Save the Women's Research Institute!

BYU is closing the Women's Research Institute (WRI).

This makes me want to bawl... scream... hug Bonnie (the director of the WRI)... do something drastic... and generally make a ruckus.

For the past three years I've had the dreaded feeling that this would happen. During my last year of working as a research assistant there (I worked there almost 4 years) all our other research got pushed aside trying to get materials together for the "review" BYU was doing on the institute. It was awful. We were constantly trying to find ways to prove to the university and the review board that what the WRI was doing was useful and important. The whole time we were working on it I kept asking myself... why? Why is this even a question? This institute studies women's experiences, relationships between men and women, women's welfare, and the impact women have on the world... aren't women useful and important?

The WRI was a godsend in my life. When I started at BYU I was young and very confused and bitter about women's roles in society and within the LDS church. Through the WRI I met women and had discussions that changed my heart, answered my hard questions and healed my soul. Another women who worked at the WRI wrote an article in the Exponent that captured exactly how I feel. She said:

"... it was the lessons I learned in my women’s studies classes that influenced my ideas of marriage and motherhood. I have a happy marriage because I was taught gender theory and was looking for equal partnership. I love being a mother because my teachers not only validated motherhood as a feminist choice but provided models of how to be a mother without losing one’s self. I am still a faithful, temple-recommend holding member of the church because my teachers acknowledged the painful and problematic aspects of our doctrine and provided me with enough satisfactory answers to stay. And they were able to do this because of the safety and support of the Women’s Research Institute.

No where else on BYU campus were topics such as female sexuality, the exploitation of women and feminism safe to broach. The WRI was a haven..."

Like this woman, I too found peace about my role as a woman in the LDS church, about motherhood and about my relationship with my husband because of the haven I had in the WRI. It makes me so sad to think that after next year other young women who are struggling with the gospel and feminist questions won't have the WRI to turn to. Where will they go? How many will flounder? How many will lose their faith because they can't find answers to their questions? It makes me want to cry.

BYU needs the Women's Research Institute because LDS women need it. There are many LDS women who never struggle with questions of gender inequality, but for those of us who do the WRI represents hope. Hope that there will always be an open dialogue between LDS men and women on gender. Hope that if we keep searching we will find answers to our hard Gospel questions. Hope that one day men and women will be able to live together with out violence or inequality. And hope that our daughters will inherit a world that is safer and kinder to women.

I don't want to give up that hope.

If you don't either you can join the facebook group "Save the Women's Research Institute" , join the protest at BYU (oh how I wish I was there), write a letter, and pray... a lot.