When Democratic talking head Hilary Rosen remarked on CNN last week that Ann Romney hadn’t “worked a day in her life,” Aimee Hickman says her heart sank. “I thought, wow, Ann Romney is going to be on the Internet in 20 seconds – and in fact she was – because if there’s one thing that Mormon women are trained to do, they are trained to defend stay-at-home mothers.”
As McKay Coppins explained at Buzzfeed, “[F]or many Latter-day Saint women, staying at home to raise children is less a lifestyle choice than religious one — a divinely-appreciated sacrifice that brings with it blessings, empowerment, and spiritual prestige.” And yet Ann Romney’s position, for all the outrage it produced, doesn’t reflect all Mormon women’s realities. A growing group of young Mormon women, like Hickman — who calls herself a stay-at-home mom, but co-edits the feminist journal Exponent II, runs a stained-glass studio and is writing an academic paper about Mormon women opening Etsy stores — are increasingly challenging women’s traditional role within the Church. Though Mormon women are still more likely to be stay-at-home moms, several Mormon women active in feminist issues said that in their wards, roughly half of women work outside the home. Even more surprisingly, rather than shunning these women, as it did as recently as the 1990s, the Church is showing some signs of a new tolerance toward them.
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