Latter-day Saint Life

Podcast: How Have the Attitudes of LDS Women Changed Since the Early Days of the Church?

35306.jpg

LDS Perspectives podcast hosted editors Jenny Reeder and Kate Holbrook, historians of 19th- and 20th-century women, to review their unprecedented project of compiling LDS women’s speeches within the LDS Church in the book At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women.

The book brings together perspectives and discourses of many LDS women from earlier years of the Church helping us see how some attitudes of women in the Church have changed and some have stayed the same over time.

The authors share they feel many of the things the women talked about back then relate very much to today’s issues.

A quote from one of the discourses stood out to Hales as one of the strong, timeless principles from the book.

“’I had a Methodist mom who taught me Mormon doctrine.’ Just that one sentence, though simple, speaks so much to the broader Christian context that so many of these women came from who gave the discourses in your book,” Laura Harris Hales says.

Holbrook responds, “That’s one of the things you really take away from the reading of this book is how to be a more effective disciple of Jesus Christ, and that’s a broader vision than just a ‘Mormon’ disciple of Christ.”

Lead photo from Getty Images

At the Pulpit contains fifty-four discourses given by Latter-day Saint women throughout the history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Written to the high scholarly standards of the Church Historian's Press, the book provides a resource for contemporary Latter-day Saints as they study, speak, teach, and lead. Available at Deseret Book stores and at deseretbook.com

35305.jpg

Tags
Share
Stay in the loop!
Enter your email to receive updates on our LDS Living content