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“I’m Not Your Stereotypical Mormon Girl”: Mormon Women’s Gendered Resistance

  • Original Paper
  • Published:
Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Research on women in gender-traditional religions has shown that women often exercise agency within the gendered confines of their religious institutions. This paper builds on the growing literature on women’s agency in gender-traditional religions by exploring whether and why some active Mormon women resist the gendered expectations of their faith more strongly than others. Drawing on interviews with women members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church, Mormon), we find that eight of the 30 women interviewed strongly resisted traditional Mormon gender expectations. We then explore their patterns of resistance and provide possible explanations for why they resist gender traditionalism more than the other participants. We discuss the wider implications of our findings, including a call for further examinations of the ways in which women’s religious experiences include both accommodation and resistance to traditional ideas about gender.

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Notes

  1. Some Mormon women have been active in formal social movements organizations, e.g., Ordain Women, a movement to allow women to be ordained as priests in the LDS Church. However, our focus is on Mormon women’s everyday resistance.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dan Olson, Mangala Subramaniam, Kevin Stainback, Joey Marshall, Ben Pratt, Fanhao Nie, John Bartkowski and Jong Hyun for their comments, critiques, and encouragement on earlier drafts of this paper.

Funding

This work was supported by the following grants awarded to the first author: the 2012 Fichter Award from the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the 2012 Student Research Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the 2012 Jacquet Award from the Religious Research Association.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Glendale Community College, 6000 W. Olive Ave., Glendale, AZ, 85302, USA

    Reid J. Leamaster

  2. Department of Sociology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Rachel L. Einwohner

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  1. Reid J. Leamaster
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  2. Rachel L. Einwohner
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Correspondence to Reid J. Leamaster.

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Leamaster, R.J., Einwohner, R.L. “I’m Not Your Stereotypical Mormon Girl”: Mormon Women’s Gendered Resistance. Rev Relig Res 60, 161–181 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-017-0324-3

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