Question about Church of Latter Day Saints

[bornbaker]

Two gentlemen just were at the door from LDS (they were very nice - I'm kinda kicking myself because I said they could come back at a better time :/). Anyway. I've only ever really seen the men from the LDS church go door to door. Is this something only the guys do? Is it a 'requirement' of the faith? The men I've seen have always been kind of young, too. 

[Jalapeñomel]

Yes only guys, and it's called their mission.

[Deleted]

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

oh ETA: It's more of a spiritual 'requirement' (but it's not really required, just very much encouraged) that the men go on missions than the women. It's considered a priesthood duty that all able men go on their missions, where as for girls it's encouraged but not as much as for guys. Although that it changing now that the mission age for girls is lower (19 instead of 21) and more girls are going on their missions. It's really up to the individual though. 

[Jalapeñomel]

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

I didn't know this! Has it always been this way or is it a new thing?

[bornbaker]

Mar 1, 2014 18:27:57 GMT -5 @astrid said:

They have to go on missions in their late teens/early twenties.

That seems about the age - I would guess maybe 20. When there were talking to me the mentioned "our generation". Referring to myself and them - I am not 20. I was flattered, but nope! I'm not old either, but glad to not be 20 anymore! 

[bornbaker]

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

These guys were super nice - they're still out walking around. It's super snowy and cold. I have 1/2 a mind to offer them coffee/hot cocoa. BUT  I also don't really want them to come back.

[Deleted]

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:54 GMT -5 Jalapeñomel said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

I didn't know this! Has it always been this way or is it a new thing?

It's been like that for as long as I know. They used to have an age requirement of 21 for women and 19 for men, and typically encouraged girls to get married instead of going on missions (which is dumb) and it used to be (and still is to an extent) that the girls who couldn't find a husband just went on missions. Now, with the age for girls being 19, more girls are going on missions before getting married. It's only in the last year or so that they changed the age, so the real effects are still kinda not being seen, but they saw a HUGE drop in admissions to BYU and BYU-I, the two church schools in Utah and Idaho, after it because so many girls were going on their missions. I think it has the potential to change the cultural 'Mormon girls get married so young' idea that is so prevelant in Utah. 

aaaaand I'll get off my soapbox. lol. 

[nsl]

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:54 GMT -5 Jalapeñomel said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

I didn't know this! Has it always been this way or is it a new thing?

It's not new (I had friends with older sisters who went on missions in the early 90's), but girls used to have to be 21 before they could go, and most didn't. 

[Deleted]

Mar 1, 2014 18:33:23 GMT -5 bornbaker said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

These guys were super nice - they're still out walking around. It's super snowy and cold. I have 1/2 a mind to offer them coffee/hot cocoa. BUT  I also don't really want them to come back.

lol! They're usually out until 8 or 9, when they have to be back in their apartments. They'd love the hot cocoa (Mormons don't drink coffee) but inviting them in might encourage them to come back. lol. Which I totally get (I'm the only memer in my family and my mom haaaaaaaates when the missionaries came over when I was living at home). 

When H was on his mission, they regularly had dinner at a Catholic family's house that was down the street from their apartment. They would listen to what they had to say and talk about the differences and had no intention of ever converting. H always says they were his favorite family on his misison. hahah

[Jalapeñomel]

Mar 1, 2014 18:37:09 GMT -5 nsl said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:54 GMT -5 Jalapeñomel said:

I didn't know this! Has it always been this way or is it a new thing?

It's not new (I had friends with older sisters who went on missions in the early 90's), but girls used to have to be 21 before they could go, and most didn't. 

I wonder if this is because by 21, most Mormon women are married with children (or at least this has been my experience with the Mormons that I knew).

[nsl]

Mar 1, 2014 18:56:05 GMT -5 Jalapeñomel said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:37:09 GMT -5 nsl said:

It's not new (I had friends with older sisters who went on missions in the early 90's), but girls used to have to be 21 before they could go, and most didn't. 

I wonder if this is because by 21, most Mormon women are married with children (or at least this has been my experience with the Mormons that I knew).

I grew up in Salt Lake City and can say that 90% of my LDS high school friends were seriously dating, engaged, or married to a returned missionary by 22.  It's anecdotal, and I always feel like I'm participating in negative stereotyping when I say it, but yeah.  This was my experience.

[tacokick]

I think LDS outside of Utah tend to marry later. Our best friends growing up were LDS and we'd go to things with them and most of the girls I met that were my age not only went to college but grad school and/or a mission before getting married. A lot them got engaged along the way but few got married while still in school.

[Deleted]

I've seen young women in Boston too. 

[macmars45]

I've had plenty of women LDS come to my door FWIW.

[bornbaker]

Mar 1, 2014 21:41:39 GMT -5 Lucy Honeychurch said:

People complain about them coming door to door, but they've always been very polite and respectful when they've come here. Once I was unloading groceries from my car and they helped me bring them inside. It was so nice of them I talked to them for like half an hour.

This is what I thought, too! I've never had someone so nice and polite at more door! Honestly, I probably would have let them talk to me longer, but one dog was not a fan and I thought was going to eat them, one wanted to be their BBF, and Emily was plotting her escape. 

ETA: They were both super nice to Emily, waved, said "HI" after she said "hi" a million times. She was just soaking it all up (she loves attention, little stinker ) Seriously, you can win me over just by being super nice to my kid! 

[janiejones]

Is it a requirement for them to wear a short sleeve shirt with a tie, or is it just a convenient uniform?






FTR, my uncle, a JW wears this combo too.

[Deleted]

Mar 1, 2014 21:41:39 GMT -5 Lucy Honeychurch said:

People complain about them coming door to door, but they've always been very polite and respectful when they've come here. Once I was unloading groceries from my car and they helped me bring them inside. It was so nice of them I talked to them for like half an hour.

Definitely. Mormons are crazy nice in general. I've found in some wards there is a bit of southern "bless her heart" double-face but I think that's to be expected in tight knit communities in general. Mostly, even if the methods might be wrong for individuals, there is genuine concern for each other and a willingness to help with anything. I think the fact that the religion focuses a lot on service has a lot to do with it (now, I think they could stand to look outside their own doors more for service but they're getting there - big generalization there, but my ILs ward has started more interfaith service and I don't hear a lot of that in the larger Church stuff).

Also missionaries are going to be focusing more on service than tracting in the coming years which I think is pretty awesome. Much better use of time.

[ohiowan]

Mar 1, 2014 18:33:23 GMT -5 bornbaker said:

Mar 1, 2014 18:31:03 GMT -5 @utahlove13 said:

Girls can go on missions too! In fact, there are a lot more girls going on missions now that they lowered the age requirement about a year ago than there ever has been. We have a set of sister missionaries in our area right now. I love them way more than the elders. haha.

These guys were super nice - they're still out walking around. It's super snowy and cold. I have 1/2 a mind to offer them coffee/hot cocoa. BUT  I also don't really want them to come back.

I've heard before that they're either not allowed or discouraged from accepting refreshments because some people are assholes. This could be 100% wrong, and I'm sure even if they are, they would appreciate the offer.

[auntie]

There was this in the NYT this morning-

Missions Signal a Growing Role for Mormon Women
By JODI KANTOR and LAURIE GOODSTEINMARCH 1, 2014
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Nicolle Ensign, center, and Victoria Julayne Scott, Mormon missionaries, talked with a potential recruit in South Korea. Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
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DAEJEON, South Korea — Ashley Farr, once Miss North Salt Lake Teen USA, is the first in her family’s long line of Mormon women to become a missionary, and in December she embarked on her new life in this gray corner of Asia. She packed her bag according to the church’s precise instructions: skirts that cover the knee, only one pair of pants, earrings that dangle no longer than one inch, and subtle but flattering makeup, modeled in photos on the church’s website.

Sister Farr, as she now is called, had left behind the student entrepreneurship competitions she was helping to run in Utah and paused her relationship with her boyfriend, far away in the Philippines, as they served his-and-her missions. Ms. Farr, a finance student at Brigham Young University in Utah, believed proselytizing would not only please God but also give her the organizational and persuasive skills to succeed professionally. She rattled off all the things she wants to become: Intern at Goldman Sachs. Wife of a mission president. Chief executive of a fashion or technology company.

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We are inviting Mormons to
share thoughts on the role of
women in the church. For those
of other faiths we invite you to
share your experiences as well.
— LAURIE GOODSTEIN AND JODI KANTOR, REPORTERS
“A mother and a businesswoman,” she said in an interview on her first day, neatly summarizing the two worlds, Mormon and secular, in which she hopes to thrive.

Ms. Farr, 21, is part of the biggest gender change in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in memory. After the church lowered its age requirement for female missionaries in October 2012 to 19 from 21, so many women have signed up — 23,000, nearly triple from the total before the change — that many Utah colleges suffered sharp drops in enrollment, and the standard image of a Mormon missionary, a gangly young man in a dark suit, was suddenly out of date.

In the coming years, these women are expected to fundamentally alter this most American of churches, whose ruling patriarchs not long ago excommunicated feminist scholars and warned women not to hold jobs while raising children. Church leaders have been forced to reassess their views because Mormon women are increasingly supporting households, marrying later and less frequently, and having fewer children. And for the first time, waves of women like Ms. Farr are taking part in the church’s crucial coming-of-age ritual, returning home from their missions with unprecedented scriptural fluency, new confidence and new ideas about themselves.

Already the church has made small adjustments, inviting women to weigh in on local councils and introducing the first leadership roles for female missionaries. When a band of Mormon feminists staged a demonstration last year in Salt Lake City calling for women to be ordained as priests, their demands were felt in church headquarters — in part because the church’s own surveys also reveal streaks of female dissatisfaction.

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VIDEO|0:20Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesThe New Face of Mormons on a Mission Ashley Farr spends one of her first few days in Daejeon, South Korea, singing hymns in Korean and meeting fellow missionaries, more and more of whom are women.
The church will benefit as “men’s vision of the capacity of women becomes more complete,” as Sister Linda K. Burton, president of the Relief Society, the church’s auxiliary for adult women, put it. Maxine Hanks, one of the excommunicated feminist scholars, recently rejoined the church because she sees “so much progress” for women, she said in an interview.

Yet the church’s attempt to rethink the place of women promises to be one of the most sensitive gender experiments of coming years, with Mormon authorities running simultaneous risks of going too far and not far enough. To revise female roles in the church threatens what many see as the very foundations of the faith, which dictate that men are ordained as priests at the tender age of 18, taking the title “Elder,” while women, who can never progress beyond “Sister,” are considered holiest and most fulfilled as wives and mothers.

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Many Mormon women embrace their traditional roles and flinch at the word “feminism”; a small movement to encourage women to wear pants instead of skirts to Sunday services was met with an angry backlash. Even younger Mormon men are often uncomfortable with the ambitions of their female peers, some women report, creating a chasm of expectations between the sexes.

But if the church, which keenly polishes its image, does not update its ideas about gender, it may be seen as out of step with contemporary life, an untenable home for women who are leaders in their workplaces and breadwinners in their households.

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Mormon Missionaries
The number of missionaries increased in 2013 after the church lowered the minimum age for new missionaries, to 19 from 21 for women and to 18 from 19 for men.
20,000
40,000
60,000
2003
2008
2013
Men
Women
48,461
7,776
Source: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
“The great unfinished business in the church is gender equality,” said Joanna Brooks, an English professor at San Diego State University who often writes about her experiences as a Mormon woman. “An increasing number of young Mormon women are growing up in a world where they not only can work, but have to work, and they are operating 12 hours a day in contexts where gender is irrelevant, but in a church structure where all financial and theological decisions are made by men. This will just stop making sense.”

The Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where Ms. Farr trained and missionaries-to-be are sequestered for crash courses in any one of 55 languages, is a study in transition, filled with “sister missionaries” palpably thrilled with an experience that few of their mothers or grandmothers had. Classrooms are being converted to women’s dormitories; the cafeteria mounts four sittings for each meal; and the electronic notice board in the cafeteria, reminding departing missionaries to dry-clean their suits before they depart, feels like a throwback.

“We are hastening the work,” said Nancy Pratt, a 19-year-old who wants to make ceramics and work as a massage therapist, just before she departed for South Korea. “We are a movement. We get to be part of this great push.”

Strangers and Closed Doors

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The modest apartment that Nicolle Ensign and Victoria Julayne Scott share in Mokpo, South Korea, is filled with reminders and encouragement. A laminated sign taped to their night stand lists the steps to conversion; another shows the names of prospects who have fallen out of touch; and a third lists goals such as “don’t complain about the elders,” the male missionaries who can seem like irritating little brothers. (Men can sign up at 18.)

The apartment contains almost nothing extraneous to the mission, not even a single secular book. The women share one bowl and do not use their first names, even with each other. In the United States, Ms. Ensign, 23, and Ms. Scott, 20, dress more or less like other women their age, but here their wardrobes are regulated down to the bra color, white or cream only. (After going back home, male missionaries often joke about their eyes popping when they run into their former female counterparts wearing clingier tops and shorter skirts.)

Nothing is supposed to distract Ms. Ensign, a gymnast who loves Harry Potter, and Ms. Scott, an education student who enjoys sports and plays the viola, from their improbable task: with only a few weeks of language training, to persuade strangers in a remote city to make a foreign faith their own.

Every morning, leaving their home in a giant apartment block, they have a fairly clear idea of what will happen. “A lot of Koreans won’t even answer the door,” Ms. Ensign said. “In my whole mission” — a year and counting — “I’ve been let in twice.” People they approach on the street often walk away after a sentence. Another female missionary was recently spat on, and obtaining just one phone number can be a triumph.

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Here are questions the reporters posed to a range of Mormon women. We invite you to share your responses below.
Do you feel that your faith encourages or limits women’s leadership?
Joanna Brooks, 42, San Diego
“Does Mormonism make women leaders? Unequivocally, yes. But it does not know how to use them. ”
Sarah Briggs, 28, Boston
“Within our family and our home is where greatness is taught; it is where leadership is born. ”
Lindsay Park, 31, Stansbury Park, Utah
“Many women in the LDS Church say they "feel" equal to men, but equality is not a feeling. It can be measured, and women simply do not have access to the same resources and opportunities that men do. ”
READ FULL RESPONSES
If you are a Mormon woman, how is your life like or not like your mother’s or your daughter’s?
Rosalynde Welch, 39, St. Louis
“Like my mother’s, my day-to-day life is defined by intensive, education-focused parenting, and community and church volunteerism. Yet my mother’s sense of identity was centered on a narrative of sacrifice: She gave up a promising academic career after her undergraduate degree to raise her family in obedience to LDS teachings. ”
Kristine Haglund, 44, Belmont, Mass.
“I have three, and my friends and I joke that, for Mormons, “three is the new five.” For me, the expectations about career choices are also fuzzier; the fact that I work outside the home is not a clear violation of cultural norms, but it's still a little bit unusual in my peer group. ”
Kimberly Houk, 37, North Salt Lake, Utah
“I can relate to my mother as a professional. I can relate to her as a daughter of God, but I cannot relate to her when it comes to what it’s like to be a mother and being responsible for other human beings, and she doesn’t understand my life of living alone and single. ”
READ FULL RESPONSES
Tell us a story about being a woman in the Mormon Church today
Melanie Goulding, 35, Provo, Utah
“Within a borrowed R.V., my hair and makeup was done, I put on my grandmother’s wedding dress, was handed a bouquet of flowers, exited the R.V., and posed in front of the temple for my first bridal portrait. I was 17 years old and didn't even have a boyfriend. ”
Lindsay Park, 31, Stansbury Park, Utah
“As a young woman who wanted to please God, these teachings didn't translate into healthy behaviors. I developed an eating disorder in high school. ”
Fiona Givens, 56, Richmond, Va.
“Being a woman in the LDS church means being at the nexus of a service-oriented life. ”
READ FULL RESPONSES
But from the moment the young women set out one morning in December, bowing their heads with a prayer for the day’s success, it was clear that their task was made a bit easier because they were female.

In the region that Ms. Ensign and Ms. Scott cover, the sister missionaries are outperforming male ones in recruitment, according to Yong-In S. Shin, the mission president for the Daejeon region. Korean women usually do not want male strangers, some barely past adolescence, visiting when they are alone, but two cheerful young American women are another story.

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The two roommates dropped by the apartment of a teacher and mother of two, a church member who was helping them recruit. Greeting her like an old friend, they sat down with her to sing hymns in Korean. A few weeks earlier, the teacher introduced the two Americans to her students, who said they wanted to spend more time with the young women because they were so beautiful. Ms. Scott has long red hair that strangers sometimes ask to touch, and Ms. Ensign often charms Koreans who are surprised that a pink-cheeked young woman from Utah can speak their language so well. After the two left, they met a man outside a supermarket who seemed unusually engaged with them — so interested, in fact, that they decided to hand him off to their male counterparts.

The women had stopped nearly everyone they passed on the street, and as the sun went down they boarded a bus for what turned into a kind of one-act play. They paid their fares and wordlessly separated, each slipping into seats next to Korean women sitting alone thumbing electronic devices. Like parents with bags of raisins and rattles, the two missionaries keep their satchels full of items to engage potential converts, like stickers and Tic Tac mints.

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Sister Linda K. Burton, president of the Mormon Church's Relief Society, in her office in Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Credit Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Ms. Scott, who had been in the country for only six weeks, introduced herself to her seatmate, but quickly exhausted her knowledge of conversational Korean. The woman appeared indifferent. Ms. Scott gave up and stared straight ahead, dejection registering on her face. She could overhear Ms. Ensign moving in on her target, comparing American and Korean Christmas traditions, making references to Korean pop music, pulling out pictures of her family at home, all in long, confident streams. Soon the young woman was covering her mouth in laughter and Ms. Ensign had her phone number.

Though Ms. Scott was crestfallen, generations of male Mormon missionaries have said that kind of experience — falling flat and soldiering on anyway — helps them succeed professionally later in life. Missions are so frustrating, say many Mormons who have done them, that their real purpose is to convert the missionaries themselves, to build faith, focus and grit. In addition to making her a better mother, more knowledgeable in Scripture and patient at serving others, missionary experience will “help me support my family; it’s going to help me find a job,” Ms. Ensign said.

Before a missionary leadership meeting in Seoul in December, Sister Sharon Christensen, a 59-year-old mother of five with long strings of pearls and short blond hair, prepared lunch for the group, and then delivered an encouraging lecture to her charges. With the surge in female missionaries, the wives of mission presidents, like Mrs. Christensen, tend to have greater roles.

“I really wanted to serve a mission,” she said in an interview a few days later, but like most women of her generation, she stayed home instead. She was echoing what the female missionaries said about their mothers. They had wanted the adventure of serving, but church authorities encouraged them to stay home and build families instead. (A refrain back then was that women chose missions because their marriage prospects were poor.) Now mothers are living out their dreams through their daughters.

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VIDEO|3:24Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesMeet, Greet, Converse, Repeat Nicolle Ensign and Victoria Julayne Scott, Mormon missionaries, spend long days in South Korea, saying hello to everyone they encounter, hoping a casual chat will lead to real interest in their faith.
“Maybe in the past, homemakers didn’t get that chance” to do missions, said Mrs. Christensen, her eyes welling.

“It used to be that mission was the rite of passage for men, and marriage was the rite of passage for women,” said Ms. Hanks, the feminist scholar who returned to the church. Now, she said, “the church has officially established the mission as an equal rite of passage for women.”

A picture in the lobby of the Seoul mission depicts a male missionary preparing to go out tracting, or canvassing for converts, as a knight in shining armor. On a recent trip home, Mrs. Christensen bought a matching image of a sword-wielding sister missionary, so the women would be able to see an inspirational portrait, too.

But when asked how they felt about women joining the priesthood, which would allow them to assume religious decision-making authority, Ms. Ensign and Ms. Scott shook their heads and let out nervous giggles. “I already have way too much responsibility,” Ms. Ensign said.

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VIDEO|1:12
Credit Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
A Bus Ride Is an Opportunity Depending on their language skills, missionaries can turn a short bus trip into an opportune moment to befriend fellow passengers and collect phone numbers. Continue reading the main story
In interviews attended by a church spokeswoman, dozens of their peers said the same: They welcomed more opportunities, but the priesthood went too far, a job God assigned to men. A few weeks later, the church gave Ms. Ensign more duties anyway, promoting her to a “sister training leader,” its first-ever leadership position for female missionaries. On top of her own work, she called her eight charges several times a week, set goals for them, ironed out conflicts between companions glued to each other for weeks on end, and celebrated their week-to-week successes.

“I’ve never felt like I’ve had so much purpose in helping people,” she said, sounding delighted with her new tasks.

About the same time, Ms. Scott attended the baptism of her first convert. Just before the ceremony, she took the young woman to the restroom, dressed her in all-white clothing, then handed her over to a local male church member, who performed the ritual. “I got to stand right next to the font,” she said, uncomplaining.

But some former female missionaries said their 18 months of proselytizing planted new questions about inequality.

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Maxine Hanks, an excommunicated feminist scholar, has rejoined the church, heartened because she has seen "so much progress" for women. Credit Michael Friberg for The New York Times
“We couldn’t even baptize the people we taught,” said Melissa Ovard, who served a mission in South Korea in 1997. Back then, she was filled with the certainty of the young and pious, she said, but years later, she stopped attending church because it did not square with her life as a single, professional woman.

Before Ms. Ensign and Ms. Scott head back to the United States, each will have a private meeting with Mr. Shin, the mission president, who gives the same instructions to every missionary. Their next job in the church, he will tell them, is to find a faithful Mormon spouse, “so that they can be sealed for a time and eternity as a husband and a wife,” as he put it, and “experience the joy of having their own family in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The Scramble to Find a Match

The block of ice cream was melting fast. Jessica Sagers, who returned from her mission last year fluent in Korean, worked quickly with her date, using a knife and a melon baller to sculpture the slab of vanilla into something that resembled a skull. In a room carpeted with plastic tarps at Brigham Young University, male-female pairs chiseled away, then scooped their artwork into bowls to make sundaes topped with candy.

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Launch media viewer From left, Marley Wing, Melanie Hunter, Javauna Giles and Nancy Pratt, who were being trained in Provo, Utah, for missions in South Korea Credit Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Goofy icebreakers are customary even for cosmopolitan Mormons like Ms. Sagers, 23, who was then applying to a bioscience doctoral program at Harvard. It was a Saturday “date night” in her singles ward, the church’s answer to bars and nightclubs. At the age of 18, Mormons typically join a ward, or singles congregation, where those of marrying age gather for worship and social events. Without alcohol or coffee to lubricate the socializing (both are prohibited by the church’s Word of Wisdom), there are bowling outings, pie-eating contests, ballroom dancing lessons and, in traditional Mormon fashion, lots and lots of sweets.

The scramble to find a match is intense because marriage is the church’s most important sacrament and families remain together forever. Mormons believe that only married couples who have been ritually bound together for eternity can reach the highest tier of heaven. (Singles who are worthy may marry in the afterlife, according to the church’s prophets.)

The emphasis on marriage starts young. Some Mormon women say that when they were 16, adult leaders guided them through activities like writing letters to their fantasy future husbands, choosing colors for their wedding receptions, cutting out pictures of bridal gowns and choosing the temple where they would like to be “sealed” to their spouses.

Like many young, single Mormon women, Ms. Sagers is looking for a man who would be supportive of a working wife. Her mission in South Korea had a tremendous impact on her trajectory, recalibrating her career goals. She became enthralled by the Korean language, and changed her major from molecular biology to linguistics, all while teaching Korean part time at the Missionary Training Center.

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The Disappearing Mormon Bachelor
Ages 18–30Ages 31–45Ages 46–65Ages 66+
2 unmarried Mormon men in Utah for every 10 unmarried Mormon women.

By JENNIFER DANIEL and JOSH KELLERSource: 2012 Utah Department of Health survey. Includes unmarried Mormons who said they attend church at least once a month.
Ms. Sagers, who will start the doctoral program at Harvard next fall, added that she had “post-mission optimism” about her marriage prospects. “They have three singles wards in Cambridge,” she said.

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But the push for marriage can be complicated for the growing cohort of well-educated Mormon women in their 30s and older with high-powered careers. They are encouraged to date, but they are expected to remain chaste until they marry. And while many women may want husbands who value a two-career household, they say that many Mormon men are not interested in wives with careers, because a mother’s primary role is to shape the character of their children.

“Men still have the dream of the six or seven kids, and you’ve aged out of that dream,” said Kimberly Houk, 37, a television journalist in the Salt Lake City area. “I’m doing my part. I keep my weight down and my looks attractive. If I wanted to be married, I could choose someone who is choosing me.”

The odds make it increasingly difficult for Mormon women to find a Mormon mate as they get older. In Utah, the heart of Mormonism, among Mormons 40 and older who attend church at least once a month, there are 10 unmarried women for every 4 unmarried men. Many single women say the church is at something of a loss about how to address the issue. While the church teaches that marrying within the faith is ideal, some older single women say their bishops have advised them that it would be acceptable to date non-Mormons.

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Melissa Ovard is no longer an active member of the Mormon Church. Credit Greg Kahn for The New York Times
A Changing Church, to a Point

Years after returning from her mission to South Korea — a logical placement, since she was adopted as a baby from South Korea by a Mormon family in Utah — Ms. Ovard found that being a single woman in the church undermined her faith. Like most women in the church, she had been groomed for leadership in the church’s female organizations, even speaking to a crowd of 800 at age 16.

She threw herself into church life after her mission, serving as the local Relief Society president, teaching Sunday school and staying active in her singles ward. But she found that many Mormon men — both in Utah and in New York City, where she moved — did not want to marry an Asian. (“If only you were white,” one told her.) She kept looking, but also put energy into her career as a technical writer.

“I started meeting so many incredible older women in their 30s who were still single,” she said. At the time, she felt, “I don’t understand, because if marriage is a reward for being obedient and being righteous, why are these women still single?”


www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/us/a-growing-role-for-mormon-women.html?hp

[sushi]

"Older women in their 30s” oy vey.

The missionaries are often in my neighborhood. They skip my house. I've not been here a year, so it must have been my landlord who scared them away. I would just invite them for food (I know they live on pennies) so long as they didn't attempt to convert me from my atheist ways.