A Brief and Undeveloped Post on Lady School

Everyone’s in love with Greg Mortensen (Three Cups of Tea author, in case you haven’t been out of the house in three years), he who has built schools and helped Ladies in Other countries get an education. 

I heard him speak at BYU several weeks ago, and John Tanner, the Academic VP, introduced him by giving this, perhaps apocryphal, though oft repeated, quote from Brigham Young that says something like if he could only choose to send either his sons or daughters to school, he would choose his daughters since in educating a woman you are in essence educating her children as well.  

Mortensen’s point is that educating Ladies= the most efficient and effective way to reduce poverty, birth rate, sexual oppression, etc. 

Great.

Young’s point is that women are in charge of raising kids and therefore need an education more than men.

Great?

I bristle at two assumptions inherent in Young’s supposed statement (a sentiment that I’ve heard in every single discussion about Ladies going to School in official LDS discussions)

1)   It is right and good that women and only women are in charge of children and their nurture.

2)   Lady School is only good because women will have babies and need to raise them, and therefore should be allowed to go to Lady School.  A tautology?

3)   Lady School skills should only be used to assist a woman in raising children.

Mortensen and Young are both pragmatists—efficient, accomplished, able to install cultural institutions in the most unfriendly of environments.  It is true that educating women benefits communities exponentially.  And it’s not that I want Mortensen to stop building schools for people, but, as per Eva’s previous post, this allows us to feel so warm and fuzzy about helping Other Oppressed Ladies while failing to examine our own oppression.  Is this the uneasiness I feel?  How is it that an Education for Ladies seems almost like a burden in the context of Young’s statement/the pervasive attitude among Mormons about Lady School, rather than a liberation (remember when Frederick Douglass first learned to read and suddenly understood exactly how un-free he was?)

Ladies, pack your School Books in your saddle-bags and carry them up a steep mountain to your families.  Remember that you are mules, not stallions.