Excommunicated Mormon Feminist Plans to Build a World of Her Own

Sonia Johnson’s life took a dramatic turn after she was excommunicated a decade ago for supporting the proposed Equal Rights Amendment.

Devastated at first, the one-time devout Mormon became a lesbian and an activist, lecturing and writing for feminist causes.

Now she’s setting out to make her own world.

“I think of what my mother said, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself,’ ” Johnson said. “Why don’t we just do it? We’re going to try to figure out how we would make a world, how would we make a society.”

The “we” is a group of lesbians planning an experimental community based on a simple philosophy that Johnson is sure will be misunderstood: Each member does what she wants to do all the time.

“We have to trust that our desires are wholesome and good and that our feelings reflect those desires,” she said. “We want to make a world based on women’s values, and we’re adamant in only doing what we want to do.

“I’m 54, and for the rest of my life I’m going to do what I want to do.”

Johnson envisions a society based on peace, love, harmony, joy and laughter--and work.

The underlying theory is that women will want to work if their duties are in harmony with their values, and that they will delight in doing it because it will suit them.

The plan for a new society is Johnson’s latest endeavor since the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints excommunicated her in 1979 for opposing church authority by actively working for the ERA.

Distraught at first, Johnson says now that her ouster from the church and a painful divorce shortly after led her into a fulfilling career as a speaker and author.

“It was a great boon that the Mormons gave me this new profession,” said Johnson, a former university professor with a doctorate in English education. “They excommunicated me to shut me up, and really they just gave me a forum. Women don’t get that much poetic justice, so I just revel in it.”

Johnson ran for President in 1984 on both the Citizens Party and the Peace and Freedom Party tickets, and got 71,947 votes. Two years earlier, she ran for president of the National Organization for Women and finished second, with 40% of the votes.

Johnson today regards NOW as a white, middle-class, professional organization that tries to get women into the mainstream of the country.

“I don’t want mainstream,” she said. “I want to make another stream.”

“Women have been trying to get men to change the world, saying they’ve got to do right by us,” she said. “Activism in the women’s movement has been to try to get men to change things, but this is the way men do worlds. They know the problems, but on the whole, they think the world is pretty amazing. We’re asking the wrong people to change things.”

Johnson and her group of six or seven women are looking for a site for their community.

She is sure they can successfully divvy up duties according to what each wants to do. Some will want to grow vegetables, she said. Others might want to build or cook or paint or clean or landscape or fix a leaky faucet.

Johnson envisions other communities based on the same philosophy. Hers would focus on gay women because that’s where her interests lie, but she sees other mini-environments made up of heterosexuals or of gay men.

The communities could interact, for example, by supplying vegetables to those whose residents didn’t want to grow crops or by doing carpentry where others lacked either the skill or the desire to build.

Her theory leaves room for jobs no one would want to do. How many people, for instance, really want to clean toilets?

Suppose, Johnson said, that each woman in the community checks out her feelings and finds that, nope, cleaning toilets doesn’t fit in.

“But, because these women believe that their desires are perfect guides to behavior, none of them says, ‘It’s got to be done,’ ” she wrote last spring in Woman of Power magazine. “Trusting their feelings and knowing that they spring directly from their values, they realize that since none of them wants to clean it, something is wrong with the toilet, not with them.”

For one thing, toilets are too high for most women, Johnson said, and they waste countless gallons of water. A toilet also takes “marvelous, scientifically unreproducible organic matter . . . and carts it off,” she said.

The women thus could decide to replace the conventional toilet with custom-made composting toilets, she says.