"Sisters" as supplements

Here is a story told to me by a dear friend who works at MTC. She was an exemplary missionary, and I’m sure is a wonderful teacher. She was having lunch with a friend of hers who also works at the MTC. She commented on how much she loved having “Hermanas” or sisters in her districts. The sisters, she commented, did a lot to bring the spirit, and gave a different dynamic to the class. The other teacher smiled and replied, “I prefer to teach just missionaries.”

“Just missionaries?” she responded.

“Oh! I meant just Elders,” the brother responded.

Hmmmmmmm….just missionaries…what about being a sister missionary creates a type of sub-category of meaning in our culture? And what value do we assign to Sisters in relation to Elders? What is it about specifying that a missionary is a Sister leads into the trend of supplementation? The idea of supplementation is that the supplementary word “sister” to the title “missionary” creates a meaning totally different than that of just “missionary.” If a supplement is just extra information, something un-inherent to the thing itself, and therefore valueless in an integral sense to the essence of the thing, “Sister” is seen as certainly a subset of the greater, nobler, and therefore better, “missionary.”

I am sure that none of this was going through this young man’s head as he tried to correct himself. But my critique is not with him, nor the comment—my critique is of the culture through which these comments are born. Our views of women are very constructed, we can see it in the way that we are taught to think, and the way that we express our inner beliefs that many times do not have founding.