Sonia Johnson

Sonia Johnson
Born	(1936-02-27) February 27, 1936 Malad, Idaho
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Utah State University Rutgers College
Occupation(s)	Feminist activist and writer
Known for	Supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, excommunicated by LDS Church
Spouse	Rick Johnson (divorced)
Partner	Jade DeForest

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. She went on to publish several radical feminist books and become a popular feminist speaker.

Early life and education

Sonia Ann Harris, born in Malad, Idaho was a fifth-generation Mormon. She attended Utah State University and married Rick Johnson following graduation. 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, following her husband to new places of employment. She had four children during these years. They returned to the United States in 1976.

Mormon Church and ERA

Johnson began speaking out in support of the Equal Rights Amendment (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 Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, and she continued speaking and promoting the ERA and denouncing the LDS Church's opposition to the amendment.

The Mormon church began disciplinary proceedings against Johnson 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. Johnson denounced allegedly immoral and illegal nationwide lobbying efforts by the LDS Church to prevent passage of the ERA.

Because the speech drew national media attention, leaders in Johnson's local Virginia congregation 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. Her husband divorced her soon after, which she blamed on "the mid-life crisis."

After the rupture with the church Johnson continued promoting the ERA, speaking on television and at numerous functions throughout the country, including the 1980 Democratic Convention. She also protested venues like the Republican Party headquarters in Washington. She and twenty ERA supporters were briefly jailed for chaining themselves to the gate of a Mormon temple in Bellevue, Washington.

The positive response to her from people in Washington, D.C. was leading her to consider running for office.

Dr. Flora 3rd was one of another group of 19 supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment who were also chained with Sonia to the White House gates in Washington, D.C. and jailed briefly. The 'Washington 19' got very good press. "Sonia stated "It was a grand day in my life. Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights." Dr. Flora remembers that the President's wife had been quoted as saying to the Park Police, 'If you touch one hair on those grey-haired grandmothers, you'll answer to me!" We blocked Pennsylvania Avenue with our bodies, all dressed in white with banners from our home states across our shoulders, and I called for the onlookers to join us. They streamed down onto the street and stayed until the police arrived with their bullhorns, and then they left quickly and we were gently escorted into the wagon and spent the time in jail singing "We Shall Overcome" and other 'freedom' songs. Another time, we had tea with the National Women's Party members as Sonia networked with elegant ladies in their pearls and silk suits. I remember going up to a seated distinguished lady and telling her politely that if she didn't quit eating salt, she was going to die; her anklebones were almost eclipsed by swollen trapped plasma protein from oils and dairy. She looked at me long and hard and said, 'My doctor and my children have been telling me that for years. Come sit down and let's talk.' I learned later that she was a senior reporter for the White House. I left the group when they discussed burning the President in effigy, though. I didn't want to show disrespect for my country's leader, even though I was for equal pay for equal work." In 1981 Sonia published an autobiographical book about her embrace of feminism, titled From Housewife to Heretic (Doubleday, 1981).

Citizens Party presidential candidate

Johnson ran in the 1984 presidential election, as the presidential candidate of the U.S. Citizens Party, Pennsylvania's Consumer Party and California's Peace and Freedom Party. Dr. Flora 3rd was associated with her at that time and remembers that the press was not taking her press releases seriously or her press conferences, at which perhaps one reporter or so showed up. Sonia was the first woman who got federal matching funds to run for president, but she had little or no support from the national media. In the Washington Post, there was one small article, that seemed to ridicule her efforts and didn't report honestly on the large numbers of her supporters. Seeing that she could get nowhere at home, she used the funds and shared around the world, starting the International Women's Congress, and organized other conferences and other worthy organizations that helped raise the consciousness of women worldwide and start microenterprises in remote villages. Johnson received 72,161 votes (0.08%) finishing fifth. Her running mate for the Citizens Party was Richard Walton and for the Peace and Freedom Party Emma Wong Mar. One of her campaign managers Mark Dunlea later wrote a novel about a first female president, Madame President.

Publications and personal views

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 Johnson details the personal and political experiences that turned her against the state. In the book she rejects the Equal Rights Amendment, the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, equal opportunity laws, and other government benefits because she considers them cooptation by patriarchy.

In Wildfire Johnson elaborates on her beliefs and answers her many critics in and out of the feminist movement. Her bottom line argument is 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," Johnson writes: "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 Johnson also declared herself a lesbian and began 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."

Johnson also founded Wildfire, a short-lived separatist commune for women that disbanded in 1993. She published several of her books under the imprint "Wildfire Books."

Personal life

Johnson currently lives in New Mexico with partner Jade DeForest, where they run Casa Feminista, a hotel catering to feminist women. She continues to speak at feminist events, including the 2007 Feminist Hullabaloo.

External links

• 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.
• Report on 2007 Feminist Hullaballo (with photographs).
• Bradford, Mary L. (Summer 1981). "All on Fire: An Interview with Sonia Johnson". Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 14 (2): 27–47.

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