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198 - Evolution of Women Doing Healing Rituals | Church History Matters I Women & Priesthood Series
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- [00:00]
Lisa
Women have the right to administer, and the First Presidency calls it a privilege. As soon as we start defining a practice as a privilege, it can be revoked.
- [00:12]
Scott
Another factor to consider is the temple reforms that healing rituals in the temple were to be discontinued. This eliminates officially sanctioned site for women's administration to the sick.
- [00:24]
Lisa
There's this divergence between the traditional healing practices and modern medicine is an increasing
- [00:34]
Scott
preference that's being shown for priesthood administration.
- [00:37]
Casey
They're taking things that were not as well defined previously and defining them at the same time. These healing practices declined. There was sort of an enshrinement of motherhood.
- [00:47]
Lisa
There's no question that the net result is a loss of something for women.
- [00:54]
Casey
Maybe we overdid it. Hello, Lisa. Hello, Scott.
- [01:00]
Lisa
Hello, Casey. Hello, Scott.
- [01:03]
Scott
Hi, guys.
- [01:04]
Casey
Nice to be back with you again. And this is us continuing our series on women in the church. This is kind of a part two, though. I mean, it's our fifth episode in the series. But last time we were talking about women's spiritual gifts and healings, and there was just too much to talk about to fit into one episode. So we decided to have a cliffhanger. And now we're.
- [01:28]
Scott
Big cliffhanger.
- [01:29]
Casey
Big cliffhanger. Yeah. You probably spent the last week in fear, biting your fingernails, wondering what was going to happen. So maybe we need to do a previously on Church History matters sort of thing. So in our last episode, we talked about women's healing in practice and ritual during the 19th century. Now, there is some evidence that this started as early as the Kirtland period, but the date we focus in on specifically is April 28, 1842, where Joseph Smith spoke about this and specifically set apart two sisters from the Nauvoo Relief Society to minister healed, work with the sick and the afflicted.
- [02:15]
Scott
Yeah. And in that April 1842 meeting, I thought it was really significant. And, Lisa, I think you pointed this out to us last time, that Joseph actually spoke of two ways to understand why women could legitimately heal, which some people were questioning. He said women could heal, number one, by virtue of their faith. It's a spiritual gift Jesus said was available for anyone who had faith, men or women. And then he said, second, it would be by virtue of, these are his words, the authority conferred on them. And we spent a little bit of time talking about, what does that mean? What's the authority conferred on them? Eliza R. Snow would later in Salt Lake speculate that the. The authority conferred on them came from the endowment. But then other church leaders said, no, it's not Just endowed sisters who could do. It's people who have faith. So that's interesting, right? There's kind of the two ways to think about authority and faith. And to be very clear, Joseph said the sisters had both in that April 1842 discourse. And we also talked about. As general definitions of priesthood began to shift in the later part of the 19th century, there began to be some confusion as to whether or not women were healing by the authority of the priesthood or not. Because fascinating thing we talked about too, last time was that even in Nauvoo or even Kirtland, like, we don't have record of men invoking the priesthood as they healed. Seems like it was not tied together as tightly as it is today in terms of priesthood and healing. But that that convergence starts to happen a lot more at the end of the 19th century, that it's by virtue of the priesthood or it's the authority of the priesthood that they hold that they can heal. And so as that became a lot tighter understanding, confusion ensued. So church leaders, including female church leaders like Eliza R. Snow, went out of their way to explain that women could administer by faith in the name of Jesus Christ, but not by the authority of the priesthood. And it's also worth pointing out again that some women, like Zina Huntington Young, became prolific healers, carrying out thousands of rituals under a number of different circumstances. And it's still a little difficult to tell how widespread these rituals were and how they were related to the temple liturgy and priesthood. Exactly. But we do know that the temple was often looked at as the center of the healing. You would go to the temple to get healing. There were baptisms for healing. They even used the phrase washing and anointing in referring to healing blessings. Right. Especially preparing women who were about to have children, who were getting ready for childbirth. They would call that washing and anointing. So this is very different than how we do things today, which. Which leads us to the burning question we want to address, which is this. This practice of women's healing was clearly, officially authorized in the church by the highest authorities, from Joseph Smith all the way up to church presidents and United quorum of the 12 statements at the turn of the century. So the question is, why don't we do this in the church today? When did this change? How did the spiritual gifts and healing practices in the early restoration shift to their current status today? And why? And so we want to dig into all of that in this part two of Women and Healing.
- [05:26]
Lisa
It's a very, very interesting story. We're going to pick up here just after the turn to the 20th century. And we've talked in a previous episode, probably more than one, we've mentioned the priesthood reform movement that Joseph F. Smith initiated when he became president of the church, and the. The driving intention and goal behind that, as he would say it, was to place priesthood at the center, that priesthood is the governing, ruling authority in the church, and everything needs to come under that umbrella and be related back to the priesthood. And by that especially, we're referring to priesthood quorums, priesthood offices, priesthood lines of authority, and so forth. Now, at this same time, this is the Progressive era, and there have been entire books written about the transition in the church during this period where they embrace these modern methods and mindset about systematizing, defining, codifying, and so forth. And that's a major effort in this priesthood reform movement. When we talk about history, we need to think generationally. So what's happening after the turn of the 20th century is that virtually everybody from that founding generation is gone or quickly fading from the scene. So in the past, you learned how to administer to the sick because you were taught in person by someone else, whether that was a woman, whether that was a. A man. You learned from example, you learned from doing, you learned from this close association. And as the people who were part of this, you know, these founding generations who are seen as authoritative are passing on, and you combine that with the Progressive era and the desire for everything to be systematized and rationalized and so forth, what you get is a desire to write things down and to define and to codify. This is when we first get manuals and handbooks that describe the procedures for doing things. So the way we think about a priesthood blessing today, the oil anointing, sealing, placing the hands on the head to bless and so forth, that's going to come into being in the early 20th century as the standard form that's in the manuals, in the handbooks.
- [08:14]
Casey
You're also sparking a thought in me, which is, this is when the church starts urging people to not immigrate to the west and to stay in their own countries and build up the church where they're at. And that internationalization of the church might require more stuff to be written down too, because like you said, that proximate instruction, where you learned it from someone that was there, might be more difficult when you've got members in the Pacific and in Europe and in other countries where they're getting visited by church leaders, but not with the kind of frequency that we had when the church was just kind of within the inner mountain west and we weren't very far away. You'd have an apostle at your stake conference. Right now we've got stakes being set up around the world and that might require a little bit more of things to be written down so that we don't start drifting in different directions.
- [09:12]
Lisa
The other thing, I mean, we could, we could talk for a while about this process that you're mentioning, Casey, and how it really unfolded. But the other part to this is that this is also the era where it becomes the norm to send out young men on missions. And so there would be a felt need for these young inexperienced men to have a resource to, that they could use in, in doing their duties. So there's a lot, there's just a lot of factors that are going on and it's part of the zeitgeist more than like a top down, proactive, comprehensive effort to, you know, write everything down and figure everything out. That's what happens. But it takes place over the first couple decades of the, of the century and all these threads are part of that picture. Now increasingly, as we talked about last time, there just always are questions. Is this okay? By what authority? You know, that just, it just comes up over and over and over again. And one of the things that shifts really early is that women are instructed that they are not to use the term SEAL when they lay hands on to administer to someone. They confirm the anointing. But apparently seal is starting to take on this very specific priesthood meaning. And so that's one of the early shifts that's taking place.
- [10:47]
Scott
Would you say this priesthood reform movement is kind of the beginning of the end of women's participation in healing blessings, though? It's going to have a big long tail. But is this the beginning?
- [10:57]
Lisa
I would say it's an important factor. Maybe the defining. Maybe the important factor or the defining factor. But as we're going to talk about, as we go on, there are just a lot of factors and some of them are easier to identify and pin down than others. And I've got some good stories about that that we'll talk about here in a little bit. It's important to recognize though that women are laying on hands, they're administering to the sick. The practices are still going strong well into probably the 1920s and 30s. And Joseph F. Smith himself had participated in laying on hands with his wives, and he always endorsed that women could lay on hands to heal. Even as that starts to become qualified in some of the communications that are going out, underneath or over the signature of the First Presidency.
- [12:00]
Scott
I think it's important to note that even during and after the priesthood reform movement, church leaders continued to endorse women's healing practices. Like, for example, here's a First Presidency statement in 1908 that says this, quote, we do not wish it understood that sisters may not wash and anoint for the purpose mentioned in as much as they do it in a proper way. Right. This idea of as long as it's proper and you're doing it for the specific purpose, that's totally fine. And women church leaders continue to emphasize the validity and efficacy of this practice. For example, Martha Horn Tinge, who's the Young Women's General President, she gives this great talk in 1911, was later published in the Young Women's Journal. I didn't even know about this talk until you put it in her notes. Lisa and I love it. But she. Yeah, she. She said that some had come, quote, to the conclusion that women did not have any right to anoint with oil and administer to the sick. She's saying this publicly in her talk. Then she says, now I want to correct that impression, because that's wrong. The prophet Joseph was asked the same question in his time, and he said that women were pure in heart and that they had a right to anoint with holy oil. Referencing that. That famous 1842 talk. And then she said, a woman never administers the oil nor administers to the sick in the name of the priesthood, but she has the right to anoint with oil and lay on hands and ask the blessings of the Lord upon her sisters, upon her children, or any who ask in the name of Jesus Christ. And we could bring you many evidences, she says, that will testify to you that the Lord does hear and answer the prayer of his daughters. We who are here on this stand and many others in this congregation I know, can testify that their own children have been healed under their hands. And they have also been led of the Lord to give promises and blessings unto their sisters, which have been realized and verified word for word. Close quote. That's so good.
- [14:03]
Lisa
And remember last time, Scott, we were talking about Emmaline Wells's diary, and I mentioned an entry where she went and administered with another group of women, and they administered to Maddie Tingey's sister. And Maddie was part of that group, so she's very much there all along
- [14:25]
Scott
on the front lines. The young women's president of the church. That's so cool.
- [14:29]
Lisa
Young ladies, at the time.
- [14:31]
Scott
Oops, sorry. Young ladies. President of the Church. I apologize. But what's interesting, though, is at the same time, there is an increasing preference that's being shown for what they're calling priesthood administration. For example, 1914 First Presidency sent out a circular that said that women had the privilege of laying on hands and confirming an anointing in the spirit of invocation, they said. But they continue, it should always be remembered that the command of the Lord is to call in the elders to administer to the sick. And when they can be called in, they should be asked to anoint the sick or seal the anointing. Still appropriate for women, but preference for the James 5, which is then alluded to again in D and C. 42. Call the elders. Call the elders. And during the same period, the First Presidency also taught that washing and anointing for childbirth was not an ordinance that required any authority to perform. They also taught that it was not consistent for women to anoint and for then men to seal the anointing, referring to a persistent form of the collaborative male female healing administrations that had existed since Nauvoo. So they start to discourage that practice. However, President Joseph F. Smith did teach that it was, quote, no uncommon thing, he called it for a husband and wife to administer to their children together, and that a woman could assist her husband in blessing their children by laying on their hands and adding her faith to his priesthood authority. So that's all happening at the same time.
- [16:11]
Lisa
Now, notice the difference in wording between that First Presidency circular and what Martha Tingey says. She says women have the right to administer and the First Presidency calls it a privilege. Now, as soon as we start defining a practice as a privilege, it can be revoked. And so that wording is significant in marking the shift that is happening at that time.
- [16:46]
Scott
Why do you think that shift is happening?
- [16:48]
Lisa
I think it has to do with what we've been talking about, which is the increasing emphasis on priesthood and preference for priesthood and the ability for those priesthood practices to be written down and codified in a way that did not happen with women's healing practices.
- [17:08]
Casey
I keep going back to this idea of generational shift, too. And Joseph F. Smith is sort of the last of the first generation, even though he's really young when Joseph Smith is martyred.
- [17:21]
Scott
And.
- [17:22]
Casey
But Heber J. Grant is clearly second generation, and he's going to be the person that shepherds through a lot of these changes. For instance, Heber J. Grant made a few public statements where he referred to that 1914 statement giving preference to elders over sisters and administering to the sick and in private Correspondence, too, he discouraged. This is a quote, calling in sisters to administer to the sick, as the Scriptures tell us, to call in the elders. So he's making reference to that chapter in the Epistle of James in the New Testament probably that says if someone's sick, call the elders. Specifically. Then Charles Penrose, who's in the First Presidency, he makes some statements against women's presumption of authority to administer to the sick. And shortly after, the Relief Society presidency began instructing that women should administer only to pregnant women and in presumably rare cases where priesthood holders could not be called in. So there is kind of a gradual limiting that seems to be happening here.
- [18:26]
Scott
Do we know the year on those Charles Penrose statements? What time is this?
- [18:31]
Lisa
It's 1921, 22, somewhere in there. And they're pretty harsh statements. These are not. He's not trying to massage it at all. He's very discouraging. And that seems to. It seems to be a real landmark in terms of shifting what the Relief Society leaders start counseling the sisters to do.
- [18:57]
Casey
And we should put this in the wider context, too, of saying it seems like there was a number of changes that happened when Heber J. Grant becomes president of the church. The Word of Wisdom, for instance, has increased in importance and, you know, they're systematizing. But also this generational shift might indicate that they're taking things that were not as well defined previously and defining them. So something like the Word of Wisdom that was a little loosey goosey now becomes part of the temple recommend and authority of women. And their healing practices might have been something that they had been thinking about for a while, too. Now, we should note that washing and anointing for childbirth holds on for some time, but by the 1930s and the 1940s, it was starting to kind of fade away as well. And one point we could mark is in 1946, Joseph Fielding Smith, this is the son of Joseph F. Smith, was asked to write a definitive response to questions about female ritual healing. And he wrote, the authorities of the church have ruled that it is permissible under certain conditions and with the approval of the priesthood for sisters to wash and anoint a other sisters. Yet they feel that it is far better for us to follow the plan the Lord has given us and send for the elders of the church to come and administer to the sick and the afflicted. And so that's 1946. But we should note that as late as the 1960s, in his personal correspondence, Joseph Fielding Smith doesn't expressly forbid this. He doesn't absolutely get rid of it. And that might be because he was also really familiar with the early teachings of Joseph Smith, with the practice. Joseph Fielding Smith's acting as church historian during this time, and he compiles the teachings of the prophet Joseph Smith, which becomes the standard book that you go to when you want to read Joseph Smith's teachings that aren't in the Doctrine and Covenants. And so that might have been another thing that kind of kept this around, even if it seems like the generational shift is towards having men carry out these responsibilities.
- [21:04]
Scott
Okay, so I have a question, Lisa. So how did the women respond to this kind of slow tightening of the restriction against their participation in healing blessings when they had been able to in just a couple decades earlier?
- [21:20]
Lisa
So I will give you kind of a short answer right now, and then as we go along, we're going to explore some of the bigger context for answering this question. But the short answer is it's really hard to say. We don't have a lot of documentation of women resisting or reacting or agreeing or whatever. I mean, we just don't have a lot of records about this as early as 1913. We do have reference, I think it's in the Relief Society General Board minutes to Emmaline Wells, who's the Relief Society General president at the time, expressing concern that some men are not approving of women's healing activities, which, of course, she's very committed to and a prolific practitioner of. And she's sensing that the changing winds and expresses some concern there. I said a minute ago that because these were written down in priesthood manuals, that that helped push it towards a priesthood practice. It also appears that, at least in some places, as there was a sense that this was under threat or was fading, some relief Societies wrote down texts and procedures for washing and anointing before confinement, for example, and we have just a few examples of that. And so that would indicate that there was a sense of, oh, we need to hold onto this. We've got to recorded. Again, we're going from, you know, personal instruction to relying on written texts. But the problem is that just because your ward Relief Society presidency writes this down, that doesn't give it the same authoritative status as a priesthood manual or handbook. But the fact that they felt that they needed to write it down shows that there were at least some women who were still really cherishing this practice or wanting to hold on to it. Again, the fact that they felt the need to write it down can also be seen as evidence that the practices are fading. And they're recognizing probably along generational lines. Maybe the younger women are just really not participating in this as much. And so that example kind of cuts both ways. There are people, there are women who cherish and are holding onto the practice, but they're also recognizing that perhaps it's fading. So we have to kind of tease it out from the sources to get a sense of what's happening.
- [23:55]
Casey
And I have one question, and if you don't know the answer, it's okay, but how widespread were these healing practices among the women of the church? You know, we have prominent women like Zina Young and Emmeline Wells, who were in leadership positions, places of prominence, but in the average ward or branch, did this happen very commonly, or do we know?
- [24:20]
Lisa
Yes, yes, it was very common. It was ubiquitous. I would say if you spend time in the 19th century Relief society minute books, which we have scores of those in the church history library, you go in there and read the entries, and it's just there. It's everywhere. In fact, maybe in the show notes, you're going to point everybody to Jonathan Stapley and Chris Wright's landmark articles on the history of healing. And in the one on female ritual healing, they document a Sister Perry in Logan in 1920, I want to say 26, 24, 26, somewhere like that, who was washed and anointed before she gives birth to a son named Lee Tom Perry, Elder Perry, our previous apostle. So we do have a documented instance that his mother was washed and anointed before he was born, clear into the 1920s. So, yeah, it was very common. It was very common. And again, like, we have to tease it out because the fact that the questions keep arising means that maybe there were even some women who weren't sure and maybe weren't entirely comfortable with it. And it's just. It's just not something that. That got recorded and is really hard to tease out. But it's certainly not just something that the Zinas and Elizas are doing.
- [25:45]
Casey
And it's hard to figure out how this gets passed on, too, because when you mentioned El Tom Perry, my wife's grandmother was classmates with him. She grew up in Logan along the same time, and she was a prominent female speaker in the church and author. Her name was Shirley Seely.
- [26:02]
Lisa
Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember Shirley Seeley.
- [26:05]
Casey
I talked to her. I had a ton of conversations. She gave me my copy of the Journal of Discourses. She was really sharp when it came to the gospel, but this never came up. And as a woman born in the 1920s, maybe she had already passed the grand era where this was going on, and it was never on her radar. It's harder for me to go back further than that because when I was
- [26:29]
Lisa
born in a period of transition, it's to be expected that there's some unevenness and that some people will still be all in. Some people may never hear about it. My grandmother was born in 1911, and she had her children in the 1930s. And I never asked her point blank, but she did a lot of writing about her life, and there is no mention whatsoever of any of these female healing practices. She did, interestingly, keep a bottle of consecrated oil in her cabinet, and she would rub it on sores like a salve all her life. I mean, she died in 2002, so there was a little bit of that lingering folk practice that she picked up as a young, you know, growing up. I suspect her mother, who was born in 1872. I suspect that she was washed and anointed for childbirth in the 1890s. I haven't been able to document that yet. So there's another example of generational fading and transition.
- [27:34]
Casey
And I'm citing my wife's family because I come from a long line of inactivity in the church. I don't know if my grandma, who was born in 1910, would have been aware of any of this because she was sort of running. She was the bishop's rebellious daughter. She ended in a good place. But when she was younger, she used to tell me stories about how wild she was. I don't know if this ever came,
- [27:56]
Lisa
and it could be as well that it did hold on longer in the elites than in the everyday people. I don't know that that's the case. It could easily be the opposite. So I don't know. But center and periphery could have something to do with it as well. I have a friend who's done a lot of work on her family up in Alberta, Canada, and I think she's documented healing practices well into the 20th century up there. So we're just going to be in a period of transition, and we're going to expect a lot of unevenness.
- [28:32]
Scott
Yeah. Are there church elites? I didn't know there were elites.
- [28:35]
Casey
When you said church elites, I thought of a different practice, which is. We've talked about this on the podcast before, but they used to have prayer circles like we have in temples right now in people's homes, and those were sometimes arranged around family lines. Like, I was researching a guy who was a prominent early seminary teacher and a Big chunk of his oral history was restricted because he was part of the John Taylor prayer circle. And that was going on into the 1920s just in private homes. But I think that's an example, too. Like in John Taylor's family, this particular practice of doing a prayer circle was really important, and it hung on in his family probably longer than it may have in other parts of the church because of the spree de corps that comes from being the descendant of a church president.
- [29:27]
Scott
Yeah. Interesting.
- [29:28]
Lisa
One final context that I'll just mention, and Jonathan and Chris talk about this in their article, and I don't claim to be an expert on it, but there was, like, in the early 20th century, you have the rise of these charismatic evangelical Christian movements, Pentecostalism and so forth, is really taking off. And part of that, there was a charismatic healing movement in the early 20th century. And that, of course, it got a lot of attention, you know, in the newspapers and so forth. And so this raises questions, well, how are they healing people? What authority do they have? What, you know, is this for real? Or whatever? And without being able to get into all the granular details of that, I'll just point out that one of the answers we had was, well, we have priesthood. We have divine authority restored from heaven. And so that serves to further emphasize priesthood as the channel for the exercise of healing and basically other charismatic gifts as well.
- [30:37]
Scott
That's happening simultaneous with the priesthood reform movement.
- [30:41]
Lisa
It is, yep.
- [30:43]
Scott
Layer upon layer here.
- [30:45]
Lisa
Lots of threads. Lots of threads.
- [30:48]
Scott
Let me throw one more in. You know, another factor to consider in the mix is the temple reforms that are going to happen under Heber J. Grant and Elder George F. Richards in the early 1920s. So one important aspect of these reforms was a redefinition of what belonged in the temple and what did not. For example, up to this time, temples had designated certain days of the week to conduct baptisms for health and administration to the sick, with the latter being performed by both male and female temple workers, not the baptisms for help, but the administrations to the sick, men and women. So now leaders in the 1920s instructed that healing rituals in the temple were to be discontinued. So this eliminates one really visible, officially sanctioned site for women's administration to the sick. At the same time that the priesthood reform movement was elevating Melchizedek priesthood administration as the preferred form. So that's got to play into the, you know, the momentum of preferential male healing. Right. Priesthood healing. It also made certain temple ordinances, like the initiatory, the only remaining setting in which women's administration by the laying on of hands was still unequivocally sanctioned.
- [32:14]
Lisa
And that has remained the case ever since. Right. For over a hundred years.
- [32:17]
Scott
It's been the case ever since.
- [32:19]
Lisa
And I think we talked about. I think we may have alluded before, but Elder Oaks, then, Elder oaks back in 1992, really stresses this in his talk about the Relief Society and the church. He really. There's. There's a couple of lines in there where he's really emphasizing that women are authorized to lay on hands in the temple. And that's the. That's the setting where that should happen. Now, this goes back to. We Talked about Joseph Smith's 18 or April 28, 1842 sermon the other day, where he unequivocally endorses female healing. But he says these things are not in their proper order and can't be until the temple is completed. And we talked about how that's kind of ambiguous. Was that the only place that he envisioned that women would be authorized to lay on hands and heal the sick, or were they envisioning, as Eliza would later teach, that that the endowment gave some kind of authority that would enable women to lay on hands anywhere in any setting? That was just never really clear. And I think that in this era, they decided that this was the authoritative interpretation, that women laying on hands happened in the temple and not elsewhere.
- [33:38]
Scott
But church practice up to that point had said, let's just do it both ways. They explicitly have set apart times in the temple for temple healing rituals. And also it's appropriate outside the temple. But now we've got some pretty big clarity. Not even in the temple that's not appropriate for healing blessings, only the ordinance of washing and anointing, the initiatory, as we call it today. Right.
- [34:05]
Casey
And I wonder now I'm picking up another thread, mentally, which is the availability of temples. Right. Which is there weren't a lot of temples in the 19th century. You know, we get the four pioneer temples up and running by the end of the 19th century. But I remember reading the Reed Smoot hearings, and this guy's an apostle. And they were talking about the endowment specifically, and he kind of indicated that he'd only been to the temple once in his life. And he's an apostle, and he's an apostle. But now by the 20th century, we're sort of shifting so that the temple has a more central role because there's more temples and they're nearby and they're more available. And that might have been a natural Shift for them to say, well, a lot of these rituals should just move within the temple and take place there.
- [34:54]
Lisa
Yeah. Let me just add something to that, Casey. This is an important point. It's not just the increase in number of temples, but it's the proliferation of temple work for the dead that really takes off after 1894 and Wilford Woodruff's revelation that we seal ourselves to our family line. We don't have to be sealed to a church leader, a priesthood, someone that we know is faithful or whatever. We just seal our families and trust that the Lord will work that out. So in the 19th century and probably early 20th century, a lot of people only ever went to the temple once in their lives. And if they went more often, we can document how much of this healing practice was going on in the temple. And so you might go and have your own endowment and be sealed, maybe do a baptism for a dead ancestor or something. But the most frequent temple ordinances that people are engaging in, especially women, are the healings. And so then when we have this shift after President Woodruff's revelation in. In 1894, what that does is that there is just an explosion of temple work in the early 20th century. By the 1910s, they are like, the temples are being thronged by people, and they're trying to figure out, like, how do we accommodate all these people that want to do this temple work. Our friend Susie Young Gates, who we talked about early on, was a big driver of this movement and these developments in the church. And so those temple reforms that we just talked about, a lot of that was done specifically to enable more people to get through the core temple ordinances, because people are doing them now for their ancestors and are coming more often and taking up a day or more a week to do baptisms for health and healing and so forth in the temple is taking away from the ability of the temple to accommodate all of the people who are wanting to come and do temple ordinances. And so it's not just a micro focus on women shouldn't be healing or laying on hands except in the temple. It's a broader perspective on what really belongs in the temple. And healing, Laying on hands to administer to the sick can be done anywhere. And they also kind of had a feeling of, like, we actually shouldn't be privileging administration in the temple. Like, there's something magic about it, that there's not necessarily something more efficacious about being administered to in the temple than there is calling in the elders and having them anoint and lay on. On hands. So it's such an interesting. Such an interesting thing. And it's an example, I think, that we're going to see repeated in some other contexts where there's no question that the net result is a loss of something for women. That had long been an established practice.
- [38:23]
Casey
Yeah.
- [38:24]
Lisa
And that it was a loss of privileges, as they were now talking about. There's no question. Does that mean that it was done with the intention of, oh, we got to. We got to rein in the women. The women are out of control. We got to get the women under control. I don't think anybody thought that that wasn't the driving force, but it was the consequence, whether intended or not.
- [38:48]
Casey
So in your mind, this is less of an intentional shift and more of
- [38:52]
Scott
a. I don't know about accommodations.
- [38:56]
Casey
Yeah. That it just sort of happens naturally. And it doesn't seem like anybody sat down and made a decision to curtail.
- [39:03]
Lisa
It's hard to. It's hard to say. It's really organic, for sure. And it's shaped by all these larger practices and changes that are taking place now. When you read something like Penrose's talk in 21 or whenever that was, it's pretty harsh. And that makes you go, well, there must have been at least some men who were wanting to put the thumb down and, you know, pull back on what they thought women were doing that wasn't appropriate. So I wouldn't say there was no intention, but I would not say it was the driving intention behind these shifts. And we'll see this again when we talk about Relief Society and correlation and some of the other developments in the church.
- [39:49]
Casey
We should note that during the same period, and maybe driven by some of the same changes and sensibilities, just the diversity of healing practices in general in the church was greatly curtailed. We get to the now standard form of prayer priesthood, anointing the head and sealing the anointing and pronouncing a blessing on the sick that we're all so used to today. And a lot of these other diverse forms. Like I was struck in our last episode when we talked about how they would bless and anoint a specific part of a person's body. Like William McClellan has his ankle blessed and anointed. And that seems to be tied to the idea that women have their womb blessed and anointed prior to childbirth. But this also is where we see a curtailing of a lot of the more charismatic pract, like speaking in tongues or. One thing I was thinking about when you brought up, President Woodruff was being baptized, like re baptism as a sign that you were starting a new phase in your life or that you wanted to start over anything. President Woodruff kind of puts the kibosh on that as well. And that's another one of those more eccentric practices that starts to go away during this era as well. So that might be part of it too, is it's part of a generational shift, a natural shift, an organic shift shift that happens.
- [41:10]
Lisa
I think that's absolutely right. And we, it seems eccentric to us. Like we said before, like, if we went back and kind of could see these things happening, we might be kind of like, oh, okay. You know, it might seem a little strange to us. But to them, that was the world they were born into and the practices that they grew up with. And so, yeah, yeah. I think one of the most important factors and also one of the very most difficult to document is changing sensibilities and changing practices with the advent of modern medicine and just what we would call modernity and the modern mind frame. And how are we thinking about the body? How are we thinking about medical care? You know, as you mentioned, Casey, if we're going to administer to specific body parts, then that would be a strong argument for why women needed to do this for other women to preserve privacy and delicacy and appropriateness and so forth. So that's part of it.
- [42:20]
Casey
When I read about Zina Young washing and anointing a woman's womb, I remember thinking, I don't think any 19th century male is going to feel comfortable doing that unless they're a doctor. But the average priesthood holder, I don't think they'd feel okay about that.
- [42:36]
Lisa
That was actually one of the arguments if we won't go down this rabbit hole. But that was actually one of the arguments for women becoming doctors and going to medical school, both in the Latter Day Saint community and outside of it, that, you know, again, it's an extension of women's natural in quotation marks, healing practices. And that's going to involve women doing things that are, you know, maybe that are not seen in the Victorian area as appropriate for men. The competing thread there is professionalization, basically the takeover of the medical profession and especially care of women by men, by male physicians and having the, you know, professional credentials and the associations and so forth. And so it's a really, if you think about it in generational terms, it's a really profound shift in sensibilities in mind frame and expectations that you're going to have a baby at home. Surrounded by other women, delivered by a midwife, versus you're going to go to a hospital and a male doctor is going to deliver the baby, and that male doctor is going to be in total control of that birthing room and tell you what to do and what not to do. So think about how that affects a sense of who touches your body and under what circumstances, and how medical care is administered and so forth. And there's then this divergence as modern medicine comes into being. There's this divergence between the traditional healing practices and modern medicine. And modern is a very powerful word in the early 20th century. Modern, progressive, like, this is the. This is the shift that's taking place. And I've said this before, you know, I was talking to my nieces about this history one time, and this practice of washing and anointing for childbirth is absolutely beautiful. And unequivocally, I. I don't in any way want to disparage or color the memory and the feelings about it. But if you think about it today in our world, so you are eight months pregnant, and Sister Baker and Sister Shelley, who are maybe older sisters in the ward, are going to come over and they're going to touch you where. And they're going to do what, you know, to my nieces and to a lot of younger women that, you know, when you put it that way, you can kind of see how the sensibilities have changed. And now that may not have been the case for everyone, but I think this is why it's so hard to document, because it's about changing perceptions of things. So one story I can tell you, that really was a. I think, is a really important data point in being able to capture this, which, again, is really hard to capture. When we were. When I was doing the research for the History of the Young Women Carry on, our book that we published last year, that's a shameless plug for everybody to go get the book. But when we were doing that research, I read an oral history by a woman named Evangeline Beasley. And Sister Beasley was born, I think, in the 1890s. And as a fairly young woman, she is put on the board of the Ylmia. So she's maybe 30 years old in the 1920s, and then she's telling this oral history is a few decades later. But she's remembering how the Ylmia board would get together and they would have these social gatherings with all the members of the board, and then some of the older former members of the board would come to enjoy this party or this, you know, gathering or whatever. And she tells about how one time they're at someone's house, they're having one of these gatherings. And Sister Lily Freeze comes. Now, Sister Lily Freeze was a member of both the YLMIA and the primary board for decades and was a prolific practitioner of charismatic gifts. But by the 1920s, she's an elderly lady and she comes to this party and as Sister Beasley tells the story, they're sitting around and suddenly Sister Freeze breaks out speaking in tongues. And then Sister Dougal, who was also one of the older former members of the board, interprets just like they used to do, right? But for Sister Beasley, this 30 year old modern woman, she says, you know, it was kind of thrilling, but I also thought, we don't need this. She expressed real discomfort with it, that it was strange, that it was out of the ordinary. And so what you see there is how these sensibilities are changing about what seems normal, what seems appropriate, how we express and practice our spirituality and so forth. All of that is shifting. And I think the same kind of shift is taking place around women's healing practices. So there's just a few hints. If you look at Dave Hall's biography of Amy Brown Lyman, who was a great Progressive Era Relief Society leader, she became general president during the 1940s, there's some indication, and I think this comes from one of her counselors, it's in a footnote, so it's just kind of in passing, but I think it's important, where she says, we thought that was old fashioned, referring to women laying on hands and healing practices. So again, it's really hard to document, but we have a few data points. And so in this case, what we're saying is that it's possible, at least to some degree, that women were letting go of these practices as much as they were being taken away. So it's this really complicated picture of shifting norms, shifting sensibilities, shifting practices and so forth. And there's absolutely that thread of being taken away, but there's also a thread of letting go. And that may help explain why we don't have as much controversy or resistance or documentation of any kind of heartburn about this, that that's a product of the changing sensibilities of the time as well. And just one last thing, I don't want to overstate that because I think there were still women who cherished, engaged in these practices, wanted to hold onto them well into the 30s, maybe even into the 40s. But that is not where the momentum is, or the center of gravity is anymore.
- [50:03]
Casey
So you're really ringing a bell for me here because I've sometimes had a hard time with my daughters. One of my daughters, when she turned 18, saying, you need to go to Relief Society now. And there being that generational oh, isn't Relief Society for old ladies kind of thing. And if these healing practices sometimes got lumped in with that too, I could see some women. I read a lot of correspondence from Laura Merrill, the wife of Joseph F. Merrill, where she was constantly redefining herself as like a modern and new woman and sort of not tearing down her predecessors, but feeling a desire to want to move into modernity. Along with her husband, who was a PhD respected scientist, Laura was head of the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. And she wanted to be seen as a modern woman too, which that's an interesting angle I've never thought about before.
- [51:04]
Scott
Thank you.
- [51:05]
Lisa
Yeah, it's super interesting. I wish we could document it better. But when you are in the sources for this era, you can just really see this mindset taking hold and how far reaching the implications and the consequences for that are. And again, I don't want to say, well, it's all women's fault, you know, if they just would have fought harder or whatever. It's. That's not what we're saying here. It's just a very complex picture because
- [51:33]
Scott
this is also the time period of women's suffrage. So, you know, so the modern woman is rising. And it's interesting that these practices are being associated with the old way in at least some members minds. And so it's interesting. So the living memory of women's healing practices, if I understand what you're saying here, Lisa, that starts to fade along generational lines. It sounds like here modern versus old fashioned, the previous generation versus the rising generation, such that when, when the primary historical sources documenting the practice of female healing rituals comes to light in the, in the mid to late 20th century, it doesn't seem like there's a clear frame of reference for those. A lot of people are saying, what is this? Where is this coming from? Right. And some people I remember when I first heard of it, I thought was this even really a thing or is this like some anti material that people are trying to make us look weird? You know, I was like, wow, yeah, how come I've never heard of this before?
- [52:44]
Lisa
Yeah. And Scott, a part of that then what happens is that by the 1970s is really when those sources start coming to light, the only frame of reference anybody has for it is this codified priesthood administration practice that comes into being in the early 20th century and nobody really knows that history. And so the only frame of reference they have is, oh, women are laying on hands to heal. They must have had the priesthood or they must have been exercising priesthood in some way. And so that set the discussion off in a certain direction that then, with the careful work of people like Jill Durr and Carol Madsen and Maureen Beecher, really helped us to recover the rich context and the really complex threads for this practice.
- [53:34]
Scott
Yeah, that's so interesting. But we sometimes see that some vestiges of the practice at least do linger. Like, for example, Elder McConkey. He once apparently invited Camilla Kimball, Spencer W. Kimball's wife, to join him in blessing her husband before one of his surgeries. That's interesting. That's maybe I'd call that a vestige of bygone days. It seems like they just kind of kept it on kind of a. A down low basis. This is definitely not widely practiced anymore and you only hear little whispers of things like that happening.
- [54:11]
Lisa
Yeah, that account is in the biography of Spencer Kimball by his son. So that's a well documented instance. I think Jonathan and Chris mentioned it in their article too.
- [54:23]
Scott
This has been so fun and fascinating. Lisa, it's been so fun to do this with you. And thank you for your great work on the outlines and putting us in contact with sources that neither Casey and I had ever seen, which is so great just to watch how much ongoing research there is. And thank you for your good work. Yeah, well done. Yeah. And I guess the question I want to maybe end with here is like, so what do we do with this? What do we make of this history now as those of us who are now living in this modern era. Can I use the modern word? We're living in the modern time. We don't inhabit the world of the first century church. We're clearly in that second part. And we have those modern sensibilities. And yet we have this really rich history. There's a sense of taking away, there's a sense of letting go. I don't know, how would you want to maybe land this part of how we're talking about this and how you would hope that modern church members would think about this history?
- [55:26]
Lisa
I'd be interested. Before I do my spiel, I'd be interested to know in what you guys think, as I assume that you've. That you've, you know, kind of learned this history along the way. It's not something any of us Experienced, you know, ourselves. I'd be interested to hear what you
- [55:41]
Scott
think, Casey, do you want to go first?
- [55:46]
Casey
Well, I'm gathering my thoughts too. And part of the hesitation, Lisa, is as a man, to comment on women's history. It feels like tiptoeing through a minefield. Right. Because on the one hand, one of the threads we've talked about here is how at the same time these healing practices declined. There was sort of an enshrinement of motherhood in the church. And you mentioned that Susie Young Gates, someone who you've researched a lot, was one of the main voices behind that. And as you were sharing that history, and now I'm putting this as an overlay on top of it, I have deeply conflicting feelings because on the one hand, I'm grateful that we have enshrined motherhood in the church. It's really important. It's huge. And it's something that is so special and so wonderful and such a blessing to so many people. At the same time, too, there's this tendency to want to completely separate the church from the home, which I don't know is organic either. And I want those two worlds to overlap to a large degree because, I mean, in my mind, being a righteous priesthood holder as a man is tied in a lot of ways to paternal things, things we associate with fatherhood, mentoring, guiding a person, helping someone along the way. And so I have mixed feelings because on the one hand, these. These rituals are beautiful and this history is amazing, but I also can see a natural development where they're saying, hey, let's emphasize the role of mothers and fathers and elevate that in importance too. And maybe we overdid it when it came to women and we lost some of these unique blessings. But I could also see it happening organically also where in the early 20th century, just this move to create the nuclear family and to push that as the center of a person's life, I still see as a good thing. Although I admit that maybe there were a few casualties along the way as we move towards that family centered effort, that we may have lost some unique and beautiful things that it's worth revisiting now and going back and looking at.
- [58:06]
Lisa
And there's no reason that emphasis on motherhood has to mean getting rid of women's healing practices.
- [58:12]
Casey
Oh, yeah.
- [58:12]
Lisa
If anything, you could argue the opposite. So it just goes to show how complex this is.
- [58:20]
Casey
Right? Right.
- [58:22]
Scott
Once I became aware of this history and read Joseph Smith's sermon with great interest, his 1842 sermon wondered like, how did we go from that to our current practice and not knowing all the history as richly as. As you've just gone through. Lisa, thanks to your good work. I felt a sense of loss. I felt a sense of something was taken that Joseph Smith clearly endorsed. And some might want to just cleanly say it's just an example of ongoing revelation. And I think we've walked through the history careful enough to say maybe it's not that clean. Maybe it was kind of organic and maybe there were some strong feelings in some areas that I understand the forces at work that eventually kind of whittled it down and got rid of it. But giving blessings to my children at the beginning of each year before their school year, father's blessings. And Sarah sitting over on the, on the bed. I have thought many times I would love to have her put her hands, join me in blessing our kids before school. Knowing all this history and knowing great quotes even from Joseph Fielding Smith as late as his 1960s teachings where he said it would be appropriate for women to join their husbands in blessings sometimes. But knowing that's not currently the practice. I've, I guess there's a part of me that kind of longs for it. I'm totally willing to and have submitted to the current practice of the church. That's totally fine. But I guess there's a sense of me that kind of loves the egalitarian feel of it. Can I put it like that?
- [60:20]
Lisa
I think that's really well said, Scott. And I think a lot of people feel that way, myself included. And you know, this as we were just talking about how the changing sensibilities played into this and how there came a point where these practices were maybe seen as old fashioned. One of the things about history that's really interesting to me is what I call babies and bathwater. So things change over time and we think we're throwing out the bathwater. And there are perfectly understandable reasons all along for why things happen and why things change the way that they do and for why something looks like bathwater at some time. But it's inevitable that some babies get discarded too. And I think, you know, Amy Brown Lyman and her counselors, who were wonderful, faithful women who gave their lives to the church and the gospel and to serving women, yet they seem to have kind of let go of these practices and felt that they were old fashioned. They had no way of knowing that their granddaughters would rediscover them and say, oh, what did we lose? What did we let go of here? And so it's a really profound and poignant illustration of this baby and bathwater dynamic in history where when we go back and we retrace it, we can understand why things happened, but we can also look at it and go, gosh, you know, what did we lose along the way? Now history. The other thing I'll say about this is, yes, like you read Emmaline's diary and all of these instances of administering and blessing and washing and anointing and all the things they're doing, it's really beautiful and it's really inspiring. It's also taking place in the context, almost all of these women are plural wives or daughters of polygamy. They're wearing corsets and clothing that none of us would want anything to do with on a day to day basis. For the most part. It's a world where they don't have very many rights, they don't have ways to earn a living. There's just like there's a whole women's sphere that comes into being based on the shared disadvantages of being female. And women bond together and take care of each other in part because they're in a world that does not value them and that does not give them all of the same opportunities that it gives to men. And so again, you can see how as that starts to shift, the context in which these practices made sense also changes. And so history can help us, I think, identify what looks like babies and bathwater to us from where we're at now. I don't think we could ever go back and just wholesale say, okay, we're going to do exactly what they did in the same way that they did it in the past that wouldn't make sense anymore. And there are reasons that things changed and there are ways that our sensibilities probably would struggle with that. But can we go back and use history as a resource to help us think about the gifts of the gospel, as they called them, the gifts of the Spirit, how they were used, how they've been used over time, how they've been understood. And I think one of the fallacies that we sometimes fall into that I've, that I've personally seen is this idea of, well, why don't we do that anymore? And embedded in that question, there's kind of an accusation that, you know, we've, we're not right, that that was right and now we're wrong or we've gone astray in some way or whatever. Right. And I don't think we necessarily have to look at it that way. Do you have the Gifts of the Spirit in your life. We started out on these two episodes talking about the power of God and how our early sisters were looking for the power of God in their lives. I don't think we're any different. We're all looking for the power of God in our lives. I find the power of God in my life in many ways, and I've had many gifts of the Spirit that have given me power and spiritual force in my life. Does it have to take a certain form in order to be a gift of the Spirit? And what are ways that mothers. That women engage in what I've called a ministry of hands? The way that we use our hands to bless and lift each other. Whatever the ritual form that takes or doesn't take, Women are engaged in a ministry of hands. And the power of God comes to us through that ministry. And unfortunately, when we start looking at this history and it becomes a cause for angst, maybe even for jealousy, for controversy, and I completely understand why it does. I completely understand those feelings of loss and so forth. But when we do that, does it make us less likely to ask for a blessing? Does it make us less confident about our healing practices, our. Our rituals, our ordinances and so forth? Because if it does, then that's leading us down the road that Moroni warns us against. Deny not the gifts of God. Even if I could wish for a different practice or a different way of practicing, the fact is that I still have the power of God available to me in many ways, and one of which is asking my husband to lay his hands on my head and bless me, which is something that I just. Just experienced recently. And I. I don't want us to lose sight of that. In the midst of all of our understandably complex feelings about this history. Wherever we stand with it, I hope that we can recognize that the Spirit operates according to our needs and our understanding and our context, and. And we have access to those same gifts and power that the early saints did. Whatever the form looks like now.
- [67:29]
Scott
That's really good.
- [67:31]
Casey
Yeah. Thank you for saying that. Well said.
- [67:33]
Scott
Yeah. It made me think that those two tracks of understanding that Joseph pointed out in his 1842 talk, he said, there's faith and then there's authority. And that made me think of the James 5 quotation that. That church leaders kept invoking to say, call the elders. Call the elders. There's another part of that same verse that says, and the sick will be healed by the prayer of faith. So you have the authority and you've got the faith. The prayer of faith and a calling of the elders. And certainly men and women can pray the prayer of faith. And that faith to heal is still a gift of the Spirit that hasn't expired. That's still here, that's still amongst us. It's just this, the propriety of the laying on of hands is the only thing at question here. So I really appreciate what you're saying. There's more ways, there's more of a variety of expressions of the gifts of the Spirit than that one way which does feel like a gift given and a gift taken. A phrase you've used before, but I appreciate your perspective there.
- [68:41]
Lisa
How many times as a mother do you pick up a child and pray for him? I mean, you've got your hands on your child and you're praying with faith in the name of Christ for that child, you can call down the powers of heaven. Again, I do not want to whitewash the sense of loss and the complexity that people feel about it, but I also don't want us to get so lost in that that we don't recognize what we do have.
- [69:09]
Scott
Well said. Well said.
- [69:11]
Casey
Well said. Well, thank you both. This has been very illuminating and it's one of my favorite topics, actually, to talk about, especially with regards to women in the church. Just such a cool history here. Now, in our next episode, we're going to talk about women's place in the ecclesiastical organizations of the church. That includes Relief Society, which we've already mentioned briefly, but we're going to cover more thoroughly the young women's organization and a few other things. So that's something to look forward to next week, and that's going to be fun. Scott and Lisa, thank you for your time today and we'll see you next time.
- [69:46]
Lisa
Thanks.
- [69:47]
Scott
All right, we'll see you then.
- [70:01]
Lisa
Sa.