“Whoever said the feminist revolution isn't happening in Utah is wrong,” Gloria Steinem gleefully once said, according to The New York Times, at a 1975 women’s conference in Salt Lake City.
Steinem, the trailblazing women’s equality activist and author, died Wednesday at age 92. Her legacy extends to Utah, where she influenced — and was influenced by — feminists in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In the early 1970s, Steinem started Ms. Magazine, a publication run and written by women in New York City. Meanwhile in Boston, Latter-day Saint women were cooking up their own movement and started the publication Exponent II. They were also responsible for the famous pink issue of “Dialogue.”
The two groups “absolutely” influenced and bounced ideas off of each other, said historian Barbara Jones Brown.
“So they're kind of just watching each other and watching what's going on nationally to found what is called Mormon feminism today,” said Brown, who’s working on a biography of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, one of Steinem’s Latter-day Saint contemporaries and a mother of Mormon feminism. Other contemporaries include Claudia Bushman and Judy Dushku.
All kinds of women were starting feminist groups around the United States at the time, she said. On the West Coast, that also included Latter-day Saint women led by Carolyn Pearson in the Bay Area. They were standing up for women's rights and the Equal Rights Amendment.
This interview transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: Did Gloria Steinem and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich ever cross paths?
Barbara Brown: They did. In fact, there's one year where Laurel is receiving an honorary doctorate from Smith College, and Gloria Steinem is the commencement speaker. And Laurel tells a story of they're going up the stairs at Smith College campus, and there's this famous painting of a woman who's got all these children surrounding her. And Laurel has five children at the time. Gloria Steinem never had children, and she looks at Laurel as they pass this painting, says, "Look, Laurel, that's you.” So kind of making fun, if you will, of all of the children that Laurel had and Mormon women tend to have.
But later they also cross paths in that Gloria Steinem defends Laurel after she is banned from speaking at BYU Women's Conference in the early 1990s.
CH: “Well-behaved women seldom make history” is a famous quote sometimes misattributed to Steinem. But Ulrich actually said that, right?
BB: That's correct. That's something she wrote in a paper that was published in 1976, and it kind of became popular in the 1990s when somebody found that quote in a paper and put it on a T-shirt. And then it went viral. Sometimes it's been misattributed to Steinem, to Marilyn Monroe, to Eleanor Roosevelt. And so Laurel finally published a book with that title so that she could copyright that phrase, if you will.
But when she said that, what she meant by that was that women who are well-behaved tended to get ignored by historians up until the 1970s. And so her point was, she wants to write about ordinary, well-behaved women so that they are a part of history as well. But she's also told me that she doesn't mind the subversive interpretation that many have attached to that saying.
CH: Does Steinem's influence carry on in the LDS Church today?
BB: I think Steinem, and again, these early Mormon feminists, their influence definitely continues today. We’re starting to lose some of them — Carolyn Pearson recently passed away. Others are aging and battling health challenges. Those of us who are younger LDS feminists are saddened by losing them — these icons, these women that we've looked up to as examples our whole lives — and I think we're talking about how do we continue that legacy of standing up for women's rights.
I heard Steinem speak in Utah years ago, when she came into Utah campaigning for Hillary Clinton, and I went with my daughters and my mother. So we had three generations of women who were so excited to go hear her speak when she spoke in Salt Lake City. I think that is a testament to her legacy and how much influence she has.
