Vagabond Virgins

It was perhaps unheard of in 1964 for two young blonde Mormon girls from Salt Lake City to hitchhike though the Middle East. My sister and I were driven by a desire for adventure to see the world beyond Utah. But we wanted to remain Mormons, to be able to return to our family, our culture, the world we belonged to. In order to do this, we had to keep our virginity. The Mormon religion requires a temple marriage to enter the Celestial Kingdom in the next life. You cannot be married in the Mormon temple if you are not a virgin. You not only lose your chance of going to the Celestial Kingdom, you risk becoming an outcast from your family as well as your church. Staying pure proved to be very difficult because we traveled only with boys. And as we formed romantic attachments to some of those boys, our struggle to stay chaste became harder and harder, even as we became more and more determined not to lose our virginity. We traveled through Egypt, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey, and then to Greece, Rome, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Germany, and finally to Spain and Morocco. We had adventures in cultures very different from Mormon America, but we did not want to become exiles from our own roots. We thought we would return to Salt Lake City to marry good Mormon men and become mothers. This memoir is about our realization, like that of other young women in the early Sixties, that our lives were not our own; they had been determined by the patriarchal culture we'd grown up in. As our horizons broadened, we saw that we no longer had to be bound by the narrow confines of Mormonism. We could strike into territory that was perhaps dangerous, certainly unknown, but was of our own choosing.