You say that as if it were a bad thing :). I feel blessed to live in the Age of Pre-Shredded Cheese and Wrinkle-Free Dockers–a time when the demands of housekeeping are such that I don’t think it unreasonable to pursue another serious interest while mothering. In other words, I have it a heck of a lot easier than Juanita Brooks or even Laurel Thatcher Ulrich did. I had the shocking experience once of sitting down with an academic whose children were the same age as mine and realizing that I actually had more hours per week to devote to research than she did. I’ve posted before–

http://www.timesandseasons.org/?p=2251

–on the interplay of mothering and religious scholarship.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=9780151012114&z=y#REV

Taryn, worry not. I was not trying to weasle the name of the person out of you. I asked in a hypothetical way because I trying to get a better sense of what your question really was so that I could answer it more specifically. The reasons why women might not be publishing at Signature, for example, are slightly different than the reasons they might not be publishing at University of Illinois Press.

As we’ve discussed at length in the bloggernacle, there is still some concern about publishing with Sunstone, Dialogue, and Signature (three of major sources of “Mormon Studies” publishing). I think that women might especially feel that concern for a variety of good reasons that I won’t go into now.

The reasons why women aren’t publishing “Mormon Studies” pieces in other venues (academic journals, university presses, etc.) may overlap with the reasons they don’t publish in Sunstone, etc., but I don’t think it’s exactly the same problem because other issues are involved. To produce quality work publishable by a university press one must have achieved a certain level of expertise and rigor as a scholar which usually requires extensive academic training and consistent concentrated time to research and write. Most Mormon women simply do not have such time or training. As long as Mormon women are encouraged from the pulpit to bear as many children as they can (whatever that might mean in practice) and stay home with them, the numbers of Mormon women publishing are unlikely to change.

In other words, while a woman might have the time and ability to write an article for Sunstone, she is disinclined to do so. By contrast, a woman might be very interested in producing a manuscript for serious publication but be constrained in her time or training to pull it off.

As is obvious, since “Mormon Studies”* is still obscure in the academy the number of non-LDS women publishing in the subfield remains insignificant.

*I put “Mormon Studies” in scare quotes because the question of area studies in the field of religion is a hotly contested one. Many discredit the zoo model of religious studies, and I think rightly so.

MHA reviewers make suggestions to the editor about whether they believe articles should be published or not, and whether articles need lots of revisions or not. The editor makes the final decision about publication and probably knows who wrote each article, but the JMH at least has an approach that aims at ridding itself of things like gender bias (and, for that matter, “well-known author” bias (i.e., Mike Quinn or Jill Derr wrote it so it must be well done)).

I don’t know about BYU Studies, but I’m pretty sure Dialogue submissions are not read in this manner.