19 thoughts on “LDS Teaching and Learning: The View from 1970”

1. Females looking admiringly on while males take the lead…?

2. I initially thought “Tesĺ akme a pnla” was some foreign language — who uses an acute accent with the letter “l”?!

   Cate, I think those two must have gone on to be the models for the recently-notorious “mansplaining” statue.

3. As I scrolled down, I saw children, youth, and adults. I saw happiness and faith. It wasn’t until the comments that I saw some readers were offended. Is there anything wrong with a male sharing something with a female?

   I prefer my perspective. Yeah, I know — privilege and patriarchy and all that. But I see it as innocent and charitable.

4. It isn’t innocent when you’re the girl faced constantly with those images of boys being actively engaged and girls being passive watchers. It just isn’t, ji, whether you acknowledge that or not.

   You can fairly ask whether there were other models during the same time period where girls were the leaders. You can fairly ask whether real-life modeling was different from the view of page designers. There are lots of legitimate questions to ask that might challenge the images shown here.

   But to say that this constant modeling held before the eyes of girls is “innocent and charitable” is simply false. You don’t know what you’re talking about — or worse, you don’t want to know what you’re talking about.

5. I’ve wanted to blog about this, but haven’t found the right hook: I’ve always loved church history. In my youth it never occurred to me that I could add anything myself, though — I remember a specific interior monologue I had in 1979, while sitting in a religion class at BYU, when I sadly concluded that I could never “do” history because I was a girl. Church history to me was Joseph Smith and the receipt of the Book of Mormon and visions and organizing the church, and girls couldn’t have anything to say about that because it took priesthood and revelation to know anything more, or to expound or interpret, Joseph Smith’s visions.

   Obviously I didn’t have a sufficiently broad idea of what history is, or an understanding of the difference between devotion and scholarship. But why did I not realize that girls could have something to say about church history, even in that limited context of Joseph Smith’s visions? Because I was born in 1959 and raised on a steady barrage of stories and life models through Sunday School and Seminary and BYU where all the teaching was done by men in their roles as priesthood leaders. Images like these reinforced that impression. Women didn’t teach, except the girly lessons in Primary and MIA. Women taught about babysitting and cooking and dating and makeup. Any real gospel instruction was given by men, in their roles as priesthood leaders.

   And I didn’t know enough to question that.

6. Thanks, Ardis, for your comments. I couldn’t agree more.

7. Thank you, Gary. Between ji and Ralph Hancock, I needed that today.

8. I look back on the church classes I was attending back in 1970, and the first two images are not representative at all. As I remember, the boys wrestled in the back of the classroom as some of the girls watched and a few girls cowered on the front row trying to stay out of the fight while answering the teacher’s questions. By 1979, at least the boys tended to remain head up at feet down.

   I remember having both men and women as teachers, but I also remember both groups teaching, at least implicitly, a few weird things in regards to being female.

9. I thought the puzzle in the first picture was the boy acting as scribe for the girl solving the puzzle! After all, her mouth is open & his mouth is closed. When I was teaching Primary, it was usually the girls who solved the puzzles first.

10. Well, we are all glad you overcame that limited perspective of BYU Religion classes. These kinds of subliminal messages are pervasive. I remember my older brother’s two kids arguing back in the late 1970s, with my nephew telling his sister, “Some day you will have to obey me, because I will have the priesthood.” I believe they were 10 and 8 at the time, and I don’t think it is anything my brother or his wife specifically tried to teach them.

11. Speaking of subliminal messages, everyone’s pretty white, too…

12. That last photograph looks perfectly natural. What couple among us doesn’t put on their Sunday Best and stroll through the woods on an autumn day so they can sit down on logs by a brook for scripture study with the worthy priesthood holder expounding scripture to an audience posed in rapt attention? Who of us hasn’t done that, or countless times encountered couples so posed and well-clad in the forest?

    Did anyone else notice in the other photograph, that the young man is providing helpful enlightenment from his friend’s triple combination? Dudes don’t carry white leather scriptures.

13. All 3 of my daughters, as well as my son, would refer to the young woman in the last picture as a “BYU bimbette” – a term one of them picked up a college that quickly spread to the others. General definition: big smile, no brain.

    Yes, they are aware that Mom graduated from said university. They told me since I got a “real degree”, it didn’t apply.

14. Left Field, you made me laugh out loud. And I’m at work!

15. Ardis, a picture is worth a thousand words, indeed. You are doing important work here.

16. About 15 years ago, the assignment in an intro to women’s studies class was to look at photos in a magazine written for a general audience, and count the number of photos showing men or women. Which sex was pictured more often? I analyzed a conference issue of the Ensign, and found that men were shown slightly more frequently than women. I think it’s getting better. To go further, I now see more people of various ethnic groups in its illustrations and photos. But then I wondered: should the illustrations achieve parity with the makeup of the intended audience?

17. The Conference issue has been pretty good for a number of years now, not only in picture male and female attendants, but also different races and nationalities — they may be conscious of that in part because of the emphasis of the Church as a world-wide institution.

    I’m also aware of a directive to Church magazine staffs and the publications divisions of various departments of the Church, given a year or so ago, to be conscious of who appears in illustrations. The reason that was passed on to me by several people in attendance at one presentation was because I had done some posts not long before about singles in the Church, and one part of the directive was to avoid the exclusive use of obvious family groups, to include pictures of individuals and of groupings that were not necessarily a couple and their children.

    Illustrations do carry a message, intended or not. If you’re the art director and you choose attractive images like the ones shown above because they “look right” to you, then they reflect your own worldview without your being aware of the message they send beyond the mere depiction of, say, “studying the scriptures.” I’m glad they’re paying attention to that. It matters.

18. One of my Argentine companions was really mad after looking at the conference Ensign. When I got her to tell me why, she said that they only take pictures of people with perfect teeth! They never show normal people with missing or crooked teeth. Yeah, it started a new way of looking at things for me.

19. FWIW, the first two seemed pretty neutral to me. The first looks like maybe the boy posed a puzzle the girl is solving; after closer analysis, he’s holding the chalk, so maybe that puts him in a superior position? But I wouldn’t have thought that without the comments after the post. The second looks to me like the boy and girl are studying together, with neither leading or teaching or being in charge.

    But that third photo — yikes! I have a hard time imagining that wasn’t cringe-worthy the day it was taken. We’ve made some progress in the last 40 years.

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