The New “AT LAST SHE SAID IT” Book
Essay collection by Susan Hinckley & Cynthia Winward, reviewed by Ynna Padilla
The At Last She Said It project began with Susan Hinckley and Cynthia Winward’s realization that many of their discussions about being women in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were aligned. Yet, there was still no real platform to address their issues or connect with other like-minded people. “We should start a podcast!” began as their joke but now boasts more than two million downloads.
And now, Signature Books is publishing a book of Hinckley and Winward’s favorite topics, titled At Last She Said It: Honest Conversations About Faith, Church and Everything In Between. This is a tangible reminder of the actual sisters in Zion with the same complicated, nuanced, and unique perspectives on the Church.
ALSSI is organized into five main sections: “Dancing With the Patriarchy,” “Outside the Box,” “What About…?,” “It’s Complicated,” and “Embracing Your Journey,” with several of the authors’ conversational essays under each topic. The essays examine an array of ideas, traditions, and policies, ranging from inconveniences to outright misogyny. Hinckley and Winward share personal stories and their own candid conversations, successfully reassuring the reader that they are not the only ones who have thought about female ordination and/or the fact that any decision made by a woman in the Church can be overridden by a man (repeated throughout the collection and never got less painful to read).
The essay, “What Women Don’t Get in Our Church” begins with the challenge, “Flip the narrative and see how often we have Latter-day Saint men speak to other LDS men about their equality. Do men go on podcasts, write books, and give speeches about their equality? If that sounds silly it should. A man’s contributions to leadership in the Church are obvious. We would never have to convince men through talks, conferences, and podcasts that they’re as needed as women, yet that’s exactly what we do when we try to convince women that they have full equality in the church. Spoiler: if you have to explain equality, then it doesn’t exist. Equality would be measurable, factual, and obvious.” Winward goes on to list callings women are excluded from, followed by a staggering “ever larger list of duties and callings that ‘women don’t get’ despite ordination not being requisite.” This essay was a strong introduction to a solid collection examining what it would actually look like if men and women were treated and valued equally in the Church versus our current reality.
I was personally touched by Winward’s essay, “Why I Stay,” a topic I find myself pondering regularly.
In one of my favorite essays, “In Search of a Larger God,” Hinckley states, “So often what is missing for me in our religion is everything that cannot be said, that peace-giving space where we need not know any more than this moment and the people with whom we are in it. In that immediate place, knowledge is replaced by hope, which I find to be much more reliable, and how I live becomes a decision made to improve things here and now, one made out of love and not with an eye always trained on gilding my eternity. My life can be an exercise in love, and my God can be allowed to love without a lot of additional rules and regulations that quantify a child’s worthiness or God’s willingness.” This reminded me of the beauty of our human existence as a practice of love for one another, rather than a test of worthiness.
Under the topic, “What About . . . ?” the seemingly simple concepts of obedience, blessings, fear, faith, repentance, and worthiness are dissected and reveal deeper complexities and alternate ways to interact with the basic tenets of Mormonism. “Jesus said faith is enough so then why do we lean heavily on ‘I know’ language? If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and banish the phrase, ‘I know . . . ‘ from our testimonies and talks. I don’t think it has any place in our places of worship. Church is where we discuss things that are precisely not knowable . . . Knowing is rigid, but having faith is malleable.”
I was personally touched by Winward’s essay, “Why I Stay,” a topic I find myself pondering regularly. Winward was asked the same question by a friend, and the friend provided the response that the gospel must just “work for you,” to which Winward protested. “As I have thought more and more about that phrase — works for me — I have thought, my car works for me. My beloved Kitchen Aid mixer works for me. My car and my mixer make my life easier, kneading my bread so my arms don’t have to, or getting me to stores and appointments so I don’t have to walk or wait for a bus. But I’m not sure my affiliation with the Church makes my life easier. Perhaps assessing the value of something as making my life easier isn’t quite the metric for choosing, or sticking with, a religion. But there are certain aspects of my lifelong association with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that have ‘worked for me’ — not in the sense that they’ve made my life easier, but that they’ve added meaning and richness . . . Knowing that God loves me ‘works for me.’” She goes on to share her Mexican mother’s conversion story, and does not gloss over the colonialism of missionary work, but highlights the sense of community which greatly improved her mother’s life and ultimately ‘worked for her.’ My own Filipino parents joined the Church after years of staunch Catholicism, and similar stories of friendship and community were what drew them to the gospel and keep them active members today.
ALSSI is a thorough collection of the most discussed and debated topics in the Church and provides the comfort that we are not alone as intelligent women questioning historical practices and traditions.
Years ago, I attended a sacrament meeting in Seattle, Washington. I was friends with another woman in the ward who had a baby who was to be blessed that Sunday. Baby blessings have always made me uncomfortable. Why did a circle of men get to hold and present this baby to the ward, while the most important person in that child’s life sat in the congregation? This time, I was shocked and brought to tears when my friend joined the circle of men and held her baby for the entirety of the blessing. The small act of holding her child during his introduction to the Church felt like a small step towards progress and equality. I believe small acts like this one and the conversations in this book are steps of progress that must continue in our meetinghouses, homes, and AirPods. Amplifying diverse female voices in the Church is one of the missions of the Exponent II magazine, and this new ALSSI book is a gorgeous accomplishment of that same goal.
Ynna Padilla is a speech-language pathologist who enjoys reading novels, pilates, and surfing.
Learn more about the book: signaturebooks.com/books/p/at-last-she-said-it
Categories: Book Review
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