“Guard Your Virtue with Your Life”: Current and Fromer Latter-day Saint Women’s Experiences with Purity Teaching and Gender-Based Violence

Reilly H. Brady, University of Virginia

Abstract. This study investigates purity expectations directed toward girls and women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The 19 semi-structured interviews explore current and former LDS women’s conceptualizations of purity teachings, the impacts of those teachings, and any connections between purity and gender-based violence. The vast majority of interview participants discussed receiving lessons in their youth communicating that LDS girls and women must maintain not only their own purity, but also the purity of boys and men, a concept that this study defines as “responsibility rhetoric.” Purity expectations resulted in increased shame for many participants, including in connection to experiences of gender-based violence. Although this study’s initial flyer recruited participants solely based on interest in discussing purity, 42% of interview participants identified an experience that falls within this study’s definition of gender-based violence. This highlights the embedded role purity expectations have played in these participants’ experiences and reveals a prevalence of gender-based violence among this study’s participants. This study identifies two categories of analysis to understand the mutual embeddedness of purity and gender-based violence: (1) themes of violence embedded in gendered purity teachings and (2) themes of gendered purity embedded in experiences of gender-based violence.

Brady, Reilly H. 2025. “’Guard Your Virtue with Your Life’: Current and Former Latter-day Saint Women’s Experiences with Purity Teachings and Gender-Based Violence,” Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association 3, no. 1: 16–41.