News

The Church Historian’s Press today announced the release of The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History ($49.95).

The new volume of women’s history provides unprecedented access to primary documents chronicling the establishment and growth of the Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century.

For the first time, this collection of original documents has been gathered and published in one book. In the volume, the documents are transcribed and placed in historical context with introductions and annotation to aid scholars and other interested readers in studying the documents. Such access offers new and deeper understanding of early Latter-day Saint women’s teachings, activities, ambitions, struggles, and contributions. The introductions in this book and a number of the documents have also been published for free public access on churchhistorianspress.org/the-first-fifty-years-of-relief-society. Eventually the entire volume will be published on the website.

The first work of scholarship outside of The Joseph Smith Papers to be published by the Church Historian’s Press, this volume is also the first publication from the press dedicated to documenting the history of women in the church. The press is an imprint of the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Relief Society today is a crucial organization in the church, representing six million women from 170 countries and territories. The society began, however, with a group of only twenty women in Nauvoo, Illinois, who gathered in March 1842 to “relieve the poor” and “save souls.” Known initially as “The Female Relief Society of Nauvoo,” the organization was first led by President Emma Smith. The society was suspended from 1845 until the mid-1850s. After church members emigrated west to Utah Territory, some attempts were made to organize the society on a congregational level, but it was not until 1867 that a general Relief Society for all Latter-day Saint women began to be permanently reorganized, this time led by Eliza R. Snow, who had been the secretary of the Nauvoo Relief Society. In the following decades, the Relief Society’s roles in the church and in women’s lives expanded and changed.

This new volume from the Church Historian’s Press provides an authoritative history of the beginnings of the Relief Society by producing transcripts of seventy-eight key documents. These records from the first fifty years of the society give insight not only into the spiritual and ecclesiastical dimensions of Latter-day Saint women’s lives but also into their political, temporal, and social pursuits. Relief Society women cared for their families and the poor. They manufactured and sold goods, worked as midwives and doctors, gave healing blessings, appointed and set apart Relief Society officers, stored grain, built assembly halls, fought for woman suffrage, founded a hospital, defended the practice of plural marriage, and started the church organizations for children and young women.

The single most important document in the volume is the minutes of the Nauvoo Relief Society from 1842 through 1844, which chronicle the founding of the organization. These minutes have never before been published in their entirety in print. The organization of the Relief Society was historic for several reasons—it formally organized Latter-day Saint women for the first time, created the first church offices for women, and marked the beginning of institutional record keeping by and about Mormon women.

Institutional records in the volume are balanced by more personal documents, including correspondence and journal entries from female church officers. The volume also reproduces sermons by both women and men—including six sermons by Joseph Smith, his only recorded remarks directed exclusively to women. Other documents in the volume include annual reports, newspaper articles and editorials, political petitions and speeches, poetry, and reminiscences.

Harvard professor Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said of this volume, “This remarkable collection is not only a landmark in Mormon historical editing—it is a signal contribution to religious studies, women’s history, and the economic and social history of the American west. In my view it is the most important work to emerge from the Mormon press in the last fifty years.”

The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History is available at Deseret Book, Amazon, Store.LDS.org, and many other retail outlets. Visit the Publications section of the Church Historian’s Press website for more information.