This book was a missed opportunity. When the anecdotes are actual excerpts from the women's own diaries, we find powerful and intelligent voices, but the historical narrative they are embedded within is very problematic for the way it flattens out controversial points, notably the Priesthood issues. The Joseph Smith Translation notes that the Priesthood is an Order "without father or mother", and this book does, in fact, have the quotes from Joseph Smith in which he desires women to be ordained into the cosmological Priesthood; for instance, on page 12, he is quoted saying "Tell the sisters their offering is accepted of the Lord, and he has something better for them than a written constitution. I invite them all to meet with me and a few of the brethren [...] next Thursday afternoon, and I will organize the women under the priesthood after the pattern of the priesthood."
For the first few chapters, I had hopes that this book would be the needed corrective to much of our (non-doctrinal) patriarchal church culture and show that the Priesthood is not actually gender-based, but midway through it becomes an apologia for the current practice of denying it to women. This, despite the fact that Emma Smith was an answer to a purported prophecy, and Joseph Smith ordained the Relief Society with a Priesthood Key, saying "This society is to get instruction through the order which God has established -- through the medium of those appointed to lead -- and I now turn the key to you in the name of God, and this society shall rejoice and knowledge and intelligence shall flow down from this time -- this is the beginning of better days to this society." Especially painful was the patronizing story (couched in faith-promoting rhetoric) of George Albert Smith telling Sister Spafford to remain in the National Council of Women against her judgment.
I wish Eliza R. Snow and Emma Smith were still around. When will we be able to call our Sisters Prophetesses again, as the early Saints did Eliza R. Snow, or Priestesses, as they did with those such as Emma Smith, Bathsheba W. Smith, or Zina Diantha Huntington? Not to mention Biblical Prophetesses such as Miriam, Deborah the Bee, Huldah, Anna from Luke, the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist, and Isaiah's wife. We, who believe in the Restoration's vital doctrine of a Mother in Heaven to complement the Father, should have been the first people in the modern age to continue to embrace ordaining women into the Priesthood. Instead we have mingled the philosophies of men with our scripture -- the "false traditions of the fathers" that the Book of Mormon warns so strenuously against -- and become the fools who say "A Priesthood! A Priesthood! We have got a Priesthood, and there cannot be any more Priesthood."