Kline, “Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness” (Reviewed by Julie J Nichols)

Review
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Title: Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness
Author: Caroline Kline
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: Feminist Theory, Religious Non-Fiction
Year Published: 2022
Binding: Paper or Hardback
Pages:   246 (Appendices, endnotes, bibliography, and index begin on p 171)
ISBN (paperback): 978-0-252-08643-4
Cost (paperback): $27.95

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters

For decades, Western scholarship about women and religion has focused on the paradigm of gender equality. Certainly, this has driven feminist scholarship about women in Mormonism. Recently I stumbled across my stashed-away copy of the Spring 2017 issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, where Maxine Hanks, Mette Ivie Harrison, and Neylan McBain redefine (respectively) feminist theology, feminisms, and Mormon womanhood in their complexly individual ways. Questions never seem to go away, at least among liberal feminist scholars, about how we direct our lives. Between desire for community and resistance to hierarchy, personal revelation and priesthood restrictions, agency and authority, we Mormon women present conundrums worth lifetimes of study.

But when Caroline Kline, currently assistant director of the Center for Global Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9J9tPzAn-k), set out “to explore the worldviews of Latter-Day Saint women of color in the United States and the global South” (1),  she saw that her questions, skewed as they were toward “gender equality,” were simply not the right ones.

On the one hand, she was committed to “critically analyze the systems that marginalize women” (2-3). On the other, she meant to “recognize the complexity and depth of the diverse worldviews, cultures, and social locations of Latter-day Saint women” through their oral histories (3). What she discovered through her interviews with women in Mexico, Botswana, and the American South was a mindset not strictly concerned about gender equality, a mindset which she named by the umbrella term “non-oppressive connectedness.” This term is at the intersection—the “crossroads” of the title of her book—of Mormonism as it comes down from Salt Lake and as it is lived, with appreciation and devotion, by these women of color.

Although Mormon Women at the Crossroads contains anecdotes and some narrative, it is for the most part, academic in methodology and tone. Kline’s data is scrupulously researched, far beyond the interviews that form the core of the study. Mormon and non-Mormon sociological and theological writing, Mormon and non-Mormon women’s studies, feminist religious scholarship, as well as scholarly work on the cities and cultures of Mexico, Botswana, and the American are all meticulously referenced and cited.

This academic approach leads to some, inevitable repetition as Kline uses her data to support her points. The book’s audience is more academic than general, as Kline provides background, interview questions, and diagrams delineating demographics. She is careful to include multiple points of view. She interrogates her own assumptions, as a responsible scholar must.

Such responsible scholarly behavior begins in the introduction, where she declares her positionality as a researcher with liberal feminist training for whom oral histories have great value. Three chapters record interviews with three populations.

Women of Veracruz, Mexico, lead Kline to generalize three ways Mormonism helps (rather than colonizes or suppresses) Mormon women there. Domestic violence, infidelity, and alcoholism are contained; material status is improved; and spiritual power is acknowledged and encouraged.

In Botswana, bride-price and children born out of wedlock are cultural norms that official Church policies have opposed, causing conflict within and between families there. But the interviews Kline records indicate that the women treasure the idea of a God who loves them and wants stable families. They’ve found ways to hold close both their own cultural norms and the directives of the Church. Quotations from their histories filled me with respect for their complex resolutions to problems earlier scholars have dismissed as fixable only by doing away with one part of the problem (the Batswana culture) or the other (Western colonization).

At home in the United States, Kline finds Mormon women of color in the South lamenting the lack of attention from headquarters to matters of social justice, bristling at blatant racism in a church that’s supposed to represent Christ, the seat of unconditional love. Yet it’s clear that “breaking out of cycles of misery and violence is a theme” (110) among these women. As elsewhere, they find power in the strong doctrines of a Father and Mother in heaven who love all Their children (Kline includes some beautiful discussions of experiences with Mother in Heaven), and who want—and provide resources to create–stable, functional families for them.

An additional chapter pulls wisdom from many of the women Kline interviewed, wisdom “toward a Mormon womanist theology of abundance,” where there is space and resources for all God’s daughters have to offer. A final chapter concludes that these women “contend with multiple identities, loyalties, and contexts.” This multiplicity inevitably led to “a different interpretive paradigm,” one of “vitalizing, non-oppressive connectedness,” which “[centers] their worlds and [emerges] as the most productive interpretive framework through which to analyze and understand these women’s lives, choices, and agency.”

Acknowledging the complicated relationship all these women of color have with a Western patriarchal church is a profound contribution not only to the field of Mormon studies but also to “ongoing conversations in the field of women’s studies in religion” (21). Further, because the study “attends to differences between Latter-day Saint women in ways that prior studies have not” (21), it also expands definitions of Mormon womanhood, with the potential of breaking down existing barriers between the stereotypical (happy, blond, straight-toothed-and-smiling) Mormon woman and her sisters of color in the global South.

Finally, the study “[broadens] and [complicates] the way [scholars] think about women’s agency at the intersection of race, colony, and class in the context of religion” (21). For me, a daughter of the feminist revolution of the ‘70s and ‘80s, this was the most powerful thrust of the study: to discover that there are moments and places where women “embrace, creatively propagate, and support patriarchal norms” by choice, in positive and devoted ways.

That Kline does not back down from this discovery, giving it an empowering name and aspect, is perhaps the strongest feature of Mormon Women at the Crossroads. I believe her conclusions are vitally important not only for scholars who must now expand their sense of the variety of responses Mormon women have to Church teachings and policies but also for missionaries, travelers, investigators—and leaders at all levels in this hierarchical, patriarchal, imperfect, Utah-based church.