Posted October 14, 2026
By Michelle Bulsiewicz

All my life growing up in the LDS church, very few events could be held for females without a man present. Maybe a few evening activities at the church were allowed to be women only, but definitely no overnight trips, no Sunday services, and anything with ordinances would obviously be straight up heresy. Even back when the church used to have Relief Society or Young Women general broadcasts, the program always had to end with a male speaker. Nothing was official or truly “approved of” by God unless a man had touched it. 

This is something that has bothered me since I was a teenager at least. I remember the bishop coming and speaking in my Young Women lessons, and I would be bothered that he did that, but no women did the same for the Young Men. Or, when I went to Girls’ Camp, and a whole tent-ful of priesthood men always had to come along because us females couldn’t possibly handle a camping trip on our own. It would be dangerous, irresponsible. No matter how often my church leaders tried to insist that God saw women as equal to men, I saw the contradiction in the fact that woman apparently couldn’t be trusted to run a church event on their own.

Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash

For a couple years now, I’ve attended a church that ordains women. A few weeks ago, I went to a women’s retreat in the mountains with other ladies from this church. It was a lovely, relaxing weekend, but something that really struck me after my Mormon upbringing was that there was not a single man present. We did not need them. We had all the authority we needed by ourselves.

The woman who gave the first prayer of the event addressed it to the Hebrew female aspect of the divine, Sophia, and no one blinked an eye. Coming from a tradition where such a prayer would be highly controversial and likely lead to social if not ecclesiastical punishment, hearing it said so unapologetically immediately made me emotional.

That evening, one of the women present wanted to receive a blessing, and there were other women there who could perform it for her, whose assignment within their church was to do so. They decided to have every woman present—about twenty people—bring their hands into the circle in some way while the blessing was given. It was an incredibly powerful experience that brought many to tears, including myself. No one there had to doubt that they had the same equal access to God as anyone else in the world. We didn’t have to call in a man to execute a sacred experience that women were deemed unworthy to perform. We had our own complete spiritual autonomy.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

The point of this story is not that everyone needs to start going to the same church I go to. I no longer feel that way about church or religion in general. Everyone has their own path and different things that work for them. Nor do I think that the church I go to is perfect, by any means. But I do think that women everywhere deserve to feel empowered instead of lesser.

Women don’t need to be on a pedestal to be looked at and preserved and protected, they need to be in charge of their own lives and their own spirituality. They need to know that God sees them as just as capable as any man. Any institution that fails at doing that needs to be corrected, and needs to do better. That’s why we all needed to keep speaking up against it, until women everywhere are treated as fully capable adults, empowered by the divine in us all.