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For two days in June 1977, fourteen thousand women packed Salt Lake City's convention center for Utah's International Women's Year conference. Across the country, each state convened an IWY conference to discuss various issues affecting women, most notably the equal rights amendment. Utah's IWY conference ranked as the nation's largest state conference, by far eclipsing the second biggest, of six thousand participants in California, a state twenty times more populous than Utah. In Utah, the organizational skills of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ensured the conference's record crowds. The Mormon Church wanted to counteract the perceived liberal slant of participants in other state conferences by flooding the Utah meetings with faithful church members.
From the church's highest leadership ranks, word went out that every church ward was to recruit at least ten women to attend the Utah IWY conference. A church memorandum directed ward bishops and Relief Society presidents to tell selected women they had been "called" to attend and that they should defeat every conference proposal. When more than thirteen thousand Mormon women arrived at the Salt Palace, they overwhelmed conference organizers, who had expected two thousand attendees. These thirteen thousand women steered the conference in keeping with church directives by harassing various speakers, voting on platforms before discussion and soundly defeating every proposal. The Utah IWY conference had been a masterful performance on behalf of the Mormon Church in repudiating liberal agendas of the 1970s, particularly the equal rights amendment.1
The historiography of the Equal Rights Amendment has largely ignored the Mormon Church's role in the political battle. Jane J. Mansbridge's study Why We Lost the ERA references the church in just one sentence when she locates anti-ERA opposition in "the fundamentalist South . . . and in the Mormon ©2007 The American Studies Association states of Utah and Nevada, where the Mormon church actively fought the ERA." Mary Frances Berry notes the church president's official opposition to the amendment, but fails to examine any organized role the church played in the ERA's defeat.2 Mormon-centered studies, however, have offered notable supplements to the ERA's historiography. These works have attributed the church's part in preventing the amendment's ratification to its hierarchal nature and Mormons' solid deference to that hierarchy.3 As one...