Recreation was an important theme of Camilla Eyring’s experience as a young woman in her teens and early twenties. She recalled feeling isolated when she arrived in Provo, Utah, as a refugee, having left her home in Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She felt so self-conscious about her clothes, which didn’t match Provo fashions, that she initially wouldn’t go to Sunday School or activities. However, after she secured some income and learned to sew dresses in local styles, recreation became a central mode of her relationship-building. Her autobiography recounts hikes, church dances, movies, parties at private dance halls, and membership in a sorority. Organized recreational outlets, whether religious, academic, or commercial, were particularly valuable to people like Camilla, whose young adult lives were marked by constant movement. Between her first church dance in 1909 and her marriage in 1917, Camilla lived in Colonia Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; El Paso, Texas; Provo, Utah; Hinckley, Utah; San Francisco; Pima, Arizona; Logan, Utah; and Salt Lake City.²⁰ While MIA organizations were more fully developed in majority Latter-day Saint communities, MIAs also had a long-standing presence, often led by missionaries, in branches like the one in San Francisco.²¹ For young women like Camilla, MIA activities could be an accessible, low-stakes way to meet new people.

MIA leaders had higher aims than merely facilitating young people’s social lives. Like Edith Lovesy, they believed recreation could bring religion into young people’s hearts, and their rhetoric shows how comprehensively they defined recreation.²² “Social affairs,” one writer explained in the Young Woman’s Journal, “embrace the highest economic and ethical principles that can be applied to the problems of collective living.”²³ Recreation was physical, moral, spiritual, and social in nature. It developed talents and abilities. Therefore, it encompassed almost any organized activity—but the organized aspect was essential.

Progressive recreation reformers also saw a close connection between physical, social, and moral development. By developing people’s individual character, constructive recreation improved society. Reformers worried that children and youth who spent their time in school and adults who worked all day in offices and factories were becoming physically unfit, their nerves overstrained and their bodies under-developed. They also worried that children in the city had too little to do and needed supervised public spaces with open air to channel their energies away from vice.²⁴ Public parks, playgrounds, and organized sports leagues were outgrowths of this movement. The Young Woman’s Journal ran several articles noting local developments on this front.²⁵ And in 1910 the church opened the Deseret Gymnasium in downtown Salt Lake City, giving local Latter-day Saints a state-of-the-art facility for pursuing wholesome recreation.²⁶

Religious thinkers in the wider society had seized on such ideas to explore ways of combining physical activity with religious programming. For decades, American religionists had sought ways to energize their churches by employing athletics to instill good habits and ideals among those who might not otherwise engage in religious practice, with the ultimate goal of guiding them more firmly into the Christian fold. The YWCA and Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) were among the national organizations seeking to synthesize the religious and the recreational and thereby attract participation in religion.²⁷ For Latter-day Saints, church-sponsored recreation presented a possible path to retaining young people who might be less spiritually inclined, while at the same time helping Latter-day Saint youth achieve greater respectability in American society in the years following the end of plural marriage.²⁸

Latter-day Saints also developed a unique theological basis for their sponsorship of recreation, in keeping with their longstanding belief in the spiritual significance of the physical and material aspects of life.²⁹ Addressing MIA leaders at the 1912 June Conference, B. H. Roberts invoked scriptures defining the soul as the spirit and the body combined in one and teaching that God views all things as spiritual. He insisted that the body is holy and that pursuing physical development is just as sacred a part of the work of mutual improvement as efforts at spiritual and moral improvement.³⁰

In 1915, YLMIA board member Mary Connelly laid out an even more explicit rationale in a June Conference address titled “Teaching the Gospel through M. I. A. Activities.” Quoting the account of Brigham Young’s founding charge to the MIAs, Connelly reminded leaders, “More testimonies are obtained on the feet than on the knees.” While some worried that recreational activities took the MIA’s focus away from gospel learning, Connelly insisted that idea was mistaken. She used the example of competitive activities. “Isn’t there an opportunity there for teaching brotherliness, justice, honesty, truth, integrity, glorying in the success of others?” Debating, music, and storytelling, she argued, all likewise brought spiritual growth. “All through the work everywhere is the Gospel standard,” she insisted. It was MIA leaders’ duty to “teach [youth] the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which embraces all truth,” she exhorted, “the Gospel of being and of doing.” Young people would learn spiritual truths and values by applying those truths and values as they participated in activities in the MIA. Connelly’s language—“teaching the gospel through activities”—gave expression to the foundational understanding of the MIA’s goals, an expression that would persist for the next six decades.³¹

One of the clearest indicators of the 1910s’ rapid expansion of recreation in the MIAs was the rise of “contest work” on the ward, stake, and general levels. Contests grew out of stakes’ annual MIA Days, large community events held in the spring to mark the end of the Mutual season.³² General leaders of the MIA observed such events and advocated for more areas to adopt similar practices. In his 1911 talk, for example, Edward Anderson noted that an increasing number of stakes were holding these celebrations, which featured contests in athletics, dance, music, oratory, and storytelling, as well as presentations of lectures and exercises from the manuals.³³

The general boards of the YLMIA and YMMIA had also begun sponsoring athletic contests at the annual June Conference. The first MIA Field Day held during June Conference was in 1906, featuring a baseball game between the young men’s teams from the Box Elder and Weber stakes in northern Utah and a basketball game between two young women’s teams from Salt Lake City, as well as some footraces.³⁴ In 1911, a fourteen-stake MIA track meet featured young men competing in individual and relay races, jumping, pole vaulting, and shot put.³⁵ On the preceding day, young men’s basketball games and wrestling matches had been held at the Deseret Gymnasium, along with classes of women and girls demonstrating calisthenics and folk dancing.³⁶

The associations also held music contests, which gave young women more opportunity for participation. The Granite Stake in Salt Lake City had pioneered large-scale music contests in the MIA in 1909 when it held a song festival intended to stimulate interest in music.³⁷ Wards entered contestants in twelve categories, including chorus, trio and quartet, vocal solo, and violin, piano, and organ performance.³⁸ Again, the YLMIA general board worked to spread local innovation. In a 1912 article, board organist Mattie Read Evans described contests in the Granite, Jordan, and Salt Lake stakes and said that “every stake in the church should inaugurate the same system and take up the work in the same spirit.”³⁹ By 1913, contests had become a large focus at the annual June Conference. Finals in storytelling, oratory, and quartet singing (male and female) took place on Saturday evening, 7 June, in front of a large audience in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Several female quartets competed, and the young women from the Wasatch Stake in Heber City, Utah, took first place.⁴⁰

Unsurprisingly, performances in competition became a source of local pride. A Utah County paper praised two local 1913 finalists in oratory, who narrowly lost out to boys. “Two pretty Y. L. M. I. A. girls, Miss Lisle Lindsay of Heber City and Miss Lethe Coleman of Midway, won the popular, if not the judicial decision,” the report read. Lisle’s story was entitled “Theodosius’s Pearls,” and Lethe’s oration on Utah was described as patriotic and full of love for her state.⁴¹ Contest success could also bolster personal aspirations, and both young women mentioned in the newspaper continued to cultivate their talents. Lisle went on to teach dramatic arts and physical education classes at Brigham Young College in Logan.⁴² Lethe went on to appear in numerous church-related film productions, including How Near to the Angels, the first dramatic film produced by the young women’s organization.⁴³ Lethe’s most famous performance came when she was eighty-three years old, starring in a church video called The Mailbox.⁴⁴

A culture of performance and contests opened the door for independent performance groups to enter church settings. For example, in the western Utah town of Iosepa—populated mainly by Hawaiian church members—MIA minutes mention a variety of musical numbers by MIA members alongside performances by local groups like the Kawailani Glee Club and the Hawaiian Troubadours of Iosepa.⁴⁵

As contests grew more prominent in the MIAs—bringing with them the potential for controversy and hurt feelings—leaders felt it necessary to explain how they helped the organizations achieve their goals. Speaking at the joint officers’ meeting of the 1913 June Conference, Oscar A. Kirkham, a YMMIA board member, took up the subject. Contests provided both individual and group benefits, he said. They inspired young people to give their best and ended the MIA season on a climactic note. They also taught young people how to compete graciously. “Life is a series of contests,” he declared, and it was good for young people to learn the life lessons of winning and losing among friends and fellow Saints. Finally, Kirkham envisioned the ultimate purpose of contests: “If the officers and members get the proper spirit of this movement,” he exhorted, “they will realize that it is not to win or lose, but to grow, that matters.” He saw meaningful victory in the hours of preparation and improvement that contests required.⁴⁶ May Green, speaking on behalf of YLMIA leaders, agreed. “The idea of contest is not the main thing,” she said. “It is only a means to an end.” The main goal was helping young people improve their talents and desire advancement.⁴⁷ Local leaders and members shared this enthusiasm for contest work, and a large majority of stakes expressed clear appreciation for it.⁴⁸

The stakes that implemented contest work saw the added benefit of increased youth engagement and participation in MIA activities, in some cases quadrupling regular attendance.⁴⁹ Throughout the decade, contest work flourished in the MIAs, both reflecting and contributing to the momentum of a recreational focus. In 1915, the finals at the June Conference featured public speaking, storytelling, quartet recitals, choral performances, and a short drama.⁵⁰ In 1916, leaders introduced an award system: each ward earned points when its members participated in or won a contest, and each stake awarded a pennant “to the ward scoring the greatest number of points in proportion to its enrollment.”⁵¹ As the United States entered World War I in 1917, the YLMIA sponsored contests reflecting the ethic of the times. Young women could earn a share of $300 in prize money for preserving the most dried corn, peas, or fruit.⁵² The scope, content, and configuration of contests varied from year to year, but they became a standard element of the organizations’ programs.

Since the MIA season officially ran from fall to late spring, the question of what recreational activities to sponsor during the summer—if any—was a perennial one. Meanwhile, the idea of summer homes and camps as a restorative response to the demands of modern city living was taking hold all over the United States, often with a distinctively religious bent. The Salvation Army, for example, had been developing “fresh air” camps since 1897, and in 1898 the Young Women’s Bible Training Movement established a camp, later known as Camp Pinnacle, overlooking the Hudson Valley in New York. By the turn of the century, the YWCA had also opened camps that offered experiences in outdoor skills and sports, with a focus on transforming character and “ministering to the whole person.”⁵³

Latter-day Saints in Utah also became interested in using the summer months to give girls some time away from city life. In 1912, the newly appointed president of the Liberty Stake YLMIA, Emily Hillam Higgs, resolved to organize a girls’ summer camp. As a young woman, Higgs had worked in various positions and attended LDS College for a year and a half. After her husband died in 1905, she became a secretary at an insurance company to support her family. It was likely during this time as a single mother that Higgs gained an appreciation for the benefits of outdoor life. Her oldest son, Brentnall, developed tuberculosis, and the doctor prescribed outdoor living. So the family built a small “sleeping house” behind the regular house. This sleeping house allowed for constant fresh air, and the family often slept in it year-round. Later, Higgs and two of her siblings purchased land in Emigration Canyon, east of Salt Lake City, where they built a cabin similar to the sleeping house behind the family’s home in the city.⁵⁴

Higgs and her stake board recognized that many of the young women in their stake were employed in various jobs in the city or studying in school, and they believed these young women would benefit from some time in what they called “nature’s luxuries.” Yet they also recognized that commercial summer resorts were unaffordable for many.⁵⁵ Therefore, in addition to planning for the camp itself, the board began raising funds to pay for their own campsite. Fundraising events included a stake outing to Saltair, a church-owned resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, as well as activities at the Deseret Gymnasium. The stake presidency also contributed, and eventually the stake raised $365.27 toward the camp (the equivalent of $9,746 in 2020).⁵⁶

Early in 1912, Higgs and her counselors rode all over the Salt Lake Valley with the stake president, Hugh Cannon, in his automobile to scout for an appropriate location. The place they chose was in a glen about a mile east of Murray, on the farm of James and Fannie Jones Godfrey, who had lived there for several decades.⁵⁷ Though the site was only a twenty-minute walk from the streetcar line, it felt sufficiently remote from civilization.⁵⁸ The Godfreys agreed to host the camp on their property and widened and deepened a portion of a stream on their property to make a swimming hole for the young women. One evening each week at camp, one of the Godfreys’ sons acted as a teamster and took the campers for a hayride on country lanes. In addition to the money raised by the stake, each camper paid twenty-five cents to the teamster and twenty-five cents toward upkeep of the camp.⁵⁹

With the money they raised, the stake YLMIA leaders built modest sleeping quarters for the girls. The building’s walls were made of boards halfway up and then connected to the roof with netting, and the cabin could sleep about twenty girls on cots and straw mattresses. A member of the stake donated his labor to install electric lights, and a music company in Salt Lake donated a piano. Swings and hammocks were strung out among the trees.⁶⁰ Next to the swimming hole, leaders furnished a tent so that the girls could change in privacy, and atop a fifty-foot cottonwood pole hung an American flag.⁶¹

Three rules governed the new campsite, called Liberty Glen: (1) The girls must be present and ready for meals at appointed times. (2) The girls must not leave camp without permission from their leader. (3) Camp must be kept sanitary and left clean. Otherwise, in keeping with the goal of giving young women a vacation, camp life was largely unstructured. The campers took turns cooking the meals according to a menu that the leaders had planned and the young women had practiced at home. Likewise, camp responsibilities rotated among participants: While one group of three girls cooked, another group served the food and washed dishes, and still another group made the beds and did necessary cleaning.⁶² Everyone else enjoyed free time. Parents and ward leaders were invited to visit the camp one day during the week and join in activities like bonfires, candy pulls, concerts and performances, and open-air dances.⁶³ The young women also received some outdoor training. One afternoon during the week, Joshua Hughes Paul, who was the president of LDS University, came to teach the young women about flowers, insects, and birds.⁶⁴

Liberty Glen Camp proved immediately popular, and the YLMIA general board took notice. They interviewed Higgs to learn how she had organized the camp, and in 1916 Higgs herself became a member of the general board.⁶⁵ That first year, eighty-two young women and fifteen officers attended the camp, taking turns attending in groups of twenty for a week each. The next year, the number rose to ninety-eight, and the stake added a dining lodge next to the dormitory.⁶⁶ Higgs later recalled what summer camp would come to mean as it grew into an integral program for the young women: “The girls wake each morning in their new world. Their busy life has been left behind. There is time and opportunity to think and feel,” she said. Higgs saw shared time in that setting as nurturing social development. “They become a united family of friends. Their social instincts begin to develop.” She also felt camp revealed and nurtured a foundational spirituality. “Morning is the time for daily devotional prayer,” she wrote. “Their hearts easily attune to their Heavenly Father.”⁶⁷

The desire to teach young people values through experiences in nature extended beyond Higgs’s efforts. Around the same time the Liberty Stake YLMIA was establishing its camp, the YMMIA was investigating the possibility of affiliating with the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), which attempted to reconnect boys with pre-urban skills and train them to be leaders.⁶⁸ By 1911, YMMIA leaders had formed a committee headed by church general authority B. H. Roberts to study the matter and report back to the board. The committee saw much good in the Boy Scouts program but initially advised against joining. They were concerned about diverting engagement from church-sponsored activities and convinced that the Latter-day Saint youth program had the resources necessary to achieve their goals.⁶⁹

The Scouting idea was too popular and attractive to drop altogether, and YMMIA leaders continued to explore options. The director of physical training at Brigham Young University (BYU) proposed creating a Scouting-inspired organization specific to Latter-day Saint boys. Writing in the Improvement Era, he suggested the “Boy Pioneers of Utah” as an adjunct to the YMMIA. It would teach all the same outdoor skills as the Boy Scouts, but it would also incorporate an emphasis on the Saints’ pioneer legacy.⁷⁰ This idea never came to fruition, but it represented a growing desire to give better shape and a name to boys’ activities. In late 1911, YMMIA leaders voted to give the name MIA Scouts to the scouting-inspired activities the organization was beginning to sponsor.⁷¹ Local leaders were to continue with regular lessons from the class manuals, but they were also to organize local MIA Scouts units, adapting guidelines from the Boy Scouts handbook though they were not affiliated with the organization.⁷²

The new MIA Scouts program continued through 1912, but by 1913, the BSA began working to bring all the various Scouting movements—which were then only somewhat loosely connected as a system—together into a central organization. S. A. Moffat, the field secretary of the BSA, visited Salt Lake City over 7 and 8 January 1913 to pursue the goal of affiliating the YMMIA with the Boy Scouts.⁷³ It was apparently a fruitful visit. When the general board leaders met for another round of discussions in February 1913, B. H. Roberts favored affiliation, and the board voted with him.⁷⁴ But Church leaders wanted to maintain some autonomy. At the insistence of the YMMIA, the BSA agreed to commission John H. Taylor, who had overseen MIA Scouts, to oversee all Boy Scout work in the church through the YMMIA, preserving its distinct identity within the national organization.⁷⁵

The YLMIA and YMMIA had some shared practices with Scouting, such as using brief statements like a motto, a slogan, and a law to communicate core values.⁷⁶ The YMMIA and YLMIA already each had a motto: The scriptural phrase “The Glory of God Is Intelligence” had appeared on the nameplate of the YMMIA publication Improvement Era since its initial 1897 issue, and a 1904 article noted that the YMMIA in Norway had taken the phrase as its official motto.⁷⁷ That same year, the Young Woman’s Journal began publishing its own phrase on each issue’s title page: “Improvement our motto, Perfection our aim.” This motto went back as far as 1880.⁷⁸ Beginning in 1914, the YMMIA and YLMIA jointly adopted a slogan for each mutual improvement year.⁷⁹ Some slogans reflected progressive engagement on social issues. For example, the 1916 slogan—“We stand for state and nationwide prohibition”—expressed Latter-day Saint support for a progressive reform intended to improve health and home life by eliminating the alcohol industry. Slogans also encouraged spiritual and religious growth, such as “divine guidance through individual and family prayer,” “attendance at sacrament meetings” (Sunday worship services where members partake of the Lord’s Supper), and “a testimony of the divine mission of Joseph Smith.”⁸⁰

Each year the general boards of the YLMIA and YMMIA prayerfully considered current needs and conditions and formulated the slogan, which they introduced at June Conference with a talk explaining its meaning and application. The congregation then stood and repeated the slogan, literally “standing for” its message. At every session of the conference, leaders repeated and discussed the slogan, and they often also printed it on buttons for all to wear. Thus fired with enthusiasm for the new slogan, stake and ward officers returned home to implement it in their organizations through talks, music, readings and scripture recitations, dramatizations, testimony meetings, and class work.⁸¹ The slogans became a prominent focus each year, emphasized in the handbook as “the rallying cry that concentrates M. I. A. effort to live by gospel standards.”⁸²

Both nationally and locally, the development of boys’ outdoor programs led many to call for similar opportunities for girls. The Girl Guides originated in Britain when girls demanded to be included in Boy Scout activities; it was adapted as Girl Scouts in the United States in 1912. In the same year, another organization called the Camp Fire Girls was established.⁸³ YLMIA leaders quickly recognized the potential of these movements to provide a framework for their organization’s summer work. Ann Cannon of the general board led out in investigating the feasibility of affiliating with one of the girls’ organizations.⁸⁴ During the summer of 1913, the Ensign Stake YLMIA in Salt Lake City experimented with some aspects of Camp Fire Girls, and the Box Elder Stake in northern Utah tested the Girl Guides program.⁸⁵

At the time, Camp Fire Girls was the largest girls’ organization and the focus of YLMIA leaders’ investigations. Founded by the recreational reformers Charlotte and Luther Gulick and a group of likeminded associates, Camp Fire Girls sought to address what Luther Gulick called “a new relation of women to the world.”⁸⁶ The Gulicks believed that modern culture had contributed to a disassociation between girls and their domestic nature. Their program sought to arouse girls’ womanhood by featuring activities centered on the campfire, which represented the hearth fire and women’s imagined primeval role as conservators of the home.⁸⁷ Spending time in nature and tending the fire, the Gulicks believed, would help girls internalize an archetypal femininity. The Camp Fire Girls incorporated stereotyped Native American imagery, and rather than adopt a slogan, Charlotte Gulick used a kind of acronym she thought sounded like an Indigenous word, coining the term Wohelo from the first letters of the three words that the organization stood for: work, health, and love.⁸⁸ The program was based on practical activities, many of them taking place outdoors, that would develop these ideals, with participants proceeding through three ranks and being rewarded with beads for completing requirements in seven areas.⁸⁹

Camp Fire Girls proved influential with YLMIA members and leaders. In 1914 the general board published a detailed outline of possible activities based on the Camp Fire Girls program. The work was optional, but it did provide practical mutual improvement work for the summer.⁹⁰ Madelyn Stewart, Ann Cannon’s niece, was thirteen at the time. Over the next year, she completed requirements in the seven outlined areas, including practicing correct horse-riding form, planning a balanced vegetarian diet for a week, memorizing five folk songs, identifying twenty wildflowers, making a pair of pajamas, and earning money to pay for a Camp Fire Girls uniform and beads.⁹¹ Meanwhile, Cannon and her committee corresponded with Luther Gulick about the possibility of official affiliation with the Camp Fire Girls organization, along the same lines as the YMMIA’s adoption of the Boy Scout program.⁹²

Leaders soon decided not to affiliate, however. Like their male counterparts, YLMIA leaders wanted autonomy, and they were unconvinced that affiliation would allow it. Cannon explained that they felt it was necessary for the YLMIA to keep control of their program and not cede oversight to a national organization. YLMIA leaders also worried that the charter fees and annual dues would burden the members and be difficult for leaders to collect, and they saw the potential for Camp Fire Girls activities to overtake the YLMIA’s other priorities. Representatives from the Camp Fire Girls did not make the same sort of follow-up recruiting visit BSA representatives had made. Instead, with Luther Gulick’s blessing, the YLMIA leaders decided to create their own version of the program.⁹³

The result was the Bee-Hive Girls program, which was announced in March 1915.⁹⁴ Honeybees had long been a symbol of biblical significance in the United States, including through references to the country as a New Canaan, flowing with milk and honey.⁹⁵ The image of the beehive was embraced by early frontier communities for its powerful imagery of communal harmony and by Freemasons as a symbol of industry and thrift. For Latter-day Saints, the beehive, or deseret as it was called in the Book of Mormon, was an integral representation of industry and collective effort.⁹⁶ Ruth May Fox, a counselor in the YLMIA general presidency, was the first to suggest the honeybee as a symbol of YLMIA.⁹⁷ When board member Elen Wallace discovered a book by Maurice Maeterlinck, Life of the Bee, the board realized the symbol could work well with the program. Maeterlinck’s detailed exposition of the workings of bees and beehives provided a framework for the ideals and skills the program would teach. “It seems almost as if it had been written to meet our especial need,” they later wrote.⁹⁸ Wallace testified that the experience of finding the beehive symbolism and mapping it onto the new program was inspired by God.⁹⁹

The Bee-Hive Girls program became the summer work for all young women in the YLMIA. “Swarms” of eight to twelve young women met weekly under the direction of an adult “Bee-Keeper.” The bees’ work, as Wallace explained it, was animated by an unseen force directing the bees’ united efforts, known as the spirit of the hive. Likewise, young women began their membership in the swarm by learning and reciting a theme titled “Spirit of the Hive,” which laid out the ideals Bee-Hive Girls should strive for in their subsequent development:

Have Faith

Seek Knowledge

Safeguard Health

Honor Womanhood

Understand Beauty

Know Work

Love Truth

Taste the Sweetness of Service

Feel Joy ¹⁰⁰

After completing a certain number of requirements, Bee-Hive Girls advanced in ranks. The three ranks were modeled after roles and dynamics related to the beehive: some worker bees establish the hive by building cells from wax, others go out into the fields to gather pollen, and the human beekeeper oversees the work of the whole hive. Likewise, Bee-Hive Girls moved from Builder in the Hive to Gatherer of Honey to Keeper of the Bees, progressing from acquiring individual knowledge and skills to becoming a leader who could help direct the work of others.¹⁰¹ Each requirement was called a cell, as a beehive is made up of cells, and young women filled cells in seven fields, as a bee gathers pollen in fields of flowers. The fields were religion, home, health, domestic arts, out-of-doors, business, and public service. Leaders were encouraged to complete requirements alongside the young women to promote mutual understanding.¹⁰² Requirements encouraged good health (“For at least one month, refrain between meals from candy, chewing gum, sundaes, sodas, and commercially manufactured beverages”), domestic skills (“Keep a written account of all money received and spent during one month, classifying it under the heads of food, clothing, amusements, tithing, reserve fund, etc.”), and artistic sensibilities (“Commit to memory a poem of not less than twenty-five lines”).¹⁰³

As the founders of the Camp Fire Girls had done, YLMIA leaders expressed the culture and aims of the new organization through a watchword: Womanho, made up of the first letters of the words work, mankind, and home. Two original Bee-Hive Girls songs appeared in the first handbook, and light blue, gold, and brown were designated the official colors.¹⁰⁴ Uniforms were not required at first, although it was suggested that young women wear a shorter skirt (or bloomers when hiking), a sailor-style blouse, and a necktie, in some combination of the official colors.¹⁰⁵ At the end of the season, each group celebrated the Day of the Swarm by meeting as a stake group to demonstrate and celebrate their accomplishments. On 14 September 1915, the first Day of the Swarm ceremony was held in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City.¹⁰⁶ Madelyn Stewart, who had faithfully fulfilled the Bee-Hive Girls program requirements, was among the first to receive the Builder in the Hive rank.¹⁰⁷

The Bee-Hive Girls program was the first personal achievement program for Latter-day Saint young women, cementing the YLMIA’s commitment to self-improvement. In its early years, the program’s combination of group activities and personal advancement made it a close corollary to the Boy Scouts, only more rooted in Latter-day Saint imagery and goals. “The purpose,” the Bee-Hive Girls handbook declared, “is to perfect our womanhood,—to hold the faith of our fathers and develop it in our individual womanhood, drawing from all good sources to do so.”¹⁰⁸ That purpose statement balanced the perennial impulses toward retrenchment and improvement: the program was meant both to anchor youth in an inheritance of Latter-day Saint faith and to open new horizons for them in a larger world. By adapting an outside program for their own use, YLMIA leaders gathered the best the world had to offer and brought it home to use in building Zion.

The same striving for balance that guided the YLMIA—preserving the faith of the forebears while drawing innovations from all good sources—was also playing out elsewhere in the church organization. The MIA, Relief Society, and Sunday School had each built up their own fundraising systems, publications, leadership lines, and sometimes even buildings. They were all learning from and partnering with outside organizations, and they operated mostly autonomously.¹⁰⁹ As the church grew in numbers and complexity, church presidents could no longer rely on networks of personal relationships to ensure coordination. Church president Joseph F. Smith recognized the challenges of leading nearly half a million Latter-day Saints, concentrated in the area around Utah but expanding in the Pacific, Europe, and Mexico, with smaller branches in the Ottoman Empire, South Africa, and Japan.¹¹⁰

In response to these challenges, Smith instituted a priesthood reform movement. Priesthood quorums had been structured inconsistently—sometimes reporting to stake leaders, sometimes to ward leaders—and participation in them was low. In 1913, reported priesthood meeting attendance was just 16 percent.¹¹¹ Smith oversaw the restructuring of priesthood quorums so that reporting lines were the same throughout the church, and he consistently emphasized that priesthood quorums were the core of the church—all else was peripheral.¹¹²

During Smith’s administration, leaders increasingly used the term auxiliary to describe the relationship between the canonical priesthood bodies and the vibrant organizations that had developed in response to social and religious needs. Within the church, auxiliaries were regarded as helps to priesthood quorums, with an understanding that these entities were not part of the priesthood and were subordinate to it. The term was applied to the YMMIA by the 1880s and to other church organizations by the 1890s.¹¹³

“Our auxiliary organizations, what are they?” Smith asked in an April 1913 address. “Helps to the standard organizations of the Church.” Without taking issue with their innovations or outside partnerships, Smith emphasized that their primary accountability was to priesthood leadership. “I want to say to the Young Men’s and Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Associations, and to the Relief Society, and to the Primaries, and to the Sunday Schools, and Religion Classes, and all the rest of the organizations in the Church, that not one of them is independent of the Priesthood of the Son of God, not one of them can exist a moment in the acceptance of the Lord when they withdraw from the voice and from the counsel of those who hold the Priesthood and preside over them,” he said.¹¹⁴ Moreover, he envisioned that the day would come when the priesthood quorums would better understand their duties and assume much of the work of the auxiliaries.¹¹⁵

In keeping with this model, church leaders experimented with different ways to coordinate and direct the work of the auxiliaries. In 1916, for example, Smith noted ongoing concerns about new fashions that conflicted with commonly held views of modest dress, and what he referred to as “unbecoming positions in the dance”; he announced a reform movement to be headed by the general boards of the women-led organizations, under the umbrella of the Relief Society.¹¹⁶ Three women from each board convened as the newly formed Social Advisory Committee and began discussing how to respond to such issues. They adopted resolutions affirming their commitment to teach modesty by example and principle and wrote two documents: a “Communication on Dress” and “Instructions on Social Work” (primarily dancing), which were published in the church magazines and issued separately as pamphlets.¹¹⁷

While a specific directive from priesthood leaders had created the Social Advisory Committee, its influence quickly broadened beyond the original concerns. Within a short time, the committee expanded to include representatives from the YMMIA, the Sunday School, and the program of after-school religion classes for children, giving it largely balanced gender membership and the potential to coordinate action between the church’s auxiliaries. An apostle, Stephen L Richards, was assigned to chair the committee, which continued to function for six years.¹¹⁸ During that time, it would become a leading influence in bringing progressive methods and ideals to bear on modern social problems within the Latter-day Saint community. Auxiliary leaders’ proactive collaboration with each other and with priesthood leaders—and their engagement in seeking the good in the world around them—would help Latter-day Saints navigate the social turbulence of the coming years.

America’s reluctant involvement in World War I in 1917 disrupted regular YLMIA activities, but classwork continued as the young women directed their work toward the war effort. Members of the YLMIA board were appointed to National Defense Committees, and they recognized ways the young women could contribute. Girls were encouraged to knit, sew, and work on other needed items during local meetings.¹¹⁹ Leaders introduced a new war service pin for Bee-Hive Girls, which they could earn for twenty-four hours of volunteer service in the war effort. In addition to knitting, sewing, and making surgical dressings, they harvested and preserved food through bottling and drying, and raised funds for Liberty Bonds and war service stamps.¹²⁰

Young women rose to the cause in remarkable numbers. In 1918, the young women of the Utah Stake in Provo dried nearly 3,000 pounds and canned over 24,000 quarts of fruits and vegetables.¹²¹ That same year, the general board also held a conservation contest to encourage greater effort. Five thousand young women from forty-three stakes and one mission participated.¹²² The young women’s combined volunteer hours totaled over 370,000, through which they grew 36,000 pounds of food, dried nearly 100,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, canned 600,000 quarts of fruits and vegetables, and stored an additional 450,000 pounds of fruits and 175,000 bushels of vegetables for the winter. This was in addition to donations of money, jam, Christmas boxes, and 225,000 dressings and garments—all of which they had made themselves—to the American Red Cross.¹²³

The influenza pandemic in 1918–1919, which had a disproportionate mortality rate for young adults, also impacted MIA activities. “The conditions through which we are now passing should give rise to serious reflection on the part of all of us. Perhaps never before has it happened that quarantine well nigh Church-wide has existed, preventing the holding of religious gatherings,” the Young Woman’s Journal reported in December 1918.¹²⁴ The first wave of infections caused the MIA season to be suspended for different lengths of time in different areas, and the January 1919 issue of the Young Woman’s Journal gave directions on adjusting lesson schedules, filing delayed reports, and lowering the thresholds for certain awards. At the same time, the Journal noted that meetings might be canceled again in some areas, leaving young women to study lessons alone at home. “It behooves each officer and member to exercise faith and to be cheerful and courageous,” the journal said. Though its past editorial policy had been not to publish death notices, the Journal promised to publish short sketches honoring stake-level MIA leaders who had died over the previous six months.¹²⁵

In the March 1919 issue, as a deadly winter drew to a close, a three-part editorial reflected on the war and pandemic. The first section, titled “The Art of Adjustment,” addressed the feeling of ongoing disruption. “Changes now come so quickly and suddenly into the lives of all,” it said. The editorial complimented women’s wartime economic mobilization, including in traditionally male labor roles. “They met the difficulties of war nobly, they adjusted themselves splendidly,” it noted, while adding, “We wonder how they will adjust themselves to the changed peace conditions.” The next section, “The Art of Nursing,” encouraged young women to enroll in the nursing courses offered by the Relief Society. Many people “could not get help however much they were willing to pay, for every nurse was kept employed constantly and could not begin to take all the cases she was called upon to nurse,” the editorial noted. “Wise are the girls that take this work.” The final section, “Trust,” addressed the existential questions raised by the death toll. “We do not know why so many of the best people have been stricken, why so many in the prime of life have been summoned hence, but we must not let doubts darken our lives.” Rather than invoking heavenly rest, the editorial asked readers to consider the meaning of a short life. “If one’s earthly work is finished, what matters it whether the sojourn on earth has been long or short. ‘One crowded hour of glorious life is worth more than sluggish years,’” it said.¹²⁶

The upheaval of war and pandemic intensified and accelerated the profound social change happening at this time, resulting in generational strain in American culture that extended into the 1920s. Young people—those in secondary school and college—were seen as different than their parents had been at the same age. “What ails our youth?” one influential 1924 book asked.¹²⁷ Tension points were not difficult to see: young people were rejecting the formal manners of the past and taking up jazz music, fast dancing, dating (in place of traditional courting), speaking in slang, and racing in automobiles. Young women were going out joyriding with young men, bobbing their hair, and wearing short skirts, low necklines, and cosmetics. Smoking and drinking seemed especially popular, and new ideas about sex and birth control seemed to be breaking down traditional morals.¹²⁸

Many adults reacted by denouncing young people’s behavior and calling for authoritative efforts to control it. Others took a positive, progressive view, recognizing that cultural change had brought new realities and celebrating the potential of young people to bring improvement to society and human nature. They acknowledged that there were serious challenges, but they insisted that improved understanding of psychology, sociology, and physiology would offer modern solutions to modern problems.¹²⁹ While some Latter-day Saints were shocked and alarmed by the ways of the youth, church leaders quickly mobilized the MIAs to create a positive, optimistic outlook on the youth and their future, without ignoring the challenges of social change.

During the early 1920s, the Social Advisory Committee made recommendations and issued guidelines for what it called “social work.” The committee’s understanding of this term was very broad. “The common idea of the word ‘social’ must be enlarged,” explained one editorial in the Young Woman’s Journal. “Heretofore it has held for many of us only the thought of recreation but the term really implies all of the relations of man which make for normal life.” By this definition, charitable work and efforts to address problems of health, labor, or delinquency belonged under the heading of social work along with recreational activities.¹³⁰ Social work thus encompassed virtually all activities and reforms intended to improve community standards and prevent societal problems. The committee subdivided its areas of emphasis into three broad subjects: teacher training, social and educational leadership, and charity and relief work.¹³¹ The MIA representatives particularly emphasized the second. As a result, YLMIA leaders were exhorted to see themselves as social workers, or leaders in improving community standards and activities through working directly with the young people. The committee established several avenues for developing this kind of leadership in the church.

One of these efforts took place in spring 1920. The Forty-Seventh Annual Conference of Social Work commenced in New Orleans on 14 April that year, and among its nearly two thousand attendees was Clarissa A. Beesley, the general secretary of the YLMIA. She had departed for the event four days earlier, along with Stephen L Richards and other members of the Social Advisory Committee, and found herself rubbing shoulders with notable activists in social work, including Jane Addams and Felix Adler.¹³² Beesley was a well-known figure in the Latter-day Saint community. At forty-one, she had been involved in ward and stake leadership for over twenty years, working mostly with the young women, and after serving a successful mission in the central United States, she had been invited to join the YLMIA general board in 1912. Beesley was unmarried and had taught school for several years after earning her teaching degree from the University of Utah. She was a popular speaker and frequent contributor to MIA lessons and articles in the Young Woman’s Journal.¹³³ Attuned to the social issues among youth, Beesley relished participating in this grand congregation of like-minded individuals working for social improvement.

At the conference, social workers’ methods and their forthright acknowledgment of the shortcomings inherent to their approaches impressed Beesley. “They are among the most earnest and energetic people of the Nation,” she wrote. They so inspired her that she wrote a Journal article to share details of their insights with young women and their leaders. Yet she also returned even more impressed with the Church of Jesus Christ, believing it to be beautiful and complete, the perfect plan for social healing and progress.¹³⁴

After attending the conference, Beesley and other members of the Social Advisory Committee worked to disseminate similar training widely within the church. In summer 1920, they sponsored three concurrent five-week courses at BYU focused on teacher training, social and recreational leadership, and charities and relief work. Each stake sent three representatives (presumably one for each course), and those who completed the course satisfactorily received college credit. Arthur Beeley, a professor of sociology at the University of Utah and the secretary of the Social Advisory Committee, directed the courses on social and recreational leadership, which included lectures from experts in psychology, sociology, drama, music, pageantry, games, dancing, and physical education.¹³⁵ Beeley felt the courses’ success showed that a scientific and religious approach to social problems was both possible and desirable.¹³⁶ Attendees were expected to take what they had learned back to their stakes and use it to train local leaders. Minutes of the Social Advisory Committee indicate that committee members attended many of those conventions and reported favorably on their results.¹³⁷

The committee conducted several studies using modern statistical and scientific methods, including a study that compared urban and rural adolescent activity in the church. The study found that large numbers of adolescents of both sexes were not being reached by the church, and adolescent disengagement from the church was highest in large cities.¹³⁸ Beeley also studied social dance and concluded that boys liked sports even better than girls liked dancing, although dancing was the second-place choice of a large majority of the boys. Both girls and boys ranked “association” and “meeting new people” as their top reasons for enjoying dancing.¹³⁹ In response to Beeley’s studies on the nature of female adolescents, the Social Advisory Committee recommended that the MIA hold a wide variety of activities, such as music, dance, drama, oration, party hosting, sewing, athletics, and the study of social problems. Finally, the committee advocated for religious influences that would appeal to young people’s hearts and intellects, recommending weekly supervised recreation either in conjunction with MIA meetings or on another weeknight.¹⁴⁰

Out of the Social Advisory Committee emerged a vision of making the ward the social center for members of the church. The ward building would serve as a kind of community center, perhaps something like the settlement houses established by progressive activists to bring recreational, cultural, and educational facilities to urban neighborhoods.¹⁴¹ Stephen L Richards said in one meeting that the ward amusement hall should become the social center for church members, appealing to young people’s interests and thereby drawing them back from commercial gathering places.¹⁴² One writer explained that the committee sought to make the wards “interesting community units providing dressmaking, millinery classes, physical recreation and all other activities which go to make up an interesting group unit.”¹⁴³

While the idea of using the ward building as a fully equipped social center did not come to pass as envisioned, changes to meetinghouses did facilitate the centering of social activities in the ward. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, a new building pattern took hold in which the formerly separate buildings for Relief Societies, “cultural halls” for social activities, and chapels or assembly halls for general meetings were consolidated into a single structure. These new buildings incorporated classrooms, Relief Society rooms, and recreation halls, which often included a stage for performances.¹⁴⁴ Just as all church auxiliaries were being brought under the jurisdiction of central priesthood authority, church buildings consolidated all church entities and functions into a single architectural space.

In November 1920, the Social Advisory Committee was consolidated with the Correlation Committee, which had been working (under various titles and in various forms) for most of the decade to study and coordinate the work of the organizations within the church, attempting to reduce overlap and increase efficiency.¹⁴⁵ The new Correlation–Social Advisory Committee considered social matters, structural relationships between church entities, and the potential for duplication of efforts.¹⁴⁶ Two years later, in 1922, the First Presidency issued a circular letter that reflected the outcome of these efforts, laying out the purpose and function of each auxiliary in the church. The auxiliaries were to provide a place to study the gospel and participate in literary and social activities. The MIAs were to teach the gospel, help young people obtain testimonies, and establish clearer guidelines and oversight for social activities.¹⁴⁷ Significantly, the MIAs were also designated to function as the church’s chief recreational agencies.¹⁴⁸ In 1923, the MIAs began publishing the Recreation Bulletin, reflecting their assumption of this responsibility; the bulletin was a forerunner of increasingly elaborate handbooks that continued to articulate expansion of the recreation focus.¹⁴⁹

The efforts of the Correlation–Social Advisory Committee emphasized and codified standards and guidelines for dances, activities, and personal conduct—including modest dress—while also communicating to MIA leaders the breadth of their commission. Stephen L Richards exhorted the committee to ensure that church activities aimed to do more than entertain. Their greater purpose was to help the young people develop faith. “The dancing manager is not employed merely to see that the young people have the correct position in the dance,” he said. “To be successful he must see behind his work for the future of the boy and the girl and help them to accomplish their great work in life.”¹⁵⁰

The MIA emphasis on recreation saw the inauguration of several iconic Latter-day Saint traditions that would be cherished for generations. Many activities became more than youth events, involving the whole ward or branch and becoming a prominent part of Latter-day Saint life rhythms. Foremost among these were Gold and Green Balls. In 1922, a joint committee of the general boards decided to adopt official colors for the MIA: green to symbolize “life’s springtime” of youth and gold to symbolize light and knowledge.¹⁷⁰ Gold and Green Balls began as local events in the mid-1920s, but by 1927 they were listed as one of the expected events on the MIA season calendar published by the general board.¹⁷¹ By 1928, the MIA handbook stated that the Gold and Green Ball stood out “for its beauty and cultural tone.”¹⁷² These dances were usually held early in the year and, in keeping with standard practice of the time, generally required attendees to purchase tickets. Reports and photographs of the dances, which often became gala productions, appeared in the Young Woman’s Journal and the Improvement Era. Common elements included elaborate decorations, selection of a queen of the ball, a formal procession, creative invitations and refreshments, and performance of a standard gold and green waltz or cotillion. While the MIA sponsored and organized the dances, they were usually community events to which all were invited.

Even small, rural towns staged elaborate Gold and Green Balls. For example, in the Garfield Stake in southern Utah, the queen, dressed in gold and green, opened the stake’s 1927 ball with a grand march. MIA officers and teachers participated in the procession, eventually marching into the shape of the letter M. The queen spoke briefly about the MIA colors, and senior classes of both young men and young women, also dressed in gold and green, performed a folk dance. Then everyone joined in social dancing for the rest of the evening. In addition to decorating the room in which the ball was held in gold and green, the MIA served refreshments of gold- and green-colored lemonade and cookies frosted in green with the gold letters M, I, and A on top.¹⁷³

Dances in Salt Lake City were no less impressive. On 25 January 1929, the Pioneer Stake held a Gold and Green Ball at a venue called Rainbow Gardens. Each ward’s queen took her place on the platform in a beautiful gown. Following a speech by the stake president, a little girl dressed in a white satin fairy costume brought in a jeweled crown on a gold and green pillow and gave it to the queen of the ball. Gladys Huber, the queen from the Mexican Branch (a unit within the stake for Spanish-speaking Saints), was the winner. Two flower girls then entered, distributing corsages and boutonnieres to Gladys, her attendants, and their partners, who then led a procession around the room to form three sets for dancing the cotillion.¹⁷⁴

Performance became a major emphasis of the MIAs in the 1920s, with local groups putting on plays, pageants, tableaux, and all forms of drama. Latter-day Saints had long embraced drama as a wholesome cultural outlet; the grand Salt Lake Theater, built under Brigham Young’s direction sixty years earlier, still stood as a monument to the power of theater in the Saints’ community-building efforts.¹⁷⁵ Now, in the Progressive Era, the MIA took up the cultural work of drama. Building on the work of Maud May Babcock, who had become a pioneering theater professor at the University of Utah, YLMIA leaders explained that drama promoted mental, moral, and physical improvement and uplifted performers who portrayed worthwhile characters.¹⁷⁶ Young women could also develop positive attributes through drama. “Practicing and playing the part of a refined, lady-like person in one of our M. I. A. plays might have a lasting uplifting influence on a naturally rowdy, careless girl,” one article in the Young Woman’s Journal argued.¹⁷⁷ Leaders believed that young people would learn about the gospel and high moral standards more by doing than by being lectured to. Besides all that, putting on plays was fun.

Road shows, in which productions toured to multiple local audiences, became the hallmark feature of MIA drama. The Granite Stake in Salt Lake City originated the idea in 1924 with its “merry-go-round,” in which eighteen troupes of performers traveled around the stake, presenting their short plays to audiences totaling over 2,500. Road shows were enabled by improved roads and the widespread availability of automobiles. In the Granite Stake, it took thirty-five cars to transport everyone from ward to ward, but they did so on schedule and without any accidents.¹⁷⁸ Conditions in rural areas sometimes made for challenges, but many stakes rose to the occasion. In the Panguitch Stake in southern Utah, bad weather in January 1927 made the roads unusable, so performers held their road shows on two separate nights, a week apart. Still, the weather did not discourage performers or audiences—stake leaders reported the event had elicited greater participation than anything they had done before.¹⁷⁹ The MIA had tapped into a social need and was shaping the culture. While the MIA sponsored the road shows, the variety of onstage roles and need for offstage help with the production often drew in participants of all ages and made the plays a true community enterprise.

The YLMIA incorporated drama in many of its programs for young women as well. Original plays gave them the opportunity to embody principles they could aspire to. For example, A Bee-Hive Girl’s Fantasy was a short play written in verse by Marguerite Gordon and Velma Wing, who were Bee-Keepers in Honolulu. In the production, a Bee-Hive Girl slipped away from her group to avoid helping with the work. After falling asleep, she was visited by the ideals of the Bee-Hive, such as Faith, Knowledge, Health, and Beauty, who each bestowed their emblems upon her. When Work, Service, and Joy entered, however, they were unable to give her their badges. Awakening, the Bee-Hive Girl recognized the lesson of her dream. “And now I know what I must do,” she said. “Work and Service my motto shall be / For surely Joy will then come to me.”¹⁸⁰

The June Conference provided another venue for dramatic performances by YLMIA members. At the 1925 June Conference, young women performed a play called The Latter-day Saint Girl. In this elaborate production, the Spirit of Mutual Improvement (a young woman dressed in the MIA colors) joined three young women representing the Bee-Hive Girl, Junior, and Senior (or Gleaner) classes and gave each in turn a charge to enact the ideals of her class. The representative figures then took seats at the back of the stage, and scenes depicting the activities of each age group followed. Finally, a “True Latter-day Saint Girl” stepped forward and was proclaimed “the culmination of the Bee-Hive Girl, Junior, and Senior years.”

“O, Spirit of Mutual Improvement,” she exclaimed. “Through you I have found expression in literature, in music, in the manual arts, and above all in our glorious religion. It is to you largely that I owe my testimony of the divinity of that religion.” The girl then bore her testimony, focusing on the divinity of Jesus Christ, and led the audience in repeating the year’s slogan: “We Stand for an Individual Testimony of the Divinity of Jesus Christ.”¹⁸¹

Similar presentations carried out at the local level struck a meaningful chord. Elizabeth Eames King, president of the Raymond Second Ward YLMIA in Alberta, Canada, reported to the Journal that her young women had prepared productions as part of a conjoint evening with the young men. “These were very much appreciated by the audience,” she reported, “and gave an opportunity to use about forty-four girls.”¹⁸² Through drama, the YLMIA built relationships between young women, offering them shared memories and opportunities to work together.

By 1925, the annual June Conference was well established as a highlight in the MIA calendar, and the vibrant scope of the MIA organizations was on full display at the June Conference of 1925, which was the focal point of yearlong celebrations. This year marked the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Young Men’s organization—the Young Ladies’ organization had celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1919—and since the two organizations’ joint relationship had continued to intensify, the boards of both organizations felt it was appropriate to join in a single, massive commemoration.¹⁸³

Events commemorating the Jubilee extended throughout the year with two particular initiatives. First, the organizations mounted a drive to increase the rolls of the MIAs to one hundred thousand members—fifty thousand each for the Young Men and the Young Ladies.¹⁸⁴ Second, they promoted 1925 as “a year of testimony” in the MIA. Invoking Brigham Young’s founding charge that “more testimonies are obtained on the feet than on the knees,” the goal was to have all members and leaders of the MIAs “stand on their feet and tell of what they believe and know” about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even if such expressions were “halting” and “timid,” leaders believed that individuals who stood to express themselves would receive a more powerful spiritual witness.¹⁸⁵

In addition to these ongoing efforts, each local association was to hold a special joint program on Sunday evening, 7 June. At least by aspiration, this meant the entire membership of the MIAs would be meeting simultaneously to commemorate the Jubilee. The suggested program featured historical sketches of the general and local organizations, a review of the MIAs’ purposes, and testimonies of its accomplishments and influences by members, both men and women. All who had served in the MIAs over the years were to be invited and recognized during the meeting.¹⁸⁶

As the highlight of the Jubilee year, the celebration at June Conference triumphantly exceeded all expectations. Following the regular leadership sessions held over the weekend on 6–7 June, several big events took place on 8–10 June. During the YLMIA session on Monday, young women presented the play The Latter-day Saint Girl. That evening, a pageant entitled The Torch of Inspiration presented the origin, growth, and potential of the MIAs in the past, present, and future.¹⁸⁷

On Tuesday, stake bands, choruses, and speakers performed in tryouts during the afternoon; winners were announced and all participants joined in a “grand concert” that evening. A capacity crowd eagerly filled the Tabernacle to witness the gala program, which included ensemble performances by fourteen bands, thirty-six ladies’ choruses, and twenty-two male choruses, as well as impressive addresses from young women and men participants in the public speaking contest. The audience was thrilled: “It was Mutual Improvement work at its height!”¹⁸⁸

The next day’s events soared even higher, as over twelve thousand participants in fourteen divisions joined in a grand parade on the streets of Salt Lake City. For a full ninety minutes, the procession, stretching over two miles in length, paraded past spectators and an official reviewing stand on the steps of the Church Administration Building on South Temple Street, where Church authorities, government officials, and MIA leaders were seated. One reporter described the “floats, banners, standards, flags; groups in costume, in uniform or bearing significant trophies” who made a “demonstration unprecedented” that impressed the tens of thousands of spectators who crowded the parade route.¹⁸⁹

As each unit passed the reviewing stand, its flag bearer dropped out and joined the others in formation on the side of the street opposite the stand. Eventually over two hundred flag bearers stood six deep, their banners bearing slogans, mottoes, and insignia of the various groups and programs in the MIA—an “impressive moment” in the event.¹⁹⁰ “The Mutual Improvement Association has borne testimony to the world, that the Gospel as taught by the Latter-day Saints is a marvelous work and a wonder,” exulted a Young Woman’s Journal editorial about the Jubilee events.¹⁹¹

Continued emphasis on recreation led to the expansion of camp programs. Throughout the 1920s, camping in the YLMIA remained centered on summer homes built by various stakes, usually in a mountain setting. Newspaper articles touted the summer home for Latter-day Saint girls in Brighton, Utah, as a beautiful, affordable recreation site.¹⁹² Nestled in the Silver Lake Basin atop Big Cottonwood Canyon some twenty miles southeast of Salt Lake City, the camp at Brighton connected to several trails and mountain destinations, including Lakes Mary, Martha, and Catherine. In 1927, camp attendance had reached five thousand, and by 1928, eleven homes had been built by seventeen stakes to accommodate young women from the Utah-Idaho border in the north and into Arizona in the south.¹⁹³

Leaders planned camp experiences carefully to foster a sense of camaraderie and wonder in participants, and they worked to develop camp traditions. One of these traditions at Brighton was the sunrise hike, such as the one held on Thursday, 12 July 1929. At two o’clock in the morning, a leader gently woke the sleeping young women. They quickly dressed, then filed down the stairs to gather in front of the cold fireplace. Leaders distributed “bugs,” or large tin cans fitted with candles and a wire handle, and soon the girls were on their way. The destination was Mount Majestic, now known as Clayton Peak, a little over three miles up a steep, rocky trail.

The young women hiked along in single file, crossing creek beds and brushing past trees in the darkness as their bug lanterns lit the path a few feet ahead. They stopped periodically to catch their breath and admire the low-hanging moon. As dawn began to cast its light on the western mountains, the young women hung their bugs on tree limbs and began the final scramble, using both hands and feet to reach the summit. Once atop the peak, they rested and watched as rose-colored clouds gradually faded, creating a pale glow on the mountains below, until finally, shortly after five o’clock in the morning, the sun peeked over the eastern ridges and fully lit their view.¹⁹⁴

In addition to hiking, typical camp activities included swimming, boating, games, races, stunts, performances, storytelling, and an evening bonfire with group singing. Camp was intended to be busy in a good way—it was not a place for loafing but for change and recreation.¹⁹⁵ Camp also contributed to the growing trend of ritualizing Latter-day Saint history: for one evening, camp leaders were instructed to organize a Camp Fire Ceremonial, a program that included a poem, recited lines, dances, and lighting of the fire, with themes commemorating the Saints’ pioneer heritage.¹⁹⁶ To help leaders blend recreation and spirituality, several summer homes hosted recreational institutes for leaders, led by Elva Moss, a college-educated returned missionary who served on the YLMIA general board as field secretary to the camp program.¹⁹⁷

Writing after two years as chair of the camp committee for the Cache and Logan stakes in northern Utah, Claire N. Hulme laid out a religious rationale for camp as a valuable element of the YLMIA’s programs. Summer camps had brought joy, spirituality, and ethical values into the lives of hundreds of girls, she wrote, and they were one of the best activities the association could provide its members. Camp activities harmonized physical, social, and religious life and created a happy, healthy atmosphere. The fresh air, comfortable setting, and engaging activities promoted good health and high moral standards. Girls developed leadership, self-control, teamwork, cooperation, consideration for the rights of others, respect for law and order, and sportsmanship. Most of all, camp developed a spiritual awareness by fostering a deeper acquaintance with the works of the Creator. “Through sleeping among the tree-tops, as we do in our camp, with the stars shining upon our beds, there are moments when the most thoughtless girl realizes, if but dimly, the wonder and glory of it all.”¹⁹⁸

While the MIA in the 1910s and 1920s focused on strengthening spiritual development indirectly through recreation, progressive thinkers in the organization also wanted to use modern methods to track and address more overtly religious behaviors. The data they obtained worried them. One major concern was a decrease in the number of Saints marrying in a temple. One study reported that the 1920 percentage of temple marriages was among the lowest in the twentieth century, despite the highest total number of marriages ever recorded. About a quarter of church members who married chose non–Latter-day Saint spouses, and of those marrying outside the faith, three-fourths were women. If these trends continued, temple marriages would account for only 40 percent of Latter-day Saint weddings by midcentury.¹⁹⁹

The 1920 study cited “lack of faith” as the primary reason for the declining temple marriage rates.²⁰⁰ The reality was more complicated than a single statistic might suggest. Lethe Coleman was married civilly at age forty-one and did not have children, but she was active in the church and passed on her religious identity to the next generation through service in the Primary and Young Women organizations.²⁰¹ There were also many women who married outside the faith and raised committed Latter-day Saint children. For example, in 1906 Nellie Marie Rasmussen married John William Hunter, who was not a member of the church. Their son, Howard W. Hunter, later became the church’s fourteenth president.²⁰² Studies of temple marriage rates might miss some couples who were initially married civilly, for whatever reason, and sealed in the temple later. Camilla Eyring, for example, married Spencer Kimball civilly while his military draft group was awaiting possible deployment to Europe. Because his unit’s deployment was postponed, they were able to make the rail journey to Salt Lake City to be sealed in the temple shortly before she gave birth to their first child.²⁰³ However, because church leaders believed marriages outside the temple might represent a risk in religious transmission, leaders and programs would increasingly emphasize temple marriage.

Worry over their young people’s marriage choices was not new for Latter-day Saints. Earlier generations had warned against marrying outsiders while trying to maintain community boundaries. In the 1910s, lessons on marriage tended to focus on principles and lofty ideals; by the 1920s the ideals were still important, but the lessons drew on sociological and scientific research about marriage and family life.²⁰⁴ The sociological language of the time often reflected the larger society’s assumptions about gender and race, which also appear in the lessons. In the 1921 introduction to the courtship course of study for the Senior class, for example, YLMIA leaders explained, “Most scientific authorities agree that for our race and climate the best age for marriage is on the average from 22 to 26 years for the young man and from 18 to 24 years for the girl.”²⁰⁵ The writers of the manual assumed that all Latter-day Saints were of the same race (white) and that men and women of approximately the same age should be referred to differently (as young men and girls).

While marriage was some years off for many participants in the MIA, leaders sought ways to connect Latter-day Saint young women to the temple as they grew up. Interest and participation in genealogy and temple work had been growing significantly in the church since the early decades of the century,²⁰⁶ and at the April 1928 general conference, church president Heber J. Grant encouraged Saints to spend more time at the temple.²⁰⁷ By the end of the 1920s, many young women had experienced a new tradition of youth temple trips to perform baptisms for the dead, a distinctive aspect of Latter-day Saint theology in which church members conduct genealogical research and then enter the temple to be baptized for their relatives and others who died without receiving the gospel and its ordinances. Young people who had themselves been baptized were qualified to perform vicarious baptisms for the dead, and leaders hoped temple visits to perform proxy ordinances would offer powerful spiritual experiences and a reminder of the covenants and blessings associated with church membership.²⁰⁸

In 1928, the same year Grant made his remarks on temple attendance, Bee-Hive Girls in the Deseret Stake in central Utah participated in a temple trip. Each young woman contributed one dollar, and the group raised additional funds by selling paper flowers. Fifteen young women attended, traveling to the temple in Manti, Utah. The evening before they entered the temple, the Bee-Hive Girls met with their leaders on the tree- and grass-covered temple hill, which overlooked the city. They listened to a talk on the construction of the temple, and some of the Bee-Hive Girls gave a program. The next morning the girls were baptized for 160 deceased individuals. One of the leaders, Zola Woodbury Bunker, reported, “Our trip to the Temple was surely worth all the effort that we had put forth.”²⁰⁹ Several months later, an article in the Young Woman’s Journal tied baptisms for the dead to increased spiritual maturity among the youth: “The principle of universal salvation becomes full of spiritual significance to the MIA girls or boys who go in large numbers to the temple and are baptized for the dead.”²¹⁰

Lessons on courtship and temple marriage were only one part of a larger constellation of YLMIA curriculum. Young women received consistent messages that marriage and motherhood were women’s most important missions, but YLMIA instruction also included preparation to engage in the world beyond the walls of a home.²¹¹ The wide array of lesson topics also shows that leaders paid increasing attention to stages of young women’s development, aided by their engagement with scientific studies in this area.²¹² The leaders’ progressive attitudes and understanding, along with consistent feedback from young women and their leaders on the local level, spurred the general board to create more age-group divisions for young women than ever before.²¹³

Between 1919 and 1936, the board implemented over a dozen changes or adjustments in the age groupings, their corresponding names, and the lessons and work or activities recommended for them. In 1919, Bee-Hive Girls work was adopted as the program for the Junior class, ages fourteen through seventeen, though the specified ages initially fluctuated.²¹⁴ By 1923, entrance into the Bee-Hive Girls was equated with entrance into the YLMIA; the first edition of the Y. L. M. I. A. Hand Book, which was published in 1923, codified the age range for the youngest class (called Bee-Hive Girls) as fourteen to fifteen, while the Junior class covered ages sixteen and seventeen.²¹⁵ Even though boys were entering Scouts at twelve, YLMIA general leaders maintained the age of entry into the young women’s program at fourteen.²¹⁶ An exception could be made in the case of a physically and mentally advanced girl of younger age who had the permission of her parents, YLMIA leaders, Primary leaders, and bishop. But in this period, girls of twelve and thirteen were still seen as juvenile, and leaders insisted that the YLMIA was not a children’s organization.²¹⁷ Also by 1923, a shift had occurred in how leaders viewed the Bee-Hive Girls program in relation to YLMIA classes. The Young Woman’s Journal announced that the Bee-Hive Girls would no longer serve as the program for the Junior class’s “work” (though a woman of any age could still enroll in the program), and leaders and young women soon began using the Bee-Hive Girls name to refer solely to the youngest age group in the organization. A 1931 supplement to the Bee-Hive Girls handbook advised that MIA officers could allow girls of twelve and thirteen to join, with parental approval, but that officers were not to actively invite girls of that age. Those who did enter at age twelve were called Nymphs, with special officers to guide them in transitioning to the Bee-Hive Girls program.²¹⁸

Now distinct from the Bee-Hive Girls program, the Junior class began to take on an identity of its own. Each Junior class could choose from two outlines of “courses” (readings on a particular topic), both of which also contained a required course specific to gospel study. The courses were available in small booklets, but each course was also printed in one of the monthly editions of the Young Woman’s Journal, as were the courses for the Senior and Advanced Senior departments.²¹⁹ Through these courses, Juniors might learn about such topics as “Social Conduct,” “Studies in Nature,” “Parables and Miracles of the Savior,” “Some of the Songs We Sing,” and “Music Appreciation.”²²⁰ Juniors also participated in several social activities throughout the year, such as the yearly Mothers’ and Daughters’ Day and the MIA Day, but by 1926, the general board offered lists of specific monthly activities for these young women, such as a fashion show, where they could bring and display items of clothing they had made themselves; a music appreciation evening (the main list also included opera and composer nights), which was facilitated by the Victrola or a local member with musical ability; or a Junior Outing, during which they might hike, swim, or travel to see various sites.²²¹ A common summer activity for young women in Junior classes was growing flowers, which they were then encouraged to share, perhaps by providing decoration in sacrament meeting or taking them to the sick and sorrowing.²²²

As with the Bee-Hive and Junior classes, the year 1923 was also momentous for young women in the Senior class, those ages eighteen to twenty-three.²²³ In 1922, leaders had established Senior class organizations as a way to “make the M. I. A. more vital” in the lives of older young women. The work of these organizations supplemented the regular studies of the Senior classes and provided opportunities for leadership, self-expression, and group association. Members of these organizations, which were led by the young women themselves, participated in activities during the last half-hour of weekly MIA meetings.²²⁴ In 1923, YLMIA leaders announced the name Gleaners for this program, beginning a tradition associated with that name that would carry on for decades.²²⁵ Referring to the Old Testament story of Ruth, program instructions noted that, as Ruth gleaned grain from the fields, Senior girls gleaned knowledge from many sources.²²⁶ In the Gleaner program, young women gleaned sheaves by gaining knowledge and bound those sheaves by putting the knowledge into action. By gathering knowledge, Gleaners were to raise their standards, gain self-mastery, and build character. Suggested sheaves, or goals, included controlling one’s temper, leaving one’s room in order, avoiding criticizing others, cultivating a hobby for half an hour each day, and reading from the Bible each night. The young women were to write out their chosen goal, hand it to their leader, then work on it for one month, after which they were to report back on their success. This made the program almost entirely self-determined and individually motivated.

In addition, ward Gleaner groups could choose a collective sheaf, and a general sheaf was recommended for all Gleaners to bind during each MIA season.²²⁷ In the 1927–1928 season, the general Gleaner sheaf was “I Will Endeavor to Cultivate My Graces,” for which young women sought to understand their gifts and cultivate further cultural, physical, and intellectual talents.²²⁸ Several years after the introduction of the Gleaner program, ward Gleaner groups began participating in sheaf-binding ceremonies, which celebrated a Gleaner class having achieved 100 percent enrollment of all eligible girls (ages seventeen to twenty-three).²²⁹ These ceremonies were often elaborate affairs, with carefully scripted and highly choreographed programs that included young women, attired in formal gowns and corsages, walking in a procession to the front of the gathering. There, they explained the Gleaner program and the Gleaner sheaf, which after 1937 had become an official code for living. Written by board member Rose Wallace Bennett and based on Psalm 24, it encouraged young women to possess a clean body, a pure heart, a humble and obedient spirit, and an honest mind.²³⁰ The sheaf-binding ceremony frequently incorporated music provided by combined girls’ groups or local soloists, but the focal point was always the moment when the girls brought their individual sheaves of wheat and tied them together, symbolizing both their declared commitment to the ideals set forth in Bennett’s creed and the camaraderie they shared in maintaining those ideals.²³¹ As with the Bee-Hive Girls program, Gleaners soon replaced Senior as the name of the department for young women of this age.

The most ambitious curriculum was reserved for the Advanced Senior department, introduced in 1917 for MIA members over age twenty-five.²³² Advanced Senior classes, later termed Adult classes and then, interestingly, Seniors (after that class had become Gleaners), were for combined groups of women and men, with a curriculum that included lessons on travel, literature, ethics, music, art, civics, and science.²³³ The program proved popular as people responded to leaders’ aspiration to enrich young adults’ social and intellectual lives.²³⁴ Lessons were progressive and high minded, presented through a gospel lens and geared toward helping people make sense of their rapidly modernizing world. In the 1923–1924 MIA season, for example, the course of study was “Life’s Visions and Purposes,” which included the topics of education, marriage, service, aesthetics, physical fitness, and spirituality.²³⁵ Topics for discussion also included more secular subjects that could be taught by local experts, such as “All about Radium,” “The Advance of Surgery,” and “The Struggles for Sanitation.”²³⁶ In addition to lessons, classes were to hold socials and include time for bearing testimonies.²³⁷

The Advanced Senior class was the culmination of leaders’ aims to develop youth into model Saints and citizens, and the efforts of those aims were woven into the curriculum and activities of each class. This oldest class participated in a sophisticated curriculum and an elaborate slate of activities that seemed more developmentally appropriate for an older age range.

The MIA’s inclusion of secular topics in the curriculum and focus on elaborate activities made some members wonder whether recreation was overtaking the organization’s spiritual mandate. General leaders reported on questions they received: “Are we not to teach religion any more?” and “Are we not to do more than devote our energies to secular studies and play?”²³⁸ A new handbook released in September 1928 responded to those questions by defending the organization’s heavy recreation emphasis.²³⁹ While previous handbooks had built up to the 1928 handbook, this handbook laid out a comprehensive, progressive view of the mutually reinforcing roles religion and recreation could play in the development of a new kind of womanhood and manhood.²⁴⁰

The handbook was the work of the Community Activities Committee, a joint subcommittee of the YLMIA and YMMIA general boards that consisted of twelve board members.²⁴¹ Foremost among the progressive thinkers on the committee were Charlotte Stewart and Ephraim Ericksen. Stewart began her twenty-five years of service on the YLMIA board in 1914, when she was assigned specifically to use her knowledge of recreational leadership. She was head of the women’s physical education department for the Utah Agricultural College (now Utah State University) and director of physical education for Salt Lake City public schools; she would go on to do graduate work at New York University, Columbia, and Stanford and to represent Utah and the YLMIA at numerous national recreation conventions.²⁴² Stewart was attuned to the needs of young women and brought their case to the board insistently: “We must take care of our girls and must find a way to meet their needs,” she said.²⁴³ She believed that recreation was vital to growth, as did Ericksen.²⁴⁴ Ericksen received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago with a dissertation later published as The Psychological and Ethical Aspects of Mormon Group Life. A professor at the University of Utah since 1915, he joined the YMMIA general board in 1922 and was quickly appointed to head the recreation committee. Thoroughly imbued with the outlook of progressive recreation, Ericksen believed it to be what he called a “spiritual agency,” and he felt a sense of mission in his work on the board.²⁴⁵ Supported by the other members of the committee, Stewart and Ericksen drew on their expertise to set forth a religiously based program of progressive recreation for the MIA.

Like earlier publications, the handbook quoted Brigham Young on the founding purposes of the YLMIA and YMMIA, drawing on the accounts in Susa Gates’s history of the YLMIA and other sources. In addition to the traditional statements on gaining testimonies, however, the handbook included additional passages from the origin stories of the organizations. To the young men, Brigham Young had mentioned the need to develop “the gifts within them” and to cultivate “a knowledge and an application of the eternal principles of the great science of life.” He had told the young women to “retrench in everything that is bad and worthless, and improve in everything that is good and beautiful” in order to be happy in this life and the next.²⁴⁶ The handbook connected these statements to recreation, endowing it with prophetic approval.

The handbook listed the following purposes for the MIA, in addition to cultivating young people’s testimonies:

To aid them in obtaining all true knowledge; to teach the young people to preside over public assemblies; to express themselves before the public; to enable them to study and practice civil, vocational, social, scientific and educational affairs; and also to train them in all that pertains to religious, moral, social, physical and intellectual advancement.²⁴⁷

Nevertheless, the handbook repeatedly insisted that the MIA’s top priority was spiritual. “Directly or indirectly, all the activities under the direction of our Church organizations should contribute to the making of true Latter-day Saints,” it said. It also indicated that the recreational activities should “emphasize the fundamental ideals and standards of the church.”²⁴⁸ But this goal would be realized through action. The MIA’s recreation program would be applied religion—what they called “the gospel of doing rather than of theorizing.”²⁴⁹ It would reach out to young people who might not currently be interested in religion and, through its activities, draw them in to spiritual awakening. Recreation was a means, not an end.²⁵⁰

The MIAs were charged, the handbook said, “to assist every man and woman to complete living on the foundation of faith in God and His great Latter-day work.”²⁵¹ The idea of “complete living” powerfully blended Latter-day Saint and progressive ideals. It expressed a belief in the church as an agency of social, physical, intellectual, and spiritual development, rooted in the Saints’ aspiration to create a unified, all-encompassing community—or in Latter-day Saint parlance, to build Zion. At the same time, it captured a progressive vision of promoting human flourishing through organized means and application of modern insights.

Substantial leadership training programs connected with that vision were necessary, the handbook argued, for Latter-day Saints to engage young people who had so many other options for how to spend their free time. “Recreation has been so generally commercialized that it is going to be no easy matter to develop the leadership which can compete with commercialized recreation,” another section of the handbook observed. Church leaders did not desire to eradicate commercialized recreation, but they did wish to have some influence in raising standards. Above all, they sought to protect their own young people from the damaging influences they perceived in commercial environments.²⁵² For those concerned about social boundaries, the handbook suggested that an effective, church-sponsored recreation program would eliminate the need for young women and young men to look elsewhere to satisfy their legitimate desires for recreation.

While boundaries governing social interactions were critical, MIA leaders did look outward to design their recreation plans. In setting forth the extensive programs for each age group within the organizations, the handbook drew explicitly on sociological theory that attributed to human beings seven fundamental needs, which it called urges: social, rhythmic, dramatic, linguistic, physical, environmental, and constructive. Effective recreational activities would satisfy each of these urges—music for the rhythmic urge, sports and games for the physical urge, community beautification for the environmental urge, and so forth. Because the theory asserted that these needs manifested in different ways at various stages of life, the manual outlined specific needs and corresponding activities for each age group.²⁵³

While some needs and activities were different for the young women and young men, the 1928 handbook presented the YLMIA and YMMIA as distinct but thoroughly integrated. The organizations were structured around complementary divisions between the female classes and their male counterparts: Gleaners and M Men, Juniors and Vanguards, Bee-Hive Girls and Scouts. Contests included a few sex-segregated categories, primarily in vocal music, but playwriting, dance orchestra, drama, and dancing were all open to participants of both sexes.²⁵⁴ Commenting favorably on the new manual, apostle Richard R. Lyman observed that, given the joint nature of their programs, perhaps it was time to start referring to the two organizations as the “M.I.A. of the Church,” echoing George Q. Morris’s statement from two decades earlier.²⁵⁵ The handbook also reflected the increasingly common practice of referring to the meetings and activities of both organizations as Mutual.²⁵⁶

YLMIA leaders generally enjoyed their joint leadership in the MIA. For them, it reinforced the sense that women had taken their rightful place in the modern world. Ruth May Fox celebrated women’s leadership in the MIA and in the church at large. “Women have become teachers of the Gospel and have been brought into closer cooperation with the priesthood of the Church,” she noted. “Both men and women have broadened their attitude toward each other and have a larger understanding of the great problems of life.” She thought the work of women in the church had elevated them to stand shoulder to shoulder with the men of the church.²⁵⁷ Men still presided at meetings and took the lead in other ways, but the relative parity between the YLMIA and YMMIA struck her as significant.

The clear integration of the YLMIA and YMMIA presented in the 1928 handbook made further changes possible. The Saturday morning session of the 1929 June Conference was just winding down when the gathered officers of the various local and stake MIAs received a surprising announcement. Looking at their programs, they saw that the next event was “A Delightful June Ceremony,” but they were wholly unprepared for what this meant. It was, in fact, a “story book wedding”—at least, that is how the news was presented to them. Melvin J. Ballard, now serving in his tenth year as a church apostle and also in the role of assistant superintendent of the YMMIA, explained to the congregation that the Young Woman’s Journal and the Improvement Era were to be joined into a new Improvement Era.²⁵⁸

Despite the momentum toward an integrated program, the journals’ merger seemed sudden. Clarissa Beesley, who had served as the Journal’s managing editor for most of the 1920s, had guarded the magazine’s independence and impressed upon her successor, Elsie Talmage Brandley, the need to prioritize YLMIA lines of authority and not get swept up by every conjoint proposal. “One of the important lessons I have had to learn in this work is to stifle energy and initiative and wait until I am told what to do—and then do it—and be sure it is the right authority by whom I am asked,” Brandley wrote. “If the Young Men’s organization representative asks me to do things—refuse until it comes through the recognized channel of power.”²⁵⁹ Given that YLMIA leaders had turned down merger proposals in previous years, the rapid move toward union of the journals was a surprise.²⁶⁰

The journey toward merging began early in 1929, when the YMMIA general board appointed a committee to study the status of the Improvement Era, which had been its official magazine since 1897. The result was a ten-thousand-word report confirming that the magazine was losing money and subscribers.²⁶¹ The committee had studied trends in national magazine publishing and made several recommendations: enlarge the Era to standard magazine size, add more colorful covers and increase illustrations throughout, and incorporate advertising alongside reading matter in the back half of the magazine. They also recommended launching a more intensive subscription drive led by a representative in each ward. If these recommendations were adopted, the committee wrote, they felt sure that the Improvement Era would become the most prominent regional magazine, with the finest, most influential content.²⁶²

Up to this point, nothing had been said about joining with the Young Woman’s Journal. The committee met with the YMMIA general board on 8 May, and the general board accepted the committee’s recommendations. But then Ballard suggested merging the Era with the Young Woman’s Journal, and the board decided to pursue the idea with the YLMIA. That same day, Ballard met with YLMIA leaders and showed them the plans for the new, improved Improvement Era. The minutes of the YLMIA general board meeting record that Ballard “asked if the Young Ladies would like to make this a joint magazine, doing away with the Young Woman’s Journal.” The board agreed to consider the proposal and vote on it at their next meeting.²⁶³

That meeting was held on 14 May, but records leave no insight as to YLMIA leaders’ assessments of the proposal. The minutes record only this: “The amalgamation of the Improvement Era and Young Woman’s Journal was considered. Rose W. Bennett moved that the consolidation take place, which was seconded and passed.”²⁶⁴ The next evening at a joint board meeting of the two organizations, Ballard announced that the YLMIA board had voted to combine the Improvement Era and the Young Woman’s Journal.²⁶⁵

It is unclear why the YLMIA board accepted the merger and whether they had reservations about doing so. At the time, the Journal was flourishing. General board minutes show that the Journal made money for the YLMIA, which they were able to use for other purposes in the organization. Each issue featured between sixty-four and seventy-four pages of content, with twelve pages of advertising.²⁶⁶ Board members often expressed satisfaction that the magazine was edited and managed by women, and they exhorted young women to regard the Journal as theirs and take pride in it. In the atmosphere of the late 1920s, however, perhaps YLMIA leaders saw having a single magazine for both genders as a mark of progress, signifying women’s equal position with men. Perhaps they felt it simply reflected the reality that an ever-increasing portion of MIA work was undertaken jointly.²⁶⁷

At least initially, representatives from the two organizations collaborated closely in editorial leadership of the merged periodical. Brandley shifted from working as the managing editor of the Young Woman’s Journal to working as the associate editor of the Improvement Era, while Hugh Cannon of the YMMIA continued as its managing editor. “We worked together in harmony and friendliness,” Brandley recorded in her journal. She appreciated Cannon’s faith and perspectives and felt his death two years later as a personal loss. “From the time of his death on, I think my own faith was stronger,” she reflected, “for having known the man, and realized that such as he could not cease living—he was too much a soul to be perishable, as a body might be perishable.”²⁶⁸

On 28 March 1929, Heber J. Grant attended a special meeting of the YLMIA general board to announce the release of Martha Horne Tingey as president of the organization after almost fifty years of service in its presidency.²⁶⁹ Ruth May Fox, then serving as Tingey’s first counselor, was appointed as the new president. It was not exactly a generational changing of the guard; at age seventy-five, Fox was four years older than Tingey. But she was vigorous in mind and body and had proven herself an imaginative, capable leader. After announcing her appointment, Grant handed Fox a poem that read, in part: “But if from life you take the best / And if in life you keep the zest / If love you hold; No matter how the years go by, / No matter how the birthdays fly, / You are not old.”²⁷⁰ Fox served as president for eight years, and she lived for three more decades.

The new presidency anchored the YLMIA with tradition and experience. First counselor Lucy Grant Cannon had served almost continuously for thirty years as a YLMIA leader since becoming president of her ward association at age eighteen.²⁷¹ Since 1916, she had served on the general board and had worked extensively on the Guide committee (which compiled the lessons) before becoming second counselor to Tingey in 1923. Clarissa Beesley, Fox’s second counselor, had a long record of service in the organization and had been a key participant in the MIA’s embrace of progressive methods as a member of the Social Advisory Committee. Both had served missions.²⁷² These collaborators presided over a vibrant organization of over fifty-four thousand members in nearly twelve hundred local associations.²⁷³

The YLMIA faced modern conditions with a sense of optimism. “We believe sagacity, foresight, vision, stability and faith are not foreign to youth—our youth,” wrote an editorialist of the Young Woman’s Journal in 1929. “They are making a contribution to the world.”²⁷⁴ Picturing the faces of the young people of the church, Richard R. Lyman had proclaimed that no other institution was giving as much experience and training to its youth. This generation would be stronger and better because of the modern methods of the MIA. Fifty years ago, he said, his generation had been born into a world of “dirt, ugliness, disease.” Now the world embraced cleanliness, beauty, and health. The MIAs, he said, “provide that recreation, training, and education which are necessary to produce well rounded and successful lives.”²⁷⁵