Salt Lake City, USA - Chantal Thompson was not surprised when her family disowned her for joining the LDS Church. They had warned her they would.
But Thompson, a young French woman who believed she had found eternal truth, was undeterred. She was baptized on her 18th birthday in the English Channel, as was her older sister. Though there were few Mormons at her French university and not many in the tiny branch where she attended services, she threw herself into church activity with gusto.
Four decades later, Thompson, now a Brigham Young University French professor, sees that same kind of independence and determination among many Mormon women outside the U.S. Many, especially those in some African nations and other Third World countries, face unimaginable hurdles not just in joining the LDS Church but in navigating their daily lives amid family responsibilities and economic hardship. But the church, with its all-volunteer leaders including those who direct the female Relief Society, provides a chance for such women to speak publicly and manage their own organization possibly for the first time in their lives.
Membership growth internationally means that it is becoming nearly impossible to speak in general about "women in the LDS church," says Melissa Proctor, who teaches Mormon studies at Harvard.
"The most pressing issues for North American Mormon women may not even be on the radar screen outside of the U.S. and vice versa," Proctor says. "Historically controversial 'women's' issues such as male-only priesthood, prayer to Mother in Heaven, and mothers working outside the home remain central to some contemporary American Mormon women, but these issues are largely irrelevant to international converts for whom grinding poverty may be the most urgent woman's issue."
Debates about motherhood vs. career are largely absent even among churchgoing Mormons in more developed nations of Europe or Asia.
"If a woman even with young children chooses to work, no one would criticize," says BYU's Thompson, who has three children and seven grandchildren. "But the European governments make it easier for women with children to stay home. You get money from the government. American life is not at all conducive to doing both."
In Belgium, most LDS converts are women, often single or single mothers, and nearly always have jobs (not necessarily in "careers," but out of economic necessity), Carinne Decoo said in an e-mail. A fair number are struggling immigrants for whom jobs mean survival.
Belgian schools prepare girls to be independent women, get degrees and join the workforce, same as for boys, Decoo, a church member in Antwerp, writes. Decades of emancipation struggle, social laws, education, anti-discrimination rules on the work floor, etc., have made the presence of women in the workforce, on all levels, and in leading positions, "natural."
Still, international Mormon audiences often value the church's emphasis on traditional families. Some new female converts would be pleased to have a husband who provides for their children, treats her with dignity and doesn't smoke or drink.
"Many people who wouldn't necessarily be interested in Christianity, or in a new brand of it, are very interested in something that promises to strengthen their families," says Kristine Haglund, who edited a special women's issue of Sunstone, an independent magazine of Mormon ideas. "The church has grown especially rapidly in places where women's roles are more circumscribed than in the contemporary U.S. and that tends to reinforce the idea of a two-parent, many-children, dad-earns, mom-nurtures kind of family as an eternal verity and a marker of accepting the gospel."