Sonia Johnson
About the Book
Few figures in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints provoke such visceral responses as Sonia Johnson. Her unrelenting public support of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) made her the face of LDS feminism while her subsequent excommunication roiled the faith community.Christine Talbot tells the story of Sonia's historic confrontation with the Church within the context of the faith's first large-scale engagement with the feminist movement. A typical if well-educated Latter-day Saints homemaker, Sonia was moved to action by the all-male LDS leadership's opposition to the ERA and a belief the Church should stay out of politics. Talbot uses the activist's experiences and criticisms to explore the ways Sonia's ideas and situation sparked critical questions about LDS thought, culture, and belief. She also illuminates how Sonia's excommunication shaped LDS feminism, the Church's antagonism to feminist critiques, and the Church itself in the years to come.
A revealing and long-overdue account, Sonia Johnson explores the life, work, and impact of the LDS feminist.
About the Author
Christine Talbot is a professor in the Gender Studies Program at the University of Northern Colorado. She is the author of A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852-1890.Also by this author
Reviews
"Christine Talbot expertly navigates her way through the narrative of church courts and legal proceedings, challenges to ecclesiastical authority and leadership (both male and female), and the on-going manipulation of the media that both helped and harmed Johnson through these years. This short book is valuable, well researched and competently argued."--Nova Religio"Talbot does not portray a heroine, a martyr, or a villain but a woman who found a cause and went for it, missteps and all. . . . This book offers a look at the national effects of Johnson’s work that is somewhat lost in her first-person writing."--Utah Historical Quarterly
Blurbs
“Talbot’s treatment of Sonia Johnson’s life and thought is deeply researched and wonderfully presented. It offers new information and fresh analysis of well-told stories. The result is an excellent study of Johnson’s rather remarkable journey through two turbulent decades of the 1970s- and 1980s-women’s movement and her own personal clash with her leaders in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Johnson's story reveals so much about activism, gender, and power in her church, the feminist movement, and the United States.”--Taylor Petrey, author of Tabernacles of Clay: Sexuality and Gender in Modern Mormonism
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