Listen to the introduction here:

In July 1885, members of the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association in the East Bountiful Ward in northern Utah Territory issued their own handwritten newspaper. An association member named M. A. Willie wrote that she felt self-conscious at first about writing for the project, but living in a culture that prized collective industry, she also felt a strong need to contribute to the shared work. “The Kingdom of God is a progresive Kingdom and it will wait for none of us,” she reflected. “I want to be one with my sisters.” Setting her insecurities aside, she cast her generation’s experience in heroic terms that echoed those used for their parents, the pioneers who had worked to build up their religious Zion in the Great Basin of the American West. “I think we as daughters of Zion have a great labor at home with ourselves,” she wrote. “There has never been a better time for woman to improve her talents than at the present time. We have oportunities that our mothers were deprived of for the improvement of our minds. Then let us as wives, as mothers and as daughters of parents that we have reasons to be proud of, improve every oportunity that is afforded us, that we may be honored instruments in the kingdom of God.”¹

Fifty years later, Jantje Copier, who lived in the Netherlands, expressed her excitement over the church’s Bee-Hive Girls program for young women. “Begun in Utah, it has now penetrated to the little village in Holland where I live and gather my honey of knowledge. How thankful I am for the great privilege of being a Bee-Hive Girl,” she wrote. “It has brought me that for which my soul seeks. It has brought me faith in life, in love, in joy, and in helpful work. . . . May our Father bless the Bee-Hive work that it may bring happiness to this and future generations.”²

In 2006, teenagers in Panama City participated in the Personal Progress program in their Young Women organization. “Personal Progress hasn’t taught me only about the Church,” said sixteen-year-old Andrea Navas. “It has helped me realize who I am, that we’re daughters of God.” It was equally meaningful to Mayka Moreno: “Personal Progress helped me to understand the doctrines of the gospel. It strengthened my testimony a lot about Christ’s Atonement and other things I didn’t understand. . . . I’m not the same person I was. I’m better. . . . The Lord wants us to be better, shine brighter. He wants us to develop our talents, to be a light on the hill. . . . That’s why we have this program.”³

Although separated by generations and nationalities, these young women are united through their participation in the Young Women organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For more than 150 years and through varied name and programming iterations, the organization has played a pivotal role in cultivating a sense of divine identity, purpose, and belonging for the rising generation of Latter-day Saint women in their respective eras. Preparing young women for a lifetime of discipleship in the gospel of Jesus Christ, encouraging them to make and keep covenants with God, and cultivating their engagement within the Latter-day Saint faith have been central to the purpose of the organization’s programs. The Young Women organization also nurtured young women who would become its future leaders. Understanding what individuals like M. A., Jantje, Andrea, and Mayka experienced in Young Women helps reveal what Latter-day Saints valued at different times in their efforts to keep faith alive and build up the kingdom of God on the earth.

Early histories of the Latter-day Saints seldom mentioned the Young Women organization, focusing instead on the prophets and apostles who serve as the faith’s central and most visible leaders. Over the past half century, however, scholars have been increasingly interested in the ways women have influenced religious practice and the transmission of faith traditions, a focus that has coincided with Latter-day Saint women’s interest in and subsequent efforts to recover the history of their foremothers. These efforts were first characterized by a strong emphasis on biography and life writings and on the Relief Society, the church’s first women’s organization.⁴ More recently, scholars have published important studies of the religious lives of Latter-day Saint women, and the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has established women’s history as one of its primary areas of focus.⁵ A growing body of scholarship and commentary has shed light on the roles of women in the church and on their relationship to men and to the priesthood as the church has grown and changed since it was established nearly two hundred years ago.

Still, little of this scholarship has examined perhaps the most potent intersection of all these historical inquiries: the history of the church’s Young Women organization. It is in this organization that adult Latter-day Saints have most consistently worked to define and model what it means to be a woman who follows Jesus Christ and lives the ideals of Latter-day Saint faith. Throughout its history, the organization’s female leaders have worked in concert with and under the direction of the church’s presiding male priesthood leaders to determine how to respond to cultural change and international growth. While the Young Women organization published its own official histories in 1911–1955, no full, scholarly history of this important organization has yet been written.⁶ Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 enters this virtually unplowed field to examine the aspirations and anxieties that have shaped the organization and its members.

The history of the Young Women organization, while unique, can serve as a case study of the ways religious groups wrestle with generation gaps, gender roles, and the tension between fidelity to tradition and adaptation to modernity. In addressing these issues, Carry On draws on scholarship about the history of childhood and youth and on scholarship probing Latter-day Saint communal boundaries and relations with the outside world. With this foundation, this history shows how successive generations of Latter-day Saints defined youth, femininity, and spirituality and how a succession of female leaders both studied social trends and sought divine guidance as they set a course for their organization and solidified its place in the larger church.

This volume is essentially an institutional history.⁷ While the Young Women organization has sought to adapt to the local circumstances of its members around the world, the organization is headquartered in Salt Lake City, and thus the cultural changes and contexts that have molded it most throughout its history overwhelmingly reflect those of the United States. Additionally, because adults have led the organization and shaped its records, this volume most often reflects the concerns of adults about girls. This narrative covers the full span of the organization’s history from 1870 to 2024, but it is not a comprehensive history of every change and program in the organization, which has been dynamic and fluid since its beginning. Carry On focuses on programs, initiatives, changes, and details that are particularly significant or illustrative of larger themes and trends in the history. The appendixes to the book, in print and online, supplement the narrative by providing a timeline and charts outlining the organization’s general presidencies, classes, and awards.

This book draws on a rich base of source material preserved in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ central archive, the Church History Library (CHL). These sources include board meeting minutes and other executive files, personal files of presidencies and board members, statistical reports, scrapbooks, handbooks and manuals, pamphlets and circulars, and church periodicals such as the Woman’s Exponent, the Young Woman’s Journal, the Improvement Era, the MIA Leader, the Church News, the Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, and MIA in the Missions. The CHL also holds an extensive collection of local records, including minute books and local publications. Because leadership changes regularly and participation in the organization is intentionally limited to certain ages, materials that might document individuals’ experiences are often considered ephemeral, and the CHL contains comparatively few records created by everyday young women and their leaders. To supplement the core institutional history with personal perspectives, researchers scrutinized correspondence collections, community and family histories, and oral histories, including those at other repositories such as the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Church History Department staff also conducted oral history interviews and solicited personal materials for use in this book. These sources help ensure that, while this volume focuses primarily on the history of the central Young Women organization, the stories of individual young women and local organizations provide important illustration.

This volume traces the development of the Young Women organization in three parts:

PART 1: THE YOUTH OF ZION (1870–1930)

The first Young Ladies’ Department of the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Association was founded in 1870. The word retrench meant to economize or simplify, though it was also used in military contexts to refer to fortifications. Both senses fit the times. Many of the earliest members of these young women’s groups had parents who experienced religious persecution in the eastern United States or marginalization in Europe and crossed the Great Plains to build up distinctively Latter-day Saint communities in Utah. By 1869, however, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad meant the end of an era of relative isolation for the Saints. They responded to the change with concerns over encroaching outside influences and perceived spiritual erosion, yet they were also interested in what could be gained from closer connection to the outside world. These opposing impulses—defense against assimilation and engagement with the larger culture—would recur throughout the organization’s history.

Initially, “junior retrenchment,” as the young ladies’ groups were sometimes known, spread as a grassroots movement, and in its beginnings, local organizations included married and single young women in their teens and twenties and existed only in congregations in Utah and the surrounding areas. Though unified in purpose, young women created and led their own organizations without any central governing body. By embracing retrenchment, Latter-day Saint women and girls intended to resist worldly influences, foster spirituality, and band together in economic and temporal solidarity. By the mid-1870s, however, these local associations had expanded their focus to intergenerational mentoring, practical work and service, and development of skills in reading, writing, and public speaking. After the mid-1870s, local retrenchment associations also began to develop closer ties with the recently organized Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association (YMMIA) and formally adopted a parallel name: Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA). In 1880, church president John Taylor established a YLMIA general presidency in Salt Lake City to offer centralized leadership to local associations. The shift in identity from retrenchment to mutual improvement echoed the recurring impulses toward defense and engagement. In the organization’s early years, its leaders also wrestled with ongoing questions as to whether the YLMIA’s focus should be on its role as a women’s organization alongside the church’s other female-led groups or a youth organization working in close collaboration with the church’s organization for young men.

At the close of the nineteenth century, YLMIA leaders worked to meet the needs of the church’s young women through greater centralization and unification, including the advent of standardized lessons and programs overseen by an expanding and ambitious general board. As centralization progressed, the YLMIA and YMMIA began cooperating extensively in their programs and activities, which led to a growing self-perception of the two as a single youth organization. The close association of the two groups at the turn of the century required female leaders to navigate overlapping responsibility and authority with men, a diplomatic dance with long-term implications.

By the 1910s, rapid urbanization was transforming life in Utah and the surrounding Latter-day Saint–majority areas. As the United States reached the height of the Progressive Era, the surge in popularity of clubs and social programs led the YLMIA to see itself as an alternative to secular community organizations, extending the Saints’ nineteenth-century goal of self-sufficiency into the cultural and social realms. Local YLMIAs were subdivided into Bee-Hive Girls and Gleaner Girls programs to offer a more structured approach to both achievement and adolescent development. Leaders of the YLMIA and YMMIA (known collectively as “the MIA”) developed a theory of “teaching the gospel through activities,” drawing on Latter-day Saints’ expansive theology of the interrelationship of the physical, spiritual, and social to argue that the MIA’s cultural and athletic programs fostered spiritual development. The MIA was assigned to oversee recreation for the church in 1922, though questions about the proper balance between activities and more overtly religious pursuits persisted.

PART 2: TRUE TO THE FAITH (1930–1984)

By the 1930 centennial of the church’s organization, the pioneer culture of the nineteenth century had waned. Immigration to Latter-day Saint population centers had declined, and Latter-day Saints were better accepted in American society. In the records of the renamed Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association (YWMIA), honoring spiritual heritage and cultivating belief in the miraculous events of the faith’s founding emerged as key purposes of the organization alongside its robust slate of recreational and cultural activities. Given the declining focus on migration to Utah, this period also witnessed significant development of the MIA in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. In the United States, mobilization for World War II in the early 1940s heightened MIA leaders’ awareness of the world’s interconnectedness and raised new questions about how to address sexuality and track a young population in motion.

During the 1950s, the YWMIA was central to the church’s public image. Even as the organization enjoyed relative autonomy within the larger church, the YWMIA collaborated closely with the YMMIA to disseminate the church’s message and showcase the benefits of gospel living through the wholesome activities and achievements of its youth. Massive festivals, coordinated to occur during the MIA’s yearly June Conference, brought tens of thousands of youth, leaders, and spectators to watch the young people dance, sing, perform plays, and participate in other cultural events, some of which were televised to a still larger audience.

Within the Young Women organization, leaders created more subdivisions—adding the Mia Maids and Junior Gleaners—and adjusted age requirements within existing groups, in keeping with current thinking on stages of adolescent development and teenage life patterns. Reflecting the high marriage rates and relatively young marriage ages of the era as well as Latter-day Saint theology on family, preparation for marriage continued to be a major emphasis of instruction and activities for young women in their teens. Additionally, because the MIAs included members in their twenties and also sponsored groups for adults, the organizations served as the social hub for Latter-day Saints of all ages. To support both instruction and activities among these varied groups, the MIA organizations and their subdivisions printed thousands of pages of instructional materials each year to distribute to members and leaders.

In the 1960s, YWMIA leaders responded to rapid social change and church growth with an increasing emphasis on spiritual and leadership development. Even as time-honored traditions such as June Conference remained in place, concerns that church programs were too large and elaborate, combined with the international growth of the church and worries about the trajectory of the broader culture, caused leaders to drastically rethink the YWMIA. Though the church’s correlation committees had worked through the 1960s toward centralizing and streamlining all church organizations, including the YWMIA, the impact of those efforts began to be felt largely in the 1970s. Departing from the outward-facing, elaborate programs of the 1950s and 1960s, changes under the correlation movement generated a period of simplification and an even stronger emphasis on spirituality. The YWMIA was redefined and renamed to become the Young Women organization. Its recreation focus was curtailed, and its demographic scope narrowed to include only girls up to age eighteen. In the wake of correlation-related changes, leaders developed the church’s programs for young women and young men in different directions. The dramatic changes that came with closer integration into the shared structure of the church highlighted tensions regarding the place of women’s organizations within the priesthood hierarchy and the church’s expanding bureaucracy. At the same time, other developments provided more parity for the young women's organization—in 1980, when many church meetings were consolidated into a three-hour block on Sundays, the Young Women organization became, for the first time, a regular part of both Sunday instruction and weekly activity for Latter-day Saint girls throughout the world.

PART 3: DAUGHTERS OF HEAVENLY PARENTS (1984–2024)

Following the profound change and reorganization at all levels of the church in the previous decades, leaders in the 1980s worked to stabilize the Young Women organization within the new, correlated church structure. Seeking to foster a specifically Latter-day Saint identity, leaders redesigned the personal achievement program and introduced a theme and a set of values that would define the organization for more than three decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, leaders largely maintained the framework established by their predecessors and worked to help young women resist what leaders saw as increasing threats to traditional gender norms and family roles. And with rapid expansion of church membership throughout the world, they looked for new ways to make the Young Women programs accessible and relevant in settings with major economic, social, cultural, and demographic differences.

While marriage remained theologically important, the early 2000s saw marriage rates decline and average marriage ages increase substantially relative to the mid-twentieth century. By the 2010s, the Young Women organization increasingly worked to prepare young women for potential missionary service and emphasized service within the church and larger community. At the end of that decade and into the next, a series of dramatic changes within the organization and the larger church reoriented Young Women programs around integrating youth more fully into the work of the church, taking previous generations’ vision of youth leadership to a new level. Some of these changes consciously broke with the organization’s history, while others preserved and modified existing traditions. In general, the changes reduced the differentiation between the church’s organizations for young women and young men, bringing the two closer together than they had been since the mid-twentieth century. As they worked to make these adjustments, leaders turned consciously to the organization’s history, seeking not to replicate past practices but to find inspiration in them.

The organization’s recent reimagining demonstrates both the continuity and the dynamism that characterize the history of the Young Women organization. Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 narrates that history, offers insights into the challenges of imparting religious faith and promoting human flourishing, and analyzes the processes that produce religious inspiration and motivate organizational change. Taken as a whole, this history is one of young believers who worked to shape their lives around their religious ideals and of leaders who carried on a long tradition of seeking out inspiration and introducing intentional change to further the organization’s consistent purpose—to raise up righteous women who would follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, blessing the church and the world.