Proposal:

The Church of Scotland began ordaining women in 1968, The Evangelical Lutheran Assembly of America began ordaining women in 1978, and The Anglican Church of Canada began ordaining women in 1973, and the Episcopal church of the United States began ordaining women in 1976, and the Community of Christ began in 1984. The Church of Scotland, ECLA, Anglicans and Episcopal churches had conventions, protests, arguments, and formal discourses. The prayers of the faithful had a distinctly liturgical edge. The Community of Christ's ordination was more personal, and much less formal.

Each of these churches has a history of dissent, and were considered schismatic from a larger group of Christians. Each of these churches risked (or continue to risk) further schismatic behaviour by their desire to integrate women, and each of these has discourses that allow for the possibility of women as priests decades before this desire was actualised. Allowing women to become priests was a streaming together of allowed and disallowed discourses, of behaviour that was forbidden, with a desire towards explicit dissent. There was something (or many things) that happened in the 1970s that allowed for this dissent to be formalised, and then integrated.

All of the churches that are not in the Community of Christ have a European heritage, which carries the weight of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. There are minutes, codicils, reports to the primates or bishops, and other such textual examples of hierarchy. The Community of Christ, dissenting from a church that is ambiguously Christian, has a difficult relationship with liturgy and does not have the same relationship with ordination as the more traditional churches, makes their place in this break problematic.

I am hoping, by textual deconstruction and rhetorical/liturgical analysis to find a liturgical tradition within LDS communities of dissent, and trace the implications of that tradition into a discussion of women's ordination within those communities. I want to juxtapose these relationships with the dissent traditions in more mainstream protestant circles, and note the intersections between their ordination of women. At the end, using archival sources, hymn books, testimony, news reports, ecclesiastical documents, and historical sources, I hope to come to a gendered understanding of how LDS deas of women's role in the creation, ownership and maintaining of religious language differ from other protestant cultures.