Weird Sonia Johnson

A new biography suggests what was really at stake in Sonia Johnson’s feminist activism and public excommunication

Sonia Johnson, circa 1980 (illustration courtesy of Beck Seamons)

The novelist and poet Herman Melville captured the stakes of John Brown’s 1859 execution with a rather simple choice of words: John Brown was weird.¹ How so? In the sense that his failed attempt to inaugurate an anti-slavery insurrection introduced a crisis of authority. The chasm between what Brown reached for and what the law allowed triggered a crisis that would determine the course of American history. It was thus upon John Brown’s body, “Hanging from the beam, / Slowly swaying (such the law),” that the law and the liberal state reestablished itself in a moment of crisis. The legitimacy of authority was on the line in the decision to execute John Brown.² 

Something about John Brown’s history resonates deeply with the life of Sonia Johnson, given that the specter of Johnson’s excommunication discloses something deeply unsettling about the relationship between gender and authority in contemporary Mormonism. In her recent volume, Sonia Johnson: A Mormon Feminist, gender studies scholar Christine Talbot masterfully captures Johnson’s impact as a renegade housewife and feminist activist who achieved notoriety at a moment when debates over the Equal Rights Amendment were roiling American culture. 

In her short biography of Sonia Johnson, Talbot explores what was really at stake in Johnson’s activism against male leaders who mobilized female Latter-day Saints to campaign against their own political rights: the renaturalization of the patriarchal order in a time of uncertainty about the place of race, sex, and gender in American public and religious life.³ Through her excommunication, Johnson’s male church leaders attempted to re-assert their authority to draw the boundaries of normative Mormonism, recalling how the United States government executed John Brown to demonstrate its authority in matters of law and order. In her reflections on Johnson’s excommunication, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich speaks to what that event signaled: “I resented the excommunication because I resented what it taught me about the priesthood. The vision of that all-male council trying a woman’s membership was more revealing than any of the rhetoric on either side.”⁴ In the case of Sonia Johnson, the boundaries of gender and authority were drawn to reinforce the status quo ante for Latter-day Saint women.  

Talbot begins her story with a biographical account of Sonia Johnson, following her from her adolescence in Idaho, to her time as a globetrotting housewife, and finally to her sudden arrival as a confrontational and media-savvy critic of Mormon patriarchy, a Mormon feminist who took the stage at the very moment when second-wave feminism was transforming American society.⁵ Johnson’s significant media presence during the period of time from her public sparring match with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch (1978), to her widely publicized excommunication (1979), to her eventual divorce and the publication of her memoir From Housewife to Heretic (1981), mark the densest periods of her career as a feminist icon. 

More substantively, though, Talbot offers critical analysis of Sonia Johnson’s objections to what she understood to be the church’s bad-faith effort to meddle in politics by, as Johnson put it, “imposing the prophet’s moral directives upon all Americans.” For Johnson, the real ugliness of Mormon anti-ERA advocacy was the way that men—through religious frameworks of obedience and prophetic authority—mobilized women to take action that, in Johnson’s assessment, was contrary to their own political interests. By blurring the lines between the religious and the political—a crucial theme that Talbot aptly explores—Johnson expressed concern that church leadership’s “decisive crossing over into anti-ERA politics has eroded in most members’ minds the crucial distinction between church and state that our Constitution guarantees.” Talbot’s analysis of Johnson’s perspective delves further, suggesting that church leadership “thus exercised political dominion over LDS women that they had no right to exercise as religious leaders. That is, they demanded that LDS women substitute religious faith in the men of the church for their own political convictions about the ERA.” 

Johnson was deeply disturbed by the church meddling in politics, in part because it turned her pro-ERA stance—a political stance, first and foremost—into a belief that conflicted with her religious identity. Thus, she was deeply invested in revealing to the American public the extent to which she believed the church had mobilized its membership duplicitously against the ERA—and that act of disclosing the truth as she saw it both made her a media sensation and raised the ire of her priesthood leaders. 

However, as I studied Talbot’s presentation of Sonia Johnson’s polemical feminism, I came to the conclusion that something much deeper than troubling the patriarchy was at stake (and Talbot’s cross-comparison with the 1978 revelation overturning the priesthood and temple ban is crucial here). Talbot’s Johnson was aware that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had turned to politics to reinforce its own patriarchal hierarchy and foreclose alternate feminist trajectories. In light of its past contests with the outside world over polygamy and race, Latter-day Saint leadership became acutely aware of a crisis that Sonia Johnson’s feminism brought to the surface: the fact that its own destiny was not fully self-determined but was also shaped by the secular political and social orders. The realization that outside forces contribute to the church’s trajectory posed an obvious challenge to the autonomy of prophetic authority. In this context, the feminist currents supporting the ERA threatened to undermine the long-term viability of the patriarchal structure of Mormonism by upending the social and legal assumptions that made patriarchy conventional, something that church leadership was not willing to give up easily. 

In presenting the interplay of political and religious authority with patriarchy and second-wave feminism, Christine Talbot’s short introduction to Sonia Johnson revisits a familiar history—one outlined in such works as Colleen McDannell’s Sister Saints and Martha Sonntag Bradley’s Pedestals and Podiums—with focused rigor, casting new light upon Johnson’s singular and complicated legacy as a figurehead of Mormon feminism. Talbot’s Johnson remains an inviolable threshold, a “thou shalt not pass” for the activist eager to make meaningful change in Latter-day Saint circles. Or in Melvillian terms, the dissident Sonia Johnson, the woman who starved herself during ERA fasts, made her name a national headline, disowned her children, and put everything she knew at stake for women’s liberation, was weird. Her body would become the hanging-beam upon which Mormon patriarchy was upheld.

1. See Herman Melville, “The Portent,” published in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). 

2. For further reading, see Ted A. Smith, Weird John Brown.

3. While the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has distanced itself from the language of patriarchy, Talbot’s historical account—like many others—recalls that the term patriarchy was actively used in church discourse up until the end of the twentieth century. See also Jonathan Stapley, The Power of Godliness: Mormon Liturgy and Cosmology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 75: “Since the 1990s, church leaders have not referred to families in terms of a patriarchal order, and since the publication of the Proclamation on the Family in 1995, they have instead focused on husbands and wives being ‘equal partners.’”

4.  Benjamin E. Park, American Zion: A New History of Mormonism (2024), 318. 

5. As an aside, Johnson’s case demonstrates the enduring value of the terms ‘Mormon’ and ‘Mormonism’: would we want to ascribe the terms ‘Latter-day Saint’ and ‘Restored Gospel’ to both Sonia Johnson’s biography and to the gender dynamics at play in patriarchy?