Sending a woman to keep women in their place

What Katie Britt and a Mormon Church social media firestorm have in common

Mar 29, 2024

When I saw footage from Katie Britt’s now-infamous SOTU address I gasped. Not because it was so strange, but because it was so familiar.

It was like a private scene straight out of my Mormon youth was being broadcast to the entire country.

All the familiar elements were there: the soft lighting, the boring-but-flawless White lady hairstyle. The demure makeup and jewelry that carefully signal conventional femininity. The pleasing, disarming smile. The odd, hyperfeminine speaking style used to address adults in the voice of a kindergarten teacher reading a children’s book (the now famous “fundie voice.”)

Most importantly, there was the heavy-handed emphasis on the maternal and domestic in a speech that is delivered to women, that defies logic by intoning: Yes, I’m a woman who only has the power to address you in this way because I have a role outside the home, and I gain outsized status from this role outside the home—but I’m here to tell you that the home is the only place women really belong.

Look, even the wardrobe is the same!

The leaders of the Mormon Church’s women’s organization known as “The Relief Society” from the church’s website.

I have struggled to explain how similar Katie Britt’s performance is to the performance of female “leaders” in the Mormon (LDS) church, and what could be learned from those similarities.

But then last week, the Mormon Church went ahead and illustrated it for me.

In case you missed it, last week the Mormon Church made national headlines when it found itself in the middle of a social media firestorm. The whole thing started when a female representative from the church leadership, J. Anette Dennis (pictured far left above) gave a speech in a recorded church broadcast on the role of women in the church.

Shortly afterwards, the church posted excerpts from the speech (or “talk” as Mormons call it) on the church’s official social media page. And that’s where it blew up.

“There is no other religious organization in the world, that I know of,” the post quoting Dennis said, “that has so broadly given power and authority to women.”

The full quote, posted to Instagram, went on to gush about how sure, other religions might give women the priesthood or make them pastors, but the LDS Church gives women access to god through special rituals and through proximity to the male priesthood, essentially. Women’s empowerment! Praise be!

Thousands of LDS women poured into the comments to disagree, collectively responding with something like: Eh, excuse me? Come again? WTF?

The terms “dismissive” and “gaslighting” peppered the comments that piled into the tens of thousands, as the post ripped opened a seam of discontent among many Mormon women who told of their struggles with feelings of disempowerment.

The church’s social media team apparently struggled to keep up with the onslaught, and thousands of comments disappeared or were deleted from the post. This created even more outcry from women who felt silenced. (The church’s social media team blamed the disappearing comments on a “platform glitch” —but Meta responded to a New York Times inquiry and could confirm no such technical issue.)

I have to pause here, and explain that women in the Mormon church are barred from positions of authority in the church. At least, they are barred in the way that we define “leadership” authority in any other organization or context.

From the workplace to the good old PTA, a leader is someone who has authority to make important decisions for the entire organization, or big parts of it.

But women in the Mormon church structure don’t have that authority. This is because the hierarchy of the church dictates that only men are eligible for the tier of top leadership roles, with women firmly under them in non-authoritative subordinate positions. (All of the decision-making roles in the church require the “priesthood” which is only granted to men, and boys starting at age twelve.)

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And the irony is that yes, this extends to Sister J. Dennis who delivered this speech. She belongs to a trio of women who have been appointed as a “presidency” over the women of the church, but this is a (deliberate?) misnomer as these women are subordinate to the men who run the church and appointed them.

Any significant decisions these women want to implement have to be approved by the men leaders above them. Or, as more often happens in these arrangements, it runs the other way around: the men above them make decisions and dictate them to the women below them who execute and deliver their messages.

This male-dominated hierarchy is church-wide, from the church headquarters to the individual local congregations. Thus, the role women can play within Mormonism is more like assistants in a business setting, or aides in politics, or adjutants in the military. In superhero epics I think the term for these roles is “underlings’ or “minions.” Anyway!

I don’t say this to diminish the massive amount of work—and essential work— that women do in the Mormon church. In fact, the Mormon women that I grew up with are some of my favorite people to this day. I just say it to point out that despite all that work, women don’t have any authority.

And more and more Mormon women have started to take notice of this, thus the firestorm. There are currently 16,000 comments on the church’s Instagram post, and counting.

What I found interesting about this message isn’t just the overwhelming response, it’s the fact that it was delivered by a woman—not one of the top-tier male leaders who do the majority of speaking for the church.

Isn’t it interesting that they sent a woman to “gaslight” women into believing that a structure of male domination benefits them?

When an organization brings out a woman to coerce women into their place, pay attention.

This often means that organization has no intention of changing anything to benefit women. Instead, it’s signaling that if women don’t fall into place, things could get worse for them.

In fact, tellingly, Sister J. Dennis’s message falls on the heels of a decision from church headquarters in December to take away a tiny gesture that some local congregations were undertaking to make local women leaders more visible, by allowing them to sit at the front of the meeting house or “on the stand” where male church leaders sit facing the congregation.

This was banned a few months ago when church headquarters caught wind of it, a move that reminds women what their place, literally, is in the back of the room.

And that brings us to Katie Britt.

Yes, Britt’s SOTU performance was tragi-comic, nonsensical at points, and has gifted us golden tradwife parody. But the gist of Britt’s message, which was aimed squarely at White women, also went something like this:

Ladies, yes we know that it feels like things are getting worse for you and your children in this country. We know that you are anxious and are having a hard time sleeping. We have sent this woman as a messenger to remind you that you have so little power that the best you can hope for is our benevolence and the “soft power” of a woman in her kitchen. That so-called power, is, as you can see from this flailing woman on your screen, is just helplessness with carefully applied lipstick.

We are not coming to you with solutions for how we could make things better for you and your children, but a warning that things could get worse.

Katie Britt was sent from the higher-ups of the male-dominated MAGA GOP that want us to believe that the problems that patriarchy and a male-dominated society have created are so scary that our only recourse is to kneel down and serve patriarchy.

This is a slick and cynical trick, as I wrote about a few weeks ago: patriarchy creates crises and then tries to sell itself as the solution to those crises.

It’s a sleight-of-hand that male-dominated organizations, from the Mormon church to political organizations (and not just the GOP), have leaned on for a long time.

Since I’ve been thinking about women who are sent to do the bidding of the patriarchy, I’ve also been thinking about Eliza R. Snow, who is the most famous female Mormon historical figure, and one of the only ones.

Snow was formidable—she was a polygamous wife to both Joseph Smith and later Brigham Young, and was the president of the women’s arm of the church. She was a prolific poet and writer and speaker. She was active in women’s suffrage, and was a contemporary to Susan B. Anthony. But while feminists like Anthony and Elizabeth Stanton defied the notion of male domination, Snow defended it.

Unlike suffragettes, Snow “acknowledged man’s superiority and never ceased to defend it doctrinally,” writes Mormon scholar Jill C. Mulvay in BYU Studies.

Here’s a fun fact! Orson Hyde, my great-great-great-great grandfather was a historic leader of the early Mormon Church, one of the original Twelve Apostles, and delivered a speech in 1857 that Snow was fond of referencing:

“Brethren and sisters,” Hyde said, “the order of heaven places man in the front rank; hence he is first to be addressed. Woman follows under the protection of his counsels, and the superior strength of his arm. Her desire should be unto her husband, and he should rule over her.”1

He was a real peach, right?

In her speeches to women, Eliza echoed this message: “Order is heaven’s first law, and it is utterly impossible for order to exist without . . . gradation.”2 That “gradation” was that men and women didn’t occupy the same position—men were superior and women were subordinate.

In some ways, Snow is the OG Katie Britt and Sister J. Dennis, and she’s an excellent example of how powerful the role of a woman sent to keep women in line can be.

Snow did help secure the vote for Mormon women in Utah—in fact they were some of the first to achieve suffrage in the U.S. But she didn’t do it to liberate women. She secured the votes of Mormon women so that the men leading the church could leverage women’s votes for their own purposes.

“We stand in a different position from the ladies of the world, we have made a covenant with god we understand his order and know that that order requires submission on the part of women,” Snow said in one of her addresses to the women of the church shortly after they received the vote. 3

Snow rallied Mormon women against anti-polygamy legislation. She leveraged the political power and suffrage of the women in her community to get them to vote in favor of keeping themselves under polygamy.4

If that’s not a chilling reminder of the coercive power of using women to get other women to vote against their own best interest, then I don’t know what is.

But we don’t live in an isolated frontier outpost like Snow and her Mormon women did. We have more options. We have more room to be brave.

Women are noticing and speaking out against what messages like Britt’s and Dennis’s—and the men behind them—are trying to do. And they’re asking themselves, why do I support men and male-dominated organizations that don’t see me as fully human?

Let’s not let them get away with it this time.

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