Pedestals & Podiums: Utah Women, Religious Authority, and Equal Rights by Martha Sonntag Bradley

By attempting to be history and polemic, this work fails as both. It is inadequate as a polemic (namely, making the case--contra the Church's position--for the ERA) because a chronological narrative is no way to argue a position. And it fails as history because the polemical aspects make it impossible to trust the author. While virtually every page contains examples of the bias-in-sheep's-clothing, perhaps a few examples will suffice:

(1) Rhetorical sledgehammers. Sonntag Bradley describes the church's position as creating women who are financially dependent on their husbands.While technically true, her words certainly create a different impression than if she had quoted the language from the Doctrine and Covenants that women have claim upon their husbands. As one isolated example, I would dismiss this, but this kind of rhetorical trick exists on virtually every page of this book. She casts the Church and its doctrines in the worst possible light.

(2) Unsupported conclusions. By way of summation of the Sonia Johnson affair, the author states that no one really believes that her excommunication wasn't because of her support for the ERA. This is a hard position to maintain when this book provides the following data points: (a) Mormons for ERA had hundreds if not thousands of members, none of which were excommunicated, (b) the letter that Johnsons' bishop sent her announcing the decision to excommunicate began with the charge that she had publicly stated that nonmembers should not allow the missionaries into her home because of the church's opposition to the ERA, and (c) the quoted letter from a GA to an ERA supporter assuring her that her membership in the Church was not in jeopardy.

(3) Inaccurate quotations. As part of the Sonia Johnson story, the author quotes an unnamed church spokesman as stating that one is either on God's side or Satan's side. This did not strike me as the kind of language that a church spokesman usually uses, so I checked the footnote. It was to Sonia Johnson's From Housewife to Heretic, which I have, so I checked it. We can leave aside, for a moment, the questionable source itself (as Johnson is hardly a disinterested observer). The statement in Johnson's book (which is also attributed to an unnamed church spokesman) does not purport to be his (or her?) exact words, but is clearly Johnson's summary of his position. Yet Sonntag Bradley quotes it as if it were the words of the spokesman. When you only check one footnote in a book and it is as mangled as this one, it is difficult to have much confidence in the rest of the book.

I really wanted to read a good history of the Church's opposition to the ERA. It is a fascinating episode in Church history, all the more so given the current situation regarding same-sex marriage. I was seriously disappointed in this work.