Sonia Johnson

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Sonia Johnson (born February 27, 1936) is an American feminist activist and writer. She was an outspoken supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and in the late 1970s was publicly critical of the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church; see also Mormon), of which she was a member, against the proposed amendment. She eventually was excommunicated from the church for her activities and went on to publish several radical feminist books.

Sonia Johnson was born in Malad, Idaho as a fifth-generation Mormon. She attended Utah State University and married Rick Johnson following graduation. Following her marriage she earned a Master's degree and a Doctor of Education from Rutgers College. She was employed as a part-time teacher of English in universities both in the United States and abroad for the following decades. The couple changed their residence often, due to the transfer of her husband to new places of employment. They returned to the United States in 1976.

Sonia began speaking out in support of the ERA in 1977 and co-founded, with three other women, an organization called Mormons for ERA. National exposure occurred with her 1978 testimony in front of the United States Senate's Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, and she continued speaking and promoting the ERA and denouncing the LDS Church's opposition to the amendment.

The church began disciplinary proceedings against her after she delivered a scathing speech entitled "Patriarchal Panic: Sexual Politics in the Mormon Church" at a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA) in New York City in September, 1979. Sonia denounced allegedly immoral and illegal nationwide lobbying efforts by the LDS Church to prevent passage of the ERA.^[1]

Because the speech drew national media attention, Sonia’s local Virginia church immediately began excommunication proceedings. A December, 1979 ex-communication letter confirmed that Sonia Johnson was charged with a variety of misdeeds including hindering the worldwide missionary program, damaging internal Mormon social programs and teaching false doctrine.^[2]

After the rupture with the church Sonia continued promoting the ERA, speaking at numerous functions throughout the country and appearing on television talk shows. In 1981 she published an autobiographical book about her embrace of feminism, titled From Housewife to Heretic (Doubleday,1981).

Throughout this period Johnson emphasized her husband's support of her and her activities. They were parents of four children. Rick was then active in the LDS church, yet initially supportive of his wife's ERA activity. However, the marriage ended in divorce shortly after she was excommunicated.

Johnson ran In the 1984 presidential election, as the presidential candidate of the U.S. Citizens Party and California's Peace and Freedom Party. Johnson received 72,161 votes (0.08%) finishing fifth [1]. One of her campaign managers Mark Dunlea later authored a novel about a first female president, Madame President^[3].

Johnson became increasingly radicalized, especially against state power, as reflected in the books she published after 1987. They include:

• Telling the Truth (Crossing Press, 1987)
• Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation (Crossing Press, 1987)
• Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution (Wildfire Books, 1990)
• The Ship that Sailed Into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered (Wildfire Books, 1991)
• Out of This World: A Fictionalized True-Life Adventure (Wildfire Books, 1993)

In Going Out of Our Minds Sonia Johnson detailed the personal and political experiences that turned her against the state. In the book she rejected the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, equal opportunity laws, and other government benefits because she considered them cooptation by patriarchy.

In Wildfire Sonia elaborated on her beliefs and answered her many critics in and out of the feminist movement. Her bottom line argument was that state violence is male violence and that women relate to the male-dominated state much as women relate to battering husbands who alternately abuse and reward their wives to keep them under control. She compares both relationships to the Stockholm Syndrome in which hostages develop an emotional attachment to their captors.

In chapter three of Wildfire, entitled "The Great Divorce," Sonia wrote: "I have heard women involved in male politics say about our political system almost the same words I have heard battered women use about their abusers: 'Of course our government isn’t perfect, but where is there a better one? With all its faults, it is still the best system (husband) in the world.' Like a battered wife, they never think to ask the really relevant questions: who said we needed a husband, or a husband-state, at all?"

During this time Sonia also declared herself a lesbian and started a relationship with an African American woman. After ending that relationship, she wrote in The Ship that Sailed Into the Living Room that even relationships between female couples are a dangerous patriarchal trap, because "two is the ideal number for inequality, for sadism, for the reproduction of patriarchy", and that relationships are "slave Ships" (a concept from which she derived the title of the book).

"Nearly four years after I began my rebellion against relation/sex/slave Ships," she wrote, "experience and my Wise Old Woman are telling me that sex as we know it is a patriarchal construct and has no rightful, natural place in our lives, no authentic function or ways. Synonymous with hierarchy/control, sex is engineered as part of the siege against our wholeness and power."

Sonia Johnson also founded Wildfire, a short-lived separatist commune for women that disbanded in 1993. She published several of her books under the name "Wildfire Books." She continues to speak at feminist events, including the 2007 Feminist Hullabaloo

[edit] References

[edit] See also

• Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History, Chapter 17 "Sonia Johnson: Mormonism's Feminist Heretic," (University of Illinois Press, 1998)
• Majorie Hyer, "Mormon Bishop Excommunicates Woman Who Is Supporting ERA," Washington Post, December 6, 1979, p. A1.
• Carol Moore, "Our Husband, the State," review of Sonia Johnson's Wildfire: Igniting the She!volution, published in Association of Libertarian Feminists News, Spring 1990.
• Sonia Johnson papers at University of Utah Library Collection website.
• Sonia Johnson photograph collection of LDS-related and other ERA demonstrations at University of Utah Library website.

Preceded by Barry Commoner

Citizens Party Presidential candidate 1984 (lost)

Succeeded by —