Mormon Women Emerging From Shadows

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Last fall, the head of the Mormon church's

Relief Society delivered a treatise on motherhood that equated

nurturing with keeping a tidy house. Women in poor countries who dress

their daughters in clean, ironed dresses, the speaker said, honor a

sacred covenant.

Julie B. Beck's exhortation at the church's

General Conference that Mormon women strive to be "the best homemakers

in the world" did not go unanswered. More than 250 women signed an

online rebuttal.

The exchange illustrates that while the Church

of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is years removed from open

hostilities over feminism, passions still run high over the role of

women in a patriarchal church.

No one can profess to know how

women's issues will be handled by the successor to church president

Gordon B. Hinckley, who died Sunday at 97.

But few expect major changes along the lines of opening the Mormon priesthood — an office granted only to Mormon men — to women.

But women could still emerge as stronger voices of the church.

"My

feeling is that things are not going to change much, that the church is

going to keep its very conservative positions on women's roles," said

Margaret Toscano, a self-described feminist activist who was

excommunicated in 2000 and teaches language and literature at the

University of Utah.

Although the church did not reveal why

Toscano was excommunicated, she argued a historical precedence for