Editor’s note (April 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2005, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
In Boise, Idaho, a mother of three named Lisa Butterworth began writing quietly on a Blogspot blog.
She taught Sunday school and stayed closely tied to her church, but she was also holding beliefs she couldn’t voice there — around feminism, around women’s history in the LDS Church, around the tension between the two. So she wrote them down instead.
Feminist Mormon Housewives — fMh — became one of the most referenced early cases of people using blogs to connect over ideas that didn’t fit their immediate worlds.
The gap the blog filled
Butterworth’s original framing was precise: “I was getting really frustrated at church because I couldn’t talk about a lot of things that were bothering me about history, about feminism. I wasn’t interested in bashing the church; I wanted to find something that could be faithful, liberal and feminist. I didn’t find that, so I created it.”
That sentence is worth sitting with. She wasn’t trying to leave. She wasn’t trying to convert anyone. She was trying to think out loud in a community that shared her commitments but also her tensions. The blog gave her that — and then, unexpectedly, gave it to thousands of others who discovered they’d been waiting for the same thing.
This is one of the earliest documented examples of what scholars would later call “counterpublic” discourse online: communities that form not in opposition to a dominant culture but in the margins of it, working through ideas that can’t yet be spoken in the center. Long before Twitter threads or Substack newsletters, fMh demonstrated that a Blogspot template and a handful of contributors could sustain something genuinely consequential.
What actually happened after 2005
The blog grew. Joanna Brooks — a scholar and author who had left the LDS Church following the September Six disciplinary actions in the 1990s and later returned — became one of its most prominent voices. Her writing at fMh and elsewhere helped her build an audience that eventually led to her 2012 memoir The Book of Mormon Girl, a widely reviewed account of faith, doubt, and return that brought LDS feminist discourse into mainstream literary conversation.
The fMh community remained active through the 2010s and continued generating discussion around the ordination of women, LGBTQ inclusion, and institutional transparency — topics that would go on to shape broader public debates about Mormonism, particularly around the time of the 2012 “Ordain Women” movement and the political salience of LDS identity during Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
The blog’s arc mirrors a pattern visible across dozens of early blogging communities: a passionate, niche founding audience; a period of growth and media attention; a gradual dispersion to social media platforms; and a legacy that outlasts the original posting frequency. The archives remain a primary source for researchers studying early digital religious communities.
The lesson that hasn’t aged
What made fMh work wasn’t that it was countercultural. It was that it was honest about holding two things at once: faith and critique, belonging and dissent, devotion and frustration. That combination — which can feel untenable in physical community spaces — turns out to be exactly what draws readers online.
This matters for bloggers and content creators today, because the instinct in most content strategy is to resolve tension, not hold it. Listicles resolve. How-to guides resolve. Opinion pieces land somewhere. But some of the most enduring blogs — and now newsletters and podcasts — are built on the refusal to resolve, on the willingness to write into the difficulty rather than around it.
Butterworth didn’t have a content strategy. She had a need. The form followed from that.
What gets lost when platforms replace blogs
The early blogosphere’s great advantage — and its nostalgia-worthy quality — was that it was structurally decentralized. Butterworth owned her space. Her archives weren’t subject to an algorithm change or a platform’s shifting monetization policy. The community she built couldn’t be deplatformed by a product decision.
That ownership question has only grown more pressing. I personally feel that rust in algorithmic platforms as information sources is declining, while interest in direct-subscription models — newsletters, membership sites, independent podcasts — is rising. What Butterworth was doing in 2005 on a Blogspot URL is, structurally, closer to what thoughtful creators are returning to now than it is to the peak-social-media era in between.
The lesson isn’t that blogging is back, or that Substack is the new fMh. The lesson is that the impulse behind independent publishing — the need to speak into a space you control, to an audience who sought you out — was always the point. Platforms come and go. That impulse doesn’t.
A closing thought
The 2005 item that prompted this piece was written with the slightly bemused tone of someone reporting an oddity — a feminist Mormon, imagine that. What the author couldn’t fully see was that Lisa Butterworth was ahead of a wave. She understood, intuitively, that the blog wasn’t a megaphone. It was a room. A place where people who’d felt isolated by the gap between their inner life and their public one could discover they weren’t alone.
That’s still why the best blogs exist. Not to broadcast, but to gather. Not to perform certainty, but to work through doubt in public — carefully, honestly, with readers who are doing the same thing.
In an era of content marketing and SEO-optimized publishing, it’s worth remembering that some of the most lasting digital communities were built by people who simply needed somewhere to think.
