On April 5, 2024, Rachel Cope of the Department of Church History and Doctrine received the Distinguished Service Award from the Utah Women in Higher Education Network (UWHEN) at their annual leadership conference held at Utah Valley University. This award is given to “an individual who has exhibited sustained, exemplary leadership, scholarship, and/or creative work, philanthropy or service which has served to advance the mission of UWHEN.” UWHEN is the Utah affiliate to the American Council on Education (ACE) Women’s Network, whose mission is to advance women’s leadership on higher education campuses through the following IDEALS:

• Identifying women leaders.
• Developing women’s leadership abilities.
• Encouraging the use of leadership abilities
• Advancing women’s careers.
• Linking women to other women and mentors.
• Supporting women in mid- and executive-level positions.”[1]

The UWHEN awards committee was “very impressed with the work [Dr. Cope] is doing on behalf of women in Utah” and commended her for her leadership. The nomination for this award highlights Rachel’s contributions in each of the following four areas of focus for the award.

Interfaith Leadership

One of Dr. Cope’s strongest leadership qualities is her work as an interfaith bridge builder, bringing scholars from different faiths together in dialogue so each group can better understand their counterparts in their own religious context. These dialogues among the various scholars enable the development of what Kirster Stendahl describes as “holy envy.” She has worked to build these types of bridges through three main projects:

• In 2010 and 2017 she served as a visiting research fellow at the Oxford Center of Methodism and Church History at Oxford Brookes University. There she distinguished herself as a Latter-day Saint scholar among leading Methodist scholars with her ability to research Methodism with intellectual rigor and religious empathy.
• Between 2008 and 2014 she served as a member of the Evangelical & Latter-day Saint Dialogue, where she facilitated bringing together young scholars from both religious traditions to develop relationships of academic and religious honesty between two groups often divided by religious contention.
• From 2016 to 2023 she served as a member of the Nazarene & Latter-day Saint Dialogue, where her knowledge and empathy for the Methodist traditions forged bridges of understanding and respect.

J. B. Haws, one of her colleagues, who worked with Rachel in both dialogues, writes about one of her contributions: “Rachel was on a faculty panel in a question-and-answer session with students at Point Loma Nazarene University. Her response to a question asked by a student who was obviously hurting and upset and feeling anger toward The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the most unforgettable moments I’ve had during my time at BYU. It was a moment that drew together her skills as an empathetic teacher and communicator as well as her deft abilities as a scholar. Her response carried the authority of deep learning but also deep empathy and her own authenticity and vulnerability. Plus, it was in an interfaith context, an area where she continues to make important contributions and to represent [BYU] faculty so well. It was one moment that stands out as representative of so many others.”

Scholarship on Women and Families

One of Rachel’s major research interests has been women’s spirituality and conversion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Examples of her publications that draw attention to individual women and their religious contributions include

• (with Zachary Hutchins), The Writings of Elizabeth Webb: A Quaker Missionary in America, 1697–1726 (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019),
• (with Amy Easton-Flake, Keith A. Erekson, and Lisa Olsen Tait), Mormon Women’s History: Beyond Biography (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017),
• “A Sacred Space for Women: Hymnody in Emma Hale Smith’s Theology,” Journal of Religious History 42, no. 2 (June 2018): 185–264, and
• “Emptied and Filled: Catherine Livingston Garrettson’s Quest for Sanctification,” Religion in the Age of Enlightenment 3 (2012): 277–300.

Her colleague Gerrit Dirkmaat has described her work on Elizabeth Webb as “an essential contribution to the field. [The editors’] painstaking compilation and annotation of the letters and personal writings of Webb have shifted our understanding of the earliest women missionaries in colonial America.”[2]

In addition, her scholarship has also highlighted the importance of family, where women play significant roles. Cope, along with Amy Harris and Jane Hinckley, compiled a four-volume series entitled, Family Life in Britain and America, 1690–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2015) that focused on primarily newly transcribed manuscript materials that bring together sources from both sides of the Atlantic and from a wide range of regional archives. This was the first collection of its kind, allowing comparisons between the development of the family in England and America during a time of significant change. Dr. Cope was the primary editor for volume 4: Managing Families.

Advancing Women’s Careers

During her research for the Family Life in Britain and America project, Dr. Cope took the opportunity to mentor multiple female students by teaching them to work with primary sources and to transcribe documents. Several of the students went on to earn PhDs.

Since 2012 Dr. Cope has regularly taught a class on Mormon Women’s History in the Global Women's Studies Program and has served as either faculty adviser to Women’s Studies Senior Capstone projects or research adviser for fourteen female students on topics particularly highlighting the work and impact of women, such as

• “Mormon Women Academics Searching and Longing for What Mormon Women Teachers Have” (2020),
• “Women and Theology” (2019),
• “‘See, My Blood is as White as Anyone’s’: Black Women Challenging the Priesthood Ban and Racism in the Early Church” (2018),
• “Elizabeth Webb [A Quaker Missionary] on the Book of Revelation” (2016),
• “Prisoner or Preacher? Examining the Relationship between Female Latter-day Saint Missionaries and Perceptions of the Church in Victorian England” (2015),
• “Abuse and the Christian Woman: An Eighteenth Century American Spiritualist Perspective” (2014), and
• “‘Mary Is Now to Be the Sower’: Mary Sturlaugson as a (Self) Constructed Symbol of Transition” (2013).

Joseph D. Parry, who served as a director of BYU’s Honors Program and worked closely with two students who worked as Dr. Cope’s research assistants for her work on Methodist women’s spiritual writing project, wrote the following about her impact as a mentor:

They sang her praises not in the general way of saying ‘I love her, her classes are great’ (which, indeed I have heard often), but more specifically about how effective and exemplary she was as a teacher and researcher for their own work on their honors theses. I have heard this from many others, including men who have benefitted from her mentorship. In fact, honors students chose her as the honors distinguished faculty speaker at their annual banquet in 2015.

But we have also been mentors of women who are distinctively bright, capable students, who had hard things happen to them in life. Rachel gave them tremendous comfort and counsel (I know this firsthand), but again, the example she set for them of dealing with hard things with poise, discipline, and responsibility (which they also acknowledged explicitly) had a tremendous impact on their ability to be successful. Rachel has had to deal with very hard things. But the result is, and this is not hyperbole: that in thirty-plus years of higher education teaching, research, and administration, I have not worked with anyone who is more deserving of the award that the Utah Women in Higher Education Network offers to women mentors of students, primarily, but not exclusively, women. And while she mentors many students who will go on to academic careers in higher education, many of these women go into nonacademic careers. Her impact has, is, and will have significant effect on women in all walks of life.

Humanitarian Service

The most significant service to which Dr. Cope dedicates her time and service is with the Worldwide Fistula Fund (WWF), a nonprofit organization that raises funds to “protect and restore the health and dignity of the world’s most vulnerable women by preventing and treating devastating childbirth injuries.”[3] She is deeply committed to raising awareness of and funding for obstetric fistula victims. Her service with WWF is personal but goes far beyond that. According to the World Health Organization,

Each year between fifty to one hundred thousand women worldwide are affected by obstetric fistula, an abnormal opening between a woman’s genital tract and her urinary tract or rectum. The development of obstetric fistula is directly linked to one of the major causes of maternal mortality: obstructed labour.

Women who experience obstetric fistula suffer constant incontinence, shame, social segregation and health problems. It is estimated that more than 2 million young women live with untreated obstetric fistula in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.[4]

She has been a voice of advocacy for obstetric fistulas, which afflict “more than two million women worldwide—the poor, the voiceless, the overlooked, and the forgotten.”[5]

Her efforts to raise awareness of this physically and emotionally devastating female tragedy include the following:

• In 2020 she organized and participated in a Zoom Fistula Panel sponsored by BYU’s Global Women's Studies that included several experts and fistula survivors.
• In 2020 under Dr. Cope’s direction, BYU’s Global Women’s Studies raised money for the Worldwide Fistula Fund for the annual service week.
• In 2021 she invited and hosted Dr. Lewis Wall, the Selina Okin Kim Conner Professor Emeritus for Medical Anthropology in Arts and Sciences, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics & Gynecology, School of Medicine, Washington University in St. Louis, and founder of the Worldwide Fistula Fund. Dr. Wall gave a colloquium lecture sponsored by Global Women’s Studies, BYU Religious Education, and the College of Nursing. The lecture was entitled “Samaritans and Unclean Women: Directive Parables in a Suffering World.” In addition, while he was on campus Dr. Wall and Dr. Cope made a video for the WWF to draw from.
• In 2022 she gave a presentation entitled “Fistula Sisters: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” at the Southern Association for the History of Science and Medicine. Atlanta, Georgia.
• In 2022 she was a faculty adviser for a Women’s Studies Senior Capstone Project on “Vesicovaginal Fistula.”
• From 2022 to the present she has worked with female students on Fistula research: majoring in nursing and biology, public health. Students reach out to her for help every semester with questions about fistulas and how to engage in that kind of work and research.

Dr. Cope is a quiet achiever who is committed to promoting women’s voices. She goes about her work without a lot of fanfare, wanting to help all students, but particularly women, to navigate the complex nature of university life, to find answers to their questions, and to find their place and their voice in society. She helps them to be seen, valued, and heard. She does not seek public acclaim, but even so, there needs to be at least some moments in time when a spotlight finds them and allows others to recognize the contribution that they also make.

Notes

[1] Utah Women in Higher Education Network, “Mission & Goals,” https://www.uwhen.org/about-1.

[2] From a personal email to the author.

[3] Worldwide Fistula Fund, https://worldwidefistulafund.org/home. For an overview of the extent of this medical malady, see the BYU Ballard Center’s brief titled “Obstetric Fistulas in Sub-Saharan Africa,” January 22, 2024, https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/obstetric-fistulas-in-sub-saharan-africa.

[4] World Health Organization, “Obstetric Fistula,” February 19, 2018, https://www.who.int/news-room/facts-in-pictures/detail/10-facts-on-obstetric-fistula.

[5] Rachel Cope, “Guest Blog: A Voice for the Voiceless,” December 7, 2020, https://worldwidefistulafund.org/news/blog/a-voice-for-the-voiceless, and “Guest Blog: Rachel’s Journey for Healing,” May 20, 2020, https://worldwidefistulafund.org/news/blog/guest-blog-rachels-journey-for-healing.