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Show 296 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER course, she could not completely avoid them; but she felt that being a woman was a great and wonderful thing. As her daugh Judith has written: ter She made me as her daughter feel glad to be a woman. She also felt women should have their rights, not only as moth ers and wives but as human beings. She was active in Planned Parenthood when its goal was to help women control their lives so they didn't have more children than they could man age or than their husbands could support. She felt women should have the right to their own money that was uncon trolled by their husbands even if the husband had given them the money woman .... no man should have the right to push a around or expect blind obedience, even if he were her husband. Because she died two years before the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique the book that launched the American woman's movement of the 1960s and '70s, Madelyn's reaction to "feminism," and the Equal Rights Amendment cannot be known. (Madelyn does not seem to have been aware of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, 1949.) What we do know is that Madelyn adopted some concepts of "feminism" even though she never used the word, before they incorporated into "the movement." Madelyn was especially proud that, historically, Mormon (and Utah) women had equal access with males to the church's (and territory's) institutions of higher learning, the right to file for divorce on grounds of incompatibility, the virtual guarantee of such divorce petitions, the right to own property, the right to were official encouragement to be take care of the family's finances if and bookkeepers engage in any business enterprise, trained as husbands were inefficient, and official instruction to seek med ical treatment from other women doctors rather than males. From 1870, Mormon women voted, served on the central com mittee of the Mormon political party, edited a Mormon suffra gist periodical, graduated with M.D. degrees from eastern med ical schools, administered the first Mormon hospital, and |
