Lavina Fielding Anderson

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Lavina Fielding Anderson is a former editor of the Ensign magazine who was one of the September Six. She was excommunicated in 1993 for documenting cases of ecclesiastical abuse in the article ‘The LDS Intellectual Community and Church Leadership: A Contemporary Chronology.’ She co-founded the Mormon Alliance to document such cases.

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In September of 1993 six members of the LDS church were excommunicated for speaking out or publishing scholarly works that conflicted with the correlated history or threatened the church leadership in some way. They collectively came to be known as the “September Six”. These individuals were Lynne Whitesides, Avraham Gileadi, Paul Toscano, Maxine Hanks, Lavina Anderson, and D. Michael Quinn. Dubbed the “September Six,” the group were mostly left-leaning writers and scholars who had published articles or given talks about the role of women in Mormonism and the way the church’s leaders handle dissent. | wasmormon.org