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When I teach my graduate course where we examine the ways that the lives and choices of women affect international relations, my students always have a moment of clarity near the end. They reach a point where they passionately wonder how it is that women, having obtained civil rights and property rights more or less worldwide, still cannot bring about equal standing with men and a cessation of male violence against them.

As far as we know, only two religious societies have successfully built Zion: the City of Enoch and the people in the Americas after Christ’s visit. There are good reasons for this paucity of perfect societies: building a Zionistic society of “one heart and one mind” requires sacrifice and a proactive attitude from every individual towards living the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not for the faint hearted.

The symbolism of the blood of the womb echoes in the ordinances of salvation, temples ancient and modern, and the Atonement of Jesus Christ. As we rediscover sacred feminine truths that have been neglected through the ages, we develop a clearer understanding of women and their distinctive purpose in the exaltation of mankind.

The male gaze, I assert, has hovered over the world of women like the giant eye of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.

For some time I have been curious about ideas of what a woman is, and where those ideas have come from. I have also been fascinated by the images of ancient goddesses, and wondered how their images have influenced thoughts about women through the ages and whether goddess images have any influence on how women are seen today by others and themselves.

I ask that question especially of the orthodox CoJC members, of which there are many, in that legislature. What were they thinking when they voted for this disastrous bill? Were they dreaming of their polygamous mansions above? Or somehow vindicating their polygamous ancestors? Did they think of themselves as heroic ark-steadiers preparing for the Second Coming?

What would happen . . . if we thought that matter is more like the fields of energy that animate the whole cosmos rather than incredibly small particles held together by external forces? What would happen if we thought of matter as the stuff that makes relationships possible, including our relationship to God?

As a child with limited exposure to blatant evil, in my perspective, a harlot was the pinnacle of wickedness. I'm not sure if I was ever explicitly taught this in church, but this term was used to describe women who preyed on men with their insatiable lust. This fits well with another false concept I learned that when a woman falls from grace, she falls farther than any man ever can, because she is inherently purer.

That women served as deaconesses in the early church is not really in dispute. Paul writes about women deaconesses as early as the sixth decade, about 30 years after the death of Christ. The presumed earliest mention of women deaconesses is in Romans 16:1, where Paul specifically refers to Phoebe as a deacon, though in English the word is changed to read “servant.”

Heavenly Mother is prominently present in scripture. She plays all the roles we would expect a divine mother to play. While her presence has been obscured by the loss of plain and precious parts of original texts, her extensive involvement in the lives of her children is nevertheless still apparent if the scriptures are closely read with attention to symbols and surrogates. As the modern Zeitgeist impels us to look for the feminine divine in the scriptural canon, voices speaking from the dust—especially the Book of Mormon—providentially give us background information necessary to find our divine Mother hidden in plain view.