| From Housewife to Heretic: One Woman’s Struggle for Equal Rights and Her Excommunication from the Mormon Church | Sonia Johnson | Wildfire Books | 1989 |
In From Housewife to Heretic Sonia Johnson recounts how she was excommunicated from her church because of her support of the Equal Rights Amendment.
I am glad to be a woman and have never wished to be a man, but I would certainly like some of the benefits that men enjoy. I would like my work in the home—which society so hypocritically tells me is all-important and then never compensates me for—to be considered of some economic value when my husband dies or leaves me, or when I am old and need social security. When I work outside the home, I would like to make as much money as men make for doing the same work or work of equal value. And I cannot imagine anything more rewarding than to have people presume before I even open my moth that what I am about to say has some value, and when I do say it, to presume that I know what I’m talking about, as people presume about men. For women to be taken seriously would be novel indeed. I would like to help make that a reality
Sonia Johnson in From Housewife to Heretic / pp. 365-366
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Play’s the Thing
Chapter 2: The Man Who Didn’t Rock Ferris-wheel Seats
Chapter 3: Blood Ties
Chapter 4: The Bursting of the File
Chapter 5: Uppity Before the Senate Subcommittee
Chapter 6: Astronauts for a Flat Earth
Chapter 7: The Plot Thickens
Chapter 8: Writing Him Off
Chapter 9: Bishops and Other Sexism
Chapter 10: “It’s Four O’clock and I’m Still a Member of the Church!”
Chapter 11: Interlude
Chapter 12: Trial in a “Court of Love”
Chapter 13: My Last Days as a Mormon
Chapter 14: “Dear Sonia,…”
Chapter 15: Invincible Summer
Chapter 16: All on Fire