Reuters has recently reported that feminist Mormons are not voting for Mitt Romney.
First of all, FEMINIST MORMONS EXIST? I’m down with that! Secondly, you know the guy screwed up somewhere along the way if other members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints aren’t voting for one of their own.
Aimee Hickman, co-editor of Mormon feminist magazine Exponent II, took Romney to task for his comments during last Tuesday’s debate.
Romney’s infamous “binders full of women” comment, while worded ridiculously, was meant to suggest that he was comfortable having women in positions of power around him. However, Hickman states that his talk that followed of setting up a flexible work schedule for one of his senior aides just so she could go home and cook dinner for her family sounded like he was speaking in the paternalistic language of the Church, and that the comment put this “on full display.”
“The emphasis on [women] being seen as leaders or them being seen as breadwinners is still really missing from our rhetoric,” Hickman said.
Exponent II conducted a poll on their website before yesterday’s debate, and the poll showed that Democratic candidate Barack Obama is ahead of Romney among Mormon feminists, 72 votes to 30. “I pretty much know every Mormon feminist,” laughed Lisa Butterworth, who runs a blog called Feminist Mormon Housewives, “and I can’t think of any of them that are going to vote for Romney.”
While the social stigma of Mormonism in the U.S. is generally based on a sexist history of polygamy and socially conservative views, Mormon feminists look at an alternative history of the church that’s chock-full of powerful women, from the pioneers who journeyed to Utah to Mormon suffragists.
Image via Patheos.com.
