“Rise Up and Speak”: The Discourses of Eliza R. Snow

“[I] felt like shouting hallelujah,” wrote Mary Ann Burnham Freeze after hearing Eliza R. Snow speak on 9 March 1883. As a writer, organizer, temple worker, and advocate for women, Snow was a key figure in expanding women’s participation and leadership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

When Brigham Young commissioned Snow to assist bishops in organizing ward Relief Societies in Utah Territory in 1868, she readily agreed, happy to take a supportive role in sharing the Nauvoo Relief Society minutes she had carried across the plains. But when Young asked Snow to “instruct the sisters,” she experienced some anxiety. “My heart went pit-a-pat,” she remembered. Public speaking felt unnatural to this quiet and refined woman; despite her apprehension, she desired to “carry into effect the president’s requisition.”

With experience, Snow grew into her role. She encouraged other women to overcome their fears. “We must cultivate all the faculties that God has endowed us with,” she told one group. “Call forth faculties that have been lying dormant.” Under the direction of prophetic leadership, Snow and the women went to work; they frequently rose to speak and ministered to each other and to their communities. She also helped establish the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association and the Primary, encouraging young people to learn about Jesus Christ and care for each other.

President Snow emboldened others to speak. Emily Tanner Richards remembered an encounter with Snow when she was a young woman: “The first time [she] asked me to speak in meeting, I could not, and she said, ‘Never mind, but when you are asked to speak again, try and have something to say,’ and I did.” Richards became a prominent public speaker and suffrage leader, seeking the vote for women.

In her discourses, Snow consistently admonished Latter-day Saint women to awaken to their divine potential. She looked upon the faces of women in Lehi, Utah Territory, and told them she saw “the form of deity there,” imploring them to become “fit companions of the gods and holy ones.” The Relief Society, she said, would help women “fill the measure of their creation.”

Snow traveled extensively, preaching about the gospel of Jesus Christ and ministering to women of all ages in the church. Local scribes preserved notes and transcripts of her remarks; newspapers published many of them. Through a multiyear research effort, nearly 1,300 discourses have been discovered, transcribed, and published online on the Church Historian’s Press website.

The Church Historian’s Press and Deseret Book will publish a print volume with a selection of these discourses in March 2026. The selection points readers to Snow’s best-recorded and most doctrinally dense discourses, made more readable through some editorial standardization. Readers of the print book will find introductions, notes, and bracketed names added by Church History Department historians that supply context and background to Snow’s words.