Neylan McBaine is a non-profit leader, marketing executive and passionate advocate. As the author of three books and TEDx presenter, Neylan has been called a “uniquely important” “change agent” in Utah and within her faith. Drawing from foundational years as a marketer in Silicon Valley, Neylan brings a unique combination of audience awareness, clear communication and a sense of creative fun to her work in the non-profit, education and cause-oriented spaces.
“Legacies,” a podcast by Utah Women’s Walk
Season 1, Episode 8: Neylan McBaine
Utah Women’s Walk: The Podcast
Script – Episode: Neylan McBaine
By: Tamarra Kemsley
MW: I launched this podcast because I experienced firsthand the power that one woman, sharing her story, has to change another. It’s humbling every time someone agrees to sit down and tell me theirs; I am never the same afterwards. I’m still relatively new to the work, which is why I was so excited to talk to today’s guest – someone who has been dedicated to telling women’s stories for more than a decade.
NM: I like to tell people’s stories, because I do think it helps to see ourselves in other people’s stories. Of course, there is this rule of thumb with writing that universal is personal, right? The tighter you tell a story, the more universal it becomes, and people can see themselves in very specific stories…
MW: I’m Michele Welch from Utah Women’s Walk and this is “Legacies” a podcast dedicated to preserving the inspiring stories and wisdom of Utah women. Neylan McBaine is the co-founder, CEO, and director of Better Days 2020, an organization dedicated to popularizing the history of women’s suffrage in Utah. She is also an author and the founder of the Mormon Women Project, which collects stories of Latter-day Saint women from around the world. I spoke with her in August of 2020.
(Pause for transition)
MW: I would like to just start from the very beginning and have you tell us about your early beginnings
NM: So I was born and raised in New York City, right on the upper west side. And my parents were there because my mother was a singer at the Metropolitan Opera, and my father was a lawyer. They had met originally in San Francisco where my dad was from originally. My dad was on the board of the San Francisco opera and my mom was singing there, at the very beginning of her career, so they met in San Francisco. [They] got married and moved to New York, and I was born in New York. I was an only child and we lived in a two-bedroom apartment across the street from Lincoln Center, and it was an absolutely wonderful way to grow up.
They, unfortunately, didn’t have the best marriage though and so they separated when I was twelve and eventually divorced when I was in college. And so, for much of my childhood, it was just me and my mom. And she was very devout. Our community in New York really was very small at that time. Now the Church in New York City is quite thriving, but at that time there were only a couple of wards and a very small youth program. And so, it was a very tight knit community in very much of a bubble where, you know, I had my mom who was a professional, sort of, single woman with one child, no temple marriage, right? And this was in the eighties and nineties, but she wasn’t alone in that. There were lots of other professional women that I was familiar with in our church community at that time. Many of them were artists, you know, dancers, and painters, and other singers and musicians. But some of them were bankers and businesswomen. And so, New York kind of attracted that in particular in the eighties and nineties, as far as members who were trying to balance a commitment to the gospel with a desire to seek out their own potential, and it was a wonderful model to grow up with.
I should also say that my experience growing up as a girl in the Church in New York was, sort of, added to by the act that I went to an all-girls school for thirteen years. So I went to school with the same couple of dozen girls for my entire schooling. This was a school that really was focused on second wave feminist principles and making sure that we got the support that we needed, in the eighties and nineties, to become future leaders ourselves. So the curriculum there, the people that I met there, my teachers, the whole sort of aura of that, for me really served to balance out and compliment my faith. I’ve talked to some class members who were sort of going through that same experience, but maybe in other faith traditions, and they had different experiences. They found it a little bit in conflict. They couldn’t really reconcile them, but for me, I was receiving a sort of education on priorities, my spiritual priorities, my character priorities at church, and then I was, sort of, also being supported at school in my temporal priorities and my ambitions for myself. I guess maybe because of my mom’s example, I didn’t feel like those things were in conflict. I felt like I could do everything. And so, it was a really powerful combination for me personally.
MW: Were there any particular experiences with individual women, that you admired growing up, that are important to what’s become of you, or what you’ve grown to be?
NB: Oh, so many. I had so many strong female mentors growing up. I got to this point that after I went to college, and after I spent my young adult years in San Francisco—and I was in the Relief Society presidency in my ward in San Francisco—and I just saw these problems continue to plague these girls that I was getting to know.
And so, I think it was looking back at those women that I grew up with, that I feel like I had kind of a unique offering in their stories, and in the way that they had affected me. And so, in 2008, I was home with my third child. I felt like it was a really good time to put out these stories of some of these women. And of course, I had made new mentors and new women that I admired along the way, since leaving New York and since leaving my childhood, and so I actually started interviewing them. And the first person that I interviewed was actually younger than me. She was a recent college graduate, and she had joined the church after September 11th, because she had started to look for an equal and opposite goodness to the evil in the world—then to what she had seen expressed on September 11—and she found the church that way, and had since become an environmental lawyer. And she was a dear friend, and I just found her very inspiring. And so, I interviewed her.
MW: And you are talking about the Mormon Women Project.
NB: Yeah, so MormonWomen.com launched with about eighteen interviews. Over the past twelve years, its grown to hundreds of interviews from about thirty-two different countries. And I gave up editorship of it about three years ago, and the new editors have just done marvelous things with it. They have a podcast and blogs. They do this wonderful Sunday School series where they have essays from a female point of view based on each week’s lesson, and they have done just a wonderful job with it, but I did probably about three hundred interviews over the course of my—
MW: Wow.
NB: —time. Yeah, you know how that is. I loved that so much because I just felt like it was this sacred time where I would be speaking with, like, the first member of the Relief Society in Russia, right? Or somebody that had adopted a bunch of children, or maybe didn’t have something quite so grandiose, but that they had been nominated by a friend or a family member for some special reason, and it was just a really sacred thing to be able to sit down with them for a couple of hours and be able to hear their faith journey.
MW: And you are changed, aren’t you? When you interview people, you yourself are implicated, and you are changed every time and lifted. At least I have had that experience.
NM: Absolutely.
MW: Let’s talk about your books. How to be a Twenty-First Century Pioneer Woman, published in 2008. Women at Church: Magnifying LDS Women’s Local Impact, in 2014.
NM: Well, that first one, you’ve really done your research because it’s, kind of—that one takes some digging to find. That was a collection of personal essays that self-published, and that was really—so in my maternity leaves, and just kind of when my husband was in business school, I turned to writing. That is what I did with my extra time. I had been an English major and had written a lot in high school. I had won some awards for my writing, so it wasn’t out of the blue. That was my love, but the personal essays came at a time in my life when I had time to sit down, and reflect, and do that. So I wrote a series of personal essays—I guess it was in my mid-twenties—and self-published it. I think about ten people read it, which is fine. It’s a good practice. Every writer needs to just have the practice of having something to work towards. But Women at Church, came as a direct result of the work that I had done on the Mormon Women Project. In 2012, when I had been running the MWP for about three years, the public affairs department of the church actually recommended me to a group called Fair Mormon to speak at their annual conference. And Fair was a group of apologists, so a pretty tow the line group, that really was a different audience than anything that I had ever encountered before, and I took the assignment very seriously. I wanted to, sort of, push the envelope, but I didn’t want to say anything to offend or shut them off to me. So I spent a lot of time on that speech.
In August 2012, I presented that speech in person to a very large crowd and said what I thought were pretty common sense things, like “women are people too.” We need to have separate identities. We need to have separate roles, and responsibilities, and purpose. And we need feel like we can be contributing members of the community and not, sort of, relegated to prescribed identities that may feel limiting to us. And, you know, I tried to address it very personally and with a lot of stories. They have a Q&A session right after the talk. So right there at the podium, the way they did it was to collect note cards, so they went to the audience and people wrote down their questions. They collected note cards, and I still have them. The first three that I looked at said, “You are an apostate.” And I’m right there on the podium trying to find a question to answer.
So that talk went on to be read about two hundred fifty thousand times on the Fair website. It really was what had Kofford Books approach me about writing a book, and it set the tone, I think. I mentioned that I have always straddled a couple of different worlds. And so, I felt like I was in a unique position to sort of bridge people’s understanding on the various poles of this conversation about women’s increased participation in church. And I really focused on administration. That is where I felt comfortable. That’s where I felt like my marketing skills were best used. I love doctrine, and I’ve studied doctrine a lot, but I’m not a doctrine wonk. I’m not a policy wonk. And again, my marketing training had helped me really look at who is our audience? What do they respond to? What motivates people? What persuades people? How do people act? I was much more interested in actions and group dynamics than I was about doctrinal changes. So that is really what motivated me to take the approach. And so, Women at Church, as you mentioned, was published in 2014.
MW: Let’s move on to your next book. The Pioneering the Vote. Tell us about how that came about, and why, and the need for that to happen.
NB: Yes, so in 2016, about, I was working for an educational technology company, and a friend brought to my attention that Utah was the first place a woman voted in the United States, as we have talked about. And that the anniversary of that—the 150th anniversary of that was coming up in 2020. At the time, like, I didn’t know that. We kind of asked our Utah friends if they had learned that in Utah History growing up, because my friend and I were both Utah transplants, and very few people we talked to had actually ever heard that as well. So it just seemed like a really obvious opportunity to join my marketing skills with my women’s advocacy skills and to make a difference in my new home state here.
So she and I paired up, and we were able to get an appropriation from the state legislature to start a project that would lead us to the 2020 celebrations. It was really intended from the start to be a, sort of, multi-channel holistic education campaign. It wasn’t supposed to just be a party in 2020. And so, we started with an education curriculum for fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh grades. We commissioned an illustrator, Brooke Smart, to illustrate fifty women’s advocates from Utah here. And that really brought the project alive, because it used my skills in, sort of, speaking to the people on lots of different levels that were very narrative and a very visually stimulating sort of level, and yet still advocate for a different perspective and a different way of perceiving Utah women.
Around the same time that we came up with this idea, we had been reading some of these articles about Utah being the worst place for women based on some national statistics, and so it just seemed like these stories from the past could serve as a reminder of where we came from, that this progressive mindset was in our DNA.
Of course, for me, it started out as a desire to really talk about Latter-day Saint women and to really address that same community that I addressed in Women at Church, but through a historical lens and, sort of, just take a different angle at that kind of portion of the membership of the church that may be uncomfortable with these kinds of conversations. But it very quickly turned into a project that celebrated the trailblazing women of all of Utah history, or at least since the pioneers arrived. And so, we really focused on representing all of the communities that we could, over the past 150 years of Utah’s history. I am so glad that we were pushed in that direction very early on, because it really became a statewide campaign. It was really stripped from any religious overtones or any white women’s overtones. And even though my team, unfortunately, ended up all being white women, my historians did an absolutely amazing job of seeking out and including the other communities that make up Utah today. It is an incredibly diverse group. I know everyone thinks of Utah as so not diverse, but it really is, it’s just that we don’t do the work to go out there and find those people and those stories and include them. And we did that, and it’s one of the things I am most proud of with that project.
MW: It’s remarkable, and I love how you used vignettes, or stories, short bios, of each of the women that you are highlighting. I was especially touched by the Emmaline B. Wells story. You can’t get better than that one.
NB: Emmaline is my personal hero, absolutely. There are some surprising good guys and surprising bad guys. (laughs)
MW: I know.
NB: You do have these people, these men and women, saying things that feel super progressive to us even today. You have Joseph F. Smith railing on the evils of pay gap. Like, why should a man get paid more for than a woman when she too has to earn her bread? You know, that kind of thing. Just really amazing stuff. And you have Franklin Richards, who was an apostle, say that this work towards equal rights for women was going to be the brightest ray of Utah’s glorious star. It was the thing that they were most proud of with statehood—was that their women were free and franchised and treated equally.
And you know, I think in the book, I also try to really confront the fact that polygamy was the motivating factor behind suffrage in Utah. It was the factor behind giving them the vote initially. It was the factor behind the congress pulling away the right to vote. It was the factor behind congress pulling away the right to vote from Utahns in 1887. It was a huge factor obviously in the Manifesto of 1891, and then the ability to become a state after the Manifesto. And it was a huge factor in the political career of someone like Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, who became the first female state senator in the nation with her election in 1896. She ran against her own husband in the race. She was Angus Cannon’s fourth wife, and as a polygamist wife post-manifesto, she was technically not supposed to be married or having any sort of relations with him. And while she was serving in the Utah State Legislature, she became pregnant, and this literally made front page news around the country. This was a huge scandal. . . The polygamist men were required to choose a wife, as their single wife.
And so you had people like Dr. Cannon, who just didn’t accept that, and continued to live with her polygamist husband and became pregnant, and in a very public position as a member of the Utah State Legislature, that sort of unwillingness to follow the new law of the land become very evident, and she paid a severe political price for it. She had to leave office and go into exile in England and in California.
I don’t think we understand really that late late nineteenth century history around the dissolution of polygamy, [and] how it intersected with these women’s lives, and how suffrage was really a way that these women used their voice to stand up for their religious freedom and their right to be able to practice this lifestyle. We don’t want to believe that, and that is one of the purposes of the book, is that I wanted to give these women their voice back.
I just really felt a drive to put my own feelings aside and let them speak for themselves. And what they said publicly—very important—what they said publicly was that they wanted to practice their religion the way they wanted. They needed the federal government to stay out of their business, but that they were strong, independent thinkers, and that they had their own opinions, and that they were voting the way that they wanted to vote, regardless of how their husbands voted. Privately, many of these women, including Emmaline Wells and Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, expressed the loneliness and the dysfunction of their lives as polygamist wives. There was no shortage of pain, and heartache, and confusion over this way of life. They were able to accomplish some remarkable things that no other American women were accomplishing at that time because of this unusual domestic system, which was that they could leave their children and leave their home duties to other women and pursue degrees, pursue professions, pursue travel and education. They really, in mass, no other group of American women was able to do at that time in history.
MW: It really is incredible, isn’t it? I’m thinking about Ellis Ship. She left children with her mother, and her sister-wife helped, and went back to—with the encouragement of the prophet—to go back and become a female doctor, who then changed so many things for women in Utah because of her knowledge and her expertise. So it really is a unique history, and you have captured it so well, and filled a huge gap that has been needed. So, thank you for that.
Let’s talk about—you mobilized so quickly for Better Days. I mean, really, for what you are doing, it’s remarkable. What other events, and art, and different things does Better Days 2020 have—what have you done thus far, and what are the future events? And how do people learn about the project?
NB: The organization’s website is Better Days 2020.org. So that is the home of all of our activities. What we are most proud of, probably, is the educational materials at UtahWomensHistory.org. So UtahWomensHistory.org is a resource specifically for educators, but it is also for—it also has lots of materials for individuals, and families, and anybody. As I have mentioned, we have lesson plans for fourth, fifth, seventh, and eleventh grade Utah History and US History. They were written by Ph.D. 's in curriculum development and history, and they are just spectacular. And they are really age appropriate and fun, but they teach the complexities of this history in a really engaging way. I think that is one of our lasting legacies is those resources. We also have extensive articles. We have reader’s theaters. We’ve got songs that we commissioned the music. We’ve got coloring pages, and activities, and all of that. It’s a really rich resource.
MW: It’s been spectacular to watch it all happen in such a short period of time. Amazing.
One of the goals that the Utah Women’s Walk has is from a statement by Eleanor Roosevelt. She says, “There is nothing particularly interesting about another’s life story unless you can say, as you read it, Why this is what I have been through. Perhaps, after all, there is a way to work things out.” If you are comfortable sharing, what do you feel has been your most significant trial in your life, and what can we learn from you about overcoming a particular difficulty?
NB: Oh, that’s so interesting. I have so much to say about that. First of all, I really like that quote, because I think it plays into my philosophy—if I have a philosophy from my activism for the past twelve years—I like to think of myself as an empathetic activist, and I practice empathetic activism. And what that means, I think, is that I like to bridge these different attitudes, and I like to be that communicator that brings people from one side over to another side and vice versa and bring us all to the middle to a place that we can really empathize with each other. It’s also an approach to that. I like to tell people’s stories, because I do think it helps to see ourselves in other people’s stories. Of course, there is this rule of thumb with writing that universal is personal, right? The tighter you tell a story, the more universal it becomes, and people can see themselves in very specific stories, so I think that goes along with her quote very well.
I do think that we have a tendency in activism to sometimes block ourselves off from the people we are trying to talk to. And rather than say, here are all the commonalities and similarities between us as fellow humans, we often say, I am the only one who has experienced my pain and my stories and you can never relate, and so you can never sympathize. I think it just doesn’t create a sense of commonality and unity, and it just doesn’t see the best in people.
The other part of your question was about—sorry, can you repeat the other part of your question?
MW: I was just wondering if you would share some significant trial in your own life and how you resolved it, what you did to solve it, or what you are learning from it.
NB: I feel very blessed in that I’ve never had to struggle through a single life-altering trial. I’ve never lost a child. I’ve never been divorced. But I would say that, a sort of common theme in my life is being—sorry, obviously I guess, it is really painful—separated from the people who raised me. So I am an only child and both of my parents have died. And so that is a very lonely place to be in. But more than that, I was raised, in a sort of, extraordinarily unique way, right? I was raised in an environment that people literally only see in the movies. I mean, a lot of wealth, a lot of elite, sort of, New York City artistic community. I grew up backstage at the Metropolitan Opera—famous people. And that’s not sustainable. That hasn’t been sustainable, and I have made choices that have separated me from the bubble I grew up in. And so, I just think, being separated from the people who knew me when I was a child—like there really are few people in my life that could actually even describe my childhood home or who even knew my parents. And very few who knew us as a trio. That was a very small sliver of time and a, sort of, unique unit.
So I feel a massive disconnect between where, and how, and who I live with now and those sort of foundational elements of my childhood.
MW: I’m so sorry to hear about your mom passing away. I didn’t realize.
NB: Oh, yeah. She died three years ago.
MW: I’m so sorry to hear that. Do you have any particular saying, or scripture, or proverb, or anything that you have hanging on your wall?
NB: Yes. It’s actually by Sandra Day O’Conner. “For both men and women, the first step in getting power is to become visible to others, and then to put on an impressive show.” I just love that because I feel like with my marketing skills that is what I can do. I can put on an impressive show. (laughs)
MW: Absolutely. What advice do you have for women in Utah?
NB: Life is long, and I’m finding that. And I think one thing that I wish that more women have a perspective of is how long life actually is. We talk so limitedly about the motherhood years, and those years with small children, and I am almost out of those years myself. And I have decades to go, and I had decades before this. And I just feel like we need to have a much more broad conversation about what it means to be a woman, and really brace that, sort of, both/and mentality instead of an either/or mentality. You can either be a mother, or you can be a public contributor. No, it’s like, there are lots of different eras in your life. I have some exclusively at some times in my life, and other things exclusively at other times in my life. There have been a lot of times in my life when I have done all of it together. And I think embracing that both/and—saying I can be something and something else at the same time, or at different times in my life, is really a philosophy that would help.
MW: What would you still like to accomplish in your life?
NB: So much. I can definitely see at least one or two other books on the horizon. My husband is always trying to get me to write a book about my family and my extended family, like my ancestry, a sort of memoire. That might happen, who knows. I would love to continue speaking. I think I have developed a strong enough platform, at this point, that perhaps that might be a possibility. We will see. I’d like to continue being a really engaged mother to my three girls. I am a little nervous about what that looks like after they leave home. I want to be present there for them. My mom, as close as she and I were, she kind of had a whole other second career to her life, and I would like to be closer to my adult children than I was able to be with her. And I would like to have an apartment in New York City one day. Is that okay to say? (laughs) I would like to get back to New York.
MW: Absolutely. What would you like to be remembered for?
NB: I just hope that they see me as a really proactive contributor, as somebody who loves the performing arts. I am so often a receiver. I just take in what other people give me in their performances, and I am so grateful for it. I feel like I am a performer at heart, but I don’t really have a skill to perform with. So I feel like I guess maybe this is my way of contributing and performing, and if I can contribute something to others that leaves them with that same sense that I have when I leave a great musical performance, then I will have contributed in the way that I am pleased with.
MW: No doubt. No doubt. You are doing that currently.
MW: I am so impressed with you and have been very touched by what you have shared. Thank you.
NB: Thank you.