Document 8: John M. Crewdson, "Mormon Turnout Overwhelms Women's Conference in Utah," New York Times, 25 July 1977. Reprinted in National Women's Conference Official Briefing Book: Houston, Texas, November 18 to 21, 1977 (Washington, D.C.: National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, 1977), pp. 234-35.
Introduction
Women committed to change clashed with those against it, at the state and territory meetings held to elect delegates to the NWC. Opponents of the NWC agenda were typically affiliated with conservative and New-Right groups including Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum, Stop ERA, the John Birch Society, the Relief Society of the Mormon Church, and the Ku Klux Klan.
The most prominent conflict between feminists supporting the pro-change agenda of the NWC and anti-change groups occurred at the Utah State convention where thousands of Mormon women registered as voters and defeated the core resolutions proposed by the NCOIWY. Organizers of the Utah meeting expected two thousand women, but on the first day of the meeting 14,000 women registered to vote to elect delegates to attend the NWC in Houston and to defeat the core resolutions. Organizers believed most of these women were affiliated with the Mormon Church, and especially with its Relief Society. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century, in the 1990s the Mormon Church's Relief Society recorded three million members. Women in the Mormon Church are subordinate to men, are not allowed to become priests, and are expected to take up "traditional" roles as wives and mothers. In recent decades the church has spoken out against feminist issues condemning working mothers and the ERA.[59] While no other states recorded such high levels of participation, many convention organizers did report high attendance of Mormon women out of proportion with their numbers in the state's population.
Many contemporaries suggested the Mormon women who attended the conventions in states like Utah were pawns of largely male church leaders (see Document 13). Yet the following document indicates significant numbers of Mormon women participated in the spirit of the convention opening a dialogue with feminists, alongside their more contentious Mormon sisters who were often described as rude and disruptive. Despite the opposition of Mormon women to major resolutions like the Equal Rights Amendment or abortion, in this document conference organizers noted that at the Utah meeting Barbara Smith voiced support for some items on the agenda including equal pay and divorce. Smith, as president of the Relief Society of the Mormon Church (1974-1984) and therefore the highest ranked woman official in the Mormon Church, took a leading role in expressing official Mormon antipathy toward the ERA.[60] Other Mormon women later wrote to convention organizers recording positive views about the Utah convention, which they had found educational.
p. 234
Mormon Turnout Overwhelms Women's Conference in Utah
By JOHN M. CREWDSON
Special to The New York Times
SALT LAKE CITY—When representatives of the International Women's Year organization here began planning their statewide convention several months ago, they invited a number of Utah women's groups to participate in hopes of showing, as the coordinating committee put it, "that diversity doesn't have to divide people."
"They kept talking about outreach, trying to get as many women involved as possible," recalled Esther Landa, the current head of the National Council of Jewish Women, who presided over the convention three weekends ago.
One of the groups to which an invitation was extended was the Relief Society, the women's auxiliary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But none of the organizers, who had anticipated a crowd of perhaps 2,000, was prepared for the 12,000 or so Mormon women, responding to their church's call to insure the support of "correct principles," who streamed into the Salt Palace auditorium in downtown Salt Lake City.
As the convention staff struggled to print sufficient numbers of ballots and other materials to keep pace with the swelling demand, the Mormon women seated themselves on boxes and table tops and proceeded to reject by overwhelming majorities resolutions favoring the equal rights amendment, abortion on demand and more than a score of other women's rights proposals put forward by the I.W.Y. organizers.
Mormon Delegates
Nearly 14,000 women were ultimately registered by the Utah convention, more than twice the attendance at any of the other statewide meetings, and of the 14 delegates selected from an anti-E.R.A., "pro-life" slate to attend the I.W.Y.'s national meeting in Houston next November, 12 are members of the Mormon Church.
"It was like a war, only they had atomic weapons and we had words," said Maggy Pendleton, a college counselor and I.W.Y. organizer who is described by friends as the closest thing to a radical feminist as one can find in this fundamentally conservative state.
The Mormon women, who she estimated had outnumbered non-Mormons by about 10 to 1, "could vote down anything they wanted to," she said. "They ran the whole thing. I've never been so rudely treated in my life."
Although she and other organizers said they had had hopes of opening a "dialogue" with the Mormons that might begin to reverse the polarization that has existed in Utah between churchwomen and feminists for some time, the acrimony that prevailed at the convention overrode nearly every attempt at a thoughtful discussion of women's issues.
In the middle of it all was Jan L. Tyler, a 34-year-old former professor of child development at Brigham Young University, who, though an active member of the Mormon Church, is also an ardent supporter of the equal rights amendment, something to which her church is officially opposed.
A Foot in Both Camps
As head of the Utah coordinating committee, Miss Tyler said, she had been "committed to do all I could to provide this kind of forum for Utah women," and had hoped that, with a foot in both camps, she would prove to be a bridge between them.
But for her, the convention produced a number of "unfortunate things that gave me personal pain," among them her observation that many of the women "who were professing a tremendous concern for life" in their opposition to abortion "were very abusive in their actions toward others."
Don LeFevre, a spokesman for the Mormon Church, acknowledged that the Relief Society had encouraged its membership to take part in the convention "and vote for correct principles."
"The church," he said, "has always been concerned with threats to the stability of the family and the home. We don't make any excuses for our women's participation. We're proud of them. Other women's groups could probably take a note from their book."
Although the Mormons place a heavy emphasis on early marriage and large families—birth control is frowned upon, Mr. LeFevre said, and abortion viewed as "one of the most revolting and sinful practices of this day"—its opposition to the equal rights amendment is founded more on physiology than theology.
"We recognize men and women as equally important before the Lord," the church's leadership has declared, "but with differences biologically, emotionally and in other ways. E.R.A., we believe, does not recognize these differences."
Although none of the Relief Society members were given explicit instructions
p. 235
Similar appeals for participation were sent by the Relief Society headquarters here to its representatives in several other states, Mr. LeFevre said, after the church decided that, based on the impressive turnout it had mustered in Utah, its women might be able to "help support correct principles" at some of the I.W.Y. conventions remaining to be held.
In Washington and Montana, two of the states selected for action by the church, resolutions supporting the E.R.A. were rejected by conventioneers, about half of whom proved in both cases to be Mormons, according to I.W.Y. organizers.
Mary Munger, the head of the Montana coordinating committee, said that all 14 of that state's delegates to the Houston convention had gone on record as opposing the ratification of the E.R.A., and that the convention there had produced "very little dialogue."
While various coalitions of conservative religious and political groups have played a role around the country in diluting the I.W.Y.'s advocacy of increasing equality for women, there is what Nikki Van Hightower, a Houston city official serving as liaison to the national convention, called "a very deep concern" over the involvement of the Mormon Church.
Mormons Started Late
"Nobody started out anticipating anything like this," Mrs. Hightower said, "but it has grown and grown." The effect of the church's involvement would ultimately be minimized, she said, only because it had not begun in earnest until after many of the state conventions had already been held. "But," she added, "if they had gone on much longer…"
Several of the women who have worked on behalf of the I.W.Y. in Utah said they suspected the anti-E.R.A. organization headed by Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative Republican, might have had a hand in the Mormon Church's decision to influence the outcome of the conventions in Utah and elsewhere, but none of them was able to produce any evidence that such had been the case.
However, a slate of anti-feminists delegates, including several women prominent in Mormon Church affairs, was circulated on the floor of the Salt Palace under the auspices of the Eagle Forum, the organization that Mrs. Schlafly heads. Most of those delegates were ultimately elected to represent the state.
Despite their obvious disappointment at the turn of events in Utah, both Mrs. Landa and Miss Tyler cautioned against concluding from the I.W.Y.'s experiences there that no potential existed for a discussion of women's issues between feminists and the Mormon Church.
Mrs. Landa noted that Barbara Smith, the president of the Relief Society, had maintained that the church's domination of the Utah convention should not be interpreted as a complete rejection of women's concerns and had spoken in favor of equal pay, legal protection for women in divorce actions and assistance to working women with family responsibilities.
Some of her recent mail from Mormon women who had attended the Utah conference, Mrs. Landa said, had contained expressions of embarrassment over the behavior of the more strident opponents of the equal rights amendment and had described the event as a positive experience that had permitted them to learn directly, in some cases for the first time, what the women's rights movement was really about.
Dealing With Issues
Miss Tyler concurred, saying she had concluded, based on her telephone calls and letters, that many Mormon women were "thinking about things they've never thought about before. A lot of them are beginning to transcend their own conditions and say that there are other women in the world who find themselves in circumstances very different from mine."
She remained convinced, she said, that despite the "political" positions taken by the Mormon Church on such issues as the E.R.A., it was not impossible to reconcile at least some feminists concerns with the church's theology.
"That doesn't mean that there isn't some pain and introspection that goes on, dealing with issues you might otherwise have ignored," she said. "That isn't to say it's an easy thing."
One unfortunate aspect, she said, was the sentiment among many Mormon women that "if they don't buy the whole package" of women's rights issues, "they're somehow shut out" of the movement altogether.
"If the women's movement is going to define itself as just another part of society that's exclusive, then it's really in trouble."
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