The editors of Scholaristas—a new blog on women’s religious history—have launched, as their inaugural forum, a discussion of the 1971 “Pink Issue” of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Now approaching its fortieth anniversary, the publication of that issue “marked the beginning of a resurgence of Mormon feminism and an increased interest in women’s history. The women who were involved—Claudia Bushman, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, etc.—have become important figures within the Mormon academic community.” The goal of this forum, according to the Scholaristas, will be to “examine the Pink Issue of Dialogue and think about the moment from which it sprang and the possible meaning of that issue today.”

To date the forum features three posts. One, by Claudia Bushman, describes the Pink Issue’s origins and reception:

The Pink Issue came to be because the cell meetings of our little LDS feminist group were contentious.  I thought that we might get on better if we had a project that was of mutual interest.  So when Gene England, Dialogue’s editor, was visiting us once, I asked him if he would entrust an issue to our group of women. He agreed without a delay, without a condition. [. . .] [. . .] By the time we turned in the material, Gene had retired, to be replaced by Robert Rees.  Bob did not like our articles, which he considered provincial, too limited, too housewifey.  The real LDS female issues, he informed us, were patriarchy and polygamy.  Well, they weren’t our issues, and I was shocked and stung to have our issues, our pain and anguish, so cavalierly dismissed.  Still, his comments sent us on a search for past women of our tradition and we did discover and write about a heritage that most Mormons still don’t know anything about.

The other two posts—by Amanda and Elizabeth, two of the site’s editors—reflect upon the continuing relevance of themes from the 1971 journal, and upon the role of story-sharing itself in the long (but often overlooked) history of Mormon feminism.

Read more at the Scholaristas site here, or access the 1971 Pink Issue here.