Sonia Johnson

This book examines the life and work of LDS feminist Sonia Johnson, primarily between 1978, when she came to public notoriety for challenging the position the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints against the Equal Rights Amendment (a proposed constitutional amendment granting women legal equality) and 1982, when the ERA was defeated. Johnson aired in public the back-handed political strategies male church leaders used to encourage LDS women to actively oppose the ERA. Her critiques and excommunication raised difficult questions about the boundaries of male priesthood authority and the ethics of LDS political activism. Johnson accused church leaders of dismissing LDS women’s issues and concerns, of dictating LDS women’s political opinions, and of avoiding accountability for their politics by displacing it onto LDS women. In December 1979 she endured a painful and public excommunication from the church that was covered in press outlets nationwide and her ordeal became a flashpoint of a now decades-long confrontation between Mormonism and feminism. Johnson’s critiques of church patriarchy and excommunication played out on a national stage, demonstrating the expanses and the limits of church leaders’ ability to contain the threat LDS feminism posed to church patriarchal authority. Her ordeal shaped Mormon understandings of feminism and left a legacy of fear and pain around gender issues in the church that remains unresolved.