Guest post from frequent commenter Margie

It’s September, and that means General Conference is almost here. As an active Latter-day Saint, I often find myself in March and September turning back to the Conference talks that moved me in the last few Conferences to prepare for the next. That maybe sounds disingenuous from an inside-edge member like me, but it’s true.  

In the past five years, there is no single talk I reacted to more strongly than Sister Michelle D Craig’s October 2022 Saturday evening talk, “Wholehearted.” I admit at the time to being absolutely appalled by it. 

I now think it is one of the most useful parables of the modern Church, and as clear a depiction of how patriarchy works as I have ever encountered. The stories we tell each other and the messages they convey, intentional or not, matter. And the story in her talk plainly illustrates how life works for those of us who attempt to function in the Church without access to its power structures. In other words, most members. 

I’ll summarize the story here, but it really is worth reading the talk in its entirety. 

Briefly, Sister Craig’s childhood family is having the house re-carpeted. Little Emily, seven years old, has fallen asleep, and the mother of the family asks Emily’s older brothers to clear the furniture, except the bed Emily’s sleeping in, out of her room and tear out the old carpet as she sleeps (she must have been a really sound sleeper!) so that the people installing the carpets will have an easier time the following morning. The boys follow their mother’s instructions but decide to play a prank on Emily. They write Emily a note explaining the family has moved and will write and let her know where they are in a few days. Then they leave the note and shut the door. Morning comes, and the brothers notice Emily’s not at breakfast. They find her shut up in her room, “sad and alone.” [1] She’s been crying in her closet, convinced the family she loved has abandoned her (and taken nearly all her worldly possessions with them, I might add). In Sister Craig’s telling, little distraught Emily then realizes if she had just opened the door that had been shut on her, ignoring the bewildering and painful evidence all around her, including the note signed from the family she loved and trusted, she would have known, among other things, heartbreakingly, “I really was loved.” If only she’d been just a little savvier. See, Emily? All on you, hon. 

Notice the conclusion Emily draws from what happened: this whole thing is, if not her fault exactly, at least her responsibility. And that is precisely how the whole thing goes. The Parable of the Little Girl in the Closet illustrates at least five things I’ve found to be true of the way patriarchy works in the Church:

  1. However justly aggrieved you may be, however miserable you may feel, however poorly you have been treated, you ultimately must understand that in this system, you bear entire responsibility for resolving the misery inflicted on you with whatever limited and probably insufficient resources you have. 

Let’s be clear about some things: Emily is a child, a young child with limited experience and understanding. She is entirely innocent. Her trust was abused, and her older brothers were the ones to blame. But in the logic of the parable, it’s on her to fix the situation. If you want to operate within the Church’s patriarchy, whatever discomfort you feel, whatever pain you endure, even and especially when the source of the injury is the system itself, your discomfort and pain are on you. You’d better find another gear, a different perspective, etc.—never mind that you’re innocent and unable to imagine a paradigm in which you can make your situation within the system tenable. Again, that’s on you. 

  1. Individual actors in the patriarchy may or may not feel bad for their individual poor behavior, but there will be no systemic accountability.

In this story, the brothers, at least some of whom I assume were Aaronic Priesthood-age, appear to have been worried enough about Emily or guilty enough about what they had done that they went to up to check on her, but the story tellingly does not address any consequences for the brothers’ behavior. Was it laughed off? Ignored? Were the boys privately reprimanded? We aren’t told, and that, reader, is the point.

3. Many of the most damaging behaviors of the patriarchy do not come from a place of malice or intention to cause hurt. They are still hurtful and often even more pernicious as a result.  

Emily’s brothers were having a laugh. In the back of their minds, had they really stopped to think about it, they might have realized that this wouldn’t have been funny to Emily, but they weren’t thinking. They were just doing “like older brothers sometimes do,” to borrow Sister Craig’s phrase. Boys will be boys, after all, and they really didn’t mean to hurt Emily. I mean, sure it happened, but like Emily herself said, she should’ve realized it was a joke. After all, they weren’t trying to be bad or mean. 

That’s vintage power-privilege stuff, and definitely the way Church patriarchy operates.  

I have seen so much harm done in my decades of Church participation without the slightest intention to cause hurt or offense. You don’t need to be privy to the workings of your ward council to see this; it’s a feature of the Church writ large. And then because no hurt or offense was meant, the possibility that hurt still might have been caused isn’t even entertained. In fact, I have seen men angry at the very people they’ve unintentionally hurt for suggesting that their offensive words or behavior, were, in fact, offensive and hurtful, and so the damage is compounded. Nobody feels better; everyone feels worse. In lots of cases, victims may blame themselves or question the validity of their own experiences (see Emily). Nobody improves, and the damage goes on unchecked. The collateral damage can grow if somebody else speaks up and takes the side of the aggrieved; leadership then targets them too. (Been there, seen that.) 

4. Patriarchy’s purported systems of checks and balances will fail.

Patriarchy is supposed to work because it’s premised on the idea of leadership by a series of wise, loving fathers. But we acknowledge, at least theoretically, in our particular patriarchy that people are imperfect and make mistakes. But never fear!: If our bishop’s loving wisdom fails us, there is our stake president, if he fails, area authorities and all the way up to the Quorum of the Twelve, and the First Presidency, and then, since we—again, theoretically—acknowledge that they too can make mistakes, our elder brother and Savior, Jesus, and an all-knowing, all-loving Father in Heaven are at the helm. In both the story and in practice, this isn’t actually how the system works. The wise, loving father in this story is entirely absent except for a cursory acknowledgment, in the very beginning, of his existence: Emily’s “parents” were having the house re-carpeted. And that is as much as we ever see or hear of the loving, wise father whose purported role is to preside (whatever that means) over his family, which leads us to the mother in this story and the final truth the story teaches that I’d like to discuss: 

  1. Do not expect to lead effectively as a woman in the patriarchy. 

The mom in this story, the co-presider if we’re to take Elder Soares at his word (and I believe him to be sincere), gave her sons simple instructions. According to the current Church teachings, including the words of President Oaks, this is perhaps the one and only instance in which a woman really and truly presides over priesthood-holders: when they are her young sons, living in her home. And even still, things didn’t work out so well for Mom. Oh sure, the sons did what she told them to do, but honestly, it would probably have been easier for her in the end if they hadn’t done it at all, considering their little flourish at the end. I imagine she was helping little Emily process the trauma of this whole thing for years. The fact that it made a sister’s General Conference address is telling. And, as I said, this story showcases the one instance in which, perhaps, the patriarchy recognizes the authority of a woman over priesthood-holders, and it all still went south. 

It is so much worse, so very much harder to try to “lead” in the Church’s systems as a woman. I have watched as a Relief Society President told a younger, far less experienced priesthood-holder point blank, that if he did X with regard to one of the sisters in the ward, the consequences would be dire and under no circumstances should he consider it. (She wasn’t asking him to do anything that violated the Handbook, if that sort of thing matters to you.) He did it anyway. The woman nearly died by suicide. We all have stories, and it’s been pointed out many times that women’s experience at Church is increasingly and jarringly at odds with their experience in “the world.” To be sure, patriarchy is everywhere, but navigating it is uniquely difficult at Church. 

Given all of this, one might justly ask why a capable woman with plenty of options would choose to stay, especially when staying arguably props up a system that causes so much hurt. There are many answers to that question, including to conclude as plenty of us are doing, that there is no ethical way. Sister Craig’s story was a moment of reckoning for me because it forced me to examine just what it is that I am participating in, whose pain I’m colluding in.

And here is where I am now, and what I’ve decided: I stay because I don’t want Emily to be alone in her empty room, stripped bare by the people she had been taught to trust. I don’t want her to sit by herself in her bewildered pain and budding sense of betrayal mixed liberally with self-doubt. So I stay in the empty room too. I sit with her in the closet. I could go other places, but this is my house too and the house of my mothers before me. Emily is my people. 

Sometimes, as Sister Craig reminds us in the opening words of her talk, it helps to know what to expect. But even still. It infuriates me that my only recourse is to sit and point toward the exit. I don’t want the little girl in the closet to have to go.

But I am a woman, and this is how patriarchy works, and Emily may well be safer and happier if she opens that door and walks out. 

What do you think? 

Can Sister Craig’s story be read as a parable of patriarchy and the modern Church?

Does the list included in the post resonate with your experience of how patriarchy in the Church has worked for you?

Are there other observations of how patriarchy works you can draw from her story?

Discuss. 

[1]  found “sad and alone”, unlike the girl in the illustration for this post. AI will not let one depict a sad girl in a closet, with all sinister meaning that might have.