You Must Imagine Eve Happy

Mormon feminists make a big deal about Eve because they see her as this important figure on center stage making historic decisions that impact millions like some kind of Eden CEO.

That is how we experience her, sure.   Our Eve is a stagy Eve.

Eve’s own experience would not have been that way.  Even the dramatic stuff would have been on a very personal scale, a naive kid trying to figure things out with her father.  (I don’t mean naive as an insult, but as a literal fact).  The majority of her life would have been scratching out a living with her husband in the wilderness.  Living in . . . what, a little hut or tent?  Bathing in a stream.  Using a latrine.  Cooking over a fire.  Having babies with no midwife on a dirt floor.  Eating whatever crops her husband with her help could scratch out of fields they made.  Starting rough and with a lot of weary work and hands rubbed raw, putting a life together.  The people you know who would be the most like her are some dirt poor homestead type families who are into natural birth and stuff like that.

This is the Eve who says “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil.”  The good should knew was marital union,  nursing her babies, figuring out domestic contrivances and household survival.    This was her influence.  This was who she was.  When you read about her, you must imagine her as a real person living a real life.  You must imagine her happy.