Handcart Books

Mormon Women: Portraits and Conversations

By Neylan McBaine

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Neylan's mother, whom she refers to in this article, is Ariel Bybee, noted mezzo-soprano who has sung in over 450 performances at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

As a child, I accompanied my mother to work far more often than I accompanied my father. Mom's work was way more fun than my dad's legal practice: She was an opera singer, the embodiment of a glamorous and glorious diva. In the bowels of the Metropolitan Opera House, the make-up artist would dash a bit of blush on my cheeks, the dressers would knit outfits for my Cabbage Patch Dolls while the singers were on stage. I learned early on to stand motionless behind the stage manager's desk while my mother took a calming breath before elegantly bearing an unfailingly elaborate costume into the magical world of the proscenium.

The fact that my mother worked while I was a child remains a defining element of my upbringing. I was so proud of her. I recognized early on the physical power required to sing unamplified to an auditorium of four thousand people and be heard perfectly over an orchestra. I loved the stories she acted in, the fairy tale doll coming to life in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman and the life and death passion of Bizet's Carmen.

But another element of my upbringing balanced out the egocentric grandeur of the stage. My mother was a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving as Primary President and Relief Society president in our Manhattan ward while portraying freewheeling Jenny in Mahagonny or the young boy Sesto in La Clemenza di Tito across the street from our chapel. Throughout my childhood, my mother successfully straddled both sides of Lincoln Center: on one side, she excelled on the Met stage, while on the other side, she faithfully attended and served in the Manhattan chapel.

The balance demonstrated so exceptionally by my mother allowed me to see that, despite the one-size-fits-all expectations that we sometimes embrace for women, there are many ways for a Mormon woman to choose the right. Constructing a life of faith and service was, for my mother, a grueling lifelong pursuit requiring an intense personal relationship with the Lord and an iron sense of self-worth. She appeared externally to have little in her life that mirrored the "ideal" Mormon woman template often preached from the pulpit: She did not have a Priesthood-bearing husband, she did not have a lovely suburban home, she did not have an abundance of children. She often felt judged for these perceived failures, but in her heart she understood the Lord's purpose for her.

"[Mormon] culture is unused to sustaining two identities in any one woman," wisely observes poet Emma Lou Thayne in the recently published book Mormon Women: Portraits and Conversations (Handcart Books, 2009). The co-existence of faith alongside a life in the world is the theme so movingly explored in the fourteen profiles of this book. Author James N. Kimball and photographer Kent Miles spent years traveling to Scotland, Japan, France, Brazil and throughout the United States interviewing and photographing Mormon women who are unlikely to fit the standard mold, but who live their religions with exceptional grace.

My mother's own dual identity as a singer and a Mormon woman finds companionship in the lives of these remarkable women. Consistently, these women successfully balance their faith with involvement in professional, civic, or service pursuits in a way that makes meaningful and lasting changes not only in their families but in the world around them.

"My culture idolizes the simplified woman, ardent and singular, bent to the collective and determined to serve it," Thayne continues in her profile. "The idea of the radiant mother, which I have been a part of for nearly forty years, is not something I would abandon. But a concomitant life beckoned, the life of those poets. It's one of the great human dilemmas: How could I live both lives and be fulfilled without sometimes neglecting one or the other? Mostly by being tired in the morning."

What mother hasn't felt that pull at the end of the day when the little ones are tucked in bed to invest in something that confirms her own intelligence, her own spiritual longings, her own creative goals? And what mother hasn't woken up the next morning, on far too little sleep, bemoaning but never regretting that sacred second life? The passions and skills of Mormon women vary in the time invested and the recognition received, but the constant back-and-forth tug between ourselves and those we serve is common to us all.

For my mother, this balance was defined in part by the fact that she had only one child. While she mostly gave up international performance to be home with me, she might have had to sacrifice more of her career -- or the whole thing -- if she had had more children. Similarly, many women profiled in Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations have never married or have small nuclear families, giving them the time and impetus to invest in lives outside the traditional Mormon family structure. Cecile Pelous, a fashion designer from Paris, was not able to have children of her own, giving her the time and means to start an orphanage in Nepal. She is now the official, adoptive mother of seventy-nine Nepalese children. "They are now in my genealogy," she explains in her profile. "I have learned that I am not important, but I am sure that the time and effort I have given has changed the lives of so many children. For me, it isn't necessary that I personally give life to a baby. I am mother to a hundred and thirty-eight [the number served in her orphanage]."

Catherine M. Stokes, a public health administrator profiled in the book, identifies the inverse relationship between time required by a family and the time required to pursue an outside interest: "All women are single at some point in their lives. You're single before you marry, and most women outlive their husbands, and they're single again. You can have a wonderful life being single. You can serve. As a matter of fact, you may be in a situation of being freer to serve because you don't have immediate responsibilities for someone else."

It's not surprising then that almost half of the women profiled were not married long-term or have only one child. So is the lesson of the book that we must give up abundant, life-long familial relationships in order to make a public impact on the world around us?

Absolutely not. While women with smaller families may have more time and energy to invest outside of their homes, the book also highlights women who fit the Mormon prototype: Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Emma Lou Thayne, Christine Durham, Victoria Fong Kesler and Carol Gray all have followed the model that eluded my own mother. All around retirement age, each has been married to the same man and has born an abundance of children. The life model celebrated by these women is that of "times and seasons." Each spent years in the trenches of motherhood, fulfilling years of traditional service at home and at Church. But life is long, and these women found an evening here and a morning there to piece together advance degrees, publications, teaching jobs or small business ideas. Englishwoman Carol Gray enlisted her grown daughter to help her deliver 27 convoys of aid supplies to the Balkan War zone. Kiyo Tanaka serves as a news anchor for the deaf, using everyday the gift of sign language given to her by her deaf parents to serve the community around her. Each woman's life remains entwined with Church and family, but the long reaches of time, age and experience have allowed her to extend her skills beyond her home.

While my mother pursued music professionally, I dedicated thousands of hours in my youth to studying solo piano. Aside from the hours spent at school, nothing else in my life required so much time and commitment as my piano studies. Once, as a teenager, I had the opportunity to visit with a revered older woman who had held positions of Church-wide leadership and who seemed to me to embody supreme womanly spiritual grandeur. She too had spent thousands of hours as a youth committed to piano studies, and had been accepted to The Juilliard School for college where I was currently attending a high-school program. A woman even attending college in her era was a major accomplishment, and to be accepted to the world's greatest conservatory an even greater honor. She pulled me close as she continued her own story: "Neylan, I never went," she told me as my mouth dropped in bewilderment. "I loved the piano too much. I felt that if I gave my all to the piano, as Juilliard would require, I wouldn't have enough room in my life to love the Savior."

My older friend's story left me confused and somewhat discouraged. As a Mormon woman myself with a thousand joys and curiosities in my life, did I have enough time, enough emotional and physical energy, to serve the Lord sufficiently?

Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations offers a hallowed relief to those women like me who have lived with a question mark over their multihued lives. Yes! if affirms. You may be tired in the morning, but over the course of a life, faith and family can walk hand in hand with a life of worldly work. The women's stories are a spectacular and long-overdue testament to our historically underestimated capacity.

The aftertaste of that initial affirmation is, however, slightly bitter. Upon reflection, the stories might seem in fact too spectacular. While thrilled that our culture is represented in the broader world by such richly woven lives, I also found myself feeling a little overwhelmed by the greatness of it all. What does this greatness mean for me? Am I still justified in pursuing my "concomitant life," as Emma Lou Thayne describes her non-motherly pursuits, even if I never win a Pulitzer Prize (Laurel Thatcher Ulrich), become governor of my province (Lea Rosser) or survive a Stalinist gulag in Siberia (Tsobinar Tadevosyan)?

The answer -- as it is in all of these women's lives -- is in the balance. As personal examples to other Mormon women, they prove that one can live a gospel life without reproach and still carve out time and energy for non-stereotypical interests. As representatives of our culture, these women offer balance too: rather than setting a new, unreachable standard for what Mormon women are expected to do, they serve merely as a necessary and belated counter weight to the convention of the simple woman that has too long defined seven million diverse sisters.

Association of Mormon Letters

by Lisa Olsen Tait
April 2009

I loved this book. That could be my entire review. Period. But I know I'm supposed to say more than that, so here goes.

Mormon Women is a collection of fourteen "conversations" with Mormon women from all over the world. Their life stories are incredibly varied. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich grew up in a small Mormon town in Idaho and then went on to become a highly decorated historian and Harvard professor. Angela Cummings grew up in Germany and became a much sought-after jewelry designer. Along the way she married, became a Latter-day Saint, and had a child. Maria Consuelo Dimaya was an anti-government guerilla in the Phillipines and spent time in jail before meeting the missionaries and becoming a member of the Church. Lea Rosser grew up in Australia in an LDS family and, through a process she describes as "serendipity" has become a senior government executive and was city manager of Auburn during the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

And so on.

Each chapter begins with a short (very short) biographical profile of a woman, accompanied by a beautiful photographic portrait. The chapter then consists of each woman's story, in her own words. Each woman's voice comes through with clarity and strength, and I was left wishing I could continue the conversation.

Kimball, a travel writer, and Miles, a photographer, began this project in the mid-1990s. Following a suggestion from Miles's father, they decided to focus on LDS women. As Miles describes it in his Preface:

"We both wanted to focus on women who inspired us, who were doing their best to live the gospel while negotiating the deep waters of modern-day life. We were interested in women notable for their own accomplishments, rather than who they were married to. Women of high position in the Church already had plenty of official visibility. We wanted to dispel the stereotypes about Mormon women, held by some and reinforced by popular media. We wanted to interview women of courage, valor and compassion. In retrospect, we were looking for women not unlike our own mothers and wives, sisters and daughters."

Kimball and Miles spent several years and traveled literally around the world to interview over thirty women. When Kimball died of a brain tumor in 2004, the project lay dormant for a few years until Miles picked it back up and finished it. The downside to the lengthy development process of the book is that many of the interviews are more than a decade old. Some chapters contain recent updates from the women profiled, and it would have been nice to have this for all of them (except Gulag survivor Tsobinar Tadevosyan, who died in 2006).

Miles notes in his Preface that he and Kimball were keenly aware of their identity as Latter-day Saint men and wondered "Does anybody really need more men talking on behalf of women?" It speaks highly of our authors that they even recognized this question. The answer, they decided, was to become "documentarians." "We would base the project on something done too rarely," Miles says, "Women conversing about women's lives. We would get them talking, and we would listen."

As I have said, this approach results in a strong voice from each woman interviewed. On the other hand, it means that Kimball's and Miles's role as interviewers was completely obscured. We are left to conjecture what questions the women responded to and why they chose to speak about the things they did. The chapters do not read as true "conversations," therefore, since only one side of the exchange is represented. I kept debating whether it would have been an improvement to be able to see both sides.

Sometimes I found myself wanting to know more about each woman's relationship to the Church and, when applicable, her conversion story. The chapter with Tsobinar Tadevosyan, for example, gives almost no attention to how she became acquainted with the gospel. Of course, the rest of her story, about how she survived life in the Soviet gulag, was compelling enough, and I recognized that my desire to hear "foreigners'" conversion stories is probably the result of cultural conditioning wherein we "Utah Mormons" encounter our international counterparts primarily as "converts" whose process of joining the Church is the only aspect of their lives that matters. Mormon Women introduces us to LDS women from all over the world who are presented as more than just "converts."

This is perhaps the aspect of the book that I found most exciting. We are constantly hearing about how the Church is a worldwide organization, but we rarely get to hear the stories and voices of our sisters (and brothers) abroad, talking about themselves and their lives in any detail or complexity. I would like to see many more efforts of this kind to bring Latter-day Saints (male and female) into conversation with one another from around the globe.

The overriding question I came away from this book with was this: What makes a woman "ordinary" or "extraordinary"? It is clear that most of these women consider themselves quite ordinary, and yet their accomplishments and experiences are anything but. If we want to better understand the category "Mormon Women" are these the women we should be talking to? I don't ask that question by way of criticism. I think it's something the book invites us to ponder. Is there really any such thing as "ordinary"?

I spend a lot of time studying the legendary Mormon women of the past-Eliza R. Snow, Zina D.H. Young, Susa Young Gates, and the "leading sisters" of nineteenth-century Mormondom who were not only pioneers but who were involved in so many important, compelling causes and events. There is often a sort of implied narrative about Mormon women that places such accomplished, active women in the past and sees contemporary Mormon women as less engaged in the world. Mormon Women shows that this perception is not true.

I highly recommend this book.

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Book explores varied roles of Mormon women

By Lisa Carricaburu
The Salt Lake Tribune
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They are mothers and wives, sisters and daughters. They are people you know.

Some are easily recognizable for their accomplishments; others are not.

But read their stories, told in the new book Mormon Women: Portraits and Conversations (Handcart Press, $15.95), and these women will teach you things you may not have known about, well, Mormon women.

Kent Miles and the late James N. Kimball set out to explore the diverse experiences of faithful Latter-day Saints. The 14 subjects of Mormon Women are not "cookie-cutter versions" of anything, he says.

"There isn't adequate exposure in the church and the world to the kinds of women who are in the church," Miles says. "These are women with really interesting stories [who demonstrate] there are all kinds of things we can do without throwing out our standards. Our values are a foundation, not a limitation."

Miles, a photographer, and Kimball, an entrepreneur who died of a brain tumor in 2004 before the book was completed, started in Utah but ended up traveling extensively to interview women, who include Catherine Stokes, a public-health nurse in Chicago; Maria Consuelo Dimayo, a former guerrilla medic in the Philippines; and Tsobinar Tatevosian, an Armenian woman who spent five years in a Russian gulag.

Their book also features interviews with U.S. scholars Claudia Bushman and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Scottish mystery novelist Anne Perry, Utah poet Emma Lou Thayne and Utah Supreme Court Justice Christine Durham.

"Each interview was a gift," Miles writes in the book's introduction. "Each woman clearly revealed what is meant by the LDS doctrine that we are all sons and daughters of God."

He acknowledges some may find it odd that two men wrote a book about Mormon women, but he believes their involvement adds an important dimension to the book.

"You don't have to be a woman to appreciate the nature of the conversations" the pair had with the women, he said. "Because we were listening in the way we were listening, the nature of the conversation was different than it would have been had we not been men. ... The book has a different voice that is approachable by any audience."

For her part, Utah poet and author Thayne says she was thrilled to be part of the project because its goal of providing a broader view of Mormon women is her personal goal as well.

She raised five daughters while also teaching, writing, coaching and serving in church leadership positions, including the Young Women's general board and the Deseret News board.

"I never felt like I was neglecting my family. I always said I can love you with all my heart but not with all my time," Thayne says. "I've always felt life was a both-end thing rather than either or."

Thayne says she has always been and continues to be a faithful Latter-day Saint.

"I've simply always thought [women] had every right to have our own sense of things," Thayne says. "I never felt like a rebel, only that I wanted to open more vistas."

She hopes the book will succeed for what it can add to the conversation.

Miles hopes so, too.

If the book does well, Miles hopes to produce a second volume based on interviews he and Kimball did that were not included in the first volume. "If there's interest, I'll definitely carry on," he says.

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These are women of great insight

By Jerry Johnston
Mormon Times
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
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There's a saying in the LDS Church that the men tend to be theologians while the women tend to be Christians.

In their new book, "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations," Kent Miles and the late Jim Kimball seem determined to make the second part of that notion stick.

I read through the book over LDS conference weekend, and I am proud to say I know several of the sisters profiled in it.

I am also chagrined there are several I've never even heard of.

But most of all, I am delighted the book has finally seen the light of day. It has been a long time coming.

About a dozen years ago, my wife and I ended up at a dinner party with Kent and Jim just as their project was gaining steam. The late member of the Seventy -- Elder Hugh W. Pinnock -- was also there. And so was Catherine M. Stokes, one of the women featured in the book.

What I remember most about that evening is the frank and passionate conversation between Elder Pinnock and Cathy -- a black sister from Illinois.

The church had built a chapel on the South Side of Chicago, I recall, in a dicey section where insurance rates were through the roof. Cathy wondered why the church hadn't built the chapel on the North Side, so the disadvantaged brothers and sisters would have a reason to escape their lot. It would be a chance for the poverty-stricken to find a better way.

Elder Pinnock was just as adamant. He said the gospel had to be taken to the people; it couldn't stand on the outside and beckon. It had to be preached in their midst, wherever they were.

It was a fascinating conversation. I heard no disrespect in the exchanges. In fact, I sensed a lot of affection. (I also felt the temperature in the dining room rise a few degrees.)

I left that night with newfound admiration for Elder Pinnock and also admiration for Cathy Stokes and other sisters like her. She was competent, confident and very comfortable with herself and others. She was a woman with a lot to offer.

And I think that, in the end, is what this book is all about.

With handsome portraits by photographer Kent Miles and personal written "portraits" penned by each sister herself, "Mormon Women" left me with this thought: It's possible to be as lovely as a lily without becoming a shrinking violet.

Not everyone -- male or female -- has what it takes to become an international author like Anne Perry, a Supreme Court justice like Christine Durham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian like Laurel Thatcher Ulrich or a battlefield medic like Maria Consuelo Dimaya. But those who do have that moxie should be celebrated.

In short, these women need to be put in their place. And their place isn't on a pedestal -- it's next to the ear of everyone who seeks wisdom. What they have to say is of "good report." Their insights belong among the traditions of our tribe.

"Mormon Women" (Handcart Books, 228 pages, $18.95) is available at Deseret Book and -- as the old line goes -- "wherever good books are sold."

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Book dispels stereotypes of Mormon women

By Steve Fidel
Mormon Times
See original story

Friday, April 03, 2009

A collection of interviews and portraits of 14 unique individuals describes the vastly different life experiences of people with two common elements: All of those interviewed are women who are also Mormons.

"We wanted to dispel the stereotypes about Mormon women, held by some and reinforced by popular media," writes photographer Kent Miles, who spent years with friend and travel writer James N. Kimball searching out unique women and documenting their stories for "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations."

Individuals might find themselves in church each Sunday with any one of these women, but it would be inconceivable to imagine encountering all of them without the kind of extraordinary research and world travel it took to bring this collection together.

Kimball died in 2004 of a brain tumor, before the book project was finished, and the recently released work is dedicated to him.

"Jim and I thought these women had stories everyone would benefit from hearing," said Miles, whose environmental portraiture illuminates the character of his subjects, compelling readers to look at the people, not just see their pictures.

"These are ordinary LDS women. And that is what this book celebrates," Miles writes in the book's preface. But "ordinary" in this collection is further defined as "women notable for their own accomplishments, rather than who they were married to," or women of high position in the church, who "already had plenty of official visibility."

A few of the women profiled are known in Utah or elsewhere in Latter-day Saint circles, like Utah Supreme Court Chief Justice Christine Durham or Salt Lake poet and author Emma Lou Thayne.

Others are literally and figuratively strangers to mainstream Mormon culture. One example is Maria Consuelo Dimaya, who was a guerilla medic for communist rebels fighting the Marcos government in the Philippines before she and her husband investigated and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"I remember being overwhelmed by the matter-of-fact way Maria 'Chelito' Dimaya told of being captured and tortured by the Filipino military. She bore her testimony to me that the Mormon Church had more power to instigate social change than all the guns and all the revolutionaries in the world, because the gospel of Christ changed the hearts and desires of people."

Thayne talks about an upbringing in a Mormon culture "unused to sustaining two identities in any one woman."

"The idea of the radiant mother, which I have been a part of for nearly forty years, is not something I would abandon," she says. "But a concomitant life beckoned, the life of those poets. It's one of the great human dilemmas: How could I live both lives and be fulfilled without sometimes neglecting one or the other? Mostly by being tired in the morning."

Also interviewed in the book are humanitarian Carol Gray of Sheffield, England; Salt Lake jewelry designer and business owner Angela Cummings; Auburn, Australia, City Manager Lea Rosser; homemaker and mother of 12 Victoria Fong Kesler of Rifle, Colo.; history professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich of Cambridge, Mass.; public health administrator Catherine M. Stokes of Chicago, gulag survivor Tsobinar Tadevosyan of Yerevan, Armenia; mystery novelist Anne Perry of Ross-Shire, Scotland; news anchor for the deaf Kiyo Tanaka of Yokohama, Japan; fashion designer and humanitarian Cecile Pelous of Paris; and teacher and city council member Raquel Ribeiro of Santo Antonio do Pinhal, Brazil.

The book's foreword is by Utah's first and only female governor, Olene Walker. "The women in this book have made great achievements, but each one of them had to balance her professional life with the needs of her family and her church," Walker writes. "When we find that balance in our lives, when we work hard to look to our Heavenly Father for strength, I am convinced that we can achieve more than we ever dreamed possible."

Fewer than half of Kimball and Miles' interviews are published in "Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations," opening the possibility of an expanded or additional work in the future.

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James Kimball (1936-2004) spent years traveling the globe gathering the stories contained in Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations. A travel writer and Salt Lake City businessman, Jim was a community treasure, famous for his hilarious retelling of stories about J. Golden Kimball, his great uncle and Mormon folk hero. Jim died in 2004, before this last book was complete. He is survived by his wife, Joan, and their children.

Kent Miles is a widely renowned Salt Lake portrait photographer who specializes in fine art portraits in a classic documentary style. He attended Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, where Ansel Adams handed him his diploma. His work includes numerous documentary projects highlighting ethnic and minority communities of Utah

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A book like this is long overdue, and so it is a great honor for me to write the foreword to Mormon Women: Portraits & Conversations. This book recognizes the impact women can have in all aspects of our rapidly changing world, celebrating the insight, courage and determination these women bring to their lives. I feel especially privileged because two of these women, Emma Lou Thayne and Christine Durham, are close friends, mentors and role models who have had a lasting impact on my life.

These are stories of hope and inspiration. There is a common thread of service and faith, as these fourteen women have excelled in their respective realms. Each of their journeys is unique, illustrating what one ordinary person can accomplish when they put their trust in the Lord. What great examples and guideposts they are for women everywhere who have the desire to reach out and make the world a better place.

I met Emma Lou Thayne in college, and I have many fond memories of time spent with her during those years. Soon I became aware of her amazing academic abilities. Over the years we have remained close, and when it came time to refine my inaugural speech, I immediately thought of her magical use of words. Christine Durham is a person for whom I have always had the greatest respect and admiration. She is a woman of tremendous insight and wisdom, and I relied on her expertise while I served in the legislative and executive branches for the State of Utah. Indeed it was a highlight for me when Chief Justice Durham (a woman) swore me in as fifteenth Governor of Utah (a woman).

I was touched as I read about the heroism of Carol Gray, leading convoys into war-torn Bosnia; how she knew that "when the Lord is on your side, when you have a desire to help, He gives you the ability to do it." This is a wish I have for all women-to reach inside themselves, discover their inner potential, and put that knowledge to good use. Every woman is a daughter of God, capable of accomplishing tasks that only seem insurmountable.

I was equally impressed when I read the story of Cecile Pelous helping orphans in India and Nepal. She exemplifies what can happen when one has the desire to serve and wholeheartedly embraces a worthwhile cause. Cecile states, "Serving them, I discover in myself talent and energy that I never would have sought for myself. I have been able to do much more than I thought possible, without previous training, but with the sincere desire to serve."

This book gives the reader an opportunity to get to know these women, their families, and share in their life experiences. Scattered around the globe, they all have different stories to tell, but they all discovered that every individual has the ability not only to serve God, but to serve their fellow people. No matter the setting, be it a prison in Siberia, the fashion world of Paris, or the academic world of Harvard, women, Mormon or otherwise, have the capacity to make meaningful and lasting changes.

It is my hope that in reading these stories, women everywhere will be inspired to know that they have the potential within themselves to accomplish the desires of their hearts. And one important lesson that I have learned along the way is that you have to find balance in your life, the balance that works best for you and not anyone else. The women in this book have made great achievements, but each one of them had to balance her professional life with the needs of her family and her church. When we find that balance in our lives, when we work hard and look to our Heavenly Father for strength, I am convinced that we can achieve more than we ever dreamed possible.

Governor Olene Walker
St. George, Utah
January 2009

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Jim Kimball and I were friends for thirty years when we began work on this book. For a long time we had wanted to do a project together, but nothing ever got off the ground. One day my father made a suggestion: "Why not tell the story of Mormon women. They're really key to the success of the LDS Church, but their story never gets told." Right away, Jim and I knew we had found our project.

There was just one problem: we happened to be two Mormon men. What made us think that a book about women should be put together by a couple of guys? Shouldn't it be a women's project? Does anybody really need more men talking on behalf of women?

We decided that our role would be as documentarians. We would base the project on something done too rarely: women conversing about women's lives. We would get them talking, and we would listen.

We both wanted to focus on women who inspired us, who were doing their best to live the gospel while negotiating the deep waters of modern-day life. We were interested in women notable for their own accomplishments, rather than who they were married to. Women of high position in the Church already had plenty of official visibility. We wanted to dispel the stereotypes about Mormon women, held by some and reinforced by popular media. We wanted to interview women of courage, valor and compassion. In retrospect, we were looking for women not unlike our own mothers and wives, sisters and daughters.

Where to begin? Like good returned missionaries, we started with friends and asked them for referrals. There was no shortage. Everyone knew a woman who should be included. We started with people in and around Utah. Soon we were in Los Angeles, then the East Coast. Eventually, we would find our way to Russia, Ukraine, South Africa, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Hong Kong, the Philippines and Australia.

We spent years traveling the globe, eventually interviewing more the thirty women. The project gave us wonderful and surprising experiences. I remember visiting Dornach, Scotland, in 1996, where we met with Anne Perry. At church, she was just one of the branch members, just "Sister Perry." There was no sense that fame and fortune had separated her from the rest of the congregation.

I remember being overwhelmed by the matter-of-fact way Maria "Chelito" Dimaya told of being captured and tortured by the Filipino military. She bore her testimony to me that the Mormon Church had more power to instigate social change than all the guns and all the revolutionaries in the world, because the gospel of Christ changed the hearts and desires of people. As we concluded our interview, she told me she was going to look for a new place to live. A typhoon the previous week had flooded her family out, yet she still had taken the time for our interview.

I remember Tsobinar Tadevosyan talking about her imprisonment in the Soviet Gulag and how the experience had been a great blessing to her. Everyone there had been prisoners of conscience, the shining lights of her generation, and she was grateful to be included among them.

Everywhere we traveled, each interview was a gift. Jim and I thought these women's stories ought to be heard by everyone. They each display the courage to allow their natural talents, abilities and interests to find expression in their lives. They each make the best effort to live according to gospel standards, but they are not perfect. They make sacrifices, finding their way as they go, making compromises between the demands of life when they need to. But they do not allow themselves to become enslaved by external expectations. They roll with life's punches. When they're knocked down, they get up, dust themselves off, adapt to the lessons learned, and go on to do what is in them to do.

These are ordinary LDS women. And that is what this book celebrates.

* * *

In late 2003, Jim was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He passed away the next spring. He made it clear that he wanted our project finished and published, but it was difficult to carry on without the spark of his irresistible humor. Mormon Women was put on the back burner, but never forgotten.

In late 2007, I got a call from Cambria Judd and Michelle Williams-they are neighbors of Jim's son, Ted. They had gotten a hold of the manuscript and were determined to see the project finished. We all met to evaluate the existing material. Our fears were that it might have become dated with the passing of almost a decade. In reality, the interviews seemed to increase in relevance and timeliness. The women we spoke with had tapped into a wellspring of wisdom and human experience.

Ted's desire to honor his father's legacy, combined with Cami pushing and Michelle pulling, made it possible for us to bring this book to life. With the help of the good people at Handcart Books, we came up with a plan to publish a first volume that would include fourteen of the interviews we conducted, along with portraits I took at the time of each interview.

There are still many stories to tell.

Kent Miles
Salt Lake City, Utah
July 2008

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