(This was written recently in response to an assignment to address the issues raised by Virginia Woolf in her lecture by the same name. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is hailed as one of the premiere modernists; her literary work was well-received in her own time and continues to be recognized as significant. In her private life, Woolf suffered from mental illness. She was married, but she openly carried on affairs with both men and women. Ultimately, she committed suicide.
In her talk to working women, Woolf congratulated them for fighting to win "a room of their own" in the office buildings previously controlled exclusively by men, but she also informed them that their rooms are bare and unfurnished. She recounted her own experience as a writer whose inheritance made her work "telling stories" to get "a motorcar" nonetheless a losing battle against the prejudices of men. She rejoiced at killing the spirit that urges women to be "pure" or be virtuous homemakers and said women could only define what it means to be a woman by seeking out every possible experience and using their collective experience to come up with relevant meaning.)
In her talk to working women, Woolf congratulated them for fighting to win "a room of their own" in the office buildings previously controlled exclusively by men, but she also informed them that their rooms are bare and unfurnished. She recounted her own experience as a writer whose inheritance made her work "telling stories" to get "a motorcar" nonetheless a losing battle against the prejudices of men. She rejoiced at killing the spirit that urges women to be "pure" or be virtuous homemakers and said women could only define what it means to be a woman by seeking out every possible experience and using their collective experience to come up with relevant meaning.)
Long ago, during the first spring of my mission in New Hampshire, Sister Smith and I were assigned to serve together in the township of Lyme. This picturesque community (along with its sister community, Lyme Center) is located directly above Hanover, the college town where Dartmouth stands. In those days, Lyme was a rural place for the natives.

The town’s newest minister, single and in her thirties, was the first woman pastor Lyme had ever boasted. The people were proud of their broad-mindedness and delighted to be Ecumenical. The old Congregationalists called their pastor by her first name and chuckled at the irony that a Baptist was
leading them. “Marsha” (never Reverend Minister Anyone of Anything we heard) had graduated from a Seminary and had been ordained “by the laying on of hands”—something sententiously communicated (and repeated) with High Significance.
As young Sisters in skirts, we heard this last pronouncement from a wizened, mostly-blind spinster as an incantation against our callow conceit: she heard nothing of the conversation but her own inside jokes, so we made our responses afterward, to one another. For several hours Sister Smith tactfully ruminated on Marsha’s remarkable credentials; she finally pointed out to me that we had both been to Seminary and had also been set apart to minister in a priesthood responsibility “by the laying on of hands”—and those who had given us our calls and set us apart to preach and teach were actually authorized by God to do so. “We have more authority than she does,” a breathless Sister Smith concluded.

Words mean things. Employment, for example, means more than having a place to go to trade your time for money: at its core, to employ means “to use or be used” by something or someone, and it particularly pertains to how we use our time, talents, and energy. Business is only an “I” and a “why” away from busyness: let us hope that the business of our lives is more than an attempt to keep ourselves busy—as if being most occupied, most occupied indeed equates with significant effort or leads to worthy accomplishment! A professor became a university figure delivering lectures because originally higher education was religious education—and a professor is a person who is not ashamed to publicly proclaim his testimony of Christ and is willing to preach the truth of Scripture and join with Christ’s organized Church. A profession is this open declaration; it is a public avowal of commitment to follow Christ through obedience, chastity, and consecration; it is also a personal mission wherein one engages her heart, mind, and body, rather than a merely mechanical occupation where we “use and be used.” Emphatically, professions are for women!




The man emerged first: hunching from the rooms, he tried to casually make an apprehensive dash for the front doors. He looked searchingly to left and right, then retreated to the passenger seat of a convenient car and partially concealed his down-turned face with a gesture. Soon the woman materialized, locking the door behind her. After a glance to either side, she strutted from the building and made her languorous entrance into the driver’s seat of her vehicle. The businessman, aware who had possession of each of the three keys to his building, watched from above as the car pulled away. Neither party looked up.
This story is no comedy; it is, unfortunately, a tragedy being recast and broadcast everywhere—as if the female real estate agent, the most unprofessional Professional imaginable (define it how you may) is somehow our Modern heroine! She takes mankind for rides in her motor car, employing herself in the money-grubbing business of selling, renting, and extending liberties in rooms of all descriptions: because she is driving—because she sets the terms—this is Freedom. The feminized world professes—it sings, whispers, shouts, and acts out in a million derivative episodes—that such perversion in Woman is good, right, and Holy. Sisters, this is a lie.


God truly perceives and discerns us—and others do, too, whether we notice or not. Your professions, made through covenants, are open invitations to others to mark and follow—and they do. Like it or not, what is in your heart will be known of your fruits, just as you will be known by them: are the good words you say hollow professions, or will the people in your life (particularly your children) be influenced for good by your righteous integrity? The work to become as Christ and to bring souls to Him for salvation is, after all, the business of Motherhood and the true profession of Woman.

Make no mistake, Sisters: we are in a war, waged on many fronts. Happily, the professors of Truth have been promised victory in the ultimate battle against wickedness and error in our day. If we have any secret weapon that will not fail, I envision it as charity, the pure love of Christ: “And above all things,” we are told in scripture, “clothe yourselves with the bond of charity, as with a mantle, which is the bond of perfectness and peace”(Doctrine and Covenants 88:125). A mantle is a cloak or robe, worn by paupers, prophets, priests, and queens; it is used for warmth and for decoration and for a token of authority; a clean mantle protects and magnifies the light in a lamp; it is also a military shield or device used to invisibly cloak and defend something precious. Charity—Christ’s pure and perfect and peaceable love—is our mantle.


I beg of you, you who could and
should be bearing and rearing a family: Wives, come home from the typewriter,
the laundry, the nursing, come home from the factory, the cafe. No career
approaches in importance that of wife, homemaker, mother--cooking meals,
washing dishes, making beds for one's precious husband and children. Come home,
wives, to your husbands. Make home a heaven for them. Come home, wives, to your
children, born and unborn. Wrap the motherly cloak about you and,
unembarrassed, help in a major role to create the bodies for the immortal souls
who anxiously await.

May you find lasting joy in your professions for God and in God’s Professions for Women.
Photos from sxc.hu and from LDS online photos and from the movie, The Errand Of Angels. Sxc photos used courtesy of Janet Burgess, Nick Benjaminsz, pear83, Griszka Niewiadomski, bvasquez, Victor Zuydweg, Lori Jesseman, Kristy McCaskill, Egalo Palo. The missionary photo included is not of Sister Smith and me, and the pictured church is not the actual building in Lyme or in Lyme Center.
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