As Sisters in Zion: Mormon Feminism and Sisterhood

Twenty years ago at BYU I took a class I'll never forget: English 352, Contemporary Literary Criticism. Each week a different group of students gave a presentation based on a major text in the field. When it was my group's turn we faced our audience from the front of the room, the four of us representing the four different strands of feminism described in Alison Jaggar's tome, Feminist Politics and Human Nature.

By way of introduction, we took turns summarizing our assigned persona's point of view. Buffy, the liberal feminist dressed in full 1970s regalia, pulled a bra from her pantsuit pocket and set it aflame with a cigarette lighter (which, thankfully, didn't trigger the sprinkler system). Tiffany and Cami, the Marxist and socialist feminists, decried the misogyny of capitalism and the alienation of the female proletariat. And as the radical feminist, I twanged a dissonant chord on my acoustic guitar and called for an end to patriarchal hegemony, announcing (among other things I'd best not repeat) that "the future is female."

Read more on patheos.com