Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors: A Pan-Historical Analysis, by Tiffany Kinney

Tiffany Kinney's Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors: APan-HistoricalAnalysis joins the ranks of the Mormon feminist scholarship that seeks to expand the presence of Latter-Day Saint women in current academic dialogue.1 By examining the extant writings of Emmeline B. Wells, Fawn Brodie, Sonia Johnson, and Kate Kelly, whose works span over 140 years, as paradigms of twentieth-century Mormon feminist thought, Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors analyzes the diverse modes of rhetorical engagement that each of these women employed as they sought access to power and authority within the hierarchical structures of their patriarch-centric church. In doing so, Kinney endeavors to "stay true to these sources and provide more attention to Mormon feminist women and their efforts to construct legitimacy for themselves in their faith" (11 e-book). Beyond a thorough examination of Wells's, Brodie's, Johnson's, and Kelly's writings, Kinney addresses the perpetual tendency in feminist scholarship to disregard certain women's voices owing to their "lack of radicality" in overcoming oppression. She argues that, like many religious women, Mormon women represent an underresearched population because they pursue equality by operating within their faith's power structures instead of trying to deconstruct them (15 e-book). She therefore seeks to fill a gap in feminist rhetoric scholarship through an in-depth study of how Latter-Day Saint women rhetorically engage to establish their voice and find positions of authority within their own religious communities.Kinney grounds her research into Mormon feminist rhetors in academic theory while contextualizing the words of Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly in their respective historical moments and in the space of their religious faith. The first two chapters of Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors address the reader's presumptions regarding religious women as potential feminist figures. Chapter 1 explores the role of the archive in locating religious women's voices by noting the various modes of rhetorical employment that women utilize to assert their position of authority. As Kinney indicates, her archive-based, pan-historical methodology responds to current archival studies conversations by contributing to the work of "critically examining the archive as a theoretical construction, acknowledging and challenging public memory, and cultivating 'ground-up' or community-based archives" (37 e-book). She situates Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly within the context of the archive by examining how each utilized different aspects of the five canons of rhetoric in their writings to demonstrate rhetorical capability and ethos. Chapter 2 analyzes Wells's, Brodie's, Johnson's, and Kelly's strategies for obtaining legitimacy by outlining both external and internal pathways to legitimacy available to women that "trace various threads of alternative communication strategies that open spaces for women as effective rhetors" when "traditional routes to gaining legitimacy are blocked" (65–66 e-book). Kinney outlines two modes of alternative communication strategies that operate as different pathways available to those seeking legitimacy: external approaches, such as "drawing on context" and "gaining visibility," and internal approaches, such as "claiming legitimacy" and "citing experience" (66 e-book). Thus, she employs the feminist lens of legitimacy by evaluating the ways in which Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly asserted their authority and right to speak as Mormon feminist rhetors.Chapters 3–6 unpack these arguments in more detail. Moving in chronological order, Kinney examines the writing practices of each of the four women as they relate to different components of the rhetorical cannon: Wells and her use of article arrangement in the nineteenth-century female-operated publication Women'sExponent; Brodie and her work on public memory through her biography of the Latter-Day Saint prophet, Joseph Smith; Johnson and her work of invention through archival generation of personal material in the University of Utah Special Collections; and Kelly and modern forms of delivery as found in her blog entries on the website Ordain Women: Morman Women Seeking Equality and Ordination to the Priesthood (ordainwomen.org). She follows an established trend in academic scholarship of seeking out opportunities to apply current rhetorical principles to past rhetorical examples. For example, the collection Nineteenth-Century American Activist Rhetorics (Bizzell and Zimmerelli 2020) examines nineteenth-century rhetorical activism by applying current rhetorical thought and methodologies as potential lenses through which to view these prior rhetorical acts. While Bizzell and Zimmerelli offer essays from various scholars, each with a unique and distinct approach, the collection's purpose is to connect past rhetorical activism to current trends of rhetorical engagement. Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors has the same objective. Kinney traces the tradition of Mormon women's rhetoric by applying current methodologies borrowed from feminist rhetorical theory in order to demonstrate how Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly sought to establish their own authoritative ethos as women rhetors within the discursive community of their faith.Kinney's study taps into valuable and unexplored primary sources by engaging with the primary works of Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly. However, one would have expected to see more contextualized engagement with those sources. Instead, Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors leans—perhaps too heavily—on theoretical investigation at the expense of historical context and tends to favor academic scholarship over primary source material from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints when rendering claims regarding practices and traditions within the faith. In depicting the experience of women in the Latter-Day Saint Church, Kinney discusses the effects of correlation on the rights and autonomy of women in the church yet fails to offer any documentation to explain what correlation is or what its purpose was within the faith. In the context of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, correlation refers to the efforts of Latter-Day Saint head, male leaders between 1908 and the mid-1970s to limit confusion about official teachings and doctrines of the faith by unifying the curricula and auxiliaries around the world and thus "build consistency in messaging across the Church," a response to extensive membership growth throughout the world ("Correlation," n.d.). For the female members of the church, this meant that their independently run auxiliary, the Relief Society, became housed under the general church organization, resulting in the loss of independence as an organization and financial autonomy. However, rather than offer a clear explanation of what correlation is or referring to church publications, Kinney instead makes assumptions regarding the loss of the rights of women in the faith because of correlation. She claims, for example, that in the late nineteenth century Wells "witnessed the initial start of correlation, when Mormon women started to lose authority and were only allowed to minister to same-sex groups" (14 e-book). She further asserts that the practice of correlation extends to Latter-Day Saint women today, claiming that they are "forbidden . . . from participating in many sacred ceremonies or offering prayers to audiences made up of both male and female listeners" (65 e-book). As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I know that these assertions are contrary to my personal experience regarding women praying and speaking from the pulpit in mixed company. While correlation did limit women's prayer in front of mixed-gender audiences over a ten-year period between 1968 and 1978, the practice was never consistently applied, as demonstrated in Belle S. Spafford's address to a mixed-gender audience of students at Brigham Young University (Spafford 1975, 41–50). Similarly, At the Pulpit (Reeder and Holbrook 2017), a collection of Latter-Day women's speeches dating from 1830 and published by the Church Historian Press (a publication division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), also shows that women of the Latter-Day Saint faith have been addressing mixed audiences since the church's inception. I have even had on numerous occasions since the age of twelve the opportunity of speaking from the pulpit to mixed-gender audiences. Therefore, Kinney's claims lack credence as the available evidence found in the church archives indicates otherwise.Regrettably, Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors makes multiple assertions about Latter-Day Saint practices that are either misconstrued and unsubstantiated or underresearched and, therefore, inappropriately presented as evidence of the exceptionality or inventiveness of the four women on whom Kinney focuses. In chapter 6, Kinney details Kate Kelly's efforts to petition the male leadership of the Latter-Day Saint Church for the ordination of women into the male-held offices of the priesthood by examining her delivery tactics on ordainwomen.org—an active online website and blog that aims to bring women who desire the church to change their position on women's ordination into the priesthood together in an online platform. Latter-Day Saint women are not ordained into the priesthood and never have been. In analyzing her blog posts, Kinney argues that Kelly invented the term prospective elder as a description for women seeking priesthood ordination (262 e-book). However, prospective elder is found in the current and older versions of the Latter-Day Saint General Handbook and refers to male members of the church who are over the age of eighteen and not yet ordained to the second order of the priesthood, often called the Melchizedek priesthood. Such omissions have the effect of undermining Kinney's assertions regarding Kelly's unique rhetorical strategies.In a broader sense, Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors struggles to acknowledge Latter-Day Saint primary sources regarding terminology and women's engagement in the church, thus minimizing many of the arguments Kinney attempts to make. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints maintains repositories of primary materials and, recently, has brought forth archival publications about dedicated Latter-Day Saint women: see, for example, At the Pulpit (Reeder and Holbrook 2017) and The First Fifty Years of Relief Society (Derr, Madsen, and Holbrook 2016). Academically, these collections resonate with scholars' calls (e.g., Hogg 2022) to include women who engage in rhetorical discourse but not always from a strong feminist position or ethos. However, rather than let the voices of the women of the Latter-Day Saint faith speak for themselves and include a wider range of voices in the discussion, Kinney instead chose to highlight figures that promote the idea of the feminist Mormon rhetor as an activist fighting against the power structures of the church. By focusing on Wells, Brodie, Johnson, and Kelly as representative Latter-Day Saint women because of their activist positions when three of the four women were excommunicated from the church and, ultimately, ended up leaving the faith, Kinney advances a version of the feminist Mormon woman that, while academically engaging, creates an incomplete and inaccurate picture of Latter-Day Saint women's voices. Therefore, focusing on these women as representative of Mormon feminist rhetors sets the precedent that feminism is restricted to activism, especially in a religious context—an activism that eventually leads to excommunication from the very faith in which these women sought legitimacy.Ultimately, the lack of sufficient research in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints evinced in Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors demonstrates a wider issue in the academy: scholars hesitate to engage with nontraditional forms of source material, in this case, religious materials and figures. As the examples offered above illustrate, even though Kinney's intention for Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors was to bring forward models of religious women who engage in feminist rhetorical acts as a contribution to women's rhetoric, her struggle to include source material speaks directly to the academy's perpetual denial of religious archives as legitimate locations for scholarly information. Thus, while Kinney's work appeals broadly to scholars seeking historical examples of religious women engaging in distinct rhetorical practices through different mediums, Legitimization of Mormon Feminist Rhetors also forces a consideration of not only whose rhetoric counts in the field of feminist rhetoric but also what material counts as welcome in academic discourse. As scholars, should we not consider material innate to individual communities instead of relying solely on previously accepted academic analysis?