Is it real, or is it yet another of those “look how far we’ve come” fabrications? Yet another piece of “olden days” text, typically titled “How to Be a Good Wife” or “The Good Wife’s Guide,” is said to have originated with a 1950s-era home economics textbook. Or poke fun at Victorian sexual attitudes (or modern day feminism) by trotting out a piece of Advice to Young Brides. Remind someone what easy lives we lead these days by showing him an alleged list of rules for teachers from 1872. Want to prove that American slaveholders were even more vile than we could possibly imagine? Just point people to the apocryphal Slave Consultant’s Narrative. Such reinforcement works on the principle that if you won’t do a good thing just for its own sake, you’ll surely do it to avoid being laughed at and looked down upon by your peers.Ī typical vessel for this sort of comparison is the fabricated or misrepresented bit of text from the “olden days,” some document that purportedly demonstrates how our ancestors endured difficult lives amidst people who once held truly despicable beliefs. It reminds folks of the importance of holding on to these newer ways of thinking and to caution them against falling back into older patterns which may be more comfortable but less socially desirable. The juxtaposition of wonderful modernity with a tawdry past also serves to reinforce the ‘rightness’ of current societal stances by making any other positions appear ludicrous. We go away from such readings a bit proud of how we’ve pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and with our halos a bit more brightly burnished. When we despair over the human condition and feel the need for a little pat on the back, a few startling comparisons between us modern enlightened folks and those terrible neanderthals of yesteryear give us that. The lessons of FW and the HOW organization turned these women’s attention outward to the nation and committed them to countering the country’s social and sexual developments they believed directly opposed their moral vision and ideological worldview.It has become fashionable to portray outdated societal behaviors and attitudes - ones we now consider desperately wrongheaded - to be worse than they really were as a way of making a point about how much we’ve improved. This chapter examines Andelin and Davison within the context of LDS teachings on sexuality as a way of understanding how Mormon women responded to and helped shape the development of Mormonism’s conservative culture of sexuality and gender and its political consequences.
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HOW soon claimed ten thousand members in all fifty states. Creating the organization Happiness of Womanhood (HOW), Davison’s group not only targeted the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) but also opposed abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education, busing, and the removal of school prayer. While Andelin mostly avoided the brewing controversies of her era, the meetings radicalized Davison. Andelin’s workshops, and her accompanying best-selling book, Fascinating Womanhood, offered LDS women the hope of personal fulfillment by accepting their divinely ordained roles and responsibilities, including embracing their sexual gifts as wives.
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In the late 1960s, Jaquie Davison, an Arizona housewife who struggled to find happiness while raising her seven children, enrolled in a Fascinating Womanhood (FW) workshop at her Mormon church ward led by a fellow Latter-day Saint (LDS) woman, Helen Andelin.