Background

Dear Readers,

My name is Laura. I am 24 years old; last year, I graduated from a master’s degree in Humanities at the University of Chicago, got married a week later, and welcomed my first son into our family nine months after that. I am so deeply happy to be a woman, and truly am beginning to feel my heritage as a daughter of God. With the help of a nourishing community of family and friends, and encouraged by a growing online community, I have created this site to help each of us connect more firmly to what it means that “gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose” (Proclamation on the Family).

Like me, many of you may have wondered what exactly is your connection to your gender, why it is so important to the Lord, and what it has to do with how you live your life. You may be negotiating your relationship to feminism, trying to understand how best to balance desires for family and career. You may wish for more meaning and guidance in such aspects of life as marriage, pregnancy, and raising children. You may desire to gain a better understanding of women’s roles in the church. You may worry about the growing antagonistic attitude that others are developing toward foundational family structures.

We come together not only to share in our common concerns and questions but to take these a step further, and create. As women we have within us the divine ability to create life in all its forms, and here we create it in thought. We truly give life–spirit, energy, meaning, vivacity–to womanhood and family by our faithful tones and glorying attitudes toward God’s eternal plan and our place in that plan as women. We know that the best way to grow in truth is to pursue it: to move beyond doubt, skepticism, hopelessness, and pain toward faith, active belief, perfect hope, and healing. And we realize that the best way to convince others of truth is to express it, freely and purely, so that it may shine in all its glory for them to see.

Thank you for joining me in this journey and for adding to my faith and testimony with yours. With your fellow readers, I appreciate every thoughtful contribution, every perusal, every publicization of our goals. Please find the courage to share your own thoughts, to provide the rest of us with some precious articles of your faith in your divine heritage and roles.

Yours Sincerely,

Laura

Editor of Embodying Womanhood