The full-bearded red head says he came here "without any definite feeling one way or the other" about the church; he had, in fact, decided against going on a mission. But several members of the Cambridge church challenged him to try praying, which he had given up three or four years earlier. Gradually, Dewey began to work out his relationship to god through the New Testament and the Book of Mormon.

By year's end Dewey had decided to go on a mission. Although he had requested an English-speaking country because he had no language skill, the Mormon missionary committee sent Dewey to heavily industrialized Alsace-Lorraine, where Thomas would go two years later. Both a test of spiritual commitment and a means of expanding the church, the mission forced Dewey to "work not to become bitter," especially when doors were slammed in his face and, he adds, "I had dogs sicced on me." In one target city of 40,000 in Belgium, Dewey says, "we held meetings in the market and knocked on every door in the city. People really got to know us, from the mayor on down."

Super Woman Complex'

Kathleen M. Bybee '78 came to Harvard from Salt Lake ("the mecca," she calls it flippantly) with a chip on her shoulder, expecting the worst. "I had read about the persecutions of Mormons in Illinois [where Joseph Smith was pulled from a jail and killed by an angry mob], and I kind of expected a little persecution," she says with a nervous smile that hardly conceals her embarassment at this paranoia. The oldest of seven children ("people always joke about Mormons and Catholics," she adds), Bybee chose Radcliffe over BYU, her parent's favorite. "They were afraid I would fall in love with and marry someone from the East." The fear, she explains, was only geographical; they did not want her to settle in the East. "It didn't occur to them that I would marry a non-Mormon," and indeed Bybee, and most of the Mormons interviewed, do plan to marry Mormons, if they marry.

Bybee arrived here fully committed to the church culturally and religiously and has not felt the doubts that many Mormons experience their first year here. She is concerned about the church's idea "that a woman has one role to accept while men get such a range."

In Utah, she says, she found no appealing role model. "My mother expects me to grow up and be the perfect housewife and mother," Bybee snaps. "It is not what I want to do." An English major and the only Mormon at Radcliffe this year, Bybee hopes to go on to graduate school, but she is vague about which one, first she mentions law school, and then she says she's also thinking about graduate or business school. "I'll decide on whims and on who lets me in," she finally admits, muttering under her breath, "Kalamazoo pre-dental school."

Carolyn M. Christensen '74, now a special student at Harvard taking undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, came to Cambridge not from the "mecca" but from New Canaan, a city in New York's Connecticut backyard. She had only limited exposure to the church before she arrived here: Her mother (whose grandmother was the daughter of a second wife of a polygamist) and father (a scientist who believes in super-intelligence and thinks Mormons are vain to see god as a personage) grew up in Utah. When they moved East 25 years ago, they rejected Utah and Mormonism as unwanted remembrances of provincialism past. Liquor is served at home, and Christensen adds, "I learned how to make martinis."

Though active in the church around the age of 12, when she was baptized, Christensen remained a half-hearted Mormon until she graduated from Ethel Walker, and all-girls prep school, where school choir practice took her away from Mormon services. When Christensen came here in 1970,she began to read the Book of Mormon and asked a lot of questions at church. "I found the answers more intriguing than the original questions," she remembers. In February and March of her freshman year, Christensen realized she was a believer, although not until late last summer did she take the step of testifying in church that "I know from myself that these things are true."

Tall, dark haired with wide eyes and a broad smile, Christensen says she feels no tension between her career aspirations (to go to public health or medical school and later develop health care clinics in rural areas) and the faithful wife stereotype. "A lot of this is how I was brought up," she says. Treated the same as her brothers and sent to an all-girls prep school, Christensen has never felt discriminated against. But she admits, half-jokingly, "I saw myself as a man coming home to a wife and kids." So while she endorses the virtues of the home ("in this time of revolution, I think the best way to be revolutionary is to be a parent"), Christensen admits that she may not follow that path. "It's up to you to decide if your case is an exception," she says.

Still relatively young, Bybee and Christensen have not yet faced the conflict between becoming a professional woman and a Mormon wife. But Teresa Dewey, who grew up in Idaho and graduated from BYU before moving here after her marriage, feels she pushed to "be a perfect wife, perfect mother, be active in the community, go into higher education, bake bread and make my own clothes." Trying to meet this "super woman complex," as Teresa calls it, "has frustrated her," and Larry confides that she "has been getting a lot of hassle about being a mother and homebody." Teresa, who works part-time at Harvard's Center for Population Studies, also resents "this myth of the Mormon woman that I see propounded around here, that of a domestic wife subservient to her husband." Larry, she adds, is very supportive and often takes care of their daughter Andrea, although it is hard on his studies. After long thought to make sure she is not acting in response to peer pressure, Teresa has applied to a graduate program in education in the area. But she and Larry plan to have more children and eventually move out West.