Professions For Women

(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.) 

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.

           
There were two churches: the Congregational one in Lyme and a Baptist church in Lyme Center. The township was small and church attendance was geographical and traditional, depending on where one lived. Years before, the two community congregations had decided to pool their resources and hire one minister to care for both. Professional pastors were auditioned at both churches, giving the same sermons to each. According to our neighbor, an older female deacon in Lyme, the system worked great.

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.

I have not been set apart in a priesthood stewardship over you, so I address you today on the subject of Professions for Women as a fellow-sister who has a testimony of Christ. I know by experience that the teaching of God’s truth comes through the Spirit and I hope to be a conduit for Him; if you hear truth, please accept it on His Authority. I have prayed that my experiences and insights will help you to see truths you can apply for yourself on your personal journey to Christ.

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!

I like reading and have always loved reading aloud to children. When I married and began having my own children, I pored over the holdings at our local library in search of the best and most beautiful children’s books; I also sought information to help me become excellent and confident in my homemaking duties. I particularly checked for titles relating to relationships, health, cooking, child rearing, money-management, and home organization. We moved when I had four young children and I came across a perspective-shifting book in the money-management section of our new library. The authors of this book decried the tendency people have to identify themselves with their job titles or their activities (“I am a student,” or “He is a gymnast,” for example), encouraging us to recognize that we are People who have reasons for spending our time (and our “life energy”) in particular ways.  They encouraged the reader to do some soul searching, looking for clues to determine his personal life mission—the thing for and into which he felt called to voluntarily invest his time and energy.

For the next few days I pondered the authors’ question: If I were not required to work to support myself, how would I spend my time? For the previous eight years I had been home full time with my children, so I considered my husband’s exhausting work frustrations and tried to imagine what unpleasant job I would wish to leave, and—if you can believe it—I was stumped. Suddenly, with startling clarity, it dawned on me: I was already living the Volunteer’s Dream! I had a loving and self-sacrificing husband who had been trading a Herculean amount of talented life energy—each day for many years—to provide me with the freedom to do what we both felt was the most important work of all: we were raising a family up unto God, and (because of his ongoing sacrifice) I had all the time in every day to do it! I recalled (with renewed significance) how, one day when we first married, I had asked my husband if I could spend some money on a trifle and he had responded, “We are One: now we just have four hands and four pockets.” Through the years, this generous response had impelled me to treat Our Money with the respect I would give him: I observed more fully on this day that, like the income which his labors provided, the time I shared in voluntary service to our children and our neighbors was also his gift. I was liberated from the bondage of a paradigm and was thereafter more free to act in my profession; because I knew I was giving for both of us, I actually became both more generous and more deliberately particular in the ways I chose to spend our family’s precious, consecrated time.

Regardless how things are framed, never forget that freedom -- for the captives or the races or the sexes -- is the cause of Christ and of His people, and it comes through righteousness and morality. We live in a feminized world, where Christian attempts at elevating the stations of all women and men through personal dignity and mutual respect have been supplanted by an atheistic, antagonistic “Social Justice” environment that pits women against men. Unless you are at least my mother’s age, you probably haven’t seen the difference or the harm; yet even a shallow shovelful of the history of “Women’s Issues” reveals that attacking the confidence of women in their motherly roles in order to undermine the family is a very old Cause. In an environment where abusive women are hailed as strong and justified, it is easy to get caught up in seeking for answers and approval from the wrong sources, or to forget that there exists a True Source. When a person or society rejects Christ, sooner or later barbarous cruelty—particularly to women and children—inevitably follows. Our Modern world demonstrates that it is only in cultures retaining vestiges of Christianity that women have been accorded social license for beastly behavior: in non-Christian lands, unspeakable atrocities against women are both lawful and commonplace; with our current paradigm of Who/Whom abuses, it probably won’t be long before the emasculated “Frat Boys” (whose existences offer little motivation for graduation into Manhood) will tire of feminist put-downs and will slide from the Whom into the Who role godless women have carved out for them. Each woman’s choice to be pure in today’s atmosphere of deceit and degradation is pivotal, as we still maintain freedom to set society’s stage and direct its action—for now.

I know a man who owns a corporate building. He works with his associates on the upper floor and rents out the offices on ground level to other companies. One day there was an electrical problem in his office, so he trudged downstairs to check the power boxes in the closet of a back room on the lower level. The unfurnished offices below were for rent, but he has a key. When he let himself in, he heard scuffling sounds in the vacated rooms and went to investigate: in separate spaces, he discovered a man and a woman, hastily zipping their trousers. The unexpectedness and abrupt indignity of the situation startled him and it took a few moments for him to fully recognize what he had interrupted. He promptly addressed his business and returned to the upper landing to observe what would happen next.

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.

Have you had time to wonder what happened to idealistic Minister Marsha? Sadly, I don’t know where she is now. People loved her sermons and Sister Smith and I saw her service in action, especially as she tried to motivate the young people of Lyme. Marsha seemed nice and friendly to us, but when we baptized an inactive member of her congregation she became (in proper New Hampshire lingo) “wicked ugly.” A few months after we left, Sister Smith received a letter from the lady deacon and learned that Marsha was no longer with them: she had “moved in” with a fellow from Thetford, across the river. “We wish her well,” the neighbor remarked with characteristic briskness. I do, too—but I also know that many precious things were lost when Marsha abandoned her Profession.

Korihor, the talented Anti-Christ of Alma 30, led away “many women, and also men, to commit whoredoms—telling them that when a man was dead, that was the end thereof” (verse 18). Korihor liberally applied such mocking epithets as “foolish,”  “derangement,” and “frenzied,” to cast doubt on the doctrine of Christ, Christian lifestyles and traditions, the idea that any can know the future, and the concept of sin: this continues to be the treatment modern professors of Christ persistently receive from the world. Do we allow peer pressure to make us ashamed to believe and act in virtue, according to our professions? The building's owner observed that both the woman and the man were worried who would see them, but they did not look Up. Do we? We who profess to know or to want to know Christ; do we look to Him? Are we willing to heed the gentle whisperings from the Spirit or from the Divinity within us that leads us in the path of holiness and love? Killing that Spirit is not only madness, it is suicide: our eternal life is at stake, as is our precious time in mortality.

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.

The doctrine of modern Korihors is not really very hopeful: his groupies accept that there is nothing Ultimate and nobody knows anything in advance: life is a lonely concert with you gasping out an interminable jazz solo, made up as you go along—all for the remote chance of a little applause. That dogma, though popular, is false; it is decidedly good news that we can see ahead and don’t have to make our own way by trial and error. Though a woman often staggers to piece together the incomplete puzzle of her life without its box top, there is a template to follow: Christ is the prototype: God has given us His pattern and, piece by piece, He helps us discover, create, and put things together the Right Way, so the beauty of our lives can emerge Complete and Whole.

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.

How can women use charity to uniquely and gloriously stand firm in these final battles? What is our God-ordained profession in this war? Though you may perceive the vision differently, I will try to share a glimpse of what I see: our front is an impenetrable line of obedient women, courageously calling to our charges like so many steadfast hens; united and cloaked in a power and love that our enemy cannot conceive or comprehend, we peaceably encourage and support one another. In hostility’s darkness, all is dim: the swaddled robes that shield in light and warmth and safety are indistinct amidst the whirlwind confusion of the End. Betimes emerge warriors, visionary and valiant; their armor of faith has been carefully forged and fitted for the fray in the Place where the enemy’s spies of rebellion have been banished. And when dawns the awaited Morning, the glories of our many-splendored robes are revealed in all their hand-worked variety and majesty, welcoming into light and warmth and peace the warriors of other fronts. By extension, your mantle of charity is Home: these spaces of influence about us are the rooms we create to nourish and preserve life: they protect that for which the wounded and weary warriors willingly bleed out their days: this is where and how we nurture humanity’s hope in Hope.

I close with one plea of God’s latter-day prophets:

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.

When you have fully complemented your husband in home life and borne the children, growing up full of faith, integrity, responsibility, and goodness, then you have achieved your accomplishment supreme, without peer, and you will be the envy [of all] through time and eternity (Spencer W. Kimball, San Antonio Fireside, Dec. 3, 1977; quoted by Ezra Taft Benson, Fireside for Parents, 22 February 1987).


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.