Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist

The story of Sonia Johnson's support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), criticism of opposition to the ERA, and excommunication from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1979 is infamous. Covered widely in the national press, her critiques of patriarchy were a flashpoint both within Mormonism and in the broader United States as the church and nation confronted the growing feminist movement, passage of the ERA in Congress, and its subsequent defeat in the struggle for ratification by the states. Nearly fifty years later, these events still resonate—sometimes painfully so—for many.The hypervisibility of Sonia's story, distortions in the press, and the contested nature of the events in question make the prospect of writing a biography of her quite difficult, but this is a challenge that Christine Talbot readily meets. (Talbot indicates that Sonia asked that her first name, not surname, be used throughout the book, a request this review also follows.) Talbot ably untangles a complicated story using archival texts and recordings, particularly those in the Sonia Johnson Collection at the University of Utah, news sources, Sonia's first book, From Housewife to Heretic, and interviews Talbot conducted with Sonia in 2022 and 2023. The majority of Talbot's book is devoted to the years 1977–1982, when Sonia was most active in campaigning for the ERA.The first chapter provides a short biography of Sonia, starting with her early life in Idaho and concluding with a discussion of her life after her excommunication. Chapter 2 is an in-depth examination of Sonia's confrontation with the church and subsequent excommunication. The third chapter explores Sonia's feminist interpretations of Mormon ideology, including that the church's anti-ERA position was not revelation but rather a political issue outside religious authority. The final chapter in the book centers on questions of gender and power in exploring Sonia's criticism of the anti-ERA Virginia LDS Citizens Coalition (VACC), which Sonia viewed as an example of how church-adjacent organizations for women were not opposed to the ERA organically, but rather, served as a cover for men's power and authority.While readers might be most interested in the chapter on Sonia's excommunication, and indeed that story is told clearly and insightfully here, the book offers a fresh and innovative means to understand Sonia as a Mormon intellectual in the final two chapters. In doing so, Talbot provides readers with a book that not only helps us better understand Sonia's particular story but also explores the nexus of religion, politics, and feminism in the 1970s and ’80s.That old chestnut in women's history—debates over the public (gendered as male) and private (gendered as female) spheres—is part of the controversy surrounding Sonia's activism. While scholars have contested the dichotomy of “separate spheres” ideology, instead seeing the boundaries as highly contingent, overlapping, and porous, Sonia's work exploded expectations for women's activism in the 1970s and ’80s. Talbot notes in her chapter on Sonia's excommunication that when Sonia finally received the formal charges against her—at the trial in which she was excommunicated—all centered on public speeches Sonia had given in the late summer and fall of 1979. Indeed, much of Sonia's feminist ideology from this era is oral in nature. In the U.S., written forms of protest such as petitioning and letter-writing have been open to women since the founding of the nation. Giving speeches, and particularly ones critiquing men, has long remained a third rail for women in public settings. The particular ways that Sonia loudly and visibly critiqued the church exemplify this.The final chapter of the book, which explores Sonia's view that the church was using women's councils like the VACC to hide the role of men in organizing opposition to the ERA, complicates notions of gender and power in public. VACC co-chair Beverly Campbell told women in her organization that they must “take this seriously as a calling” (70). Even though Campbell may have used the term “calling” liberally, it provided Sonia with evidence that men played a role in organizing women against the ERA. Fascinatingly, Sonia refused to appear on the TV show Donahue with Campbell in December 1979, implying that Campbell had no real power within the VACC and was simply a cover for the men who had created the organization. Indeed, the men's reluctance to appear in public in the ERA debate suggests an intriguing reversal of the typical gendered expectations of public relations.As part of the Introductions to Mormon Thought series, Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist fulfills the series’ promise to provide succinct and accessible works on Mormon intellectuals. Yet the book's abbreviated nature meant that Talbot had less space to explore aspects of Sonia's feminist philosophy. Sonia's early feminist leanings are only briefly explored in the first chapter. We learn that Sonia was reading feminist theory as a young mother, but it is not clear what she was reading. This seems particularly important since Talbot explains that Sonia was not inspired as much by the Mormon feminist movement of the era as by the broader national movement. Within that national movement, many interpretations of feminism existed. How did Sonia come to settle on her views? Further, how might we consider Sonia's work after the mid-1980s? Did she continue to be a “Mormon Feminist,” or did that identification cease in the years following her excommunication? How might Sonia's later works, briefly explored in the bibliographical essay, complicate our understanding of Mormon feminism, particularly Sonia's conceptualizations of women's communities?The popular phrase of the women's movement, the personal is political, applies to Sonia's biography. Sonia's excommunication was deeply personal and private. Yet, it was also very much public and political, not only for Sonia, but also for the Mormon feminists who were chilled by the church's treatment of Sonia and who faced formal and informal discipline that “intimidated and silenced” (45) women for years after. Talbot's book offers an important and innovative examination of this important Mormon feminist, relevant for those interested in religion, feminism, and politics.