On an 1869 tour of the settlements in central and southern Utah, church president Brigham Young became concerned that women were spending too much time and too many resources on elaborate meals and, to a lesser extent, on their clothing. While he was in Gunnison, Utah Territory, he spoke about his concerns with Mary Isabella Hales Horne, Relief Society president in the influential Salt Lake City Fourteenth Ward and a leading figure in women’s work in the church. He asked her to lead a movement to reform dining, dress, and housekeeping. Young then took up the topic in public meetings upon his return to Salt Lake City. Lamenting that church members were taking lightly their spiritual opportunities and duties, he said that humans were weak and shortsighted, prone to give themselves up “to the grovelling things of the world.” He then invited female audience members to work “a revolution” by preparing simpler meals and establishing a plainer style of dress. Young taught that this “practical religion” would help them save time for spiritual and intellectual development and improve the health of their families.¹²

Women were the natural focus for this effort in part because they were the primary decision makers in their homes and communities in matters of food and dress. Horne herself was the mother of fifteen children, including three sets of twins; she was well acquainted with the intricacies of domestic labor and therefore well placed to oversee domestic reform.¹³ For Saints in Utah at the time, it was not enough simply to issue calls for reform. In an era of institution building, their impulse was to organize, to create a voluntary society or association. Nineteenth-century Americans joined such societies and associations in great numbers with the hope of addressing perceived social needs, and Latter-day Saints similarly embraced that inclination in their commitment to communal solidarity and the idea of cooperation.¹⁴

On 10 February 1870, Horne invited a dozen Relief Society presidents from Salt Lake City wards to form a retrenchment organization, which they called the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Society.¹⁵ Following group discussion, Eliza Roxcy Snow, who oversaw all women’s work in the church, worked with two other women to draft six resolutions for the society. One read, “Resolved:—That by carrying out the principles of retrenchment, the time, strength and means, redeemed from useless labor and waste, shall be devoted to noble purposes—such as instructing each other and the rising generation in the principles of physical and intellectual improvement, dietetics, &c.”¹⁶ Horne later described the movement’s purpose as being “to lighten the labors of the women and give them more time to devote to mental and spiritual culture.”¹⁷

Some of the language in the resolutions appears to have applied mainly to people who were financially stable—those who had comfortable resources from which to retrench. Addressing the Saints in the less developed town of St. George, Utah Territory, apostle Erastus Snow admitted as much. “We have not needed so much in this part of the land the sermons on retrenchment,” he said with some understatement.¹⁸ One woman in southern Utah recalled being taught retrenchment by a wealthy visitor from Salt Lake City. “They told us how it was the wish of the President that we should do away with all our extravagances in dress and habits,” she remembered. She looked around at the women in the audience and contrasted their coarse, faded homespun clothing with the speaker’s silk dress adorned with wide bands of velvet ribbon and lace edging. She sat and listened as long as she could stand it and then asked wryly, “Which do you want us to retrench from, Sister Young, the bread or the molasses?”¹⁹

The founders of the retrenchment movement demonstrated at least some awareness that many Relief Society members lived in poverty. The fourth resolution shows a determination that retrenchment would promote unity by reducing class distinctions and diminishing the opportunity gap for those with lower household incomes: “Resolved:—That inasmuch as many of our good and worthy citizens are deterred from inviting company by the consideration that they cannot compete with their more affluent neighbors, and are thereby deprived of many rich and profitable interviews, we say that henceforth any table neatly spread, with no matter how plain, but wholesome, food, shall be considered fashionable.”²⁰

Although the Retrenchment Society was an entity distinct from the Relief Society, the two organizations were still closely allied. Horne continued to serve as president of the Fourteenth Ward Relief Society while she was president of the Retrenchment Society. The Retrenchment Society was formally established only in Salt Lake City, but leaders visiting Latter-day Saint settlements throughout the West broadcast the message of retrenchment. In the city, retrenchment meetings provided a forum for ward Relief Society presidents to come together and discuss matters of common concern. In this way, retrenchment meetings functioned as an unofficial governing board for Relief Society until the establishment of higher-level leadership in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

A few months following the launch of the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Society, Eliza R. Snow composed resolutions for another new society—this one for young women.²¹ As a plural wife of Brigham Young, Snow lived in the Lion House with many of Young’s wives and children. Every evening around seven thirty, Young or one of the children rang the bell that called the fifty or so family members living at the Lion House into the parlor for their nightly prayers. Each mother and her children took their assigned place, and the family knelt as Young led them in prayer. Then the little ones went to bed while the others stayed behind to sing or discuss the day’s affairs. Snow often took a leading role in these discussions and used the time to consult with Young about women’s interests.²²

At one such gathering, his daughters remembered, Young stressed the need for his family members to lead by example in needed reforms. Church members watched his family, including his popular older daughters, and were influenced by what they did. He criticized church members for competing with one another for status and his daughters for following worldly fashions. He encouraged them to instead make their own fashions and establish those as models for Latter-day Saint young women to follow.²³

Sources attribute contradictory dates to this discussion. Much later in their lives, daughters Susa Young Gates, Zina Young Williams Card, and Maria Young Dougall remembered it as happening in November 1869, shortly after Young returned from the southern tour during which he discussed retrenchment with Horne. It is possible that Young did discuss retrenchment with his family at this time when the subject was clearly on his mind. But other sources show that the formal organization took place six months later. When published in the Deseret Evening News, Snow’s resolutions for a new Young Ladies’ Department of the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Association were dated 27 May 1870.²⁴

“Realizing ourselves to be wives and daughters of Apostles, Prophets and Elders of Israel,” the resolutions began, “we feel to unite and co-operate with, and do mutually pledge ourselves that we will uphold and sustain each other in doing good.” While the adult women’s society focused primarily on table reform, the resolutions proposed for the Young Ladies’ Department emphasized dress reform as their organization’s main purpose. “Inasmuch as the Saints have been commanded to gather out from Babylon and ‘n[o]t partake of her sins,’” the resolutions declared, “we feel that we should not condescend to imitate the pride, folly and fashions of the world.” The young women committed to set an example for others by following scriptural counsel regarding dress and adornment; they would enhance real beauty through plain dress and reject waste, extravagance, and extremes in fashion.²⁵ Pledging to support each other in this movement was the cooperative part of the endeavor. They resolved not only to wear homemade items but to exercise a united influence in rendering them fashionable.²⁶ Seven of Brigham Young’s daughters signed the original resolutions of the Young Ladies’ Department: Ella Young Empey, Emily Young Clawson, Zina Williams, Maria Dougall, Caroline Young Croxall, Dora Young, and Phebe Young.²⁷ Ella, the eldest, was selected as president of the new association, and she chose the other six as her counselors.²⁸

Implicit in their commitment to exercise influence was the understanding that this new movement would spread beyond the Young family. Within a few days of the inaugural meeting, Dora—one of the counselors in the new association—spoke glowingly of the new initiative to her close friend Lona Pratt, a young schoolteacher. Lona gathered many of her friends and pupils and organized an association in her ward; their resolutions were published in the newspaper alongside those of the original meeting.²⁹ Within weeks, several Salt Lake City wards organized young ladies’ retrenchment associations. Within months, many outlying communities did the same, and over the next decade, most wards in Utah established young women’s organizations, sometimes known as Junior Retrenchment or simply Young Ladies’ Associations.³⁰ Adult leaders helped found young ladies’ retrenchment associations throughout the church, as Elvira Barney did in Cedar City, and the idea of retrenchment in the church at large became identified with the young women.³¹

One aspect of this founding period has remained central to young women’s programs to the present day: a desire among the older generations to instruct and safeguard youth from the dangers of the world. As an insular community seeking to transmit its founding principles to the young, the Latter-day Saints were particularly sensitive to generational issues in the years surrounding the coming of the railroad. While worrying about external influences, they also recognized demographic challenges. By 1870, the fruits of conversion, gathering, and natural increase (including, of course, plural marriage) had multiplied the Latter-day Saint population substantially, resulting in large numbers of children and youth. In one representative community in northern Utah, for example, 67 percent of the population was under age twenty-five, and youths from ages ten to twenty-four accounted for 27 percent.³² As social and material conditions in the community changed, parents saw their children facing issues very different from their own pioneer experience.

Generational conflicts are, by definition, recurring, and while there is nothing new about adults worrying and complaining about children, factors specific to any given social moment shape the form and expression of those concerns.³³ In the church community of the late 1860s, leaders worried that pioneer-era parents had not sufficiently attended to their children’s spiritual development. Eliza R. Snow attributed the failure to difficult living conditions. Carving a living out of a challenging landscape demanded much of the time and energy of the generation that crossed the Great Plains, and their relative isolation in the West made it easier to avoid unworthy distractions. But as their children began to come of age, parents and leaders worried that the spirit of the world had crept in among their young people.³⁴

Residents of the Lion House were experiencing firsthand the community’s generational tensions, inflected by concerns about gender. Between 1847 and 1860, nineteen daughters and eleven sons had been born into the Young family. Most of those girls were adolescents by 1870 and lived either in or near the Lion House, where the household also included, at any given time, as many as twenty women who had married Young (some of whom adopted children or brought children from previous marriages). In the 1860s, then, the majority of the household was female, and at prayer time, Young was surrounded by up to forty women and girls.³⁵ The Young parents had worked hard to provide a comfortable, secure home for the family, but the resultant ease and privilege had a downside. “The girls in the Lion House, took life too easy,” one of the daughters recalled. While the boys helped work the farm, the girls had few chores to occupy their time, since their mothers took care of most of the housework.³⁶ The time not devoted to school lessons was often given to various kinds of recreation, such as parties and plays, with all the attendant focus on what to wear, including dresses, ribbons, and bows. Given these dynamics at home, it is not surprising that Young encouraged his own daughters to inaugurate another cooperative endeavor within the community.³⁷

While Snow, Young, and others expressed concerns about the young people, the parameters of that group were not yet well defined. At the time Young’s daughters inaugurated the organization, Ella was twenty-two, three others were over twenty, two were in their late teens, and one was fifteen. Five of these women were already married—all before turning twenty. In the early decades of the organization, society often considered girls quite juvenile well into their teens,³⁸ but the definition of young womanhood continued to shift over time and only gradually settled into the clear categorizations based on age and marital status reflected in the twenty-first century Latter-day Saint recognition of young women as unmarried girls ages twelve through seventeen.

The term adolescence would not come into common use until the end of the nineteenth century. Several trends converged to make that new life stage visible. The rapid growth of urban and middle-class life shifted social, educational, economic, psychological, and familial patterns and gradually created a discrete space between childhood and adulthood. Freed from some of the domestic labor that defined earlier generations’ lives, middle-class girls found new opportunities to go to school, spend time shopping and visiting with friends, and engage in cultural and literary activities—developing new life patterns that would bridge the growing-up years. The Lion House, situated at the heart of Salt Lake City, in many ways epitomized those developing circumstances in Utah.³⁹ The Young family members were eager patrons of the growing cultural opportunities, including theater productions and music and dance training, and they enjoyed an increasingly prosperous household, with access to businesses—some of which the family owned—to serve their needs. Nineteenth-century American girls have been called the first adolescents; the daughters of the Young family—and those of the other prosperous families of the community—may well have been the first Latter-day Saint adolescents.⁴⁰

No one in the Lion House in May 1870 was thinking explicitly of identifying a new age group for young women. Still, their views of young women aligned with patterns of nineteenth-century thinking about girls and women. Relationships among female members of households and communities were often characterized by generational interdependence, in which girls were seen as apprentices to be mentored by adult women and a mother’s work and identity were tied up in her relationship with her daughters. These relationships provided girls instruction on what it meant to be female and feminine. Girls learned not only domestic skills but also the social and emotional patterns of womanhood from the adult women in their lives. Mothers and daughters identified strongly with one another, each seeing in the other an image of herself.⁴¹

Intergenerational mentoring was the bedrock upon which the organization for young women was originally founded. When Cedar City’s Young Ladies’ Retrenchment Association became official on 9 December 1875, Henrietta Lunt had six young women to serve with her as counselors, as well as a treasurer and two secretaries. Even with all those positions filled, she also had three adult women to act as superintendents and then added a “mother” over the society.⁴² Ann Blunt Alldridge filled the mother position, and Henrietta later remembered that they “certainly did appreciate her good advice and counsel.”⁴³ Alldridge spoke frequently in the meetings, as did Mary Ann Lunt, Henrietta’s actual mother and a counselor in the Relief Society presidency.⁴⁴ In the spirit of intergenerational bonds, the new young women’s organizations were considered something of a daughter to the Relief Society. The Young Ladies’ Retrenchment Association of Virgin City in southern Utah Territory, for example, reported that it was established “under the guardianship of the Relief Society.”⁴⁵

In keeping with the founding impulse toward dress reform, young women in ward after ward began adopting resolutions to dress neatly and attractively, to avoid indulging in ornate styles, and to create their own fashions.⁴⁶ In practical terms, retrenchment in dress saved time and money, both of which they thought could be put to better use. But the focus on women’s clothing was also something more. In discussing women’s fashion, Latter-day Saints participated in a much broader cultural conversation taking place in the nineteenth century—one that was on the minds of other reform movements as well. Other American reformers of the period denounced women’s clothing as unhealthful, impractical, socially and politically restrictive, and just plain ugly.⁴⁷ The Saints’ emphasis on the economics of dress seems to have been unique among such movements. One of the most famous clothing reform efforts of the nineteenth century was the adoption of the Bloomer costume by women in the Perfectionist community of Oneida, New York.⁴⁸ Latter-day Saint women were never quite so far reaching in their clothing reform as groups like the Perfectionists. Despite a momentary effort in the mid-1850s to incorporate trousers into a Deseret Costume for women—named after Utah’s nickname of Deseret—Latter-day Saint women’s retrenchment in dress followed a much more conservative approach.⁴⁹

In the end, the rhetoric around retrenchment in clothing faded rapidly, likely because reform impulses could not outweigh the broader societal norms surrounding appropriate dress for women. Clothing was an important avenue by which individuals expressed their sense of self and their relationship with the social order in which they lived.⁵⁰ Within American society, presenting oneself as proper and refined through one’s clothing and appearance was not only personally but also morally significant.⁵¹ National media in 1870 regarded Latter-day Saint women as sexually degraded, downtrodden slaves of their polygamous masters.⁵² Maintaining allegiance to accepted standards of clothing, therefore, was an important assertion of legitimacy and respectability.

Latter-day Saint women also soon found that retrenchment in dress could lead to increased contention rather than unity. Many early members of the young ladies’ retrenchment organizations felt a sense of isolation and restriction in adopting retrenchment styles, and they hesitated to invite their friends to join. They even experienced ridicule from some of their peers—both for embracing the strange new clothing and for not embracing it enough.⁵³ Maria Dougall recalled that a neighbor told her sister Zina, dressed in the new style, she looked like “a yard of pump water.”⁵⁴ On another occasion, Maria attended an early retrenchment meeting with another sister, Ella, the new president of the Young Ladies’ Department of the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Association. Ella had dressed plainly, with only one small pink bow on her white collar; still, one woman criticized her for wearing that much finery.⁵⁵

For some young women, the association’s message of dress reform failed to catch on simply because the rhetoric addressed a problem they could hardly fathom. Speakers generally offered frequent but vague comments about moderation, eliminating trimmings, and avoiding competition.⁵⁶ Yet, outside of the more established and prosperous cities, women and girls in towns and settlements were living at a far more modest level where there were few luxuries from which to retrench. So while dress reform was an impermanent goal of the new retrenchment associations, the rhetoric established fashion and female self-presentation as enduring points of tension and as boundaries between young Latter-day Saint women and the outside world.

As the new young ladies’ organization grew beyond the focus on dress reform, leaders and speakers attributed broader meanings to retrenchment. Louisa Barnes Pratt did so for the young ladies of Beaver, Utah Territory, for example.⁵⁷ Pratt, a leader in the Beaver Relief Society, explained that the term signified a cooperation of effort in restraining from extravagance. Yet it also meant working toward communal harmony and establishing a “wise, prudent, and refining intercourse with each other.”⁵⁸ In another ward, a young woman testified that retrenchment encompassed everything that would make them wise, useful, and happy by teaching women to live their religion and align their lives with God’s will.⁵⁹

Seen in this light, retrenchment encouraged intellectual and spiritual development. This, like the impulse to organize a voluntary association to address social needs, reflected broader American sensibilities. In post-Revolutionary America, associations and even academies for educating young women had proliferated, seeking not only to instill refined comportment but also to properly educate mothers of the new republic and increase women’s access to political discussions in the growing nation.⁶⁰ Leaders of Latter-day Saint young women similarly wanted their meetings to cultivate the girls’ minds and abilities.⁶¹ Eliza R. Snow stressed the need for spiritual development and warned young women to depend on neither their parents nor their future husbands for salvation.⁶²

Mary Ann Burnham Freeze, who went on to become the president of the Salt Lake Stake young women’s organization, later remembered the spiritual purpose in positive terms.⁶³ “Many can look back to their first associations in these societies,” she testified, “as to the dawning of a new and happier life, because of having become acquainted with their heavenly Father, and the principles of the holy gospel which bringeth joy and peace that the world can neither give nor take away.” Those who were faithful to their duties in young women’s retrenchment societies could expect a continual growth in the things of God, she promised. If they applied the things they learned, they would become great and mighty women in the kingdom of God and attain final exaltation in His presence.⁶⁴

The term improvement was soon used to express this more positive emphasis for the young women’s organization. Early in 1874, the Young Ladies’ Retrenchment Association of the Sixteenth Ward in Salt Lake City adopted it as their motto; the girls of Richfield, Utah Territory, followed suit a few months later.⁶⁵ Improvement reframed the retrenchment movement’s essentially negative mindset—rejection of the world—to a more positive, outward-reaching effort to increase spirituality and refinement among young people. As one young woman expressed it, improvement applied to all aspects of life: “We need to improve our minds, our persons, our habits, and our language. We should improve in true politeness, socially and morally,” she said. “As members of the church and professors of the Gospel, we should improve in the spiritual graces … and thus bear testimony to all, that we love virtue and truth.”⁶⁶

Latter-day Saints were not alone in aspiring to improvement. The term was used widely in the nineteenth century to denote a desire to progress, not only in moral matters but also in physical, secular, and religious ones.⁶⁷ And if improvement was a widely held value, mutual improvement was a social expression of that ideal—the idea that by engaging together in worthy pursuits, people could build each other while improving themselves. This sense of mutual improvement stretched back to the seventeenth century; it was applied to numerous groups, formal and informal, encompassing a wide range of purposes and social classes.⁶⁸ A directory of women’s clubs in the United States shows how ubiquitous the term had become by the end of the nineteenth century. A page listing clubs in Iowa and Kansas, for example, shows that of the sixty-two clubs listed, sixteen indicate “mutual improvement” as their purpose, with another seventeen employing one term or the other (“mutual” or “improvement”).⁶⁹

Not surprisingly, then, the Latter-day Saint young women’s associations soon began replacing retrenchment with improvement in their names. On 9 November 1876, the Young Ladies’ Retrenchment Society of Virgin City in southern Utah Territory, which had only just been organized in March of that year, changed its name to Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA).⁷⁰ The trend quickly spread, with some also changing the word Association to Society.⁷¹ A report from young women in Goshen, Utah Territory, provides a snapshot of the expanding nature of the improvement program. Their resolutions called for each member to participate by reading, writing essays, or praying. They were to dress attractively, engage in worthy types of dancing, observe the Word of Wisdom (the church’s dietary code), attend church meetings, display good manners, and develop charity.⁷²

Self-expression, both spoken and written, quickly became one of the primary emphases for young women. They were now invited, even expected, to speak publicly. Although the prospect was daunting for many, Latter-day Saint women wanted to hear their sisters speak. “I think we should try to overcome this timidity which keeps us on our seats,” exhorted Hilda Stark in the Brigham City, Utah Territory, Third Ward meeting.⁷³ Older women hoped the associations would provide young women with both experience and confidence. For her part, Mary Ann Freeze was pleasantly surprised at the talent she saw emerging at the young ladies’ meetings. She remarked that young women who had thought it impossible to contribute through their writing or their speech were doing both well.⁷⁴

A staple of young ladies’ meetings was the reading of essays written by members. Some of these essays found their way to publication in the Woman’s Exponent, a semimonthly newspaper for Latter-day Saint women established in 1872, which provided a forum for articles and poetry written by women on both religious and secular topics. Publishing in the Exponent made young women’s writings available to be used as readings by other groups.⁷⁵ In many locations, the outlet for girls’ literary ambitions took the form of manuscript newspapers sponsored by the young ladies’ associations. These were amateur periodicals, handwritten and circulated person to person, with editorship often rotating among the group. Dozens of such publications existed at one time or another in the last quarter of the century, sometimes providing the first outlet for promising writers.⁷⁶ The young women of Goshen established their own manuscript paper, the Young Ladies’ Gem, featuring writing by the young people themselves.⁷⁷ Julia Ivins Macdonald, who was later widely published in Latter-day Saint periodicals under her own name and under the pen name Cactus, first wrote as “Juie Ivins” in the Little Girls’ Magazine of St. George in the late 1870s.⁷⁸ These papers were inherently ephemeral, and most have been lost, but they were taken seriously by their readers and writers and provided a significant venue for young women to develop their literary talents and sense of agency.

Back in Cedar City, where families were generally poor compared with those in Salt Lake City, improvement was an effective rallying cry for the girls of Henrietta Lunt’s ward.⁷⁹ The focus on intellectual and spiritual improvement readily shaped their aspirations, and after organizing their association, the girls immediately set to work. Meetings for the young women in the Cedar City Ward, held at first every other Monday in the Social Hall, which served as Cedar City’s meetinghouse, consisted largely of singing, reading aloud, exhorting, and sharing testimonies. Young women and older women attended together. Henrietta recalled that they bore testimony to the truth as they understood it and depended on the Spirit of the Lord to direct them.⁸⁰

Their meeting on 20 March 1876 was typical of their meetings and representative of other young women’s meetings being held throughout the church. After Henrietta called the meeting to order, they sang a hymn, had a prayer, and sang another hymn.⁸¹ As president, Henrietta then told the girls that she wished “to see all the girls make good use of their time and try and improve in their habbits as actions speak louder than words.” Following her remarks, several pieces from the Woman’s Exponent were read, after which Rachel Corry, one of Henrietta’s counselors, instructed the girls, and Mary A. Smith expressed her desire to help the association all she could and try to attend its meetings. Henrietta then assigned five young women, including her younger sister Ellen, to procure readings for the next meeting. Another girl offered a benediction, and the meeting was dismissed.⁸²

The scope of the organization expanded over time to encompass practical work, service, and social activities.⁸³ Henrietta recalled that they made straw hats—hat making was a common home industry among Latter-day Saint women—and on one occasion some of the young women drove a team of horses and wagon to another settlement to procure better quality straw. They made a quilt and other items, which were sold to raise funds to donate toward temple construction.⁸⁴ In September 1878, four young women were appointed “teachers” in the association. Their assignment likely paralleled that of teachers in the Relief Society and in Aaronic Priesthood quorums of the church, whose assignments included visiting church members in their homes and, in the case of the Relief Society, collecting charitable donations. The YLMIA teachers made visits throughout the ward to obtain the names of all young women who wished to join the organization.⁸⁵ Subsequent minutes show the teachers reporting on their visits and bringing donated items.⁸⁶ By 1879, the young women had begun meeting jointly with the young men on occasion and producing their own manuscript newspaper.⁸⁷

The girls of Cedar City also stepped into politics. Late in 1878, several young women, including Henrietta, joined the older women in a meeting to protest the anti-polygamy movement gaining traction in the United States. They drafted their own resolutions, which endorsed those adopted by a mass meeting of women in Salt Lake City, and submitted a report to the Exponent.⁸⁸ “The Young Ladies’ Association has a beneficial effect among our young people,” Mary Ann Lunt wrote in a joint report of the Cedar City women’s organizations to the Exponent. “Their meetings are also well attended and a good spirit prevails.”⁸⁹

As Henrietta and her peers in Cedar City organized themselves to foster improvement, other wards in the church became interested in forming similar organizations for young men, likely because members observed the momentum gathering around young women’s groups. Debating societies, literary clubs, and the like were popular among young men in the United States at this time, and by 1875 a number of such groups had been established in Salt Lake City, including the Institute in the Twentieth Ward, the Instructive Association in the Sixth Ward, and the Literary Association in the Tenth Ward.⁹⁰ Some of these groups included both men and women, like the Wasatch Literary Society, which was made up of some of the sons and daughters of leading Salt Lake City families and featured poetic and dramatic readings, lectures, debates, musical exercises, and even spelling matches.⁹¹ But the idea of a religious organization for young men was relatively new.⁹²

In June 1875, Brigham Young determined to organize the young men, and he assigned twenty-one-year-old Junius Wells to undertake this task. Junius was a son of Daniel H. Wells, counselor to Brigham Young in the church’s First Presidency, and was thus well known among church leaders. But he had also gained leaders’ respect on his own merits. He had graduated from the University of Deseret at age seventeen and then served a two-year proselytizing mission in Great Britain.⁹³ Upon returning home, Wells visited various wards in Salt Lake City to teach young men how to prepare for missionary service, hoping to spare others the embarrassment of inexperience he felt early in his mission. Even before Young approached him, Wells noticed the work being done with young women and spoke with Eliza R. Snow about the need to organize the young men.⁹⁴

Young envisioned the new organization preparing young men for church service, particularly as missionaries. He wanted them to have opportunities to speak publicly, especially to bear testimony.⁹⁵ A letter from the First Presidency—the highest governing body in the church—to representatives of the new organization emphasized this purpose, adding that young men should broaden their comprehension of the gospel. Training in public speaking and gospel principles became the basis for every association.⁹⁶ Young reportedly came up with the name for the new young men’s organization on the spot. Wells remembered him saying, “We want to organize the young men into an association—an improvement association—a mutual improvement association—Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association. There’s your name.”⁹⁷

Wells and other newly appointed leaders mounted an ambitious campaign, traveling throughout Utah Territory to preach mutual improvement and organize local young men’s groups. Working as “missionaries,” they traveled for days at a time, filling prearranged appointments in various congregations.⁹⁸ The Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association, or YMMIA, continued to appoint such missionaries periodically for several years, giving practical experience to many young men and bringing them to the attention of church leaders as candidates for proselytizing missions.⁹⁹ While the men’s efforts were similar to those of women leaders who established retrenchment associations half a decade earlier, the men were apparently more systematic and comprehensive in their approach, setting out on trips specifically designed to establish associations in each congregation rather than organizing them in whatever settlements they happened to be visiting on other business.

The YMMIA developed a strong churchwide organization almost from the start. A central committee was established in 1876, and in 1880 three members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles were appointed as general superintendents to oversee the organization.¹⁰⁰ This meant that the young men’s organization enjoyed a close relationship with church officials at the highest levels, and this strong centralized leadership facilitated the rapid spread of the YMMIA. By April 1876, not even a year after Young’s original assignment to Wells, there were 57 YMMIAs spread throughout the territory.¹⁰¹ Three years later, there were 20 stake organizations, comprising 230 associations and a membership of over 9,000; by comparison, in 1881 there were 193 young women’s associations with 7,102 members.¹⁰²

The establishment of a young men’s organization proved influential for young women. While the full extent of that influence took decades to build, some effects were immediate. The first and most visible influence was a change in names. Improvement had already made its way into the young women’s parlance for their groups, and in fall 1877, a name change became official, perhaps due to the influence of YMMIA. A Woman’s Exponent report of the Salt Lake City First Ward young ladies’ association indicated that Eliza R. Snow initiated a change in the name of the organization, explaining that Brigham Young had wished it.¹⁰³ Shortly before his death in August 1877, Young had written in a letter to his sons, “We have lately changed the old style of the Retrenchment Societies of the Young ladies to conform in name, as we also wish them to conform in spirit, to the Mutual Improvement Societies.”¹⁰⁴ After reading the First Ward’s declaration, other associations voted to change their names as well.¹⁰⁵ Since there was no strong central administration for the young women’s associations, the name change proceeded along the same lines as the original organization—that is, according to local initiative and timing—but reports published in the Exponent soon employed the new terminology.¹⁰⁶

By the late 1870s, the YLMIA had become firmly established throughout the church alongside the Relief Society and the Primary Association, collectively constituting a vibrant Latter-day Saint women’s sphere of work and relationships. Under the leadership of Eliza R. Snow, these organizations functioned cooperatively with each other and were largely autonomous. Ties to governing priesthood leaders and structures were informal in the women’s organizations; no apostles or ranking male leaders exercised formal oversight, as they did in the YMMIA. Leaders of the women’s organizations were from Salt Lake’s leading families and often had access to male leaders through family relationships or church assignments.¹⁰⁷

At this same time, the church was undergoing a movement, initiated by Brigham Young and carried forward by his successor, John Taylor, to organize priesthood quorums—groups of male church members who hold the same office in the priesthood—in a more structured and uniform way. This movement brought about significant developments for the women-led organizations by establishing layers of standardized leadership for them at the stake and general levels.¹⁰⁸ In 1877, Jane Snyder Richards became president of the Weber Stake Relief Society organization, the first stake Relief Society in the church. Young appointed Richards to take charge of all the stake women’s work, including the YLMIA, shortly before his death later that year.¹⁰⁹ In December 1877, a Relief Society presidency was appointed for the Salt Lake Stake, and thereafter presidencies were established in other stakes.¹¹⁰

While these early stake Relief Society presidents initially had stewardship over the young ladies’ associations in their stakes, separate stake presidencies of the YLMIA were soon established. No definite, central directive concerning this step survives; the earliest reported stake YLMIA presidency was formed in the Davis Stake in July 1878 under Snow’s direction at a quarterly Relief Society conference.¹¹¹ In September of that year, Mary Ann Freeze became president of the large and influential Salt Lake Stake YLMIA, and the organization of YLMIA presidencies in other stakes continued over the next two years.¹¹²

The next major step in establishing general leadership for the associations was the appointment of central committees (soon to be known as general presidencies) to oversee the Relief Society, YLMIA, and Primary Association. These presidencies, which had responsibility for their organizations on a churchwide level, were appointed by church president John Taylor at a Salt Lake Stake Relief Society conference on 19 June 1880. In the morning session, Snow and the women she had chosen as her counselors were sustained and set apart by Taylor to preside over the Relief Society.

For Snow, the formal setting apart made official the position in which she was already acting, but this was not the case for other leaders appointed that day. When conversing with a group of women over the midday meal, Snow informed a surprised Elmina Shepard Taylor that Taylor was to become general president of the YLMIA, a position that had not previously existed. “Have you chosen your counselors?” Snow asked. Taylor must have thought quickly because she was sustained that afternoon alongside counselors Margaret Young Taylor and Martha “Mattie” Horne, with Louisa “Louie” Wells as secretary and Fanny Young Thatcher as treasurer.¹¹³ A native of New York, Elmina Taylor joined the church in 1856 as a young schoolteacher, and her newfound faith became the guiding force in her life. “When I was confirmed by the laying on of hands I received the testimony of its truth which I have never lost from that day to this,” she recorded.¹¹⁴ When she became general president of the YLMIA, Taylor, age forty-nine, lived in Salt Lake City, where her husband, George Taylor, was a businessman and rising church leader who practiced plural marriage. At the time of her appointment, Elmina Taylor was simultaneously serving as secretary of her ward Relief Society, president of her ward YLMIA, and counselor in her stake Relief Society presidency; she continued to serve in the Relief Society positions well into the 1890s, even as she led the YLMIA.¹¹⁵

On a structural level, the establishment of stake and general leadership for the church’s women’s organizations solidified their position in the church and further aligned them at all levels with men’s organizations. Establishing general and stake leadership for the women’s organizations also placed them on a trajectory to become separate entities with their own lines of authority. While the YLMIA and Primary had been considered daughters of the Relief Society, all three eventually became parallel sister organizations. These implications, however, were not yet clear in the summer of 1880, when Taylor took her place as one of the church’s leading women, in close cooperation with the presidencies of the Relief Society and Primary.

Throughout the 1880s, the presidency members’ main occupation was to visit the stakes, usually at quarterly conferences, and offer support, teaching, and spiritual uplift.¹¹⁶ This required frequent travel, and Taylor joined Snow and other women leaders in an exhausting schedule of journeys, making over three hundred visits in her first decade in office. A history of the YLMIA memorably described the interconnected labors of these women: “They traveled thousands and thousands of miles, mostly in carriages or wagons, holding two and sometimes four meetings a day, organizing branches of the Retrenchment or Mutual Improvement Associations, meeting with the Relief Societies, ‘preaching up’ silk, or the loyal support of home industry; securing subscribers to the Woman’s Exponent; urging the women and the girls to study well their responsibilities, as mothers, wives and daughters.”¹¹⁷

The women-led organizations of a stake customarily met on the Friday before quarterly stake conferences, often with visiting leaders in attendance. Typically, Primary meetings occupied the morning, Relief Society the afternoon, and YLMIA the evening. A history noted that the audiences, speakers, and topics at all these meetings were very similar, engendering “unanimity and harmony” among the “three sister organizations.”¹¹⁸

Beyond making visits, organizing new associations, and speaking at meetings, the duties of the central committee were not well defined or extensive. Until her death in December 1887, Snow acted as the leader of women’s work in the church, and other general-level leaders acted under her direction, nominally in charge of their designated organizations but acting cooperatively to lead women’s work. This may be the reason that Taylor and her counselors were not formally set apart in their positions by the First Presidency until 1888, nearly eight years after their appointment and shortly following Snow’s death.¹¹⁹

While the establishment of central leadership made the YLMIA a peer with the other women-led organizations, it also nudged the YLMIA toward partnership with the YMMIA. Even before the formal founding of the YMMIA, young women and young men had sometimes met together. One report, for example, mentioned an evening meeting in Ogden in which twenty-eight young women and nineteen young men gave remarks, thanking their instructors and the Lord and bearing testimony.¹²⁰ Combined activities, known as “conjoint” meetings, now began to proliferate. Socializing was a major draw for young people, and in many smaller towns, where the total numbers of young men and young women were often low, meeting together meant a better turnout. By 1880, however, YMMIA leaders were lamenting that people of both sexes and all ages attended many of their meetings, making them more like weeknight ward gatherings than YMMIA meetings.¹²¹

Both female and male leaders resisted the tendency toward mixed membership, insisting on the importance of retaining the distinctive character of each gender-based organization. The young women’s leaders feared it would become even more difficult to get their members to participate, presumably because the presence of the opposite sex made some girls self-conscious.¹²² Moreover, existing gender norms meant that young men could expect to take a more dominant public role, likely pushing young women to the margins. Mixed groups also presented an obstacle to the more serious purposes of the associations. Junius Wells recalled that at the very beginning of the movement to organize the young men, Brigham Young discouraged the idea of combining the associations for young women and young men: “If the Associations are mixed, they will become mere courting meetings, the boys will go to take the girls home and the girls will go to be took, and I shall have nothing whatever to do with them.”¹²³ Young wanted the organizations to create serious, strong church members, and Wells himself noted that when young men and young women met together, the gatherings tended toward amusement instead of serious study and presentation.¹²⁴

After becoming general president of the YLMIA, Elmina Taylor worked to preserve gender-specific meetings for the young women, but questions about conjoint meetings continued to arise. In 1888 at a conference in Sanpete County, Utah Territory, one local leader said she thought the weekly meetings had become more interesting and beneficial since they began meeting with the young men. This admission prompted Taylor to stand and offer clarification: “The rule is that we should meet separately. … In the first place, we all need a testimony for ourselves, or we cannot withstand temptation and persecution; and for this reason a part of our exercises should consist of bearing testimony, but it is very embarrassing for our bashful girls to speak their feelings in the presence of the opposite sex. Also certain subjects pertaining to our mortal lives should be taught by our presidents and older sisters, which could not be done in a mixed assembly.”¹²⁵

In her final line, Taylor referred to life experiences unique to women, such as menstruation and childbirth, and the practices surrounding those events, which would have been part of the wisdom and training mature women passed to the younger generation. But her objection was not just about the need to discuss woman-specific subjects. She also argued for a female space in which young women could express themselves and focus on developing individual faith in Jesus Christ and knowledge of the gospel.

The answer to this dilemma was to establish one conjoint meeting a month. In 1879, while speaking to a conference of the YMMIA, Joseph F. Smith, an apostle and a counselor in the YMMIA general superintendency, expressed his view that separate meetings of the young men’s and young ladies’ associations would bring advantages; he suggested that holding joint meetings only monthly would foster a spirit of emulation between the societies.¹²⁶

Four years after Henrietta Lunt completed her service as YLMIA president in Cedar City, Utah Territory, local young women and men met in the Social Hall on a Saturday in late November 1884 for mutual improvement. This was only their second official conjoint meeting. Ada Wood read poetry, Hyrum Jones spoke about repentance, Florence Lunt sang a song, Mary Ann Hunter read prose, John Tait sang a song, Rosy May Sherratt and William Houchen both gave recitations, May Macfarlane performed a song, and Priscilla Barnhurst gave a selected reading.¹²⁷ Readings, musical performances, and testimony bearing became typical of joint meetings, as did exhortations from adults for young people to do their duty. Young people themselves frequently professed a desire to do so—to “improve” or “press forward.” In Cedar City, young people had conjoint meetings only a few times a year, but throughout the 1880s, monthly conjoint sessions became well established throughout the church, with the expectation that they would feature greater variety and be entertaining.¹²⁸ As they had in Cedar City, these lively meetings showcased an impressive array of talents and generally included a balance of male and female participants. Despite the fairly equal numbers of male and female presenters at such conjoint sessions, gender norms did seem to play a role in what each did. Women were more likely to sing and present lighter literary selections, while men were more likely to deliver speeches and lectures on weighty subjects.¹²⁹ Still, those lectures were relatively few compared with the more artistic fare.

In October 1879, the first issue of the Contributor magazine was published, with Junius Wells as editor. Billed as the organ of both the YMMIA and YLMIA, the Contributor was intended to encourage the literary talent of young Latter-day Saints. “This is the mission of the Contributor, the name of which has been chosen,” Wells said, “that it might say to every young man and every young lady among our people, having literary tastes and ability, Write.” Wells believed “that the thoughts and expressions of the young people of the Territory will be interesting to their companions, and that in writing for the press their thoughts will gain volume and solidity.”¹³⁰

In reality, the Contributor featured little writing by young people and focused on YMMIA organizational concerns, which were covered in its monthly “Association Intelligence” columns. Though it published a few resolutions of young ladies’ associations, the magazine never contained any reports or organizational communications from the YLMIA; female authors were very seldom featured in the Contributor, and no women worked on its editorial staff. Perhaps this was due in part to women submitting their writing to and reporting their activities in the Woman’s Exponent. The Contributor seems to have modeled itself after the monthlies of national stature, featuring high-toned articles on religious, historical, scientific, and geographic topics.¹³¹ Though the magazine struggled financially, it was highly regarded as modern, interesting, and progressive.¹³² By the end of its first decade, the Contributor began to open its pages to the developing genre of home literature, or Latter-day Saint fiction written for didactic purposes.¹³³ This paved the way for more content written by women in the 1890s, though by then the YLMIA had its own magazine.

The two organizations also began to collaborate on regular churchwide meetings. The YMMIA established its own general conferences (initially called the general semiannual meeting) in the late 1870s and eventually began to draw women’s participation. At first, leaders of the YMMIA planned and took charge of these meetings.¹³⁴ By the 1880s, women leaders were invited to speak at some of the meetings, and YLMIA leaders were sustained as part of the regular business of the conference.¹³⁵ While the women’s organizations continued to hold conferences in conjunction with stake conferences, the YMMIA conferences were held on the general level in conjunction with the church’s general conferences in April and October, which created greater visibility and connection with the general priesthood leaders.¹³⁶ Participating in conferences with the young men’s organization began reorienting the YLMIA toward a parallel relationship with the YMMIA and away from the umbrella of intergenerational women’s organizations.

By 1890, the YLMIA had established a lasting position in the Latter-day Saint community. General, stake, and local leaders guided 300 associations with a total membership of 8,300.¹³⁷ The economic separatism that had helped motivate the retrenchment movement was unsustainable in the long term—increasingly, the Saints’ sense of separateness and self-containment would be expressed in moral and cultural terms. The shift from retrenchment to improvement helped foster that distinctive identity and focus young women on personal achievement, setting up a fundamental duality of purpose that would ebb and flow throughout the organization’s history.