DAEJEON, South Korea – Ashley Farr 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 corner of Asia.
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. 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.
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from the total before the change – the standard image of a Mormon missionary, a young man in a dark suit, was suddenly out of date.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.
Already the church has made small adjustments, inviting women to weigh in on local councils and introducing the first leadership roles for female missionaries.
Even younger Mormon men are often uncomfortable with the ambitions of their female peers, some women report. 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.
“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.
