Cutting Off Parts of Myself

When you grow up with a very strict idea of what a “woman” is to be like, you don’t just add attributes to yourself as you grow. You don’t just mold yourself into all of the great ideals of womanhood that you see modeled in other women around you. You also end up squashing natural parts of yourself that don’t fit the pattern. This is harmful in many ways, particularly for Mormon women.

I acknowledge that to some degree, all humans have to learn to stifle certain behaviors in order to live in a society that demands that we don’t hit others, don’t act out on our worst impulses, aren’t violent or verbally abusive. But this is not at all the same process for Mormon women. We are told that the parts of us that are normal for men: sexual desire, career ambition, pride in achievements, athletic prowess, business acumen, most kinds of leadership — that these are things that are “not for us” purely because we are women.

There may be a certain number of women who are not drawn to these parts of humanity and therefore don’t feel like they have given up much to be Mormon women. There may even be plenty of Mormon women who feel like the trade off is worth it, that what they get from Mormonism is more valuable than what they give up to “keep sweet” within the context of Mormon femininity. But I suspect that more often what is going on is that the aspirations that we are told are improper are so thoroughly suppressed that they don’t even recognize them anymore.

When you have been told that you must limp and you learn to limp from the first days of your infancy, you probably aren’t going to demand that you stop limping, at least not as your first impulse. You may end up insisting that you like to limp, that it’s natural for you to limp, that it is what all women do — limping. You may also end up seeing that the Mormon society around you, your ward, your immediate and extended families — that they benefit from you limping.

Because other people do benefit from Mormon women cutting off parts of themselves. Those people tend to be men but are not exclusively men. Children may also benefit from women choosing not to prioritize their own growth and development. At least until those children grow up into their own version of Mormon femininity and end up limping along beside you and you wonder why it is that you gave up so much of life only to see your own daughters giving up the same.

If you end up in Women’s Conference or other meetings in which male leaders tell you what it is to be a proper woman, you may find yourself agreeing. Or you may be angry at some point and wonder why it is that men, who have never been women, think that they are the experts on a topic that they actually know nothing about. You may wonder why women don’t tell men how to be better men.

I got tired of cutting off parts of myself. I got tired of fitting myself into an ever smaller box. I found myself angry at men even when it was women who policed my Mormon femininity, women who told me that I should not wear athletic clothing when outside running because it wasn’t “modest” enough and because it was bothering their husbands and sons. I was angry when I found myself encouraged not to talk about my PhD from Princeton because most Mormon women don’t have that, because they are encouraged to get an education that will be useful to their lesser role as mothers. I am angry that I look back now and see that so much of my life was me trying to work so hard at being a good Mormon woman and never wondering why I didn’t want even more than the smaller accomplishments that I was criticized and to some degree shunned for achieving.

I try not to limp anymore, but I fear that one leg is going to always be atrophied and that there are not enough years left for me to get that leg back to what it would have been/should have been. Because certain amputations of self are not recoverable.