How obeying LDS Church teachings can leave some women in poverty

“Try it again,” the cashier suggested.

Allison did. And again, the credit card transaction failed.

“I just need to make a few phone calls,” said the Utah mother of four, who asked that a pseudonym be used for fear of retribution from her estranged husband.

“Sure,” the grocery store cashier said in a nonchalant tone that Allison took to mean he saw this sort of thing all the time. “Just pull your cart to the side.”

She did, and began calling and texting her estranged husband, the primary credit card holder. No answer. She waited, willing her phone to vibrate with a notification, until she couldn’t take it any longer. Praying no one would notice, she relinquished her white-knuckle grip on the cart full of food she had been counting on to make dinner for her kids that night and slipped out the sliding glass doors.

Only later did Allison, now in her 40s, receive confirmation of what she already had suspected: Her husband had cut her off financially.

“I just panicked,” she recalled.

There were utilities, gas and medications to pay for. And Allison, who long ago had given up her education and career to be a stay-at-home mom, had nothing but the change in her purse.

The former member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had heeded her faith leaders’ counsel to prioritize motherhood and was now paying a steep price for it.

It’s the kind of story that Utah State University professor Susan Madsen, founding director of the Utah Women & Leadership Project, has heard “at least a hundred times” in the past few years alone. Women raised as Latter-day Saints forfeit a chance at a career to stay home with the kids — only to be left with little money and few job prospects when, years later, their marriage falls apart.

Madsen said, “Women tell me: ‘I did what I was supposed to and now my husband has left, and I’m not prepared. I still have a kid at home, and I’m starting at the bottom working at Walmart.’”

What the church teaches about women and the workforce

Rewind to 1995, the year the church published its official blueprint on family and gender, “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.” While leaving some room for exceptions (disability, death or “other circumstances”), the document designates mothers as “primarily responsible for the nurture of their children” and fathers as the preferred providers.

This language was hardly new. Instead, it was the exclamation point on an entire era when church leaders emphasized women’s role in the home as divinely appointed.

Take then-apostle Ezra Taft Benson’s 1981 sermon, “The Honored Place of Woman,” delivered during General Conference.

“You were elected by God to be wives and mothers in Zion,” he taught. “Exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom is predicated on faithfulness to that calling. Since the beginning, a woman’s first and most important role has been ushering into mortality spirit sons and daughters of our Father in Heaven.”

Even when another eventual church president, apostle Gordon B. Hinckley, encouraged women in 1989 to “get all the education you can,” he paired it with a wish for his female audience that none of them would ever have to work for pay.

Through the years, this framing of a woman pursuing a career essentially as a backup plan has faded. The church acknowledged as much in a March essay titled “Women’s Service and Leadership in the Church.”

“In the mid to late 20th century, church teachings encouraged women to forgo working outside the home, where possible, in order to care for their family,” it reads. “In recent years, church leaders have also emphasized that care for the family can include decisions about education, employment and other personal issues. These should be a matter of prayer and revelation.”

It also flatly states that how members “choose to balance caring for children and other family members with working to financially support them will vary according to individual circumstances.”

And just last year, the current leader of the global Relief Society for women, President Camille Johnson, highlighted her own decision to pursue a career as a lawyer, calling the period of her life when her children were young a “joyful juggle.”

For women like Allison, however, these messages came too little, too late.

‘I’d be homeless’

After leaving the grocery store empty-handed, Allison did the only thing she could think of and called her dad.

“It was,” she said, “humiliating.”

Through family support and a low-paying job she chose because it worked with her kids’ school schedule, Allison has been able to cover the bills.

And if she hadn’t had help?

“I’d be homeless,” she said. “Or I would have had to take any job that I possibly could, and my kids would be left on their own a lot more.”

When Allison reflects on the counsel she received when she was still in the faith that contributed to her current predicament, she doesn’t hesitate.

Yes, she was taught to get an education. But having an undergraduate degree “is just a very small percentage of the equation” when it comes to paying for braces and a mortgage, she noted. Equally important is “building a career.”

Madsen underlined those dual points. Women should be encouraged, she said, to pair their bachelor’s degrees and other academic achievements with work experience. Doing so, she argued, is the only true path for these individuals to reach self-reliance — a principle that the faith’s leaders have long championed.

‘Not all fairy tales’

It’s difficult to say how common stories like Allison’s are. According to the Utah Women & Leadership Project, nearly 50,000 single mothers live in Utah. Of those, 1 in 4 live below the poverty line. The median income for this group: less than $38,000 a year.

Of course, not all those women are Latter-day Saints. But Tiffany Sowby, founder of the nonprofit Rising Violet, wagers “it is far more common than anyone cares to admit.”

Since 2023, her organization has been trying to put cash into the hands of mothers who find themselves suddenly on their own with little to go on.

The organization’s $1,000 grants go out at a pace of about two a month, or to roughly half of its applicants (“It just depends on funding”). Recipients don’t have to be Latter-day Saints, but nearly all are.

Sowby, who lives in West Bountiful, explained, “They’ll say in their grant applications, ‘I stayed home because that was what I was taught.’”

Other patterns she has observed: abuse by their husbands; women feeling blindsided by divorce and being left with primary responsibility for children, many with special needs. Also: limited work experience.

Most of the applicants, she has found, were born in the 1970s and ’80s, and were married for around 10 years. More than a few have described in their grant applications sacrificing their own ambitions to support their husband’s career, only for their spouse to take off after he saw success in his field.

“We’ve got to teach young girls and young women and even young adult women that it’s not all fairy tales,” Sowby said. “We’ve got to make sure that they have…some way to be financially independent.”

Working toward financial independence

Women, Sowby said, should always have eyes on and a say in the family finances, their own credit and a personal fund with enough to buy a car independent of their spouse should the need arise.

To this list, Madsen stressed the importance of keeping the resume fresh.

This can be tough, she acknowledged, with everything else mothers can be expected to do. But neither does it have to be all-consuming.

Possible avenues include finding a professional board to serve on or an evening class that meets once a week. For nurses or others in the medical field, meanwhile, even working a shift a month is better than nothing.

“Stay engaged,” she said. “Keep your skills up. It’s not all or nothing.”

Holding men responsible

But neither should the burden of avoiding poverty be left entirely on the women either, argued Becky Sumsion, a 51-year-old divorced mother of four.

Married at 19, the Farmington resident earned her undergraduate degree and worked off and on as a dietician while raising her kids. It wasn’t enough. By the time of her divorce, which she described as a mutual decision, she had fallen behind in the field and was passed over for well-paid, full-time jobs.

“I had been only doing minimal work, and no one wanted to hire me at my age with my lack of experience,” she said. “Plus, I had three kids at home and one that had just started college. It was a really difficult time to figure out a career.”

Like Allison, Sumsion left the church in her 20s. But her former husband had stayed active in the faith. One day she received a letter from his bishop, or lay leader of a congregation, saying her ex wanted a sealing cancellation, or voiding of the sacred ceremony meant to bind them for eternity. Sumsion responded by explaining that he had stopped paying child support and alimony — a topic leaders are required to ask about in the faith’s temple recommend interviews — and hoping the bishop would encourage him to pay up before greenlighting the cancellation of their sealing.

“It didn’t matter,” Sumsion said. The so-called temple divorce went forward, she said, and her husband soon was sealed to his new wife. Meanwhile, between feeding her family and legal fees, Sumsion’s credit card debt ballooned.

In the years that followed, Sumsion, who has since remarried, said her former husband stopped talking to the kids, but, as far as she can tell, has faced no ecclesiastical consequences as a result.

“Nothing,” she lamented, “holds these men accountable.”

The church did not respond to questions regarding its policy for men — and women — who are not current on their financial obligations to former spouses and children.

In a 1985 address, however, Hinckley said such a man “may find his standing in the church in jeopardy and particularly his eligibility for a temple recommend.”

Changing the system

Latter-day Saint Emily Prisbrey, founder of the Utah Single Mothers Coalition, is working to change that.

“I don’t know a man in the world who wants to pay his alimony, ever,” said the 52-year-old Bountiful resident who had two kids and no clear career path when, at age 34, she and her then-husband split up. “They think that women made a choice in giving up their career.”

And that, she argued, is where church and state ought to enter, using their separate levers of power to ensure men support the children they father.

There are signs her message is breaking through. Just last month, Gov. Spencer Cox signed HB463, a bill for which she was a vocal proponent that makes it easier and less costly for parents to use state resources to collect child support and alimony from former spouses.

As for the faith front, she offered the following advice to bishops:

• If you know the former spouse isn’t paying his (or her) part of alimony and child support, pick up the phone and let that person’s bishop know.

• A number of women seek divorces because of domestic violence and other forms of abuse. Don’t revictimize them by treating them with suspicion or blaming them for the marriage “going wrong.”

• Focus on helping your congregant heal with the Savior and leave everything else about the divorce to therapists.

What about her advice to women in the midst of a divorce?

“Find a mentor,” Prisbrey said. “There are many of us out there.”

Bishop roulette

Finally, what — if any — responsibility might the church have to help these women, particularly those who remain within the fold?

It’s a question to which Brooke Gardner has given a lot of thought.

The now 42-year-old Kaysville resident had four kids in five years before her husband’s addiction dissolved their marriage more than a decade ago.

He has since died in a car accident. But even when he was alive, the child support checks, she said, were sporadic and the alimony nonexistent.

Still, the Latter-day Saint counts herself lucky. In addition to family support, Gardner said she had a supportive bishop.

“He always made sure our needs were met,” she said, “no questions asked.”

In contrast, she described how a bishop told her friend — also single, divorced and struggling — that the church would help but only if she volunteered at one of its food banks.

“She was working a full-time job,” Gardner recalled, “had three or four kids at the time, and her ex wouldn’t help watch them.”

Gardner doesn’t believe it’s right that some women get the help they need and others don’t — purely based on what members call bishop roulette.

“If the church could take more of an approach of ‘we want to help you; here’s what we’re willing to do,’ and standardize its help across the church,” she said, “women would know where they stand.”

After all, the church, with an independently estimated worth of nearly $300 billion, can afford to step in.

“We have enough money [as a faith],” Gardner said, “that a single mom should never have to stress about keeping the lights on or feeding their kids.”

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