This article about our class ran in the Summer 2016 Issue of Exponent II Magazine. We include it here to give you a little more background on how the course came to be.
Women in the Church: A Course of Study
by Kathryn Loosli Pritchett
When I tell people that my husband and I just taught a Sunday School course on Women in the Church, they act as though I'd just said that I’d discovered the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon.
“How’d you do that!?” they ask. Often followed by, “Aren’t you going to get in trouble?” implying that we’d somehow held our ward hostage for two months and forced them to talk about Scary Girl Stuff. When I tell them that the course was requested by our bishop and ward council and was based on a course we taught at the local LDS Institute, they shrug their shoulders and say “Well, you live in the Bay Area. That could never happen here in Utah/Idaho/Texas/anywhere but California.”
I tell them not to be so sure about that. I talk about how the course was very well-attended and had extremely positive reviews. That it engaged members of different genders, ages, and faith perspectives. That people came from outside the ward boundaries to attend. I share that both times we taught the course there was a demonstrable hunger to hear more women’s stories, women’s histories, and women’s concerns. And if they’re interested in attending or teaching something similar, I give them specifics about how the Sunday School class came to be, so that it might happen in their wards as well.
A little history. My husband, M.J., has taught an evening class for graduate students and working singles at the U.C. Berkeley Institute of Religion for the past seven years. Just before the winter 2015 semester began he was asked by the Institute director to teach a course on a topic that an LDSSA survey had determined was of most interest to its members: Women in the Church.
M.J. agreed, but only if I would teach with him. I said I would and the Institute director approved our team-teaching. Once we had official approval, we turned to each other and said, “Now what?” Class was starting in a week and we had fourteen weeks beyond that to fill, but there was no CES manual for a course on Women in the Church. So we started by listing possible lesson topics based on with what we knew or what we wanted to know more about. That list included prominent women in LDS history, polygamy, Mother in Heaven, Eve, women’s auxiliaries, women and the priesthood and LDS women’s contributions outside the home. We took our list to the first class and brainstormed with the Institute students to see what they were interested in talking about—after all, they’d requested the course— and incorporated their suggestions into the following course outline:
Women in the LDS Church: A Course of Study
1. Introduction/Brainstorming “What Should a Class on Mormon Women Include?"
2. How Mormons View Eve and Mary
3. Founding Women - Lucy Mack Smith and Emma Smith
4. Women and Gifts of the Spirit
5. Pioneer Women - Eliza R. Snow and Zina D.H. Young
6. The Suffrage Movement - Emmeline B. Wells
7. Women’s Auxiliaries - Relief Society, YW, and Primary
8. Plural Marriage - Ellis Reynolds Shipp and Annie Clark Tanner
9. Mother in Heaven (with stake member Carol Lynn Pearson as guest speaker)
10.Women in Transition - Amy Brown Lyman and Belle Stafford
11. Mormon Women and Second Wave Feminism - Barbara B. Smith and Lived Experience (Talk to your mothers or share your own experience about the ERA)
12. Modern Models - Chieko Okazaki and Sheri Dew
13. Mormon Women at Work
14. Viral Voices - Mormon Women on the Web (a panel discussion with women in our area who have a presence online and openly identify as Mormon Women—originally titled “From Zelophehad’s Daughters to Mormon Mommy Bloggers”)
15. Final Thoughts/Going Forward
Each week we distributed (by email) readings from a variety of sources. We tried to achieve a good balance of lecture and discussion with both of us teaching each week, alternating the order in which we spoke so that it was clear that neither of us was the main teacher. As with most teaching assignments we felt that we learned as much or more than those we taught.
One of the major lessons we learned is that very few members, even graduate students at Berkeley, are familiar with LDS women’s history or LDS teachings about Eve, Mary, and Mother in Heaven. We think this is primarily because little attention is given to women in our current curriculum. Not that church-sanctioned materials about women aren’t available or that faith-promoting lessons on these topics couldn’t be taught, but teachers have to seek out the information on their own and incorporate it into existing lessons. Yet given the LDSSA members’ initial request for a course on women and the high attendance at both our Institute class and subsequent Sunday School class, we think that many church members would like to study and discuss this material.
We hope that the current church curriculum will soon be modified to include more women-centric topics, but in the meantime a course similar to ours could be taught using the existing lesson schedule. This could be done over the course of several years (!) during fifth Sunday combined third hours or over a year on the first Sundays of each month during the time designated for Relief Society and Priesthood presidency messages. Alternatively, the course could be held, as ours was, over 8-12 weeks as a Sunday School class (much like marriage or family history courses held in many wards). We think this is preferable since it provides better continuity.
Another argument for holding this as a Sunday School class is that a mixed-gender perspective on these topics can be quite meaningful. In our class, men heard women speak up much more than they usually do in Sunday School. And women heard how men looked at women-centric topics differently from them. For example, the week we talked about Relief Society in the Institute course, the young women expressed frustration about meeting with the older women and pointed out that Priesthood meetings are separated into two age groups. Then a male student shared his positive feelings toward his home ward Relief Society because they’d helped his mother and family through a divorce. When we discussed Mother in Heaven in our home ward, women talked about wanting a role model and friend. The men were mostly silent, but then one offered how important the idea of a Heavenly Mother had been to him when he joined the church because he had been adopted as a baby. He shared that he’d always found the concept of a Heavenly Mother comforting when processing the loss of his birth mother.
We also found that it was helpful to have both a woman and a man teach this course since we brought different perspectives to the subject matter and it encouraged class participation by both men and women. Frankly, it also helped that we are long time, active members of our ward which gave us some credibility in discussing sometimes challenging topics with a diverse group of ward members.
To help you who may be interested in developing and proposing a similar course in your own ward, we’ve created a site where you can access our course outlines, lesson plans and suggested readings called Women in the LDS Church: A Course of Study. Since you may also be limited in the number of weeks allotted for a Sunday School course (we had eight weeks and an evening fireside) you may choose to combine related topics such as Eve, Mary AND Mother in Heaven or Modern Models AND Women at Work.
Below you’ll find our lesson plan for “Gifts of the Spirit AND Pioneer Women – Eliza R. Snow and Zina D. H. Young.” Note that these combined lessons are packed with information, so to leave time for discussion (which is essential), it helps to be well-versed in the material so you can summarize it effectively and work details not covered in the lecture portion into short follow-up comments during the discussion.
Lesson Plan: Gifts of the Spirit + Pioneer Women - Eliza R. Snow and Zina D. H. Young
Teacher 1
Intro: Women of the Early LDS Church sought out and were strengthened by “Gifts of the Spirit.”
Briefly introduce Eliza R. Snow and Zina D.H. Young as the 2nd and 3rd Relief Society presidents as well as “the head and the heart” of the early female leadership. Include the spiritual manifestations both women had when they were converted and talk about how they practiced the gifts of the spirit (D&C 45:19-26)—particularly the gift of tongues and gift of healing (Daughters of Light, Pearson).
Share descriptions of women practicing the gift of tongues in the early church (The 4 Zinas, Bradley/Woodward).
Teacher 2
Talk about the Gospel Topics Essay (lds.org) “Joseph Smith’s Teachings about Priesthood, Temple and Women.
Emphasize that through the priesthood Joseph:
1) Organized/elevated the Relief Society which “defined and authorized a major aspect of women’s ministry,” using words like ordain and keys.
2) Set up the temple where both men and women could receive and administer priesthood ordinances.
3) Endorsed women giving healing blessings.
Share quotes from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young encouraging women to give healing blessings. Explain that this practice diminished over time as the church moved into the modern age and was effectively ended in 1946 when Joseph Fielding Smith strongly encouraged members to call on the Elders for healing blessings. (“Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism,” Stapley/Wright)
Read an example of one of these healing blessings from “A Gift Given, A Gift Taken: Washing, Anointing and Blessing the Sick, Newell
Discussion Questions:
1. Are there women in your family history who were called as healers who might have given blessings?
2. If this practice was reinstated, would there be certain women you would look to as healers? Or would every righteous woman be a healer? In other words, does everyone receive every gift of the spirit?
3. For the women in the room, if you were asked to give a healing blessing, how would you feel? What would you say in a blessing? For the men, how would you feel about having a woman give you a blessing? How do you prepare to give a healing blessing?
4. Why do you think we don’t practice the gift of tongues and the gift of interpretation of tongues the way our pioneer foremothers did?
5. Have you heard of women exercising other gifts of the spirit in the modern age?
Conclusion: Share Lavina Fielding Anderson’s comments about nineteenth century saints hungering for spiritual gifts and manifestations and their willingness to pray directly for them, then ask if, as she suggests, we have circumscribed our limits too narrowly. “Our birthright is joy not weariness, courage not caution, and faith not fear. By covenant and consecration, may we claim it.” (Exponent II, Fall 2014/Winter 2015)
Course Readings
“Joseph Smith’s Teachings about Priesthood, Temple and Women,” Gospel Topics Essays, lds.org
“Gifts of the Spirit,” Robert D. Hales, lds.org
“A Gift Given, A Gift Taken: Washing, Anointing and Blessing the Sick,” Linda K. Newell, Sunstone Magazine
“Female Ritual Healing in Mormonism,” Jonathan Stapley and Kristine Wright, Social Science Research Network
“Meet Eliza R. Snow,” Podcast interview with BYU professor Karen Lynn Davidson, co-author Eliza: The Life and Faith of Eliza R. Snow,(Deseret Book, 2015)
"Eliza R. Snow"- lds.org official bio
“Eliza R. Snow - First Lady of the Pioneers” Jaynann Morgan Payne, lds.org
"Zina D.H. Young" - lds.org official bio
Selected excerpts from Daughters of Light, Carol Lynn Pearson (Bookcraft, 1974) and The 4 Zinas, Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward (Signature Books, 2000)