Growing up in Cranbrook, the Fundamentalist Mormons of Bountiful were a well-known, if somewhat enigmatic, neighbour. We would often see them around, my friends and I, but of course we would never make an effort to try and speak to them. We would only speak about them; about how sad and terrible their lives must be. Judgemental whispers and disapproving glances made in the way only teen girls can.
Almost 20 years later, after a University degree and a lot more experience travelling the world and experiencing different cultures, I moved back to the Kootenays with a newfound curiosity for exploring the different cultures that I could find locally. I was very excited to discover Balancing Bountiful: What I Learned about Feminism from My Polygamist Grandmothers by Mary Jayne Blackmore (Caitlin Press) on the shelves. I was so curious to get a peek into this community that had been a mystery to me for so long. We are almost exactly the same age, and before reading this book I felt that someone like Mary Jayne Blackmore was very different from me. After reading her book however, I was delighted to discover the ways in which we were the same: Kootenay kids who led delightful, nature filled childhoods, and then found the courage to break free of expectations and blaze a new trail. In a recent interview, I spoke with Mary Jayne about some aspects of her book, how growing up in the Kootenays shaped the way she saw the world, and the ongoing tension in her life with the media.
Sarah Stupar: In your memoir there’s a lot of fun, good things that you remember from growing up. Outside of the religiosity of your childhood, the memories explicitly speak more about, essentially, growing up on a farm in the Creston valley. I was curious about how you were viewed when you went down to visit other Fundamentalist Mormon communities in the United States? Was there a divide between “townie” girls of Colorado City and the “country girls” of Bountiful?
Mary Jayne Blackmore: “Yes. In Colorado City there was a much more ‘urban’ lifestyle but definitely more intense religiosity than we grew up with. Well, maybe intense religiosity isn’t the way to put it. Our family was definitely very conservative in so many elements, but I think because of the farming background where, and you find this just in Canadian history in general, in farm communities, women were out driving tractors, women were just more needed in the workforce and therefore had a bigger role and more power within their family structure.
I think there might be something kind of similar going on in my community, where farm women just play a bigger role in their families. That’s more of what I mean than our families being less religious because we were VERY religious. Yet still, because we had kind of country/cowboy values, like, our dads grew up ‘country kids’ who played guitars, who listened to country music, they just never saw any harm in us listening to country music. Whereas in the United States, the girls our age weren’t allowed to listen to country music because it was so ‘worldly’ and ‘bad’. They didn’t ride horses and didn’t ride motorbikes and drive tractors or any of the things that were just normal life for us.
We were needed in the workforce in such a way that we would hang out with the boys all the time, something that the ‘city’ girls who had more proper gender roles or division of labour never did. We would laugh about it, but I’d say it impacted our lives even more deeply than we realized at the time. I think as a result I developed a more autonomous personality and life skills and value system, even feeling more competitive towards boys because I worked around them which, I think, affected me in a big way in my life. I felt more powerful and independent and free minded because I worked next to these boys, I knew how they thought. I didn’t realize it at the time but when I look back now, I see that that’s what I was learning.
SS: When other Mormon girls married into your family from the United States would they struggle with it? Was it hard for them?
MJB: Yeah, they often talked about that, feeling so astounded and sometimes even let down that their husbands actually expected more of them, coming into this farm community where women did actually have to do so many more things. Women were more independent, women were more likely to have more access to their finances, or be expected to take the pick-up truck into town by yourself and fuel it up … we just did that naturally but for some women who married into it, it was all quite foreign for them. Their attitude was more “normally husbands would do this for their wives” but in our family, our reaction would be “What? Just go do it yourself.”
SS: The book has a sort of recurring character in the form of “The Media,” film crews who showed up when you were little to film you and your family basically “doing chores.” This included documentary film producers not following through with their promises, and a reporter who phoned you up to ask “what’s it like to be a child bride?” You also talk in the book about a presentation that the women of the community did, and how that was covered derisively in the media. I was just wondering if those experiences are part of what motivated you to write this book, and if you felt like it’s helped to ‘level the playing field,’ so to speak?
MJB: The short answer is yes! The stories told in the media, in such a huge way, did not reflect my experience, it’s one of the long-term motivating factors behind writing this book. I put in so much effort to connect with the media, to be a voice, to reach out, to not meet the media with silence. I personally, and many other people, put in hundreds of hours into accommodating the media, taking those interviews, responding.
I participated in a National Geographic documentary, which was something I did for a year. In addition to the actual filming there’s a lot of other things, like phone calls, answering emails and still … even though they did a fair enough job, I still felt very “not heard,” or “seen” in that experience. I could watch the finished project and say “this isn’t the story, I don’t feel represented here.” The producers had a different agenda in what they were trying to accomplish, and I felt they came at it with an agenda that really wasn’t telling my story or my family’s story in a way that would be helpful or even, I would say, true to my family’s experiences.
I’ve had this recurring experience in my adulthood of trying to respond respectfully to the media or certain reporters who are portraying us in a negative way. Finally, I decided that I had to just write this book, that it would be the only way to really be able to tell a story where I can create an opportunity for the reader to see and feel and connect with these true human characters who are real people currently living, trying to create futures and lives for themselves, specifically youth, which in this scenario, is hundreds of people.
In a small way, currently, I feel like the book has made a small step in being able to level the playing field. For the first time I think there’s an opportunity for the curious person to access a more well-rounded representation of a culture and community and people that was never really accessible before this, because as much as I tried through responding to interviews and such, that story was just not available.
SS: Do you think it would be fair to say that the media covered your community and your family in a way that was the antithesis of building trust?
MJB: Yes. The media has been a gatekeeper of this story and really affected how outsiders viewed members of the community, but also, the way I viewed the world was through that media lens. It held both communities separate from each other. The church definitely had a role, but always, interestingly, the media reinforced what the church was already saying. It made it really easy for the church to create this portrayal of the world as antagonistic towards us because it was so reinforced immediately, by the media. Something would happen in the church and then the media would jump on it in a way that just affirmed what the church was saying about the wicked world. Anytime anything would happen there would be this intense backlash from the media. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy cycle that became entrenched.
SS: What has the reaction been so far to the book?
MJB: Telling my story has been really incredible, and it’s been so great connecting with people. So often when people are talking to me, they are in awe of my story, but then through that, they begin also telling me their story. We all have a journey of our family, of rationalizing where we came from and why, as well as how, we got here.
You can learn more about Balancing Bountiful on Caitlin Press’s website, here. To learn more about our contributor, Sarah Stupar, follow her on Twitter.