Review
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Title: Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex and Marriage
Editor: Holly Welker
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Genre: Mormon women’s studies
Year Published: 2016
Number of Pages: 275 Glossary. Bibliography. Contributor biographies.
Binding: Quality Paperback
ISBN: 978-0-52-08178-1
Price: $19.95
Reviewed by Laura Compton for the Association for Mormon Letters
“I had read a handful of memoirs on the topic of Mormon marriage;…I began reading books about marriage in general….I knew of several anthologies of works by Mormon women on motherhood, and I could have read any number of Mormon Mommy blogs. But none of those provided the perspective I sought.”(4) So states Holly Welker in her introduction to “Baring Witness: 36 Mormon Women Talk Candidly about Love, Sex and Marriage.” Because she could not find a book that met her expectations, Welker began soliciting Mormon women for stories of their marriages. These candid, sometimes raw, often painful, but in many ways cathartic and educational stories are the fruit borne of nearly a decade of gathering, nurturing, trimming and harvesting.
Understanding the unique importance and perspective Mormons have on marriage is fundamental to understanding what makes “Baring Witness” an important part of Mormon women’s studies. Welker’s introduction highlights some of the issues Mormon women face: the eternal nature of marriage, the encouragement to live up to an ideal; echoes of polygamy that continue to sound wherever death or divorce come into play, race relations and intermarriage, and gender roles and the eternal nature of gender as described in LDS doctrine and theology.
Most of the essays in Welker’s collection are written by women whose marriages for one reason or another do not fit into the neat and tidy “Eternal Marriage” box crafted by their faith. And perhaps that’s one of the freeing messages of this collection: that there are lots of ways for marriages to succeed (or fail) and that fitting into the Ideal Nuclear Family is not so common as Mormons have been led to believe.
For readers struggling with mental health issues, abusive situations, divorce, death, re-marriage, late marriage or a general disconnect between their own situations and those heard each week at church, there may be comfort here. There may also be pain as authors candidly express their own suffering and sorrow. For some readers, it may be too hard to read details of sexual incompatibility or spousal abuse. It may even be triggering to walk with authors through shadows of depression, loss, body image pain or pornography use, especially in the first sections of the book.
But there is light within and surrounding the darkness and pain. There are stories of women who made their marriages work outside the bounds of Mormon ideals. There are stories of women who rose above failures and ended up with lasting joy. While the essays are grouped into five sections, it is easy to jump from one essay to another, if for no other reason than to assuage the pain from early essays with balms of healing success from later essays.
Despite the fact that Welker’s collection touches on a myriad of issues surrounding Mormon marriage, the essays are primarily written by college-educated, white, straight, North American women. Welker addresses this lack of diversity in her introduction and suggests topics for further research. Even though many of the authors have academic backgrounds, the essays are not wholly academic. Personal voice comes out in many of the essays, from Joanna Brooks’ joyful telling of her marriage to “a nice Jewish boy” to Anita Tanner’s poetic comparison of death and divorce to Nancy Ellsworth’s range of emotion moving between monogamy and polygamy.
But what ties these essays together? How did Welker answer her own question, “[G]iven that a particular emphasis on marriage is one of the things distinguishing The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints what distinguishes LDS marriages for the women in them?”(4) Rachel Whipple articulates what, most, if not all, of Welker’s essayists struggled with in some way:
“Where did I get the idea that this was what I needed to do? It’s obvious: I absorbed the indoctrination of my church and my college experience very well. Everything in the church, from talks in sacrament meeting to Relief Society lessons to the religion classes required to graduate from BYU, all stress how important it is to go to the temple; it’s really the only way to be a good Mormon. The only way an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl could go to the temple then was to get married. And there’s also the clear message that the only acceptable outlet for a healthy sex drive is marriage….Given that pressure, there wasn’t much chance that I would grow up before I got married. I wasn’t an adult entering a marriage; I was a child playing house, but playing for keeps: no crying, no take-backs.” (257)
This ideal of marriage was so ingrained into these women that they were not always well-prepared for the rigors of married life or for the challenges or questions raised when they discovered marriage is more than white dresses and flowers and companions who meet everything on the teenager’s ideal husband checklist. And many thought they were alone in their struggles.
“Baring Witness” is important as a piece of the story that is female Mormonism. There aren’t other accessible collections and resources which gather into one place women’s voices sharing many of the issues surrounding Mormon marriage today. Some analysis of these essays would be helpful: an introduction for each section, perhaps, or a final chapter pulling everything together. Certainly more breadth would be ideal—many LDS women’s experiences are unlike those of the North American academics included here. And while there is value for non-Mormons in reading this book, perhaps the greatest lesson is for Mormon wives and wives-to-be themselves: that there are many ways to have both success and failure in marriage and that there are lots of marriages which don’t live up to the Ideal Mormon Family. And that’s okay.