The cover of Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright's edited volume bears a photograph of Nikki Matthews Hunter's lovely Sunday Morning (The Pants Quilt). The image is intended for more than simply aesthetic reasons: the quilt in the photograph was made from the trousers that hundreds of Mormon women wore to Sunday worship on 16 December 2012 and then sent to Hunter to be woven into a single piece of art. Traditional American gender norms remain strong within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the largest church that traces its lineage to Joseph Smith, normally called Mormonism), and thus while it is not prohibited, the sight of a Mormon woman in pants rather than skirts or a dress is unusual in many Mormon congregations. The women of what came to be called “Pants Day” sought a number of things: to call attention to feminist issues and to create a visible sign of solidarity with others who might feel out of place in the tradition chief among them.

That, then, Sunday Morning graces the cover of this book reminds us that often scholarship is intertwined with activism, and the work of academics can reflect and sometimes shape the social order outside the universities. I suspect that all five of these authors would embrace that role. Certainly, as Joanna Brooks puts it in the introduction to Mormon Feminism, in addition to documenting the modern history of Mormon feminism, the editors “hope … we can deepen conversations within Mormonism about the gains and setbacks of the last forty years” (9). She and her coeditors present themselves as Mormon feminists of various stripes, and the book appears at a crucial moment in Mormon feminism. Over the past decade, Mormon feminists have organized online. They have staged a number of actions and campaigns: from a letter-writing effort asking that a woman pray in the church's semi-annual General Conference (which had never happened before), to the high-profile Ordain Women movement, which mounted public demonstrations requesting that church leaders consider allowing women into the church's all-male priesthood. They have achieved some successes and suffered some reprisals: women now pray in General Conference, for instance. But at the same time, the founder of Ordain Women was excommunicated. For some, then, change seems halting and slow.

Similarly, Millet and Hopkin write in the rather uncomfortable glare of the spotlight which has fallen on Mormonism in the past ten years, due to the visibility of Mitt Romney's two campaigns for the American presidency, the church's activism against same-sex marriage, and increased attention in the popular media exemplified by the smash Broadway musical The Book of Mormon. Their volume is a contribution to Bloomsbury's Guides for the Perplexed series, which offers concise and accessible discussions of religious traditions many find confusing or esoteric, and Millet and Hopkin are keenly aware that their faith is in that position. They point to surveys done “in the recent presidential election in the United States, in which LDS-member Mitt Romney ran for that office,” that showed “a surprisingly low level of understanding of central LDS beliefs” (55–56). They also repeatedly defend the church against contemporary critiques: for instance, that it has “become somewhat fashionable, at least for the last forty years, to state that Mormons are not Christian” (36).

For all our authors, then, Mormonism stands at something of a crossroads in its engagement with modernity, and each book exemplifies some ways in which Mormons have grappled with its place in the contemporary world. Though they take somewhat different perspectives on the values of the Mormon tradition, each finds Mormon ideas, Mormon community, and Mormon practice of some worth, often in similar ways, and each presents a form of Mormonism the authors believe particularly meaningful today.

A volume like that of Brooks, Steenblik, and Wheelwright, with the declarative title Mormon Feminism: Essential Writings, cannot help but stake out positions on the nature of Mormon feminism, the issues it should push for, and the voices that should be deemed preeminent within it. Of course, many of those choices are made under the necessity of a publishers’ page limit, and hence the narrative that emerges from the selections in the book cannot be entirely ascribed to the editors. Nonetheless, the editors clearly seek to build one. In the introduction (by Brooks alone), the author builds from the ideas of contemporary self-identified Mormon feminists like the Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to argue that, as Ulrich puts it,

Feminism, this book argues, shares certain basic principles with Mormonism itself. Mormons see Eve as a hero for actively choosing to leave the Garden of Eden to experience mortal life; they believe in the existence of a Heavenly Mother, a divine feminine; they reject the notion of the Fall in favor of an expansive notion of human potential and equality.

And yet, Brooks points out, Mormon doctrine and practice also maintain an ecclesiastical patriarchy and a firm emphasis on gender roles established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both girded by contemporary theological interpretations about the eternal nature of marriages performed by the church's priesthood. Mormonism, she concludes, is paradoxical, both offering and denying resources to the feminist movement. Given that state of affairs, then, Brooks and her coeditors are sympathetic toward activism and pressure on the church's leadership to enhance those aspects of Mormonism they find congenial, and the collected pieces in the volume construct a narrative which brings Mormonism into consonance with the feminism of the contemporary Western left. The editors organize the collection chronologically, and particularly in the later sections they rely heavily upon essays originally published in the online communities from which Pants Day, the Ordain Women movement, and like-minded movements sprang.

That the collection begins in 1971 makes sense: it links Mormon feminism to modern second-wave feminism more generally, and particularly to a group of Mormon women who began self-consciously formulating a Mormon feminism in that year. But it also forecloses a group of very activist nineteenth-century Mormon women, who organized a women's suffrage movement in Utah, agitated for laws promoting female equality, and ardently supported the church's patriarchal order and the practice of polygamy, which does not entirely coincide with the editors’ narrative. However, the volume goes to great lengths to make clear that the reawakening of Mormon female activism in the 1970s was in many ways rooted in a rediscovery of their nineteenth-century forebears. Thus it would be unfair to say that the volume neglects ideological diversity.

Like American feminism generally, Mormon feminists have endured some divisions in their own ranks. Some have adopted the title of moderate, and have consciously sought to work within the church's hierarchy and maintain participation in Mormon worship and institution. Others deeply distrust the male hierarchy and have ceased participation. Given this, recent feminist actions, particularly the Ordain Women movement, have provoked debate over which tactics and aims are appropriate. Further, as with American feminism in general, Mormon feminism has been criticized for being a movement largely of middle- and upper-class white women. While in recent years strides toward greater racial equality have been made, the movement remains largely spearheaded by that group, and a small but vocal group of women of color have pointed out the blinders this has placed upon the movement. In short, Mormon feminism is hardly uniform. Despite its particular slants, this volume makes efforts to be inclusive: it contains several essential pieces of moderate Mormon feminism, by authors like the activist Neylan McBaine and the former Brigham Young University (BYU) professor Valerie Hudson Cassler. It also, importantly, gives voice to a number of women of color, such as the Samoan Lani Wendt Young and the African American Janan Graham Russell, representatives of groups historically marginalized in the church by virtue of both their race and their gender.

The Mormonism of Mormon Feminism, then, is a determinedly pluralistic faith. Mormon Feminism affirms those optimistic doctrines that became particularly popular in twentieth-century Mormonism – rejection of human depravity in favor of divine potential, an affirmative vision of Adam and Eve's fall, and so on – and links them to the values of the contemporary liberal West: tolerance, inclusivity, and suspicion that hierarchy leads inevitably to inequality. Though Robert Millet and Shon Hopkin hold the feminist movement at arm's length, and argue, “In the midst of its firm stance that God has only given certain priesthood leadership offices at this time to men, church leaders have also worked hard to re-communicate true principles regarding the equality between men and women” (108), the qualification in their statement indicates that they also affirm many of the same optimistic ideas which the editors of Mormon Feminism embrace: basic human equality; optimism about human potential; and a firm affirmation of individual efficacy, autonomy, and control over one's own destiny.

However, while Mormon Feminism is unafraid to press back against the institutional church, Mormonism: A Guide for the Perplexed expresses something closer to an institutional perspective. While Mormon Feminism seeks to bring Mormonism into conversation with contemporary American feminism, A Guide for the Perplexed maintains that Mormonism is a legitimate and respectable Christian faith, and engages most vigorously with arguments that the church is non-Christian or a cult. Both authors are professors of religion at BYU, and the positions they take in the book simultaneously affirm institutional loyalty and push as far as possible the steps the church itself has taken to engage with academics and activists both within and without its membership.

For many years, Mormon history was a flashpoint of controversy. Some church leaders aggressively pushed back against scholars whose work complicated a devotional narrative of Mormonism's past in speeches, in pressure against faculty at BYU, and in some cases in ecclesiastical discipline. Since the turn of the millennium, however, church leadership has moderated that stance significantly. Topics which were once largely ignored in official church venues – Joseph Smith's practice of plural marriage and involvement with folk magic, differing accounts of his early visions – receive treatment here, in sympathetic ways. Indeed, much of the book reflects the work of Richard Bushman and Terryl Givens, the most prominent of what scholar of Mormonism Jan Shipps has called “faithful scholars.” Bushman and Givens are Mormons, but also respected and responsible scholars whose work reflects both academic rigor and empathy for their religious tradition, a middle ground, of sorts, between the old devotional narrative and scholarly work skeptical of Mormonism.

The bulk of A Guide for the Perplexed, however, makes the case for Mormonism as a Christian faith with the theological and institutional heft to stand with other traditions. In a series of chapters that review topics from ecclesiastical authority to views of Jesus Christ, the afterlife, and the nature of God and humanity, Millet and Hopkin discuss Mormon theology and practice. For much of the book Millet and Hopkin engage in apologetics, tying Mormonism to the Bible and to early Christian history; as this seems to be one aspect of the Bloomsbury series to which they are contributing, it is not inappropriate. However, their description of Mormonism is worth comment. In their preface, the authors claim,

This is a bold claim, and perhaps the existence of Mormon Feminism and, moreover, the work's ready engagement with historical material which may have been suspect twenty or thirty years ago imply that uniformity both chronological and contemporary is not as great as the authors imply. Of course, an argument for uniformity is not simply a historical one, but a theological one: the authors embrace the Mormon apostle Richard G. Scott's distinction “between eternal principles, concepts that never change, and the application of those principles, which can shift according to divine direction,” to insist that Mormon leaders have taught a consistent theology since the time of Joseph Smith (107). But despite that, their arguments in many areas reflect much of Millet's own work: he has been on the forefront of a movement over the past several decades to draw the language of grace more deeply into a tradition which has historically emphasized human effort, and hence ethical rigor and the earning of merit, more than human incapacity, and hence the need for redemption. Some of their claims to theological uniformity over time and space are, then, less than convincing.

That said, A Guide for the Perplexed still reflects a thoroughly optimistic take on what Mormonism offers humanity, and one which is surprisingly consonant with the sometimes hopeful and sometimes frustrated works collected in Mormon Feminism. The two works side by side illustrate a faith tradition wrestling with its place in the modern world, but still vibrant nonetheless.