As Amy alluded in a comment on the original post, there has been some Facebook discussion of the graph included in my post on Women as Actors in Church History. A comment by another critic and first-time commenter was caught in the moderation filter and not posted. ((I typically do not have to moderate comments except spam and spamiliciousness – by now, almost everybody but the occasional drive-by commenter knows what kind of community we have here and doesn’t bother to attack Keepa readers, or mock our faith or the institutional Church. There are occasional exceptions, and I do moderate those.)) In other words, there has been some flak about my intentions and methods.

The purpose of “Women as Actors in Church History” and the posts to follow in the coming week is to highlight some of the ways women’s contributions have been included – or not – in our standard histories. I don’t intend to explore why that is so (although that would be a great discussion to have), and I’m certainly not attributing malice to anybody anywhere for the overlooking of women’s contributions. I simply want to look at how our histories have incorporated women, and, in later posts, explain why including women among the characters in our written history can benefit us all (but especially, not surprisingly, our girls and young women), and, finally, to announce a project to address that need. (I didn’t want to let that cat out of the bag so early, but at least now you’ll see how each post in this series leads to that end.)

Acknowledging that women’s participation is often overlooked in our written history is one thing. Understanding how wide the gap is — getting a mental and emotional grasp of the divide — is a necessary step, I think, to agreeing that there is a need to narrow the gap. But how do you create that understanding?

Counting the people named in published histories seemed a reasonable and do-able way to show the disparity. We’re talking about how the stories of women appear in our histories – not about numbers of women authors vs. male authors; not about doctrinal works or poetic works, but about history; and not about every book published in the history of Mormonism, but those that shape the ideas of Mormon history of the generation of readers I’m writing to (i.e., histories published in the last 50 years, and widely used and read by Church members).

I looked over my shelves at home and identified six books that fit the bill. The three that I counted were:

Ivan J. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the LDS Church to 1846 (1970)
James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (2nd ed., 1992)
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005)

As luck would have it – and it was purely luck – these three books were published at three widely spaced points in the last 35 years rather than all being bunched at the same point.

I excluded three other books from my count partly because this was a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation, and I didn’t want to spend any more than the 6 or 7 hours it already took me to put it together, and partly for other reasons. The three excluded books were:

Russell R. Rich, Ensign to the Nations: A History of the LDS Church from 1846 to 1972 (1972)
Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (1979)
Our Heritage: A Brief History of the Church (1996)

I excluded Ensign to the Nations because it was the companion to Joseph Smith and the Restoration, written at virtually the same time and meant to be the second half of the textbook used in BYU Church History classes 30 years ago. I expected it to be similar in content, form, style, and purpose as the first half of the textbook.

I excluded The Mormon Experience because it was written at virtually the same time as the first edition of The Story of the Latter-day Saints and because it was organized by topic and was less of a chronological narrative than the others.

I excluded Our Heritage because it was so brief and because it has no index.

If that condemns me for selection bias, I can live with it. I excluded those books because I had limited time to spend, and before I had counted any names (in other words, they were not excluded because they didn’t support my thesis).

So I counted names in the indexes. I only counted each index once (didn’t recount to be sure I was accurate). As I mentioned in the first post, I may have double-counted a few women in one book where women were indexed by both married and maiden names. I excluded from counts of both men and women anything but actual names, however incomplete – that is, I excluded “First Presidency” and “Primary General Board” and “Apostles” and “Indian Relief Societies,” and did count “Mrs. Husband’s Name.” I pointed out discrepancies where I noticed them (e.g., Mercy Fielding’s name appearing in the text of one history, but not in its index). No, my methodology was hardly rigorous – I repeat, this is a blog post, not a doctoral dissertation. Even so, I tried to be transparent with what I counted and what I did not.

Okay, so I had counts. I could show readers that the number for men was much higher than the number for women. But numbers themselves don’t carry much emotional significance for most of us, so I tried to help readers grasp what those numbers were really saying. I gave numbers as percentages. I pointed out that in each book, this meant that there were so-and-so many men named for every one woman named. And I included a graph to give a visual idea of how few women were named.

When I wrote to Ziff – the Bloggernacle’s master of making numbers comprehensible through visual means – asking for help, I admitted that the illustration I hoped for was not statistically valid, but would at least give some visual sense for the disparity. After explaining my project, I told Ziff:

If you’re willing, would you make me a simple line graph that shows how slowly the percentage of women increases in those histories over the past almost 50 years, and, if possible, using that data – and I know three points isn’t much to work with, and that it isn’t enough to be accurate — when we might expect to have approximately 50% of the characters in our history be women. I’m just wanting a visual representation of how little women have been shown as contributing to the mission of the Church, ‘cuz I’m about to change that.

The graph does its job. It is a visual representation of the numbers revealed in those histories (not all histories, not all Deseret Book publications, not all Mormon writing, but in those histories), and it helps readers grasp how far away we are from women being taken seriously as contributors to building the Kingdom.

So that’s the point of the graph. I think it does its job, and I freely admit that it does not do jobs it was not intended to do. Alternate suggestions to instead count all publications by Deseret Book don’t even begin to address the job. Accusing me of being a stealth agent for Ordain Women in some sort of campaign to replace the prophets and apostles in our history with “housewives and Relief Society biddies” is also rather far from the mark.

Thanks again, Ziff. Your graph clearly illustrates the numbers I gave you to work with, and you cheerfully and immediately created the image I needed.

The “She Shall Be an Ensign” series:

Women as Actors in Church History
Addendum
Wicked Witches
Damsels in Distress
The Princess in the Tower
The Heroine’s Journey
The History of the Church Told through the Lives of Its Women