Despite obeying an LDS apostle’s demand that she quit as Exponent II editor, this feminist hero thrived in the church

In the 1960s, Claudia Lauper Bushman was living in Boston as a busy Latter-day Saint wife and mother — which had been a lifelong goal of hers — but felt she could do more. The question was what?

Eventually, the “more” was earning a doctorate and teaching history; writing or editing 10 books, including a couple of groundbreaking Mormon women’s history volumes; becoming editor of Exponent II, a magazine for Latter-day Saint women; organizing 2,000 singing and dancing kids at New York’s Radio City Music Hall; taking up spinning yarn into fabric to understand women’s material culture; and launching a groundbreaking oral interview project in California.

Indeed, in each of the many locations where her husband’s job took them, Bushman had to reinvent herself and figure out what else she could do.

Yet, it wasn’t destiny or ambition that drove Bushman to these accomplishments, but rather some combination of her DNA, an upbringing in San Francisco, a knack for tackling seemingly impossible projects, a confident go-getter attitude and — Mormonism.

That elixir transformed Bushman from a traditional wife and mother of six into an intellectual powerhouse and feminist exemplar, known for her wit, candor, management wizardry, audacious schemes, and unparalleled mentoring of female scholars in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

On March 15, hundreds of attendees gathered at the University of Utah to celebrate her remarkable nine decades of life and her influence on so many of them.

Commenting on the conference, the 90-year-old said with characteristic humor and modesty: “This is amazing. I must be somebody.”

One after another of the 24 speakers who addressed Bushman’s “pioneering work,” described how the senior scholar encouraged, pushed and prodded them to try new things, to take on big challenges, to move out of their comfort zone.

Her formula for success is, she said, simple: “If something comes to mind, I just do it.”

She didn’t herald any of her landmark publications, but she did lead the assembled fans in belting out the feminist “Women Arise” lyrics (“Seize the scepter, hold the van; equal with thy brother, man”) to the tune of “Hope of Israel” (a Latter-day Saint hymn) and then recited from memory a complicated Tennyson poem.

Even after 12 hours of laudatory speeches, however, the day couldn’t fully explain the source of Claudia’s magic.

Husband Richard Lyman Bushman couldn’t either.

“I know Claudia better than her parents, her sisters, and our children do,” Richard, a famed American historian, writes in his preface to her memoir, “I, Claudia.” “All this, and I still do not understand her powers.”

Subscribe To Mormon Land Newsletter

Get the latest news by subscribing to our Mormon Land newsletter. Enter your email below to receive more stories like these right to your inbox.

Subscribe

Living in two worlds

Young Claudia spent her formative years in the middle of a city known as a “city of light, Baghdad by the Bay, a beacon of civilization on the West Coast, a city of unquestioned culture, charm, and beauty,” she writes in the autobiography. “This city was ethnic and diverse, with large groups of Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, African Americans, and gays, even back then. Catholic by majority, the city featured representatives of every other religion imaginable, even some early new-age types.”

There was “certainly room” in San Francisco, she writes, “for our invisible little band of Mormons.”

It was at church she became adept at public speaking, taking charge of young people, engaging in theatrical extravaganzas, leading the music, organizing large potluck suppers and making lifelong friends.

She also had a chance to compare and contrast two different worlds.

“I was a lucky person for having grown up Mormon in a secular world. I have long thought that people who live simultaneously in two different cultures have a perspective that the one-world people lack,” she writes. “They can judge one world by another. They can escape from one world to another.”

After graduating from high school, Bushman crossed the country to study at Wellesley College, a distinguished women’s school outside of Boston. She attended a dingy Latter-day Saint meetinghouse in Cambridge, where she became acquainted with Richard Bushman, whom she describes as “a fabled figure, spoken of with awe.”

Dick, as he was called then, was “both thoughtful and articulate,” Claudia writes. “However, his reddish hair grew down over one eye in the manner of a romantic poet and my total impression was, ‘What a lovely boy; I wish he’d cut his hair.‘”

The two courted for several years until 1955, when they had a prewedding reception in her San Francisco ward, and then journeyed to the Salt Lake Temple to marry.

“As we pulled away in Dick’s black Ford, my mother turned to my father and murmured, ‘I wonder if she’s good enough for him,‘” Claudia writes. “My own mother.”

Still, she concludes, “I discovered that he was very different from the man I imagined him to be, and since then, we have both felt very fortunate in our marriage to each other.”

Beginnings of Mormon women studies

The Bushmans lived in Boston in the late 1960s and early ‘70s as a new openness and enthusiasm about Mormon history were capturing the academic world and “second-wave feminism” was sweeping the country, Maxine Hanks explained in her overview of Claudia’s historical work at the U. conference.

But historical writing was, said Hanks, editor of the 1992 book “Mormon Women and Authority,” very “male-centric.”

A small group of Latter-day Saint moms met at church to share notes on their lives, and discuss what was happening with women in their faith and country, Hanks, one of the conference organizers, reported in her opening remarks. Together they produced a “triptych of feminist publications.”

The “pink” issue of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought came first in 1972. Two years later, Exponent II debuted, she said, followed two years after that by “Mormon Sisters,” a book of essays by various female writers.

Bushman edited all three, with help from her feminist sisters.

“I suppose the pink issue gave us confidence that we could do more things,” she wrote in the introduction to “Mormon Sisters.” “It was a voice in the wilderness. ... Our little group of housewives with crying babies began to be taken seriously.”

“Mormon Sisters” marked “a watershed moment in Mormon studies, culture and feminism,” Hanks said. “It appeared in July 1976, the 200th anniversary of American independence, like a feminist declaration of independence in Mormon culture.”

Not everyone at church headquarters in Salt Lake City, however, was pleased with the connection.

Trouble brewing

In their enthusiasm for the project, the staff mailed copies of Exponent II to the wives of all the church’s general authorities.

It caused a flurry of consternation.

“We had nothing to hide, but we became impossible to ignore. We were told never to do that again [send copies to leaders],” Bushman writes. “They were innocent mistakes, but I should have been more careful.”

Not long after that, she got a visit from future apostle Robert Hales, who was in the Presiding Bishopric at the time. He advised her to close down the magazine or the women would be “irreparably damaged’ in the church’s eyes.

Later, apostle L. Tom Perry, who had been stake (regional) president in Boston, met with all the Exponent II women.

He told them the church “would never close down the publication, but he warned the women that they should be sensitive to issues that would divide the church and to stay away from soft-pedaling women’s rights and other scary issues,” Bushman recounts. “He said he hoped the group would be strong enough to publish while it was doing good and strong enough to quit if there were difficulties.”

But he also insisted Bushman step down as editor, while her husband was the current Boston stake president, because it might suggest “official support” by the stake, she writes, “which could not be allowed.”

The decision was “unjust and shortsighted,” Claudia wrote in a letter to her family. “I not only have a husband who is almost totally preoccupied with matters elsewhere, I am forbidden from acting in any noticeable way in the church community. But, of course, I am obedient, so I resigned from the paper.”

She tells her mother that it was “more painful for me than I can say. I brood. I cry. I am paralyzed. But I am getting a little better, I think, and will just have to find a new life for myself.”

She could have refused to comply, Bushman notes, “but I don’t believe in fighting battles I cannot win, and that would have criminalized Exponent II and probably led to Richard’s release as stake president, something for which I did not want to be responsible. Richard never told me what to do.”

From that day on, no leader, to her knowledge, has ever bothered any Exponent II writer, she notes ruefully. Only Claudia.

Redirections

As Richard Bushman’s career took the family to England, Delaware, New Hampshire, Utah, New York, California and then back to the Big Apple, among other places, the adventurous Claudia found new and engaging endeavors.

She researched and wrote books on women’s work, Virginia farming, and attitudes toward Christopher Columbus. She spearheaded a yearslong Latter-day Saint program to connect with residents of Harlem. She proposed a 30-day Easter ritual, directed choirs and programs at church, and sometimes broke into song from the pulpit. Her most frequent advice to women has been to keep a journal — as she has done for 40 years.

Bushman advised her students not to “sanitize” their history, religion scholar Caroline Kline writes in the memoir’s introduction, and to “reflect on how you make meaning in your life.”

If you write it down, Bushman quipped at the conference, “it will have gotten into the ground, and somebody will dig it up, and there it will be — gold plates.”

‘The work of mentorship’

What really struck Margaret Olsen Hemming, future co-editor with Kline of Dialogue, about the U. conference was “how the work of mentorship, cultivating community, and cheering on others’ work is just as, or even more, important as any great work one produces,” Hemming wrote on Facebook. “Claudia Bushman and these other great women of Mormon feminism are beloved not for their genius, but because of how they treat people around them. I am one of the many lucky recipients of their life-changing generosity.”

So is Kristine Haglund, former editor of Dialogue, who came under Bushman’s spell in 2003 during a summer research seminar focusing on women sponsored by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History.

It was known as the “Sisters Seminar,” and there were a dozen women who participated.

“I cannot imagine the contours of my life without Claudia’s influence,” Haglund said. “I don’t know anyone who has spent more than five minutes with her and not had some element of their life or their thinking permanently rearranged.”

In 2022, Haglund received an unexpected email from Bushman:

“Dear Kristine, I was surprised to be invited to be the president of the Mormon History Association this year, but I believe that when you are asked to do something, you should agree, and I did.

“... I named my husband, Richard, as my program chair and he was soon generating many ideas for the meeting. Together we decided that you would be an excellent co-chair. Are you willing to take on that assignment?”

Haglund said Claudia’s approach “was the most direct and shameless and effective guilt trip I had ever seen.”

It also captures a deep truth about Bushman: She has the confidence and openness to accept opportunities as they come, Haglund said, and expects others to do so as well.

Such wonder, collegiality, directness and delight — with a side mix of music and dance — comes naturally to her, Bushman tells her many admirers. “Everything I ever needed to know I learned at church.”

She ends with her signature sign-off: “Carry on.”

Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.