BYU professor revels in teaching

The marriage fell apart after six years and "multiple affairs" by her husband, she says. She had two children and was pregnant with a third child when the couple split. She was ill-prepared for this turn of events.

"I had thought I was going to have my mother's life," she says.

Unable to afford housing, she moved her three sons into her family's cabin set at 7,000 feet in the mountains and lived there three years.

"It had no central heating," she recalls. "We had to rely on the fireplace for heat. There was a lot of snow there in the winter."

Refusing her father's offer to buy her a dress shop, she sought modeling work in Hollywood. She wrote scripts for fashion shows instead. "If you can write about polka dots and plaids in the same sentence, you can write about anything," she says.

After telling her friend Janice Steimeier that she couldn't afford school and a baby sitter, Steimeier volunteered to do the baby-sitting. Black took a master's degree in counseling from San Bernardino State and won a scholarship to BYU, where she earned a doctorate in educational psychology with a minor in church history. Years later, when she was awarded the Maeser award, she invited Steimeier to the stage. "When you educate a mother, you educate a family," said Black, noting that her three sons, Brian, John and Todd, all earned doctorates, two in law and one in engineering.

Black began teaching at BYU in 1978 while working on her doctoral dissertation — family finance in the college of family living and a church history class on the side. Unbeknownst to her, Dallin H. Oaks, BYU's president at the time, noticed there wasn't a woman on the faculty of the school's religion department and decided to do something about it. In 1980, he made Black the first female faculty member in the 107-year history of the department.

No one was more surprised than Black — "I didn't fit the type," she says. She was divorced and dating in her early 30s, with young children at home. For 20 years, she remained the only woman in the religion department. She struggled to fit in in a male-dominated department that was overseen by a church that strongly discourages male-female social connections outside of marriage and counsels against even the appearance of wrongdoing.

She was careful to avoid sitting by the same man during department meetings. When faculty members drove to meetings, she drove separately. Other faculty members could work one-on-one over lunch; she couldn't. She had to walk a fine line somewhere between a friendly working relationship and one that might appear too friendly. Her marital status only exacerbated the precariousness of her situation.

"It was awkward," she says.