Mormon women oppose Hillary Clinton because she doesn’t speak in a “Primary Voice”

Last updated on: October 16, 2016 at 5:20 pm by Dan Peterson

Mormon women oppose Hillary Clinton because she doesn’t speak in a “Primary Voice” 2016-10-16T17:20:56-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Ms. Lindsay Hansen-Park, founder of the Feminist Mormon Housewives podcast, has published a piece on the non-Mormon Quartz blog entitled “Hillary Clinton sounds powerful when she speaks—and that’s exactly why some women won’t give her the vote.”

It immediately becomes obvious that, by “some women,” she intends “many Mormon women.”

The article is perhaps worth a read:

http://qz.com/809136/if-hillary-clinton-wants-to-secure-the-mormon-vote-in-utah-in-the-us-presidential-election-she-might-need-to-start-using-the-primary-voice/

Here are three initial reactions to her essay from one privileged patriarchal male:

Granted that there is nowhere near gender parity among the general officers of the Church, Ms. Hansen-Park nonetheless exaggerates when she contrasts 300+ male General Authorities to only nine female leaders. She has more than doubled the number of male General Authorities by, I hypothesize, counting Area Authorities as General Authorities — which, by definition, they aren’t.

There’s probably some truth to the notion of a “Primary Voice,” but, again, Ms. Hansen-Park exaggerates it by comparing a sixteen-year-old General Conference talk by Margaret Nadauld – why did she need to go back so far to find her specimen? — to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Democratic National Convention speech. Why does she include no General Conference talks by male leaders for comparison? I would bet that Governor Mitt Romney’s speech to the 2012 Republican National Convention was different in tone and style from any talk that Mr. Romney ever gave as an ecclesiastical leader in Massachusetts. General Conference talks by men, no less than by women, are typically “soothing, non-threatening, and full of easy-to-access examples and metaphors.” They’re virtually never strident, loud, or shrill in the manner of a political rally. The reverent, devotional atmosphere of a Mormon worship service will always differ considerably from the raucous partisan boosterism of a political convention.

Ms. Hansen-Park is at least as dismissive of Mormon women in her article as most patriarchal males are likely to be. She mentions the conservative political views that prevail in Utah, but fails to accord them any actual significance. She allows them no explanatory role for the relative lack of enthusiasm that Utah Mormon women feel for Mrs. Clinton. Instead, not granting that Utah Mormon women might have real reasoning minds and actual views, she sees Mrs. Clinton’s failure to gain support in Utah as a byproduct of the enculturation of powerless females at the hands, largely, of dominant Mormon males. Her own implicitly liberal political views are, it would seem, the default setting for rational thinkers. Not to agree with her is, ipso facto, to prove oneself unempowered and irrational. But is it not possible that Utah Mormon women actually reject Mrs. Clinton’s political ideas and disapprove of her record? By seeming not even to consider that explanatory option, is Ms. Hansen-Park not infantilizing Latter-day Saint women, just as some Church-critical feminists claim Mormonism itself does?

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