Episode 51: Diaries of a Mormon Feminist – with author Carol Lynn Pearson

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy, I’m Amy McPhie Allebest. Today I’m going to start with a poem by Carol Lynn Pearson. It’s called “A Motherless House”. 

A Motherless House

“I live in a Motherless house,

A broken home. 

How it happened I cannot learn. 

When I had words enough to ask 

‘Where is my Mother?’

No one seemed to know,

And no one thought it strange 

That no one else knew either. 

I live in a Motherless house.

They are good to me here,

But I find that no kindly 

Patriarchal care eases the pain. 

I yearn for the day 

Someone will look at me and say, 

‘You certainly do look like your Mother.’

I walk the rooms, 

Search the closets,

Look for something that might 

Have belonged to her—

A letter, a dress, a chair. 

Would she not have left a note? 

I close my eyes 

And work to bring back her touch, her face.

Surely there must have been 

A Motherly embrace 

I can call back for comfort. 

I live in a Motherless house,

Motherless and without a trace. 

Who could have done this? 

Who would tear an unweaned infant 

From its Mother’s arms 

And clear the place of every souvenir? 

I live in a Motherless house.

I lie awake and listen always for the word

That never comes, but might.

I bury my face 

In something soft as a breast. 

I am a child— 

Crying for my Mother in the night.”

Today I am so honored to welcome to the podcast the author of this poem, the renowned Mormon feminist, Carol Lynn Pearson. She is an American poet, author, screenwriter, and playwright. She frequently addresses the topics of LGBT acceptance and the role of Latter-Day Saint women. She has written many important works, including Goodbye, I Love You, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy, and this year, The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson – Mormon Author, Feminist, and Activist, which we’ll be discussing today. This is an especially fun episode because we’re here in person together, speaking in your home in California. 

Carol Lynn Pearson: Isn’t that fun? It’s great to have you in my home, Amy. Thank you for coming. 

AA: Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been so looking forward to this episode. I loved your diary so much. It illuminated things about you that I hadn’t known, it illuminated things about me that I hadn’t known, and it was just a powerful and profound experience. So thank you for sharing these diaries with the world. I wonder if we can start our conversation by talking a little bit about your life more broadly, where you come from, what brought you to do the work that you do, but then also what journaling meant to you as you were growing up. How consistently did you keep a diary about the things that you were doing throughout your life? 

CLP: Okay, so my life story all in a couple of paragraphs here. I was born in Salt Lake City. My parents were older, and they had five children. And our home was very stoic. I had to learn about joy as I went through life. There was nothing abusive going on, it was just, “We work hard and that’s what we do.” From Salt Lake, when I was about eight, we moved out to a tiny little town that nobody really has ever heard of except the several people who populate that small town called Gusher, Utah. It’s right between Roosevelt and Vernal. We went because my father got a job, and this was during the Depression, and he almost had a doctorate degree in agronomy, but he had to leave that and just do whatever was available. So he taught on-the-job training to veterans out in the Uintah basin. And my mother taught school. And, you know, kids don’t know very much of the difference. “This is an adventure! Oh, look what we get to see here! This is weird.” So, we were out in Gusher for five years, and my mother saved all of her paychecks from school teaching so she could get us back to civilization, which she did when I was 13. And we were able to buy a house in Provo. So Provo was where I really grew up. I had a fine growing up in Provo. I went to BY junior high school and high school.

And I just caught on fire with all of the exciting things there were to learn and to do, and so I was one of the top students always because I was smart and I worked so hard. And then, of course, I went to BYU, majored in drama, and got a master’s degree in drama. I then taught for a year at Snow College in Ephraim, and eventually I met this charming young man, Gerald Pearson, who I fell in love with and he fell in love with me as best he could, because, you see, he turned out to be one of the charming gay men that have come into my life. He was working so hard not to be gay, and we talked about it before we married, but nobody knew anything about all of that back at that time. It was just some weird mistake that guys made, and then they repent and get over it. Of course, we know now that that’s not the case. 

So, we had a very good marriage in so many ways. We had four children, but, of course, we ultimately divorced. And as I wrote in one of my books, Goodbye, I Love You, we remained good friends. And as so many gay men at that time, he did contract AIDS and he did pass away in this home that you’re in right now. And I never dreamed that I would write that story, but I had become a successful writer, that’s how I earned my living. And I realized that this particular subject that I was thrust into was one that needed an awful lot more light shown on it. And I realized that I had the capabilities, personally, of writing it. The story itself was a difficult story, but one that was illuminative, if that’s a good word, and one that was not filled with hate. Gerald and I were able to maintain a good relationship throughout, and I was able to understand what he was going through. So toward the end of his life, I did bring him to this house where we are now, where he passed away.

AA: Mm-hmm. And you had been divorced for many years at that point, right? But had stayed good friends throughout. And you cared for him through his end of life. It’s just so beautiful. 

AA: And what year was that? Remind us, Carol Lynn. 

CLP: That would have been. I think about 1986. 

AA: Just at a time when no one, certainly no one in the Church was talking about it. 

CLP: No, no. Only in hushed tones and only in confusion. And only in condemnation.

AA: Yeah, I mean, you were truly a trailblazer in that area. 

CLP: It’s true, I was. 

AA: You were. And in opening people’s hearts. In fact, just yesterday I spoke to a friend and told her I was coming here to interview you today. I said, “Carol Lynn Pearson, do you know who that is?” And she said, “Of course.” And she said her first introduction to you was Goodbye: I Love You, and she said that that was the first time that she had thought about things in a different way. It was the first time, I think she found the book in high school, which is earlier than I knew about it, so she was lucky that it crossed her path kind of early in her life and was extremely influential in how she started to see LGBTQ folks in general in her lifetime. So yeah, you had that effect on countless members of the Church.  

CLP: I know that that’s true, and I know that that wrenching experience led to some really powerful good that I was able to do. I know that. 

AA: Well, thank you for sharing it with the world. Another way that you’ve been a trailblazer throughout your life is on gender issues in general, and patriarchy and women in the Church. And I wonder, before we start to talk about those topics, if you could tell us about your process of journaling, of writing in a diary. This is the book that we’re talking about today, the book that has just come out, and I wonder if it was always a natural process for you to write in your diary. Because wow, it’s just an incredible experience and it must have been an incredible experience for you to go back through and read all of the different versions of yourself that had existed. Is that one of the original ones? 

CLP: This is the very first diary. 

AA: Oh! 

CLP: The very first one. And you can see it’s broken. See, this is very old. 

AA: For listeners, describe it for us, Carol Lynn. What does it look like? 

CLP: Well, this is a small, red, fake alligator cover book. I do not know who gave me this book, but I’m so grateful to them. And I see that this particular volume goes from September 26th, 1956–

AA: Oh my goodness.  

CLP: –Through April 16th of ‘57.  

AA: Wow. 

CLP: Now, I graduated from high school in ‘57 from Brigham Young University High School in Provo. So I did have this little book to share my thoughts in, and it was very, very private. Nobody was ever, no one was ever, ever, ever going to see these words. I hid this well. So this was, yes, my first diary. 

AA: Wow. So how much of that made it into the published volume? Are there still things in that book that no one will ever see, or did it all go in?

CLP: Oh, of course. See, most of this is just silly stuff. This is stupid, silly stuff. But also, right off the bat, I am looking at some issues. I write here, in the first entry, “Dear Diary, since this is my last year of high school, quite unbelievable, I’m going to keep a record of it. Many things of importance have happened to me…” da-da-da, I talk about a few family things, and then, “Today I was elected editor-in-chief of The Wildcat.” That was the newspaper at BY High School. And all of this silly but important stuff that I wish that every young person could decide to keep track of what they’re thinking. Somewhere in my diaries, I wrote, “If I can write something down, I have more control of that thought.” Something like that. And I still feel that, as I consider something enough to find words for it instead of bursts of emotion. We all mostly live on our bursts of emotion and don’t always, or very often, stop to grab that experience and put some words to it to make it more intelligible and therefore more intelligent, and to help us. Because it really did. And I know I wrote that the more of my life I can get down on paper, the more I can understand. I really believe that is true. 

AA: I had a professor in my master’s program who said, “Sometimes students will come to me and say, ‘I know what I’m thinking, I just can’t write it into words, but I know what I’m thinking.’” And he would say, “If you can’t write it, then you don’t know what you’re thinking yet.” That just means it’s not clear enough and it is the process of writing it that you start to understand what you think. 

CLP: Absolutely. I have another diary that looks just like this, and then the diaries got more into larger notebooks. I grabbed one to show you here. 

AA: Oh my goodness. 

CLP: I have diaries this huge. This is one of my diaries. 

AA: I see there’s a 10 on the spine. Does that mean that’s volume 10 of many? 

CLP: Yeah, this is volume 10. 

AA: Amazing! Oh wow. 

CLP: This goes from August 18th, 1962 to April 22nd, 1963. Oh my gosh, this was just from ‘62 to ‘63. This is one year. 

AA: Wow. 

CLP: Whoa. Look at that. 

AA: Look at that. Oh my gosh. That would’ve been during–

CLP: In college, yeah. I got my bachelor’s in ‘62 and I got my master’s in ‘63. Then I taught for a year at Snow College. Oh my gosh, all of this. But I really felt like if I had fallen behind in my diary, it really was like I had fallen behind in washing my hair. I knew that something was off, something was wrong. 

AA: Oh, interesting. What a treasure for you to have throughout your life, like you said, to understand yourself. Did you go back and read your writing pretty often? Go back and read what you had written in a prior year, for example, or a prior decade? 

CLP: I must have gone back and read some of it, but I didn’t spend time rereading it. I spent the time writing it. 

AA: Yeah. Well, that’s really valuable. Why did you decide to publish your diaries eventually, and then what was it like to go back through them and reread all of it and decide what to include?

CLP: Well, as I was writing all these, I was absolutely certain nobody would ever, ever see them. But just about three years ago, I was asked to give a little talk at an event that was being held in Utah to commemorate the ERA, which, of course, did not pass. But they wanted to have people who had been sort of involved in the subject matter come and participate on the steps of the Capitol in Salt Lake. And they wanted me to come and talk about what it was like to be present for all of the stuff that was going on at the time. So I thought, “Oh, I can do that. I’ll just check my diaries.” So I pulled out my diaries and I found the places and I read them and I thought, “Wow, this is very interesting stuff.” So I created the five or 10 minutes worth to share at that major event, after which I began to think, you know, I’ve always thought that after I’m dead, some historian is going to find all of these diaries important, because everybody’s life is important. If they write it down, history will want to read it. And then I thought, “I don’t trust anybody to do that. I should do that. Maybe I should do that. Maybe I should.” And I remember when the idea first struck me, “Maybe I should do something about sharing these diaries.” That was the first thought that came into my mind around that. And I took the diaries down and began to read them and thought, “Oh wow.” And of course there’s a lot of silly stuff and a lot of very intimate, personal stuff that nobody would be interested in, but I continued to read and to think, “Huh, maybe these would be of interest.” 

And somehow or other, I happened to have a conversation with Barbara Jones Brown, who heads the publishing of Signature. And I can’t remember how this subject came up, but she said, “I want that. I want that. You do that, and I want it.” So I began to correspond with her, and that’s how eventually this first volume happened. As I hold this up, you will see, I have all of these little markings in of things that I was paying a special attention to. But it just says The Diary of Carol Lynn Pearson: Mormon Author, Feminist, and Activist, Volume 1, 1956 –  1990. 

AA: So is Volume 2 in the works? 

CLP: Oh yeah. That’s what I’m working on upstairs. 

AA: Wow, that’s wonderful. That’s exciting. Well, let’s dig into some of the themes that emerged in this volume as you were going through your diaries and deciding what to include. And since this is the Breaking Down Patriarchy podcast and you have so much rich content in the diaries about your thoughts on patriarchy, I’d love to start there. Maybe you could talk about some of the instances where you write about the pain of patriarchy.

CLP: Okay, so now this may surprise anybody, but this should not. I’m looking at page four, and it is just the beginning. Nobody can see this, but this is a picture of little Carol Lynn Wright. 

AA: Yes, of you

CLP: Back in 1957. And then as we get a little, just only slightly further, we jump into interesting things. This is really my first recorded entry that I talk about here. October 3rd, 1956, I had just become a senior in high school, and here’s what I wrote: “All day long, I was distraught about the idea of polygamy in heaven.” So I jumped right into the big issues. And I remember why I wrote that. Our wonderful seminary teacher, who I just loved, in introducing himself he told his life history, and he said he is with his second wife now and he knows that he was married to his first wife in the temple. And he’s so grateful to know that he will claim two women as his wives when he gets to the next life. And I remember something stabbed my heart at that moment, and he went on to bear his testimony about the divine order of a plural marriage, and he said something like, “I know you young women might find this strange, but I promise you–” I remember this so clearly. “I promise you,” he said, “As you become less selfish, more enlightened, you will see the beauty in this arrangement of plural marriage, and you will yearn to live it.” I have such a clear memory of sitting there, I can even see the tie that he was wearing. I remember walking home, and I was just desolate. “Is that what God has in store for me?” So my engagement, my wrestling with the Mormon idea that if I was sufficiently righteous, I was destined to live this supreme highest order in the heavens.

AA: It might surprise listeners who don’t have a background in Mormonism at all, it might surprise them to hear that you were surprised by it. I had a similar experience, Carol Lynn. I actually don’t remember how old I was when I learned that Brigham Young had had a lot of wives, or that I guess even my own ancestors, that was kind of ambient to me as I was growing up, but it always made me really uncomfortable. But I also remember certain events where I thought, “There’s a chance that that will happen for me in the afterlife,” and that was a very different thing. And in fact, I don’t even think I knew that Joseph Smith had had plural wives until I was a teenager. Nobody talked about it. It was like this, as you write in your book, it was this ghost that kind of haunted you, but at first I didn’t know it existed, really. So anyway, I just think people might be surprised. Mormon women, if you’re not a fundamentalist LDS woman who grows up around it or your own mother practices it or something, mainstream LDS people grow up with it being just as repugnant as non-LDS people. So it’s just as terrifying and devastating, as you’re saying, to learn about it. Like, “Oh no, that could be part of my life.” Anyway, that might be surprising. 

Is that what God has in store for me?

CLP: Yeah, and I don’t know if today’s young LDS women take all that as seriously as I did. 

AA: Yeah, I wonder. 

CLP: I don’t know, I think many of them just kind of shrug it off and say, “That’s ridiculous.” But there are many of us who did not, and I’m sure there are many who do not today. 

AA: Yeah, certainly. So how did that develop throughout your life? That’s an issue that did not go away for you. Did it come in waves throughout your life where it would just demand to make itself known? 

CLP: No, it was always there. See, I was totally devoted to the LDS Church. I believed everything that was taught to me by every seminary teacher, every Sunday school teacher, every general conference talk. I absorbed everything. I was number one, just believing and accepting. And there was a lot I knew that was good for me that was coming through all of this, but it was always this… On the one hand, there’s the beauty of having these wonderful women being my teachers in MIA, in Mutual, and all of the good men that I saw. So, all of that weighed against this horror that was always at the back of my mind. This is just a long journey, and the final upshot of this journey is that I had to either give up my own feelings, my own perspective, my own confidence in who I was and how I saw things, and how I felt things. I had to either give that up or give up this outrageous, horrendous promise that I would likely, if I were sufficiently righteous, I would likely be one of many wives in the eternities. And nobody ever countered that for me. And I think it’s still a hazy thing today in the Church. Nobody pushes that, but it’s there. It is there somewhere at the back, at the back of the chapel, this ghost that appears every now and then. And I believe that if young women, and young men as well, if they are questioning, if they are really trying to figure things out, they have to meet that ghost somewhere and say, “What do I do with you?”

AA: Yeah. And you gave people such an important tool in writing the book, which you eventually published, The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy I think helps people reckon with it. 

CLP: And of course, my ultimate answer to the whole thing is that this is a ghost that we can exterminate and get it out of our houses, out of our chapels, because that ghost never existed. This was something that, for whatever reason, Joseph Smith, followed by Brigham Young and the others, latched onto with such fervor that the followers had to believe. Because if you believed in the Church, you had to believe in eternal polygamy. So I became a split personality. A split LDS girl. There were things I chose to believe and there were things that I stood up in my own mind. And, very often, I never disrupted a church meeting, but in any private conversation, I would feel very free to say, “You know what? Polygamy is all a lie. It is all a lie. Throw it away.”

AA: Hmm. You even felt that way when you were younger, that you somehow had that confidence to just know it wasn’t true? 

CLP: Well, when I came to that place, no. I was a married woman. I was very adult. I was very experienced, and I had spent years being torn in two by loving the Church, hating one of the major, major offerings that they said was essential for my eternal exaltation and the highest degree. I was just finally strong enough to say, “Do you know what? That’s a mistake. That came into our Church as a mistake. It has grown as a mistake. It has violated the sanctity of many, many marriages.” Just the thought of it. So I felt very much on the right track when I published that book about my adventures with polygamy. 

AA: I want to come back to what you said, you said you became a split girl. And I thought, yes, any LDS girl, I think, who is a thinking person, encounters that. You’re going to have to split in some way in order to be able to, as you describe, keep the beauty, keep the joy and all of the edifying doctrines and the edifying social customs and your family in order to keep those. And yet as these other doctrines come in, like polygamy and other truly spiritually violent doctrines that are degrading to women, what do you do with it? I very much resonated with that description that I just became a split person. So let’s talk about some of the other issues that come up, and maybe I’ll describe an anecdote that you share in your journal, and you can talk about it a little bit. This was when you were on the East Coast visiting the people who had started The Woman’s Exponent, the Exponent II, and you were chatting with Richard and Claudia Bushman. For people who don’t know, Richard and Claudia Bushman are renowned LDS historians and scholars, and they were in Cambridge at the time with a lot of progressive LDS people. Claudia Bushman is one of the OG Mormon feminists, along with you, Carol Lynn, and many others. 

And you talk about how, and I’m going to paraphrase what you wrote, but you described how you felt that you were a confident and capable woman with good self-esteem and a good self-concept in spite of the doctrines about women and from the Church, not because of them, and that very much resonated with me, too. But interestingly, you said that Claudia Bushman kind of emphasized, “Well, just ignore the barriers that the Church puts up. Just live the life you want to live. Just do the work that you were supposed to do.” Kind of like don’t kick against the pricks, almost just stop fighting. Just live the life you want to live. And Richard Bushman, who is her husband, said, “I’m getting really tired of the woman question.” And I laughed out loud, too, when I read that. I’d love you to say how you responded when he said, “I’m getting really tired of–” and this is the way they referred to it in the late ‘60s or early ‘70s, “the woman question.” He said, “I’m getting really tired of the woman question.” And you said…

CLP: And I said, “I am too! I’m sick to death of it. I just want to solve the dang thing and put it to rest and move forward with life.” 

AA: Yes. 

CLP: But we still can’t do it, you know? 

AA: And why?

CLP: Well, unless you choose some significant independent thinking and just tune out a lot of the LDS– or Mormon, I still use the word Mormon. 

AA: Me too. 

CLP: A lot of the Mormon thinking and history. And even today, because we know that the anticipation is that in the eternities men will be able to have more than one wife, that has not been erased from the anticipation of Mormon women today, and men, unless they say, “Come on, there are so many things that are just junk, and that’s one of them. Throw it away.” 

AA: Mm-hmm. The thing that I struggle with, and I actually had a conversation that was very similar actually with Claudia Bushman, but decades later, after yours. And she said something very similar to me, which is like, “Don’t waste your time fighting, just live the life you want to live.” And I understand the wisdom of that, and you just said, too, really to have independent thinking, ignore those things so that you can live the life you want. But if you don’t spend time deconstructing the barriers for other people, then I think that’s just leaving the situation and some people don’t have the privilege or the possibility. 

CLP: Right. I knew that I had the capability of doing something on this subject that would bless the lives of a lot of Mormon women and men. I don’t think this whole idea is a great treat for men to have to think about either. But I knew that I was in a position with my writing abilities and with my personal experiences that I could make a major contribution to getting rid of the damn ghost of eternal polygamy. And it is damnable and it is damning. Because it damns, it thwarts the development of marriages and of the way that women feel about themselves. I have not talked to a lot of young people lately, or even older people about this subject lately. I think maybe there’s just been some, “Oh, nevermind. It’s just one of those stupid things.” But I think for a lot of people that still is somewhere in the back of their mind as a painful, painful possibility. 

AA: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the other patriarchal structures that you’ve been working to dismantle throughout your life. Not just for you, but for everyone. And one of them was something that you mentioned a few minutes ago, which was the Equal Rights Amendment. That was a huge, huge, seismic activity. I mean, it was a huge cultural phenomenon in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Can you describe what it was and what it felt like to you, and specifically what it felt like to you as a Mormon woman making that choice of where to stand on the ERA and what to do about it? 

CLP: Yeah. It was quite a divisive thing that it exploded right in our midst. I remember when I first heard that there was this thing called the Equal Rights Amendment that was being considered, and I studied a little bit about it and I didn’t find anything threatening there. I found what felt to me like progress, so I didn’t spend a lot of time on a huge bandwagon. But I was definitely known to be a supporter of it and I did attend certain things and I was interviewed on TV and on the radio a number of times. And a lot of people were scandalized that Carol Lynn Pearson has gone over the edge to be with the Satanic people who are trying to get this thing through that will dismantle the true patriarchal order of things. So that turned out to be a surprise to me, that it was such a large, explosive kind of thing. And that didn’t ever become as vital a thing in my mind as the whole polygamy thing had been. But it was a thing that was in the air nationally and in the Church as a work of Satan that was trying to dismantle the true place of men and women.

AA: Mm-hmm. And the Church leadership did speak very clearly against the ERA and were mobilizing members of the Church to vote against it. And then Sonia Johnson was excommunicated around this time. Do you want to talk about that? 

CLP: Right. She was, indeed. 

AA: So it was a big deal for you to kind of break ranks with the official party line of the Church. That doesn’t happen very often for the Church leadership to take such a decisive political stance. And you voted your conscience, you worked on the side of your conscience, and, again, at great risk. 

CLP: Yes, that is true. That’s one of our harsh episodes. And I did feel that the opposition to the ERA was not a strong intelligent movement. I felt that it was just a fearful response to women upsetting the true order of things, which is the primacy of the male. So I did what I could. I remember I took a moment, and the Utah State legislature was having hearings on all of this, and I attended one of the events and I chose to say a few words. I grabbed my words very carefully because I did not want to cause any explosion, but I just said something like, “We should not be afraid of thinking new thoughts and of considering that this whole thing is moving us in the direction of male and female equality, and don’t be afraid to examine it.” And I still felt that, in general, women had an energy and men had an energy that were somewhat different from one another, and that we had different things to contribute, but that they should be equally revered. We don’t do that, and we still don’t do that. But I do remember that Dallin Oaks’s mother, Stella Oaks, a wonderful woman, a strong feminist, she was much older than I when we were in Provo, but she and I became friends and she was very much in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

AA: She was? 

CLP: Until her son Dallin had a visit with her. 

AA: Oh boy. 

CLP: And after that, she said to me, “I just have to keep my mouth shut on this one.”

AA: Wow, that’s really interesting. Would she have described herself as a feminist?

CLP: Oh yes. 

CLP: Yeah, when I was a young woman, a young married woman in Provo, there was a club on campus, that met on campus, of these older women who were feminists. I don’t remember if they had a name for their group, but they were some of the bright, bright older women, and Stella Oaks was one of them. They were avid feminists. They didn’t mince using that word. But then as the Equal Rights Amendment sort of divided the country and divided the Church, their group was disbanded. I mean, they disbanded their own group. But I had a number of– here, let me just read one thing to you. What I’m going to tell here was, I’m sure, in my actual diary somewhere. But here’s what I wrote in my diary just earlier this month. October 5th, 2025, from my diary: “I have mentioned in this diary the rich experiences I had as a newly married woman in Provo, Utah, meeting and learning from the many prominent women who were proud feminists doing good work. Among them was Stella Harris Oaks, mother of Dallin H. Oaks, who now serves as First Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I was in my early thirties, and Stella was in her seventies and lived only a few blocks from me. Evidently I did not record in my diary our many great conversations, primary among them, the need to define God as both father and mother. But I remember them well. Stella told me that her father, Silas Albert Harris, wrote a song that was often sung at family reunions. She gave me a copy of the lyrics to this song and permission to share it. Here are the first and last verses, titled ‘Heavenly Mother’. ‘Dear Heavenly Mother, why, oh why, in all the ages, past and gone, oh why has thy fair face and perfect form had one lone reverent mention, one?’ And the last verse, ‘Wilt thou forgive the oversight that veiled that happy home from view? Through stainless life and guileless thought, my children shall come home to you.’ A few years ago I sent a copy of the page Stella gave me to her son Dallin, then serving in the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I told him of his mother giving the song lyrics to me and of our many conversations about the need to invite the mother back into the family. I asked him to consider that he has the opportunity now to correct ‘the oversight that veiled her fair face and perfect form’ from our view. I assumed that he received my letter. I did not receive a reply.” So, there were a lot of great, grand women of earlier Mormon and who were devoted to the subject of Heavenly Mother. 

AA: Wow. Well, that’s amazing that you have been working on this issue, and really trying to have conversations with the brethren for decades and decades. 

CLP: For decades. 

AA: Wow. Well, thank you. 

CLP: Of course.

AA: It’s such important work, but it is kind of like hitting your head against a brick wall. And you talk about that a lot in your diaries, about being in the good graces of the brethren at sometimes and then sometimes feeling like you were on the blacklist. And because patriarchy is so solidly structural, they don’t have to listen to women and they can listen to or discount women however they choose and whenever they want. 

CLP: You’re right. But see, I have never been disciplined by a bishop, a state president. I’ve been well protected by the men in my church life.

AA: Yeah, I’m glad. I’m grateful for that. I’m really grateful. Well, that brings us close to the end of our conversation, Carol Lynn, but I’m wondering if you could wrap up by sharing some advice for perhaps those who are still staying in the LDS Church, who are frustrated with polygamy, who are frustrated with patriarchy, who are frustrated with the policies toward LGBTQ folks. Drawing on your immense wisdom through a lifetime of activism, moving things forward, what advice would you give women in this present moment? 

CLP: Be brave. Listen to your best instincts. You don’t need to be, generally, I mean there is a time to be explosive, but you don’t have to choose to do that. You can be soft-spoken but powerful. You can choose to raise your hand in Sunday school class, and I would advise everybody just to be a little braver. And you don’t have to stand up and be rude, you can stand up and be kind and powerful and say, “It’s very important to me that I’m able to express the way I feel about how this subject of polygamy has affected my life. We all need to know that, and I’m here to tell you about the pain.” And make a statement around that, whatever you want, and then without being loud or abusing anyone in particular, bear your testimony as you feel in your heart, as I have done. Polygamy was never in the plan of God. It was an error from beginning to end, but the sad thing is that there has not been an end. 

AA: I think that’s really powerful advice and could be applied to a lot of different topics, right? Because sharing your own feelings, sharing your own pain in love, I think, can sometimes be the most effective tool in changing people’s hearts. Maybe standing up and saying– and I know you have so much experience with this, you talk about it in your diaries even with your children, right? Things that would be said in church, and they know that their dad is gay. So things that people would say about gay people and it would wound them because it’s their own father. It’s your own husband, or ex-husband. And speaking out in that way about queer issues, when LGBTQ policy comes up in church, maybe just sharing like, “Well, my brother’s gay. This is how it’s hitting me.” So that those voices are represented. Because I know a lot of times what would happen, at least for me in church meetings like that, is that the people it wounds just cry all the way home and they’re devastated. But it’s very, very hard to speak out when you feel like you’re the minority or you feel like you might be disciplined or you feel like you might be ostracized, which is why your courage is just so inspiring. Because it’s very, very hard. It’s very hard to speak out. But that’s what I hear you saying is necessary, maybe for our own integrity as well as to change the institution. 

CLP: Of course. And people should choose their words carefully. But nothing has ever moved forward in this world or in this Church by people keeping silent. That never works. It only works when we stand up and say, “There’s something that hurts me. There’s something that hurts my heart, hurts my mind and my heart. And I need for us to give it some consideration.”

AA: Amen. Well, Carol Lynn Pearson, again, what an honor, what a joy to talk with you today. I just so enjoyed and was so enriched and moved by reading your diaries. So for listeners, especially those who grew up in the LDS faith, but I think even people who didn’t would find it really fascinating. It’s called The Diaries of Carol Lynn Pearson – Mormon Author, Feminist, and Activist. Volume 1 is from 1956 to 1990, available through Signature Books. I think through online booksellers, too. Is that right, Carol Lynn? 

CLP: Yes, on my website. If you want an autographed copy, you can go to my website. 

AA: Oh, fabulous. 

CLP: And order it from me.

AA: Wonderful. Well, thank you again so much for joining us today.

CLP: Thank you very much for your interest and your enthusiasm, and may God and Goddess bless us all.

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