JNS–I understand that the nature of our recent history and our Church makes women basically invisible. Not your fault, just that your list reflects it.

the least influential Mormons of the Twentieth Century

Joseph Smith, Jr. Really.

My personal experiences in the church can be characterized by the bread baked for neighbors, the drives shoveled by kind youth, the gentle hand leading nursery children on a walk, the prayerful hours spent by a tireless Bishop. They do not speak to the public debate, they do not create policy. They do not act as a public agent for the church. Yet they quietly shape the face of Mormondom across the world.

I nominate what’s his name that did that one thing. Or maybe he didn’t. I can’t remember.

I second Nick L.’s nomination of the Prophet Joseph. No one’s name gets mentioned more whose thoughts and contributions get ignored so much.

Evan Mecham: Governor of Arizona

Tal Bachman: Ex-Mormon and one hit wonder of “She’s So High” fame

better add my dad to my list since he reads this!

Bo Gritz

JNS, a list of the 10 most influential Mormon women just puts women in the ghetto. The horse is out of the barn, dude. You’re really too late to recover this.

You have no idea how appalled I was when I read that post.

Martha Nibley Beck
Mark Hoffman
Ted Bundy
Mark Hacking
Butch Cassidy only gets an honorable mention because he’s in the wrong century.

Except Joseph was well past dead by the dawn of the 20th century.

That depends on how you understand the question, Clark. I meant “person least influential on 20th century LDS-ism.” It looks like you understood the question to mean “20th century person, least influential on LDS-ism.”

I nominate Steve Martin. It has been so disappointing to me to see how little influence he has wielded as a famous member of the Church. Many people go so far as to deny his Mormonness altogether. So sad.

Brian — heh.

Ann, I thought you didn’t read the post.

Sorry, Steve. I was appalled when I skimmed the post. My bad.

Mormon women are hugely influential in the Church’s function and development, but is it revealing that those who influenced the Church the most are men? Perhaps it couldn’t have been any other way:
- Women don’t hold decision-making positions of authority in the Church.
- There are no G.A. women (RS, YM and Primary Presidencies aren’t GAs).
- Few women speak in Conference (2 last October). Have I ever needed two hands to count the female speakers at Conference?
- Is there such a thing as a female Institute Director, full-time seminary teacher or Public Affairs director?
- Women are encouraged to have modest lives caring for family rather than seeking professional or public lives.
- Surrounding American culture already produces fewer women congresspersons, judges, business executives, etc.

Again, feminine influence on the Church is vital, but individual women seldom have opportunities to influence the wider corporate Church.

It’s sad, but this is no surprise. I love the Church, but it has room to grow here.

Influential LDS women last century must include Emmeline B. Wells. Others may be Belle Spafford, Marjorie Hinckley, Sheri Dew and Gladys Knight (at the end of the century). Claudia Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich are great the Church didn’t notice much.

I do think we’re going about this thread wrong.

“Least influential”, to have any real meaning, should be about famous Mormons who have significantly less impact than they get credit for. And it’s not meant to be “negative”, in some cases their influence was reduced due to other standards.

So here are 5 vastly overrated Mormons (are they the top 5? I don’t know):

- Merrill Bateman
- Jane Clayson
- John Bytheway
- Ty Detmer
- David Checketts

Hugh–

Nibly was on that list and I don’t think he met any of your criteria? Please correct me, I may be wrong.

Is it true that woman cannot be full-time Seminary teachers? What possible reason could CES give for this?

And I nominate Chieko Okazaki as a woman known to much of the Church body who has influenced people (some people quite a bit).

How does our buddy Mitt fit into this experiment? I remember the excitement when he lost to Kennedy in the early 90’s - like this was the start of something “big.” Then, not so much.

Me.

Hmm. If we mean major 19th century figures who should be influential but aren’t then Zina Huntington definitely counts as do most of the Leading Ladies (like Eliza R. Snow) of Salt Lake during the 19th century. They were tremendously influential during their life. But lost influence after their deaths and especially after correlation.

Regarding the subthread about the lack of women were in the BCC link … so who would you take out of the BCC list and which sisters would you add?

To recap, here was BCC’s list of the 10 Most Influential Mormons of the 20th Century:

James E. Talmage
J. Reuben Clark
B.H. Roberts / Hugh Nibley
David O. McKay
Fawn Brodie
Harold B. Lee
Joseph Fielding Smith / Bruce R. McConkie
Spencer W. Kimball
Ezra Taft Benson
Gordon B. Hinckley

1 of the 10 is a sister of some reknown. 6 were presidents of the Church.

If there are deserving sisters missing, who are they and who gets removed?

How is this for influential Mormon women: all the Mormon women who got their kids up for seminary; served in RS, YW and Primary presidencies; did their calling even if it was difficult; loved their own kids, grandkids, nieces and nephews, and strangers in need. Individually they are unknown, but they have a far greater influence than anybody else. Maybe it is different for others, but in my observance, my Mom, Aunts, Grandmothers and wife have had a greater influence than anybody. For my children, their mother has had the greatest influence without question.
Least influential? The guy down the street who was baptized at eight years-old, but hasn’t been seen near the church for decades. Perhaps he occasionally goes on here to post derogatory comments about the church; perhaps he just can’t be bothered even to do that. He is totally un-influential on any level.

I had a female seminary teacher for one year, and I’m pretty sure she was full-time. She was also very much an exception, and I believe was hired because they couldn’t find someone else. I seem to remember her telling us she would have to quit if she got married, which seemed very 19th-century at the time. Actually, still seems very 19th-century.

I would love to see a most influential women post, including Aurelia Spencer Rogers and LaVern Watts Parmley (and thanks to Ardis for pointing them out in this T&S post. I don’t know why Sherri Dew keeps coming up. Did she really do much? Sure, she was the first single woman in the RS presidency, and she writes a lot, but I don’t really think her mere presence, or her talks and writings were ultimately able to change the status of single women in the church. Maybe I’m wrong, but I just think she’s getting a lot more credit here than she deserves. I suspect her inclusion has a lot more to do with proximity than with actual impact.

ESO,
For the record, our criteria was not influence on the institutional Church as such but on the day to day lived experience of LDS in today’s Church. Whether or not people have heard of JET or JRC or FB is utterly immaterial. Plenty of women have exerted meaningful influence in the day-to-day lives of Mormons (and, for the record, we already had a most influential Mormon women post in the works before you and Ann broke out the pitchforks at BCC), but we began with a much larger list — that included many more men and women — and then undertook a simple triage process: was X more or less influential than Y, than Z…

Pretending that LDS women had more power than they did in the 20th Century is not feminism and will do nothing to alter existing power structures in Mormonism.

Kristine, I totally agree. I’ve always felt Sheri Dew was overly celebrated.

Brad–
I think you and JNS might have been working from different criteria, then because he stated in comments:
“to confine influence to the three fields that we basically considered: a) institutional developments; b) changes to authoritative theology; and c) influence on intellectual Mormonism.”
so basically, women could only have been considered in category c and that is one I posit may not actually be very influential on ordinary, non-blogging, caffiene-free cola drinking members.

Thanks for placing a pitchfork in my hands–such a lovely image you have of women. For some reason, I thought my reaction to your list might be as legitimate as anyone elses, but I guess this is too important to you to disagree about.

I never suggested that women were more important than they are, historiographically speaking, just that some ackowledgement that your list ignores half of all humans and Mormons might be warrented.

“Thanks for placing a pitchfork in my hands–such a lovely image you have of women.”
??!!??!!??!!??
Right, because pitchfork-carrying women is an especially salient stock image in the universe of misogynistic stereotypes. Seriously — the pitchfork was a metaphor not for woman-ness but for knee-jerk, unsubstantive indignation. My image of women… You’re tilting at windmills here (cue a complaint here about reducing all women to Don Quixotes). I’m not your enemy.

Moving back to more substantive issues, let’s take the example of Belle Spafford’s exclusion from the list. She was undoubtedly an important and influential woman. But, in terms of the long term consequences of her tenure as RS president, by far the most significant thing she did was preside over surrendering the Society’s autonomy in a multiplicity of spheres to priesthood correlation. Her campaigning against the ERA was largely without long term impact, since today Mormon women are as likely to work outside of the home as non-Mormon women. It too seems more like an act of submission to priesthood authority than anything else, since the National Council of Women endorsed the ERA with her as president just a few years before the Church officially renounced it and began to campaign against it. Rogers and Parmley were important figures, but their influence on today’s Church was largely eclipsed when the Primary was brought under the central control of priesthood correlation. The best case to be made for a woman who did not make the list, in my view, is Janice Kapp Perry. But I still have a hard time believing that her impact was as far-reaching as any of the men on the list or several men left off the list (President Grant, Stephen Robinson, Truman Madsen, Brad Wilcox). Even people like architects who designed cookie-cutter wardhouses, committee members who revised the hymnal, or artists like Teichert or Friberg or Olson have their influence mediated and largely determined by the actions of the priesthood hierarchy who choose to incorporate their work in the activities of the Church.

ESO,
You’re right. I’m taking this too seriously. It’s not that you didn’t like the post — it felt like your reasons implicated me and the other posters personally, but that’s probably serious oversensitivity on my part. I’m not sure what different values you think separate us, but I’m willing to drop things entirely.

Sincere apologies for anything I’ve written that offended you personally.

Women are aloud to be full-time seminary teachers if and only if they have no children in the home.

Even more reason why it’s release-time professional seminary is an incredible wasteful activity. Hopefully the growing “standardization” of the Church programs across the globe, and the internationalization of the Church, will cause the Church to see that’s just dumb to waste those resources, when we already have a good model in place (early morning seminary, taught by dedicated instructors).

If I might quote William Ross Wallace in saying, another might say the mothers of each of the top 10 selected by BCC were truly the most influencial people to Mormonism in the twentieth century.

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