Fawn M. Brodie - Education and Marriage

Education and Marriage

From 1930 to 1932 Fawn attended Weber College, a two-year institution in Ogden then owned by the LDS Church, where she became an accomplished public speaker and participated in intercollegiate debate. She then completed her B.A. in English literature at the University of Utah in 1934. There she began to question core Mormon beliefs, such as that the Indians had originated in ancient Palestine. Nevertheless, after graduation, at age nineteen, she returned to teach English at Weber College, where she demonstrated excellent potential.

In high school, McKay had begun dating a classmate, Dilworth Jensen. They wrote to each other faithfully during Jensen's long absence on an LDS mission in Europe. In June 1935, both McKay and Jensen were accepted for graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and friends assumed they would marry. Her sister Flora McKay had recently eloped with Jensen's brother, whom the McKays disliked, and they encouraged Fawn to attend the University of Chicago instead. McKay seemed to have had "growing doubts about marrying" Jensen.

At the University of Chicago, where she earned an M.A. in 1936, Brodie lost her faith in religion entirely. In 1975, she recalled, "It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime. The sense of liberation I had at the University of Chicago was exhilarating. I felt very quickly that I could not go back to the old life, and I never did." She continued to write to Dilworth Jensen until shortly before she married Bernard Brodie on her graduation day, August 28, 1936.

Brodie was a native of Chicago, the son of Latvian Jewish immigrants who was alienated from both his family and his family's religion. A bright, emotional graduate student in international relations, Brodie eventually became a noted expert in military strategy during the Cold War era. The McKays were horrified at the impending marriage; and not surprisingly, Dilworth Jensen felt betrayed. David O. McKay went to Chicago to warn his niece of the family's strong objections. Out of consideration for her mother, Fawn scheduled the wedding in an LDS chapel, but of the McKays, only Fawn's mother attended. None of Brodie's family did.