poor, to watch over the morals of its members, including its sexual purity, to provide homes for the homeless, to provide work for widows, and opportunities for the women of the Relief Society to “refresh themselves spiritually”. The roles mandated for Mormon women and routinised so to speak in the Relief Society, in other words, were akin to the roles women played in other female reform societies of the early and mid nineteenth century and in middle class American religious communities more broadly.
Proper gender organization and the roles attached to them weren’t the only thing revelation commanded for the Mormon faithful. Mormon men were also counseled to be “meek”, “lowly”, “holy”, “righteous”, “long suffering in faith and virtue”, temperate “godly”, kind, charitable, good stewards, pure in knowledge, without hypocrisy, without guile, loving, faithful, virtuous, garnishing of thought, and confident in the presence of God (
D&C 107:30 (April 1835), 104:11 (April 1834), 121: 41-46 (March 1839)). Additionally, they were told to fulfill their obligations to their families, to their wives, and to the church. Men are, according to revelation, to provide for their families, to teach their children the “doctrine of repentance”, “faith in Christ”, the doctrine of “baptism” by age eight, to “pray and walk uprightly before the Lord” (
D&C 68:25, 28), and to labour for the church (
D&C 75:28 (January 1832)). Fathers are commanded to turn the hearts of their children to themselves (
D&C 98:16 (August 1833)).
Mormon women, if the revelations for Emma Smith are a guide, are urged to comfort their husbands, remain faithful, beware of pride, remain meek, keep the commandments of God, forgive their husbands, cleave unto their husbands, be forgiving, and abide by the commandments on plural marriages, by accepting those chosen as plural wives for the prophet husband by God. If they do this, revelation says, Mormon women will be blessed by God and their families will multiply. If they don’t, they will be destroyed (
D&C 25 (July 1830) and 132 (July 1843)). Like Mormon men, Mormon wives have a number of reciprocal obligations to their husbands and their children. They are said to have claims on their husbands for their maintenance (
D&C 83:2 (April 1832)) and they are commanded to “teach” their children the “doctrine of repentance”, “faith in Christ”, the doctrine of “baptism” by age eight, and to “pray and walk uprightly before the Lord” (D&C 68:25, 28 (November 1831)). Mormon children are counseled to repent and be baptized (
D&C 68:25, 27 (November 1831)). They are said to have claims upon their parents until they come of age (
D&C 83:4-5 (April 1832)).
Reciprocal obligations were central to primitive Mormon life in general and primitive Mormon gender relations in particular. The church, the revelations claim, has an obligation to its all of its members whether, man or woman, immigrant or native, well-off or poor, (
D&C 51 (May 1831), 72 (December 1831), 78 (March 1832), 82 (April 1832)), widow or orphan (
D&C 83:6 (April 1832)). Parents are told to bring their children up in the light of Mormon truth (
D&C 93:40 (May 1833)). Men and women have responsibilities to God and God to Mormon men, women, and children. If Mormons follow God’s commandments they will, it is claimed, be blessed by God and, as a result, be provided a place to live, the blessing of children (D&C 104 (April 1834) and 105 (June 1834)), and will achieve a place in the afterlife (
D&C 76 (February 1832) and 132 (July 1843)). If they do not obey God’s commandments they will be punished (
D&C 104 (April 1834) and 105 (June 1834)).
Marriage was central to Mormon gender relations. It was said to be “ordained of God” (D&C 49:15 (May 1831)), and “sealed for time and eternity”, this life and the next life, (D&C 132:15ff. (July 1843)) if consecrated by proper authority, namely Mormon “high priests”. Mormon men are urged to leave their fathers and mothers and take a wife (Abraham 5:18 (1835)). The highest form of marriage in the Mormon community was believed to be “plural marriage” since it was held to be part of God’s “new and everlasting covenant” (
D&C 132 (July 1843)). Revelations command Mormon women to recognize “the principle” as part of God’s divine plan. Childbirth, likewise, was seen as an integral aspect of covenantal relations between God and men and women. Mormon doctrine emphasized the commandment to be fruitful and multiply as part of God’s divine plan for human beings (Mormon readings of Genesis 1:28 and Psalm 127:3-5).
Both the “Priesthood” and the “Relief Society” served important internal and external functions in the Mormon community. The Mormon “priesthood” structure with its offices and callings marked some Mormon men off from other Mormon men—some were “Melchizedek Priesthood” holders others were not—defined variations in power within the male Mormon community—some were “General Authorities” while others were not—distinguished Mormon men from Mormon women—men have the “priesthood” women don’t—and distinguished Mormon men from “Gentile” men and women outside the Mormon community who didn’t have the restored priesthood at all. Just as the male priesthood structure marked off boundaries between men both within and outside of Mormon culture and society the Relief Society was an important boundary maker for Mormon women. As members of a divinely restored organization with an “elect lady” at its head who held the “keys of the kingdom” Mormon women believed that they alone had the proper “authority” to perform specific “callings”. It was this ideology which distinguished them from both Gentile women and Gentile men. Both the Priesthood and the Relief Society were thus important identity markers and played formative role in constituting and constructing new Mormon men and women both within the Mormon community and outside it.
Gender roles and the institutionalisation of power along gender lines in Mormonism was very different from that of the other so-called “radical” religious social movements of the Burned Over District Smith-Rosenberg makes so much of. Neither the Shakers nor the Oneida Community had the elaborate priestly hierarchy or the extreme patriarchal authoritarian structure Mormons did. For Shakers, the illiterate visionary Ann Lee was the charismatic seer and prophet, the embodiment of the female aspect of Christ. After her death a gender based patriarchal/matriarchal power structure arose in Shakerism whose commands were regarded as authoritative and to which obedience was due. At the Shaker command center in New Lebanon, New York, one “Father” and one “Mother” served as patriarch and matriarch for all Shakerdom. After 1780 another “Father” and “Mother” guided Shakerdom’s economic affairs. Paralleling the power structure in New Lebanon each Shaker commune had a “Father” and a “Mother” who led the spiritual life of men and women in each community and another “Father” and “Mother” who guided the economic affairs of the commune. Additionally, each Shaker community was subdivided (using the second Jewish Temple with its restrictions on who could enter certain parts of the temple as a model) into communal or advanced member meetings, children's meetings, less advanced member meetings, and after 1800, new member meetings. It was only in the communal meetings that the full communal life for which Shakers are so well known for, was practiced. It was from this meeting that Shaker leaders were drawn.
Oneida’s John Humphrey Noyes asserted that God was both male and female. At Oneida both male and female members served on its twenty-one committees and in its 48 departments. Noyes was its authoritative charismatic leader (though, in practice he maintained flexibility in the expression of his authority). According to some analysts, there was probably greater equality of gender at Oneida than anywhere else in early and mid-nineteenth century America. Oneida’s males practiced coitus reservatus during sex thus making it possible for women to avoid the travails associated with pregnancy. Additionally, Oneida’s women could choose what work they wanted to do and could choose their sexual partners, first without intermediaries but later through intermediaries. This changed, however, by 1860 when Noyes and a handful of other spiritually powerful “brothers” took over most of the community's major decisions including who would have sex with whom. Members of the community were now grouped by degree of spirituality. The more spiritual you were, the more power and authority you had. The most spiritual “brothers” had more power and authority than the most powerful “sisters” and the less powerful “brothers and “sisters”. The more powerful “sisters” had more power and authority than less spiritually powerful “brothers” and “sisters”. The less spiritually powerful “brothers” had more power and authority than the less spiritually powerful “sisters”. What this meant for the practice of complex marriage was that the more spiritual males and females inducted lower females and males into the perfection of “free love”. Noyes and his elite spiritual comrade “brothers”, of course, made sure that they introduced the most desirable lower spiritual “sisters” to complex marriage themselves. Eventually the community came to practice a kind of eugenics under the guidance of Noyes and a stirpiculture committee, which chose the partners who engaged in “group marriage”. Again, and not surprisingly, Noyes and other spiritually superior male leaders saw themselves as the most fit male practitioners of this spiritual eugenics and hence were more often “chosen” to engage in Oneida's eugenics experiments.
Individual charisma and a charismatic individual’s power in a social movement community context matters. It was Joseph Smith, the self proclaimed Mormon “Prophet, Seer, and Revelator”, who created Mormon men and women through the medium of cultural scripts, economic, political, and cultural, from the broader environment, cultural scripts he drew on, contemplated, and spliced together. All of these broader economic, political, and particularly cultural currents were filtered through the biblically oriented culture (recall Smith’s biblical nomenclature here, for example) that Smith and the early Mormons were living through, a betwixt and between state which many Mormons believed was recapitulating in the latter-days what happened in the early days of the church in the time of Jesus (primitivism). Many Mormons, including Smith, believed they were living in a time of latter-day revelation (dispensationalism), at a time when God was giving revelations to their church through their latter day prophet Joseph Smith, revelations that were considered blueprints for the one true church Smith and Mormons believed they were called by god to build. It was a betwixt and between state in which Mormon identity, Mormon men, Mormon women, and Mormon community were being created.
Smith played a central role in the creation of Mormon identity, Mormon community, and Mormon gender roles. We can see Smith’s role in the construction of Mormonism and Mormons by looking at the
Book of Mormon he “translated” and the “revelations” he received which were written down and published as the
Book of Commandments and
Doctrine and Covenants. When he told Mormon men that god wanted them to become “priests” most did. When he revealed God’s command that Mormons must migrate westward, most did. When he revealed that the faithful were to “gather” in and build “Zion”, most followed him to that “Zion” and helped him to try to establish the “city of God” there. When he “called” Saints to build temples, most helped build them in whatever way they could. When he told the Saints that the earth was about to undergo a drastic change and that they would be at the center of these cataclysmic changes, most believed him. When he told Saints that they were subjects of God’s one true and only church, most believed him. When he told the women of the Relief Society to aid the poor and to look after their husbands and children, most did. When he “called” for volunteers to go to Missouri, many volunteered. When he “called” Parley Pratt to be an apostle, he became one. When he “called” Pratt on a mission to the England, he went. When he “called” Hyrum Smith to be presiding Church Patriarch, he became Church Patriarch. When he “called” John Whitmer to write the history of the church, he did, if not fully to “God’s liking”. When he “called” Edward Partridge to be Church Bishop, he accepted. When he sent Lyman Wight to Missouri, he went. When he asked Lucy Walker, Sarah Ally, Melissa Lott, Mary Rollins Lightner, and Eliza R. Snow to become his plural wives, they did though only after some mental anguish. When he “called” his wife Emma to compile the church’s first hymnbook, she took up her “calling”. When he “called” Emma to become an “elect lady” and President of the Female Relief Society, she did. When Emma, in turn, “called” Elizabeth Ann Whitney and Sarah Cleveland to serve as her counselors in the Relief Society, they did. Most Mormon men and women embodied what their “Prophet” told them in their lives and actions. They still do. And if we truly want to understand Mormonism and the forces that brought it into being we need to understand the critical role culture and ideology play in constructing distinct identities and different communities. It is not enough to say that economics or politics did it. This paper, I hope, has been a small contribution to that effort.
End Notes
