In a recent Ensign article, Director of LDS Charities Sharon Eubank shares the ways the Church has empowered her as a woman.
Many years ago, my friend and her husband were doing leadership training in rural Ghana, and a woman came up to her afterward and said very emotionally, “This is a woman’s church.” My friend asked the woman what she meant.
She said, in essence, “We have the glorious Relief Society, which teaches us about spiritual things and everyday things that bless our families and us. And at the same time your husband is in the next room teaching our husbands that they must treat their wives and children with kindness and gentleness. We have the temple, so my children who are dead will be mine forever. Everything I want I find in this church. This is a woman’s church.”
Is this a woman’s church? With a few colorful exceptions, my personal experience has been largely one of empowerment. So rather than answer the question for you, I will rely simply on what I have witnessed around the world. I’m not a scholar, an academic, or a Church spokesperson. But I want to go on record from my own experience that my life is rich and noble and infinitely better as a woman because of the gospel and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Far from being restrictive and conservative, the Church’s doctrine on women’s roles in the family, Church, community, nation, and temple—and how men and women relate and interact in concert—is the most moderate, powerful, enlightened, and energizing doctrine I have ever heard expressed. So I say to my sisters that what you are hungry for as a woman, as a Christian, as an intellectual, as an eternal being is here in the doctrine of Jesus Christ in the Church.