As YLMIA leaders prepared for the centennial, they sought ways to promote the sort of reflection that would link modern young women with the church’s pioneer roots. One of these was Treasures of Truth, a class project that became an enduring and cherished part of the Gleaner experience. The church published an official multi-volume account of its history in 1930, and leaders intended the Treasures of Truth project to give young women an opportunity to write the religious history of their families.⁸ The young women were to collect and write their own or their ancestors’ conversion experiences and reflect on the influence of those stories of faith. Where applicable, they were encouraged to include details about the pioneer trek west, missionary service, and the establishment of settlements in what would become Utah. They were to include pictures of the relevant people and places wherever possible to illustrate their books.⁹ To link young women with their future families, leaders encouraged them to compile the book with durability in mind.¹⁰ If the pioneer era had produced spiritually valuable experiences, the centennial era had produced the right circumstances to widely document them. By the 1930s, young women had the literacy, leisure time, and access to inexpensive consumer goods—notebooks, paper, and even photographs—that made such a project possible.¹¹

Leaders worried that the emphasis on inspiring stories could lead young women to seek out stories valued more for their thrill than for the depth of personal conversion they represented. In the Gleaner manual, therefore, leaders instructed that all the stories should be well documented. Young women were to list the sources of their information and, when possible, obtain signed statements from those who provided the stories. “Great care should be taken that stories changed or exaggerated through a number of repetitions find no place in the book,” the manual warned. “The record will be valuable only as it is entirely true.”¹²

While not all young women in the Gleaner class took on the project, extant Treasures of Truth books demonstrate that many took the work seriously. Eleanor Larsen, an eighteen-year-old Gleaner from Spring City, Utah, started work on her book in 1932 and dedicated it “to my mother and her future generations.” Eleanor used her book primarily for genealogical information: beginning with her maternal great-great-grandparents, she documented ancestors and extended family, noting births, deaths, and migrations from Denmark to Utah. Multiple types of ink and later dates indicate she continued to update the book long after her initial efforts. Eleanor noted births, marriages, and deaths through the 1940s. The last date in the book is for her own 1950 wedding. Her focus on key dates is rarely interrupted by comments, but some are poignant. Under the entry for her mother’s June 1944 death, Eleanor noted, “All the flowers she loved were in full bloom. She died of a heart attack. I was alone with her at the time. I am thankful I was there.”¹³

Some Treasures of Truth books were kept not by individuals but by Gleaner groups collectively. These books, which mix personal stories with histories of the local MIA organizations and wards and narrative writing with poetry and hand-drawn art, give insight into the mix of stories that shaped a local religious identity. A 1935 Treasures of Truth book created by the Gleaners in the South Davis Stake (which included Bountiful, Farmington, and Centerville, Utah) offers organizational histories in place of a family genealogy. The book’s compilers dedicated a section to each of the stake’s wards, giving space to photos of ward YLMIA members and poems or narratives written by them. The West Bountiful Ward’s section demonstrates how a distinctive local MIA memory was being preserved and passed on. A short dedicatory verse mentions both past Gleaners and those who died before becoming Gleaners. Later in the section, the compilers included a poem written by ward member Jessie Stirling Pack about her daughter Belle, who had been active in the local YLMIA when she passed away in 1905, thirty years earlier. The poem’s inclusion suggests that the mother or daughter had made a deep impression on local YLMIA identity. A local newspaper reported that members of the YLMIA had served as pallbearers at Belle’s funeral, which might explain why this particular poem continued to resonate as the West Bountiful Ward constructed their history.¹⁴

The local spiritual history documented by the young women also sheds light on changing expressions of spirituality. Treasures of Truth books show young women forging a link with the miraculous, even after charismatic practices such as speaking in tongues and women’s healing blessings had fallen out of favor. A 1931–1932 Treasures of Truth book compiled by the Jefferson Ward in Salt Lake City, for example, features stories about sickness or accidents from multiple generations. LaVern McClellan Lloyd shared an extended account of her mother’s experiences with a son’s health crisis in 1914. This story includes a revelatory dream and a healing in the temple. “At that time they were giving blessings in the Temple for the sick,” the account notes, indicating LaVern’s awareness of how Latter-day Saint healing practices had changed in a generation. The later stories are more subtle and focus on experiences such as the incidental effects of mothers’ prayers. Bertha Blechert wrote about being hit by a truck on 16 September 1929 and regaining consciousness lying underneath it, but with only a few scratches. Bertha credited her mother’s prayer for her protection with preserving her from serious injury.¹⁵

The year following the introduction of Treasures of Truth, a similar project was introduced for the Junior classes: My Story—Lest I Forget. Like its sister project for the older young women, My Story gave fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds the opportunity to make a record and tell their own and their loved ones’ stories.¹⁶ Bee-Hive Girls—young women ages fourteen and fifteen, plus twelve- and thirteen-year-olds whose parents had given them permission to participate—were likewise encouraged to keep a scrapbook showing the activities they had engaged in to complete their requirements. Such scrapbooks might include drawings, recipes, games, songs, pressed flowers, small crafted items, programs, clippings, and pictures.¹⁷ Participants could even enter their scrapbooks in a stake contest.¹⁸ My Story and the scrapbook for Bee-Hive Girls were natural extensions of the idea behind the Treasures of Truth books and ensured that YLMIA members of all ages had a common experience.

By 1940, the general board had collected numerous responses to the My Story effort that they included in a series of lessons in the Junior Manual to encourage young women to embrace the exercise. “It’s the most precious thing I own,” one young woman said. Another said that her book was an inspiration to her: “I’ve written some of the things I’ve thought and believed about life and now it’s interesting to see how some of my views have changed.” Another mentioned the value of learning more about her family history: “I wrote some stories in my book that my grandmother told me about her early life. She died several years ago and I’m the only one in the family who has much written about her.” One young woman said that her book had become a “real friend” to her on her mission as she found inspirational things she had recorded in her book that gave her courage.¹⁹

In practice, young women experienced significant overlap between their My Story and Treasures of Truth work. In 1947, a new manual said the entire project for Juniors and Gleaners would be called Treasures of Truth, and “My Story” would appear on the title page.²⁰ For decades to come, Treasures of Truth remained part of each program, shaping the identity, spirituality, and aspirations of young Latter-day Saint women.²¹

The Treasures of Truth and Bee-Hive programs had been designed largely around the needs of young women in Utah, where large Latter-day Saint youth cohorts were the norm and pioneer ancestors were commonplace. By the 1930s, however, these programs were expanding well beyond the Intermountain West. Increased migration out of Utah in the early decades of the twentieth century had led to growing Latter-day Saint communities in California and in eastern urban centers like New York City and Washington, DC. Church leaders were no longer encouraging converts to immigrate to Utah, which led to further development of branches outside the Intermountain West and the United States.²² Despite the pressures of a deepening economic depression, the 1930s marked an increasingly visible investment by the church in its national and international presence, as witnessed by the replacement of rented meeting rooms with the first custom-built Latter-day Saint meetinghouses in many locations around the world.²³

The YLMIA provided a crucial place of belonging for young Latter-day Saint women throughout the world. Louise Puenzieux recalled belonging to the first Gleaner cohort in French-speaking Switzerland in the mid-1930s.²⁴ As their peers in Utah did, Gleaners in Lausanne, Switzerland, documented their spiritual history in Treasures of Truth books. An excerpt from Louise’s book was deemed important enough to the collective memory of Latter-day Saints in her area that it was preserved in the mission president’s files.²⁵

In her book, Louise recorded an account from when she was five months old and her parents were recent converts to the church. She was suffering from tuberculosis, and the family’s doctor told her parents she might not survive the night. Despite the concern, her father fulfilled his responsibility as a local deacon to go heat the meeting hall for the annual district conference. Their landlord, a Mrs. Perrenoud, came by while he was gone and brought up their new faith. “Look, you have your Mormons,” she said. “Let them come and heal this child, then maybe we will believe what they have to say.” Louise’s mother asked for priesthood bearers to bless the child, hoping they would come immediately. She was disappointed when they promised to come after the conference. When Perrenoud said that the men would purposely wait to come until after Louise had died, however, Louise’s mother asserted her continuing faith. “They will raise her from the dead,” she responded. But the elders soon arrived, and Louise’s condition improved shortly after they blessed her, astonishing the doctor.²⁶

As was common in Utah examples, Louise’s story focused on a miraculous healing. In her piece, however, the references to her father’s commitment to church service and her mother’s responses to their landlord’s challenge emphasize fidelity in the face of skepticism, social marginalization, and disappointment. The story served not only as evidence of divine presence but also as justification for the family’s religious identity. While Louise signed the statement, the document also notes attestations of its accuracy by her parents and one of the elders who helped with the blessing. For Louise, the dynamics of conversion provided a comparable substitute for the pioneer experiences that the Treasures of Truth program was initially designed to capture.²⁷

Bee-Hive work was also expanding internationally and becoming part of the YLMIA experience around the world. In Germany, thousands of Latter-day Saint women were involved in auxiliary work over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, YLMIA membership was becoming established as a marker of religious identity for the growing cohort of young women raised in the church in Germany.

On 24 October 1934, fourteen-year-old Helga Meiszus in Tilsit (then in the German state of Prussia; now Sovetsk, Russia) placed a seal in the health section of her Bee-Hive handbook. It was her first seal—a mark of achievement in the program, earned by going three consecutive months without missing a day of school or work due to illness. In the months that followed, she passed off additional requirements and pasted seals into the sections in her manual for religion, home, health, handicrafts, out-of-doors, business, and public service.²⁸ Around the same time, the Nazi party began strongly encouraging young women her age to join the League of German Girls. Helga asked her mother if she might enlist. Her mother told her no. “You are a Beehive girl,” she explained. “You don’t need to belong to that group.”²⁹ Over the next four and a half years, Helga passed off dozens of Bee-Hive requirements. Like all participants in the Bee-Hive program, she chose a special name. Hers was “Edelmut,” a combination of Edelweiss, the personal symbolic flower she chose as part of her Bee-Hive program, and Mut, the German word for courage. She drank warm water each morning as recommended in the health section, attended sacrament meetings, bore her testimony at fast and testimony meetings, made clothing, performed household chores, prepared meals, visited local sites of interest, and completed dozens of other requirements. Almost a century later, her carefully preserved German Bee-Hive manual, decorated with hand-colored illustrations, attests to her dedication in performing these tasks and her reverence for her Bee-Hive membership.³⁰

Although there were already groups of Saints in Germany before the founding of the YLMIA in the 1870s, the book Helga used was among the first efforts to translate a YLMIA manual into a language other than English. In 1926 a woman in the church in Hamburg translated a few parts of the English handbook and organized a few girls into a swarm. That same year, Sarah Richards Cannon, who led the Swiss-German Mission alongside her husband, Hugh, proposed integrating the Bee-Hive program into the existing MIA work of the mission. She gathered a committee to work out a translation of the handbook, which included alterations to meet the particular needs of the young women in that area, and it was published early in 1927.³¹ The committee, including three native German speakers, published an improved and enlarged second edition in 1928.³² This second German edition of the Bee-Hive Girls handbook was the one Helga used to guide her work.

The 1928 handbook represented an adapted editorial vision rather than a simple translation. The German version of the handbook omitted altogether some sections found in English, such as descriptions of awards. Some sections were shortened—for example, only five of the thirteen songs in the handbook used by young women in the United States were translated into German. Other sections were extended. The German handbook contained coursework for three full years rather than just one, as was the American custom. The German version also included supplemental material to help young women understand the principles behind the program’s requirements. There was, for example, only one line in the English version instructing young women to “know what a girl of her age ought to know of the physiology of her own body.” In the German version, there was an entire chapter on the subject, which credited a Swiss medical doctor for his review of the material.³³

Some parts of the manual indicate clearly that the committee sought to adapt the handbook to German culture. At the end of one article, for example, the committee added a verse by the well-known German writer Friedrich Rückert to poetically express and summarize the ideas:

Before each person stands an image

of what he ought to be:

And for as long as he’s not that,

he’ll never know peace fully.³⁴

The YLMIA general board was delighted with the advancement of MIA work in German-speaking countries. Within a few months of the January 1927 publication of the Bee-Hive handbook in German, the Young Woman’s Journal reported that the young women of the Basel Branch in Switzerland had “made remarkable progress and shown much enthusiasm for the new activity.” Two swarms had been created, with swarm names and symbols, under the guidance of well-trained local Bee-Keepers.³⁵ By 1929, the organizations not only in the German-speaking missions but also in the Netherlands Mission had run consistently for two full years, and several swarms in Great Britain were likewise approaching two-year anniversaries.³⁶ By the early 1930s, translations of the Bee-Hive handbook were in full swing across the European missions. Girls in France were also forming swarms, and young women in Denmark and other Scandinavian countries quickly followed. When they began their work, they did so from books in their own languages.³⁷

The growing emphasis on establishing MIA programs outside of Latter-day Saint–majority areas increased the responsibilities placed on mission leaders, who oversaw all church work outside of stakes in the western United States and Canada and reported to leaders at church headquarters. At the time, mission presidents’ wives acted as Relief Society mission presidents and were responsible for overseeing the work of Relief Society, YLMIA, and Primary in the missions and improving the experience of women and children in mission branches.³⁸ These responsibilities could be daunting. At a conference of Relief Society mission presidents in Europe, some of the women felt they were attempting to accomplish extraordinary tasks and expressed the need for help in effectively running the growing organizations. These mission leaders then wrote to the First Presidency in Salt Lake City, requesting that they send trained women from Utah, perhaps even female missionaries, to help.³⁹

The First Presidency responded by encouraging them to find local women to train as leaders. “It is not at all necessary,” wrote the First Presidency, “for the mission president’s wife to supervise all women’s work in the mission.” They believed that many local members, though new to the organization of the church, could successfully serve in the auxiliaries.⁴⁰ Relief Society mission presidents heeded that counsel and resolved to appoint local presidents for each auxiliary, along with two counselors and a secretary. They also chose district supervisors and worked toward finding more leaders.⁴¹ Once assigned, local leaders in Europe collaborated with mission leaders to adapt, implement, and expand the YLMIA.

In other regions, too, the YLMIA was often run by local members, while many priesthood leadership positions were filled by missionaries from Utah and other areas heavily populated by Latter-day Saints. When the mission in Japan closed in 1924 because of political tension, mission leaders directed the handful of Latter-day Saints in the country not to hold any meetings other than those for the MIA. Japanese Latter-day Saints organized a joint MIA the month after missionaries left. The first issue of their newsletter expressed hope that the MIA would be a path to light in the present darkness. That hope proved crucial—MIA meetings and newsletters were the primary church contact for Latter-day Saints in Japan until after World War II.⁴²

In Mexico, where criticism of foreign clergy had become an important part of the national discourse, disagreements about the urgency of appointing local leaders led to a period, from 1936 to 1946, in which about one-third of local Latter-day Saints refused to recognize mission leadership and instead established a break-off church group known as the Third Convention.⁴³ Although the MIA organizations were relatively new to Mexico at the time of the schism—efforts to establish MIAs across central Mexico began in 1934—Third Convention members nevertheless installed MIAs in their congregations.⁴⁴ That a break-off group concerned with asserting Mexican leadership and culture continued with MIA activities suggests that, despite being shaped by norms of congregations in the United States, the organizations were valued locally rather than being perceived primarily as a colonial incursion. Years later, when most members of the Third Convention rejoined the body of the church, MIA programs of drama, speech, dance, and music were featured prominently at the reunification conference. Rather than being passive spectators to the end of a decade-long division in the church, young women in Mexico played an active part in bringing their religious community back together.⁴⁵

The MIAs’ successful movement outward unfolded at the same time as anxieties increased over what it would mean for Latter-day Saint youth to move “onward with Mormon ideals.” As the 1929 stock market crash in the United States gave way to a lingering economic depression rather than the rapid recovery many had hoped for, it grew harder to sustain the effusive confidence of the Progressive Era. While the terms progress and progressive had animated developments in the MIA in recent decades, now the term modern came to the fore, reflecting the sense that the Saints were living in a new world and a new social order—one with a difficult-to-define mix of progress and peril. In the Intermountain West, where a large percentage of Latter-day Saints lived, unemployment was rampant, reaching 35.9 percent in Utah in 1932, and per capita income had fallen by almost 50 percent since 1929.⁴⁶ Nationally, young people suffered the highest unemployment rate of any group—only an estimated 6 to 10 percent of recent high school graduates could find work.⁴⁷ College enrollments grew in the absence of job opportunities, but students subsisted from semester to semester, living on meager rations and unsure whether they could afford to continue classes.⁴⁸ While the emotional toll of shrinking household incomes affected each family differently, a collective strain was clear. By 1932, some two hundred thousand young Americans had left their homes altogether to wander the country.⁴⁹ In one joint MIA board meeting, YMMIA board member Oscar Kirkham estimated despairingly that over five thousand young Latter-day Saint men were drifting without schooling or employment.⁵⁰

MIA leaders brought different life experiences and perspectives to bear on the challenges of the era. Through the early twentieth century, the impulse to engage with the world had dominated the MIA’s focus. Faced with the crises of the 1930s, leaders were divided over what to do. Several YMMIA board members were university professors, and their campus experience and academic training influenced the discussion. This meant that much of the concern focused on youth ages eighteen to twenty-four and especially on college students, who were confronting challenges to their faith in their studies, especially in philosophy and science. While this segment of the Latter-day Saint population was certainly a numeric minority, it did fall within MIA age, and leaders believed these young people represented general trends in the church and society.⁵¹

YLMIA board member Elsie Talmage Brandley shared many perspectives with the professors on the boards. Brandley’s background predisposed her to feel open to intellectual change rather than embattled by it. Her father, James E. Talmage, was a geologist and university president who became an apostle when she was fifteen. In contrast to her contemporary and college friend, Camilla Eyring, she’d had little cause to argue with her parents over perceived conflicts between science and religion, because in Brandley’s home, the two fields had existed in harmony.⁵²

In October 1933, Brandley and her husband attended a dinner social for members of the general boards of the YLMIA and YMMIA and their spouses. J. Reuben Clark Jr., a former MIA board member and newly appointed counselor in the church’s First Presidency, attended. Since joining the First Presidency that spring, he had reviewed church policies, conducted church business, and represented the church in secular affairs.⁵³ He now turned his attention to the MIA. “President Clark had been invited to speak, and made the most of it by speaking with alarming frankness about MIA work,” Brandley noted. “It had the admirable effect of waking up the Boards, both of which have needed some waking for a long time,” she added.⁵⁴

Though no one appears to have taken detailed notes on what Clark said to “wake up” the boards, subsequent discussions at board meetings make clear that he reproached them for not being sufficiently grounded in the spiritual and religious truths of the restored gospel. Just two weeks later, apostle John A. Widtsoe, recently returned from presiding over the European Mission, issued a similar rebuke. While overseeing the translation of MIA manuals, he thought they contained too much material that resembled university extension courses. “Unless we flavor all we do, all we have, with the message of the Prophet Joseph Smith,” he insisted, “we are far afield.”⁵⁵

Such critiques were not new. Concerns about the potential to underemphasize spirituality had arisen alongside the organizations’ recreation emphasis, and leaders had worked all along to fortify the testimony-building purposes of their programs. Given their official assignment of overseeing recreation for the church, the MIAs had taken pains to articulate the importance of teaching the gospel through activities while simultaneously offering a great deal of explicitly religious content. In the 1920s, slogans—and their accompanying talks, discussions, and activities—had proclaimed belief in divine guidance, the divinity of Christ, the truth of Joseph Smith’s work, and the divine origin of the Book of Mormon.⁵⁶ Critique from a counselor in the First Presidency and an apostle, however, could not be ignored. Clark’s address to the MIA boards represented a forceful new iteration of the impulse toward spiritual retrenchment.

Shaken but mobilized by Clark’s and Widtsoe’s charges, the boards appointed a joint Survey Committee, headed by Widtsoe. The committee was to conduct a thorough evaluation of the YLMIA, the YMMIA, and their programs to root out redundancy and gauge whether they were sufficiently focused on spiritual matters. The committee set to work right away, meeting at least twice a week between November 1933 and March 1934. Meanwhile, other committees immediately began reorienting the curriculum then in development toward distinctly Latter-day Saint teachings.⁵⁷ Having received what they considered authoritative guidance from ranking priesthood leaders, they quickly aligned themselves.

As the boards waited for the results of the Survey Committee’s work, they began to address Clark’s and Widtsoe’s concerns in the early months of 1934, engaging in a series of far-reaching discussions about youth, the changing world, and the church. Their discussions revealed diverging assumptions and approaches—between the church and the world, certainly, but also within the church itself.⁵⁸ At the first general board testimony meeting of the year, Elsie Brandley observed that some of the differences between leaders’ responses might reflect their own generational perspectives. “There is always much said that is helpful,” she wrote. “Always much to make the young ones realize that they are too impulsive; always much to make us realize that some of the old ones have lost the touch of youth and the understanding and tolerance necessary if they are to touch the lives of youth at all.”⁵⁹ Brandley also reflected on generational considerations during local visits to youth. At one local discussion of chastity with a group of Junior class members, she noted differences from her own still-recent youth. “They asked questions which, 15 years ago, we should not have known enough to ask, and, if we had, would have been too embarrassed to mention,” Brandley noted.⁶⁰ Meeting with another Junior class on the same subject, she found herself reflecting on the MIAs’ messaging power. “As I looked at them I wondered how many of them were believing a word of what I was saying,” she wrote. “With the floods of moving pictures, books and magazine stories which paint the matter of sex contacts so alluringly, it is small wonder that old ideas of morality go down. I should like to know how the older generation who think they would be so strong under any conditions would have reacted to the powerful influences of today—in their own youth.”⁶¹

Brandley heard others at board meetings raise related observations about the challenges young people faced. Helen Spencer Williams observed that young people wanted new ways of doing things and they felt that changing situations made information obsolete unless it was adjusted to meet the changes.⁶² Arthur Beeley noted that economic uncertainty was a major factor in young people’s mindset: “The young people today are facing many problems and are truly wondering whether there is any future for them.”⁶³ In keeping with the paradigm of improvement through engagement, George Q. Morris pointed out that the Saints did not live in isolation and needed to engage with the world around them.⁶⁴ BYU president Franklin Harris agreed: “We want to make our teaching in MIA, and our preaching, and all of our work fit the modern world just as much as we can.”⁶⁵

Many other board members, though, worried like Clark and Widtsoe that too much fealty to worldly ideas eroded young people’s foundational witness of the distinctive aspects of Latter-day Saint belief. In particular, board members worried that young people did not believe in Joseph Smith’s first vision of Deity and the other miracles that led to the establishment of the church, the revelation of divine truths, and the restoration of priesthood authority.⁶⁶ This concern registered a sense that modern ways of thinking posed a threat to belief in God’s direct intervention in the world. Leaders did not blame perceived spiritual shortcomings solely, or even primarily, on youth. “I consider that our teaching is poor,” said Rose Bennett.⁶⁷ While they criticized poor leadership, some board members were also concerned about teachers who contradicted spiritual truth claims. Nicholas G. Smith said that one of his sons had told him about an Aaronic Priesthood leader with openly divergent beliefs, explaining, “He doesn’t believe in Joseph Smith’s visions; he doesn’t think there is anything divine about what has come to pass in the organization of our Church.”⁶⁸ Herbert Maw noted particular concern on behalf of college students, who also faced unbelieving professors and fellow students who actively tried to undermine their faith.⁶⁹ Joseph Fielding Smith, son of former church president Joseph F. Smith, related his experience with one young man at the University of Utah who Smith said was “literally going through Gethsemane with his faith,” wanting to believe but finding it rationally impossible.⁷⁰ Since the MIA was the only contact many young people had with the church, he said, it was critical that youth leaders guide their attitudes correctly.⁷¹

Smith also noted a desire among many young people to gain experience of their own through meaningful church service. “I need a project,” one young man had lamented, wishing for something on par with the heroic undertaking of the pioneers.⁷² Bennett and others noted that returned missionaries especially wanted a chance to lead and participate meaningfully in the church.⁷³ Board members had also observed that young people wanted the church to take a more active approach to dealing with the economic devastation occurring all around. The discussions among board members revealed that there were, indeed, deep-seated disagreements about what the church should do—even what it should become—in the face of modernity.⁷⁴

This debate among Latter-day Saints reflected larger currents in the American religious landscape of the 1930s. Mainline Protestant denominations experienced a “religious depression” as they lost their once-dominant place in society amid a wave of spiritual decline and skepticism rooted in the disillusionment that followed World War I. Mainline Protestantism had in recent decades sought to reconcile faith and science, emphasized ethics over doctrine, and prioritized unity over a distinction between the church and the world. Meanwhile, seemingly marginal fundamentalist and evangelical movements were vibrant and growing, offering resistance to both secular modernism and mainstream Protestantism.⁷⁵ Catholicism was also rising in numbers and influence as millions of Catholics immigrated to the United States. It was a critical period for the development of American religious pluralism, and most religious groups were working to respond to challenges posed by science (especially evolution), sociology, and philosophy—challenges exacerbated by the seeming inadequacy of religion to address the acute devastation of the Depression.⁷⁶ “A change has come over the spirit of our times, and the old faiths and hopes no longer carry conviction, when stated in the old terms,” lamented one Protestant theologian, echoing the sense of religious crisis that Latter-day Saints perceived in their community.⁷⁷ After several young women were invited to share their feelings in a board meeting, Brandley observed that “some of the girls are almost tragic in their feeling that the Church is not feeding them the bread of life.”⁷⁸

During the February 1934 board meetings, divisions among YMMIA board members deepened. Arthur Beeley and Ephraim Ericksen, who had served faithfully on the board for many years, both believed the church needed to adapt to the modern world, which to them meant emphasizing the ethical, social, and broadly spiritual aspects of the gospel. Addressing both MIA boards, Beeley suggested that the youth of the church felt “some of the very literal things, such as faith, repentance, baptism, etc.” were less important than the vision laid out in the thirteenth article of faith, which indicated that the goal of a religious life was to find goodness and beauty.⁷⁹ Similarly, Ericksen believed the church’s teachings had the potential to produce the best young people in the world and build a community committed to beauty, truth, and justice. These fruits, he felt, would demonstrate that Joseph Smith was a prophet.⁸⁰

Ericksen and Beeley did not believe that modernity had to be resisted. They interpreted their religion through modernist lenses, less concerned with visions, angels, and miracles than with the application of spiritual truths and religious energies to create a community focused on human flourishing. Like Protestant modernists, they believed that modern times required a modern reinterpretation of the gospel to make it relevant—even comprehensible—to the rising generation. Clark and Widtsoe, on the other hand, believed that the new social order brought about by modernity required the church to stand apart from the culture and assert its independence as a corrective to the secularizing tendencies threatening to overtake religion’s unique claims. In their view, a proclamation of visions, angels, and miracles was exactly what the modern world needed. Above all, these were the basis for Latter-day Saints’ identity and for their mandate to offer something uniquely true to the world. Latter-day Saints were at a crossroads in the early 1930s, and the MIAs were at the forefront as the church navigated the new territory of modernity.

At the joint board meeting on 14 March 1934, Elsie Brandley read the Survey Committee’s full thirty-page report aloud.⁸¹ “Changes of great extent and deep import have come over the world since the founding of the Mutual Improvement Associations,” the introduction read. “A different religious outlook has seized upon humanity.” The church was trying to keep pace without yielding fundamental principles.⁸² The report affirmed the purposes of the MIAs, including the goal of making true Latter-day Saints and teaching the gospel through applied religion.⁸³

A substantial section of the report presented a more focused philosophy for MIA activities. In the past, and in keeping with the Saints’ goal of being a self-sufficient community, leaders had attempted to keep young Latter-day Saints entirely within the auspices of the church by creating programs that offered alternatives to popular clubs and commercial facilities. But times had changed. The report asserted that the MIAs should no longer attempt to duplicate or compete with the many social offerings sponsored by private and public entities, including recreation and extension programs offered by schools and colleges. Though the MIAs were advised to continue holding activities, the report instructed them to focus on their own purposes and treat secular subjects only under special circumstances and with a spiritual focus. This change was a recognition that Latter-day Saints in Utah coexisted with secular institutions to a far greater degree than they had in prior generations.⁸⁴

The report affirmed Clark and Widtsoe’s view that faith in distinctive elements of Latter-day Saint belief was of paramount importance. Along with repeatedly emphasizing the importance of the spiritual orientation in all MIA activities and offering recommendations for enhancing it, the survey report insisted on spiritual qualifications for MIA leaders: “All MIA officers and other MIA leaders [shall] be chosen with reference to their fitness for MIA service,” the report stated, including “their acceptance of the principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as restored by the Prophet Joseph Smith—that is, they must be real Latter-day Saints.”⁸⁵

As the board discussed the report, questions arose as to what the committee meant by “spiritualizing our program.”⁸⁶ In response, Widtsoe clarified at the next meeting. Spiritual things dealt with the influence of the Spirit or the sacred things of the church, he said. Cultural matters could impart moral training but did not account for the sacred nature of the church and its doctrine. Spiritualizing MIA programs meant that every part must increase faith in God, Jesus Christ, the plan of salvation, and the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as the fundamental claims and principles of the Latter-day Saints. Furthermore, activities should be conducted in harmony with Latter-day Saint practices, and leaders were to teach the place of every activity in the gospel plan. “Any subject which cannot be so treated should not form part of the MIA program,” Widtsoe argued.⁸⁷ This definition explicitly laid out ideas and imperatives that had been expressed before but never fully codified. Now there was a clear standard for moving forward.

On Saturday, 9 June 1934, Elsie Brandley delivered an address titled “The Religious Crisis of Today” to over three thousand stake and ward MIA leaders gathered in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in Salt Lake City for the annual June Conference. “In the religious situation confronting us today the world finds old conditions inadequate,” she declared. “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is having no more and perhaps much less difficulty in making religious adjustment than are others, but it is no longer possible for the Church to remain apart from the world.” As she described how young people were asking questions, discovering new ideas, and pushing back against the ideas of past generations, as youth had ever done, she related the story of a geologist who—when loose shale suddenly shifted under his feet—avoided a deadly fall by clinging to the roots of a tree. “To the fundamental roots of Church belief we cling; to them we anchor our faith; in them we believe.” At the same time, she said, young people needed room to find their own ways to reconcile fundamental beliefs with an openness to new ideas and innovations. “Instead of making religious truths a bone of contention and source of differences, should we not, as leaders and individuals, try to make them a means of bringing order and harmony out of apparent confusion?” Leaders and parents must allow a legitimate place for inquiry in building a testimony, she affirmed, pleading with adults to listen empathetically to the concerns and questions of young people. “Never bid them be silent but inspire them to cry out to you the innermost questions of their souls.”⁸⁸

Brandley’s talk was one of four delivered in the morning session by MIA leaders, all of which reflected the theme of the conference: “Youth and the New Day.” The talks and the theme grew out of the discussions about spirituality and modernity that had occupied the general boards for much of the year.⁸⁹ Melvin J. Ballard spoke about “Morality and the New Day,” affirming the need for chastity despite deteriorating standards in society.⁹⁰ Oscar A. Kirkham reflected on new challenges facing Latter-day Saint youth in his talk, “Latter-day Saint Youth and the New Day,” and Joseph Fielding Smith addressed “The Glorious Possibilities for Us of the Religious Crisis.” The essence of revelation, Smith proclaimed, was “to interpret truth in terms of present world conditions for the immediate benefit of mankind.” He agreed with the other speakers that the church, with its access to continuing revelation through divinely inspired prophets, was uniquely positioned to respond to the modern world.⁹¹ All four speakers also emphasized that MIA workers must respond to the needs of youth and be willing to adapt to present conditions.

The new slogan for the 1934–35 year, which was announced at the conference, was “By My Actions I Will Prove My Allegiance to the Church.” Acknowledging that the slogan had grown out of board discussions about youth problems, leaders said they chose it because of its “especial appropriateness to the present time” in hopes that it would “serve to awaken a new standard of loyalty to Mormon ideals on the part of both the young and old.”⁹² The slogan and the talks were optimistic and affirming, but by implicitly acknowledging deep concerns, they revealed the tension that underlay them. It is impossible to know how individual local leaders interpreted the messages; certainly interpretations varied. But it seems likely that the ambivalence the talks reflected was widely felt in the community.

Delegates to the MIA conference learned the results of the board’s discussions and the recommendations in the Survey Committee report about changes to programs. In an engaging talk likening the boards to architects and local leaders to builders and decorators, Clarissa Beesley affirmed that they were all working together to build a great MIA program. This year the architects had reviewed the blueprints more carefully than ever and had determined upon some significant remodeling to the MIA “house.” No longer would cultural activities revolve around contests. These events had been popular features of the MIA for two decades, but like a home’s formal parlor, contests were exclusionary—eventually there was only one winner among hundreds of hopeful contestants. Board members wanted instead a “joyous ‘living room’” where all were welcomed and valued without competition. “Life is a contest,” Beesley acknowledged, “but it was never meant to be a struggle of individual against individual.”⁹³ In that “sweet Gospel spirit,” the contests at June Conference would eventually be replaced by grand festivals in which thousands could participate.

Beesley announced that individuals would receive recognition in their wards for MIA participation and attendance and that the Tuesday-night MIA schedule would now alternate between lessons and cultural activities instead of trying to fit both into each weekly meeting. To complement this change, manuals would be written more simply and guided more distinctly by Latter-day Saint principles.⁹⁴

In addition to the changes Beesley announced, other important changes to MIA programs and structures resulted from the same discussions about the changing religious landscape that had led to the formation of the Survey Committee and their report. Among the most significant of these for the YLMIA was a change in its name, a move that had been considered for at least two years.⁹⁵ On 28 March 1934, the board voted to rename the organization the Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association (YWMIA).⁹⁶ Two months later, Ruth May Fox and her counselors sent a letter to the First Presidency requesting approval. In the letter, the leaders explained that they thought the term women was more up to date than ladies—it was stronger and more dignified.⁹⁷ These comments suggest that the name change reflected the recent discussions of modernity. In considering the conjoint relationship of the MIAs, young women apparently seemed parallel to young men in a way that young ladies no longer did. Five days later, the First Presidency replied, approving the change.⁹⁸ It was announced in the Deseret News with little fanfare shortly thereafter.⁹⁹

One direct result of the Survey Committee report was a recommendation that the Improvement Era become the official magazine to represent the voice of the church’s leadership to the members. Each monthly issue would contain a message from the First Presidency.¹⁰⁰ The recommendation was taken, and over the ensuing years, the magazine continued to run monthly columns containing “Mutual Messages,” but the magazine itself became less youth oriented, and the perspectives and voices of women became even less prominent than they had become since the Era’s merger with the Young Woman’s Journal. To fill the need for a regular means of communication with stake and ward leaders, the MIAs took another suggestion from the Survey Committee report and started their own monthly newsletter, the MIA Leader, in August 1934. The Leader published program and organizational announcements and the kind of practical details that were no longer appearing in the Era.¹⁰¹

Even after the Survey Committee’s injunction to spiritualize the MIAs, local organizations continued to facilitate socialization among the youth in their areas. Outside of Utah, especially, MIA participation created opportunities for young Latter-day Saints who often lived as part of a tiny minority to associate with other members of their faith. Geographically separated branch MIA groups traveled to meet for games and dances. In many areas, attending MIA activities was also an accessible way for people outside the church to become acquainted with the church and its members. Many missions began holding large MIA conferences like those in Utah, where church members gathered for contests (which proved persistent at the local level even after being discontinued at June Conference) and training in MIA programs.

In September 1934, Elsie Brandley embarked on a three-week trip to visit MIA organizations in Arizona, northern Mexico, Texas, and California.¹⁰² The trip powerfully demonstrated the role MIAs played in the church’s missions as both a meeting place for youth and a bridge to the larger community. While staying in the Safford, Arizona, home of her college friend, Camilla Eyring Kimball, Brandley met a local MIA board member who was not a church member. His interest in drama had led him into the MIA.¹⁰³ At a stop in northern Mexico, a government education official attended every session of the MIA conference. Since Mexico’s laws at the time limited the activities of foreign clergy, Brandley suspected the official’s role was to watch for actions that might be violations. “Naturally we all were slightly worried as to what impression he might be getting,” she wrote. The official’s address at the conclusion of the conference, however, put such fears to rest: “He stated that the program of this organization was one which Mexico might borrow to put into their own system for culture and education combined was the ideal toward which they were striving.”¹⁰⁴

Nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint relations with neighbors of other faiths had often been characterized by conflict. Now MIA events were helping Latter-day Saints position themselves as a welcome minority. In the southern United States, where there were relatively few members and a history of prejudice, MIA activities became a vital community outreach program. A Halloween party for a Tallahassee, Florida, MIA group with only seven enrolled members drew a total attendance of seventy people from the community.¹⁰⁵ The stake in Oahu, Hawaii, timed one MIA conference to coincide with larger community musical events. Different wards were assigned songs to prepare as part of a shared MIA program featuring Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Samoan, Hawaiian, and American music.¹⁰⁶ In such events, Saints were showing they could contribute something in addition to the gospel message to their communities. In Ottawa, Canada, an MIA for people who were blind drew large crowds to its bowling nights and other events. Almost none were members of the church.¹⁰⁷ “Some of our Mutual organizations are entirely among the non-members of the Church,” Adelaide Thompson Poananga of New Zealand reported. People who were not members of the church also made up the majority of attendees at a Gold and Green Ball in New Zealand, which was so popular by the late 1930s that some guests traveled three hundred miles to attend.¹⁰⁸

While nineteenth-century church leaders had warned against the MIA becoming a place for romance and courting, the potential of the MIA to foster romantic relationships and marriages between Latter-day Saints became increasingly important in the twentieth century. In central Mexico, MIA gatherings attracted hundreds of participants.¹⁰⁹ Members from church branches in different towns and cities came together to play sports, perform in dramas, and dance. At one 1935 conference in San Marcos, Hidalgo, a young woman named Porfiria Monroy helped receive visiting youth when they arrived. Guillermo Balderas, who had just moved from El Paso, Texas, to Mexico City, fondly remembered that conference, which was his first in the country. After dinner and an evening program, he and other youth from Mexico City were invited to stay and sleep on the chapel benches. In the morning, they rose early for a breakfast of bean tacos and orange tea. Guillermo and Porfiria met and developed a romantic relationship at that conference, and Guillermo looked forward to future MIA conferences as chances to see Porfiria again. Soon, they began writing each other between conferences. Guillermo treasured the memory of giving Porfiria a first gift at one of the conferences—a pair of earrings. The two were married the next year.¹¹⁰

Participating in MIA events also helped Latter-day Saints from smaller branches form a religious identity and feel like part of a broader religious community. In many areas, simply gathering young Saints was a major goal of MIA. For years, Latter-day Saints in New Zealand had gathered for an annual six-day conference and cultural event known as the Hui Tau. By the late 1930s, roughly twenty-five hundred people attended each year.¹¹¹ In addition to participating in sport and song, MIA members performed haka and poi dances. These performances allowed for a fusion of Latter-day Saint beliefs and Māori modes of expression. As Adelaide Poananga wrote in a published report, “Our hakas are given with a Gospel theme being the foundation. Our poi dances and action songs are all based upon some beautiful theme in the scriptures.” Youth speakers also addressed the massive Hui Tau crowds. Poananga praised the young people’s speeches for their oratorical craft. “Many of them are extremely clever,” she wrote.¹¹²

In the Puget Sound district, located in Washington state and British Columbia, young Latter-day Saints gathered together across the border between the United States and Canada for basketball tournaments, banquets, dances, and special events like a snow carnival.¹¹³ At a conference in Sweden, members celebrated the publication of a Swedish MIA handbook and joined voices in MIA songs translated into Swedish.¹¹⁴ In 1936, seven hundred German-speaking youth from across central Europe gathered in Berlin, where Gleaners danced with M Men at a Gold and Green Ball and eighty people sang in a choir.¹¹⁵ Hundreds of Dutch church members traveled by bicycle, bus, train, boat, and even hitchhiking to the seaport city of Rotterdam for an annual Primary and MIA conference. In addition to engaging in various competitions among the MIA members, participants gathered to watch several rugby matches, cheering on their various local teams until a hailstorm eventually forced them indoors. For young Latter-day Saints from small branches, the experience of being with so many peers who shared their faith was striking.¹¹⁶

In Britain, the MIA brought young Latter-day Saints together to forge a shared identity. On Saturday, 8 June 1935, for example, MIA members and leaders from Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and “the four corners of England” assembled in Kidderminster in Worcestershire, England, for a huge three-day conference.¹¹⁷ The event had been heralded in the Millennial Star for months in an ambitious attempt to give British Latter-day Saints an experience similar to that of the annual June Conference in the United States.¹¹⁸

Events were designed for individual young women and young men to share their stories and mingle. Saturday included young women’s choral performances, M Men public-speaking competitions, and strolls through exhibitions of Bee-Hive scrapbooks and Gleaner Treasures of Truth books. Though British Latter-day Saints did not drink tea, MIA events maintained the custom of a teatime break and small meal immediately after the contests.¹¹⁹ MIA members gathered for a “gala MIA flannel dance,” to which they wore casual cotton clothing rather than formal evening wear and danced to the music of a live band.¹²⁰ Sunday involved testimony meeting and general sessions with discourses from MIA board members and mission leaders. Even in such sessions, the theme of British Latter-day Saint identity remained. Reports on numbers of participants varied from three hundred to over four hundred, enough for reports to emphasize the “psychology in numbers” that members from small branches experienced by attending.¹²¹ In reports on the 1935 and 1936 Kidderminster conferences, the themes of group identity, local acculturation, socialization and the hope of marriage, and improved public relations were all on display.¹²²

In June 1937, YWMIA president Ruth May Fox and her counselors, Lucy Cannon and Clarissa Beesley, traveled to Europe with church president Heber J. Grant and a number of other church leaders. They disembarked from their ship, Empress of Australia, in Cherbourg harbor on the northwest coast of France, beginning a two-month tour of the European missions that would culminate in Preston, England, with a celebration of the hundred-year anniversary of the church’s presence in Britain. It was the first time a sitting YWMIA president had visited church members in Europe.¹²³

For Fox, the tour had personal meaning. She was born in England and had left the country as a young girl, crossing the plains with a pioneer company at the age of thirteen in 1867. Shortly before her departure from Salt Lake City, she spoke of the tour at June Conference, mentioning her lifelong desire to return and visit the country of her birth.¹²⁴ Once in Britain, she visited her hometown and, as part of the British centennial celebration a few days later on the banks of the River Ribble, told members that many of the same landmarks remained from her childhood memory, including a lake near her home that still had swans swimming in it. As part of a ceremony for the celebration, an Irish church member presented her with the Union Jack.¹²⁵

Various MIA events took place as part of the celebration. On Saturday, 31 July, Grant held a discussion with hundreds of young people and then heard speeches by several M Men and Gleaners. In addition to viewing sports events for the M Men, Gleaners, and Bee-Hive Girls, attendees at the celebration watched a baseball game in which the church president threw the first pitch. The local members had prepared a pageant, entitled The Everlasting Doors, that played to a capacity crowd and was repeated the next night because hundreds had been turned away the first evening.¹²⁶ Fox would remember the celebration for a long time to come.¹²⁷

The tour also made a powerful impression on Lucy Cannon, who kept a log of the travel and events along the way.¹²⁸ Her log proved to be a chronicle of Fox’s last major event as president of the YWMIA. In October 1937, shortly before her eighty-fourth birthday, Fox was released as president, and Cannon accepted the assignment to lead the organization with Helen Williams and Verna Wright Goddard as counselors.¹²⁹ Williams had experience in both MIA drama work and writing for local newspapers and church manuals, and Goddard led the YWMIA in the Liberty Stake.¹³⁰ For her part, Cannon was a daughter of Heber J. and Lucy Stringham Grant and was well-known for her kindness, her efforts to help those in need, and her ability to entertain guests, from everyday visitors to dignitaries.¹³¹ Cannon had served for decades in the YWMIA, beginning with her service as the president of her ward association at age eighteen and later on the YWMIA general board and as counselor to both Martha Horne Tingey and Fox.¹³² Cannon’s chance to visit Latter-day Saints in Europe in 1937 was fortuitous. For much of her eleven-year tenure as YWMIA president, such a visit would not be possible.

In September 1939, the expansionist policies of Germany’s Nazi government caused the outbreak of a war that seemed likely to engulf Europe. Church leaders in Europe and Utah had to make quick decisions regarding the hundreds of missionaries under their charge. Hugh B. Brown, president of the British Mission (whose headquarters were the church’s administrative center in Europe), coordinated with United States and British officials to return over 130 missionaries to the United States.¹³³ By 26 September, the First Presidency issued an official statement calling all missionaries in Europe home.¹³⁴ Brown himself went home in January 1940.¹³⁵

American missionaries’ long absence during the war helped put to rest assumptions that American missionary leadership was necessary to develop church organizations in different parts of the world. Members proved more than capable of carrying forward MIA work without American missionaries, even under difficult wartime conditions. In Oslo, Norway, the MIA continued work with its thousand or so youth through years of Nazi occupation, and various other districts and branches throughout the continent did their best to continue as well.¹³⁶ In Britain, eight months after the war’s outbreak, the Birmingham district held its annual MIA convention. Although it had to be cut short, forgoing the activities of the last day, the young people participated in public speaking, choral contests, and an evening dance. Local MIA leaders received instruction and hailed the vitality and spirituality of the youth.¹³⁷ Administrative work also marched on, with presidencies and board members released and assigned. For example, Edith Rees was released from her position on the YWMIA board in the Birmingham district, where she served as the mission Bee Keeper, to accept an appointment as the district’s YWMIA president in 1943.¹³⁸ Despite the toll of the war, the MIA in the newly formed London branch sponsored a dance in 1945 to raise funds for a seaside excursion for the branch’s children, and the Bristol branch MIA held a social where attendees enjoyed games and refreshments.¹³⁹ These and other local efforts to maintain organization and activity ensured that after the war there would be a foundation on which to rebuild.

While September 1939 marked a turning point for the MIA in Europe, there were no immediate effects on MIA work in the United States, which did not enter the war until December 1941. Even before the United States’ entry into the war, young people’s lives were changing rapidly. By 1940, 70 percent of teenage Americans were enrolled in high school, and the school year had expanded to 152 days, intensifying young people’s involvement in peer culture and strengthening their sense of distinct identity.¹⁴⁰ Terminology referring to young people was also changing: the term teen had come into use, initially mainly for girls, and teenager came into use to describe both girls and boys in the 1940s.¹⁴¹ Youth referred to young people in the eighteen- to twenty-four-year-old range. One could be a “youth” independent of marital or school enrollment status.¹⁴²

The 1939–1940 MIA executive handbook offers a sense of the rhythms of MIA activities for American young people during the period. The MIAs conducted an evening service for the whole ward on the first Sunday of each month. During this meeting, MIA members emphasized the annual theme, which for the 1939–1940 MIA year was a quotation from Matthew 22:37–40 exhorting love of God and love of fellowmen.¹⁴³ Each Tuesday evening from mid-September to mid-May, members of the MIA met for lessons and activities. Officers met first at 7:00; at 7:30, all gathered for opening exercises, which lasted around ten minutes. After opening exercises, the younger groups dispersed, and the older groups held an MIA assembly. At 8:10, the age groups separated to study lessons from the manual with their respective classes. Everyone gathered again at 9:00 for official dismissal, and then youth could participate in optional music, dance, speech, drama, or other recreational activities. During months with five Tuesdays, the MIA held special programs for the entire evening on the fifth Tuesday: one-act plays in October, an opera in January, and the ward Theme Festival and Honor Night in April.¹⁴⁴

Previously called MIA Day, the Theme Festival and Honor Night included performances to celebrate that year’s MIA theme and work.¹⁴⁵ Individual Honor Night programs varied, but they drew on the same traditions of performance and socializing. A ward in Logan, Utah, began its 1940 Honor Night with a picnic on the church lawn at 6:30 in the evening, followed by an indoor program at 7:30 that included a violin performance, a review of MIA accomplishments, a vocal solo, a story, a demonstration by the Scouts, a song, a dramatization, a speech, and another violin solo. Following the program, attendees socialized with one another and danced.¹⁴⁶ These elaborate annual events proved to be short lived. In February 1942, as the United States’ involvement in the Second World War intensified, a letter from the YWMIA general board to stake leaders requested they eliminate the Theme Festival and Honor Night on the stake level but continue to hold it as wards.¹⁴⁷

In the early 1940s, another tradition for recognizing achievement emerged. Requirements that built toward individual awards had a long history in the Bee-Hive program, and in 1940, the YWMIA also introduced the Golden Gleaner award for older members.¹⁴⁸ Young women had to participate in a minimum of three years of Gleaner work and fulfill requirements in four achievement areas: spiritual, executive, cultural arts, and creative.¹⁴⁹ When receiving their awards, young women in Nephi, Utah, described how they had met the requirements. Their descriptions of obeying the Word of Wisdom, paying a full tithe, serving in local YWMIA leadership, performing in a church play or opera cast, making a Treasures of Truth book, and arranging and living by a personal budget give a sense of how broad the work for Golden Gleaner could be.¹⁵⁰ Ward groups could also earn a related award for enrolling all eligible young women into their Gleaner class.¹⁵¹

The normal patterns of life for young Latter-day Saints in the United States changed substantially after their country entered the war. Military service had a disproportionate impact on the young. Statistics from Utah give a sense of the scale: About 130,000 men in Utah between ages eighteen and thirty-seven registered for the draft. In June 1941, six months before the attack at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, 7,000 Utahns were enlisted in the United States military, representing about 5 percent of the draftable population. By July 1945, over 60,000 Utah men—nearly half of those who had registered for the draft—had enlisted or been drafted. Just over 1,300 Utah women also served in the military.¹⁵² Virtually all women felt wartime changes as they or their friends and relatives went off for work or military service.

Emma Lou Warner, a Gleaner-age young woman from the Highland Park Ward in Salt Lake City, made frequent trips to the University of Utah library during the war.¹⁵³ An undergraduate student, she visited the library for schoolwork, but she also went to read the daily listings of missing, wounded, and dead in the Salt Lake Tribune.¹⁵⁴ One of her brothers was serving in the Naval Air Corps.¹⁵⁵ Though her brother ultimately came home safely, Emma Lou often read the names of people she knew in those listings. “The war was very close,” she later remembered.¹⁵⁶ Many of her classmates and their loved ones were off at war. Even those without family in active military service lived with the likelihood that someone they knew would be called up. And, of course, all regularly faced the loss of classmates, acquaintances, and loved ones from causes related to the war. While Emma Lou’s studies kept her close to home, many young women’s social networks changed as they moved for work. The mobilization of wartime industries finally broke the grip of the Great Depression and put people to work, but most of the work was concentrated around military bases or strategic factories and mines. Teen participation in the workforce tripled between 1940 and 1943, pulling young people into mass migration.¹⁵⁷

Utah was dramatically affected. The state’s available open land and location far from potential attacks from the Pacific theater made it an attractive center for training and military support.¹⁵⁸ By 1943, over 50,000 people were employed in defense industries in Utah, a staggering figure for a state with a total prewar population of roughly 550,000.¹⁵⁹ Many of those employees were young women, who often relocated from farming and ranching areas to take jobs in the defense industry or in supporting swelling populations near military bases or factories.¹⁶⁰ Between 1940 and 1943, Utah’s civilian population grew in only seven of the state’s twenty-nine counties, with the population in four counties near military installations or strategic mining growing by 20 to 65 percent. During the same three years, the civilian populations of the other twenty-two rural counties fell, with nine of them reduced by 20 to 45 percent.¹⁶¹

Mary Lue Knell was one of the YWMIA members who began working in Utah’s defense industry. Originally from Cedar City, she decided in 1942 to work for the Ogden Arsenal, some forty miles north of Salt Lake City. Mary Lue and her friends took turns driving from Salt Lake City to the arsenal each day, calling themselves the “Spinsters Club” and packing Spam sandwiches for lunch. They spent their days preparing ammunition for .50-caliber aircraft machine guns by linking the bullets into a belt-like strip and then packing them into metal boxes. On the days they didn’t have ammunition to pack, they worked on the railroad to pick up debris with pointed sticks. The job provided good wages, and Mary Lue and her friends continued working there on Saturdays when school started in the fall.¹⁶²

The young women were often joined in their work by Italian prisoners of war being held at the army depot in Ogden. Though the lack of a shared language made communication difficult, Mary Lue trusted the soldiers and enjoyed the Italian food the soldiers cooked for the young women. When Christmas arrived, the two groups overcame the language barrier as they joined in singing carols together, and before long, Mary Lue had learned at least one common expression in Italian: Ti voglio bene, expressing affection and friendship. She continued writing some of the Italian soldiers for a few years after the war had ended and they had returned to their homes in Naples.¹⁶³

With so many young people affected by the war, Latter-day Saint youth leaders wasted no time in responding. Immediately following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the MIA Leader published an urgent message to stake and ward leaders, outlining priorities and recommendations for maintaining courage and faith. Leaders encouraged MIA members to participate in home defense measures and civilian defense service. MIA programs were to move forward as normally as possible, and leaders were to redouble their efforts to make personal contact with the youth under their stewardship. They were also encouraged to provide opportunities for youth to hear talks from effective speakers that could provide stability and promote faith. “Our duty at the present time is to hold fast to fundamentals,” they stressed.¹⁶⁴

The First Presidency also released specific guidelines that affected MIA programs for the duration of the war. Because travel was restricted, stake leadership meetings, institutes, and conventions were suspended, placing greater responsibility on wards and branches to carry out the work.¹⁶⁵ June Conferences were canceled, and attendance at general conferences was sharply curtailed.¹⁶⁶ Under these difficult conditions, the YWMIA engaged in a memorable period of work and service shaped by a few overriding concerns: keeping track of and caring for young women, discouraging lapses in morality, and giving young women opportunities for meaningful service.

Reflecting on the sudden scramble to meet the wartime housing demand, the United States National Housing Agency called the war years “the greatest voluntary migration of free men and free women in history.” At a 1942 meeting in Ogden, Utah, near Hill Air Force Base, Major George Cressey pled with community and business leaders to prepare housing at an affordable rent (no more than $27.50 per month) for thousands of incoming civilian workers.¹⁶⁷ In such an environment, church leaders were concerned that young women would be unable to find housing that was adequately supervised and respectable. Since 1920, the YWMIA had operated the Beehive House in Salt Lake City as a boarding house for young, single women who came to the city for work or school.¹⁶⁸ The Beehive House was at full capacity throughout the war years, and the YWMIA made other efforts to secure housing for its members, though those efforts met with limited success. In 1943, board member Katie C. Jensen reported the YWMIA had connected just twelve hundred young women with appropriate housing, out of an estimated fourteen thousand young women who had come to the city for work. The low rate may have been related to the appeal of independence in the wartime economy—Jensen thought young women who had left home generally did not want supervision.¹⁶⁹

YWMIA leaders expressed deep concern about simply keeping track of the church’s young women. “They all belong to us!” proclaimed the MIA Leader, noting the influx of single young people and families with MIA-age children into many city wards. Local MIA leaders formed committees to coordinate with other auxiliaries to contact the new people—especially members of the church but also people who were not members—and invite them to participate in the church, using MIA social and recreational activities as an attraction.¹⁷⁰ YWMIA leaders were directed to expend every effort to find the young Latter-day Saint women who had moved to cities, including Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “Go into the thickly populated sections, into apartment houses, and homes and find these girls,” the Leader exhorted. “No other defense work is so important as this!”¹⁷¹

Despite efforts to connect migrants with local MIA organizations, YWMIA enrollment statistics showed an enormous drop by 1944.¹⁷² The general board discussed several possible measures that might address the problem, and the presidency composed a letter for local leaders to give to young women they contacted. “During the past year many of you have changed your way of living; you have left your homes and gone into the homes of strangers, into boarding homes or apartments. You have been to a great extent ‘on your own,’” they wrote. The letter stated that young Latter-day Saint women should have a clear understanding of their purpose and mission. Practicing their faith offered protection—attending worship services, paying tithing, keeping the Word of Wisdom, helping the poor, and avoiding the sins of the world would be safeguards to young women. The leaders admonished them to be frugal with their money and choose their friends carefully.¹⁷³

In the 1930s the church had increased efforts to find and keep track of every member. The terms active and inactive came into use around that time to describe Latter-day Saints’ level of participation, and auxiliaries were instructed to keep rolls of members in both categories.¹⁷⁴ During the war, the YWMIA revitalized a transfer card system—initially introduced in the 1920s—to help track the whereabouts of Latter-day Saint young women.¹⁷⁵ Under this system, ward leaders reported to stake leaders the names of young women who moved. Stake leaders compiled and submitted those names on specially printed transfer cards to the general office with their monthly reports. The YWMIA office staff sent those names to the stakes to which the young women had relocated, and the stake leaders then notified ward leaders of new young women to seek out, preferably by involving the other young people in the ward. In February 1944 alone, over two hundred young women were tracked through this system, which became one precursor to the general membership record eventually adopted churchwide.¹⁷⁶

Implicit in the desire to keep track of young women was a recognition that wartime conditions had created many new temptations. Latter-day Saints had long focused on Word of Wisdom observance as the foundation of clean living. Under Heber J. Grant’s continuing presidency, the Word of Wisdom received much emphasis throughout the church, including in the MIA through slogans, lessons, articles, pamphlets, and reports published throughout the 1930s and 1940s.¹⁷⁷ A two-year “Clean Life” campaign culminated in a booklet distributed to young women at a special meeting in May 1941 and a public show of solidarity at June Conference. Ten thousand young women and men stood in the Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City to verbally pledge their willingness to live by the high ideals of the clean life, inaugurating a campaign against alcohol and tobacco use that lasted through the war years.¹⁷⁸

In addition to observing the Word of Wisdom prohibitions on alcohol, tobacco, coffee, and tea, living the clean life meant adhering to high standards of sexual morality, a particularly pressing issue during the war. Wartime mobility fostered loneliness, anonymity, new acquaintances, and an absence of adult chaperones, all of which relaxed traditional sexual norms. In the United States, rates of divorce, births outside of wedlock, and venereal disease substantially increased during World War II, and women were often blamed for these trends.¹⁷⁹ Concerns about changing moral standards were not new. A decade earlier in the discussions surrounding the Survey Committee’s report, MIA leaders had lamented a decline in standards since World War I and had exhorted the youth to hold up their standards as a light to the world.¹⁸⁰

As soon as the United States entered World War II, MIA leaders identified sexual immorality as one of the major problems likely to arise. The boards’ letter to local leaders reminded them to emphasize the necessity of clean living, which included holding to strict standards of sexual conduct. Chaste thinking and behavior, board members emphasized, would lead to strength of body and mind and make Latter-day Saint youth an asset to the country.¹⁸¹ But they recognized that wartime psychology could undermine young people’s willingness to adhere to the high standards they had been taught. A pair of editorials in the Improvement Era warned against adopting fatalistic thinking during uncertain times, which they explained was “a tendency to shrug the shoulders and indulge, as they are wont to call it, in one ‘last fling.’” Such indulgences, the editorials argued, were delusions. They were not satisfying and would only pile up regret and disillusionment.¹⁸² Whatever sacrifices were necessary, those who remained steadfast would reap the rewards of living a good life, making intelligent sacrifices, and enriching their spirits.¹⁸³

While premarital sex was recognized as a sin for both men and women, the two genders received different messages about preventing sexual misconduct. There was a widespread assumption that male sexual desire was harder to control and more opportunistic than female desire. This view intensified the scrutiny of women and shifted responsibility to them for controlling sexuality—their own and men’s.¹⁸⁴ A 1942 address by Hugh B. Brown, who was a former Canadian military officer serving as coordinator for Latter-day Saint servicemen during the war, illustrated these assumptions. Titling his talk “To the Girls behind the Men behind the Guns,” Brown argued that anyone who allowed a soldier to give in to temptation weakened him and contributed to bringing down one of the nation’s “fighting men.” Even when men pled with women to give in, they really wanted their girlfriends to say no, he insisted. “To them you symbolize an ideal. Their thoughts of home, family, and the verities of life include you.”¹⁸⁵ YWMIA leaders considered the talk so timely and effective that they decided to have it published as a pamphlet for young women throughout the MIA.¹⁸⁶

Wartime conditions created further incentives to differentiate messages by gender. Because support for the military and patriotism were so intertwined, people were reluctant to criticize soldiers for sexual misconduct.¹⁸⁷ In a call to the broader Salt Lake community for awareness about the shifting sexual conditions young women faced, Marion Kerr, a lifelong member of the church who was then serving as president of the Salt Lake district of the Utah Federation of Women’s Clubs, told a local newspaper that girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen were particularly vulnerable to soldiers who were, she said, “lonesome, eager for a change in their programs, and anxious for companionship.”¹⁸⁸ Her language stopped short of condemning male soldiers preying on teenagers, even though sex with a young woman under the age of eighteen was a crime under Utah law.¹⁸⁹ The evidence of rising rates of misconduct was alarming: arrests in Utah for sexual offenses had increased sharply between 1942 and 1943 as the nation continued to mobilize and move troops.¹⁹⁰ Church and community leaders alike wanted to protect young women from the psychological, social, and spiritual risks they faced as local young men left for war or when young women found work in urban centers near military bases.

Not content to simply counsel young women about what not to do, YWMIA leaders worked to create positive alternatives that promoted feelings of connection and contribution in times of uncertainty. Improvement Era editor Marba Cannon Josephson asserted that young women’s best response to the war was to forget the troubling circumstances by finding something that absorbed their minds, exhausted their bodies, and awakened their spirits.¹⁹¹ The general board decided to plan social events for the thousands of young women pouring into Salt Lake City for employment. Responding to complaints that there were not enough respectable places in the city, they worked to create more.¹⁹² If fraternization was inevitable, they wanted to make the context as wholesome as possible and find meeting spaces where they could help protect their young women. General leaders of the MIA submitted a plan to the First Presidency and the Salt Lake–area MIA boards, which they thought could be replicated elsewhere. They suggested five social centers be designated in the area, with a monthly dance in each location, totaling five dances a month in the city. Stake and ward boards would make sure “dances were conducted under M.I.A. standards and regulations.” They also recommended that these social centers be open every day, including Sunday, and sponsor activities such as games, lectures, plays, book reviews, and music appreciation.¹⁹³ These plans apparently went unrealized, but they demonstrate the concerns that preoccupied YWMIA leaders during the war years.

Many on the home front during World War II responded to uncertainty and loss by wanting to do something, and there was plenty to do. The great, pioneer-scale project that youth in the 1930s had longed for had arrived. Like many others during the war, Emma Lou Warner rolled bandages for the Red Cross, just one of many activities young women could participate in to support the war effort.¹⁹⁴ The Lion House in downtown Salt Lake City regularly hosted such service and social activities for young women, either as church-sponsored events or in connection with outside organizations like the Red Cross.

Built between 1854 and 1855 as a residence for Brigham Young’s family, the Lion House had a long association with the church’s organization for young women.¹⁹⁵ In the Lion House parlor Brigham Young encouraged his daughters to retrench, setting them on the path to create the young women’s organization. In the early 1900s, when Young’s widows no longer lived in the house, it was converted into classrooms, a teaching kitchen, and a dining facility for students of the LDS University and later for church leaders, employees, and missionaries.¹⁹⁶ In 1932, at the request of YWMIA leaders, the building became a social center for young people.¹⁹⁷ There were rooms for sewing (including a sewing machine young women could use), reading, and gathering.¹⁹⁸ Members of the YWMIA who paid the Lion House’s one-dollar annual membership dues could host their friends in rooms there for a fee.¹⁹⁹

During the war, the Lion House’s position on Temple Square—a few hundred feet from the temple and adjacent to the Beehive House—made it an effective contact point for young women arriving in the city as part of the war effort. By January 1942, 150 women and girls were taking first aid classes at the Lion House, and many others had joined war-work clubs that met there. Lion House classes included standard first aid, knitting and hand sewing, and nutrition. Because of a yarn shortage, members of the Out-of-Towners Club unraveled donated garments and then the Defense Club knit them into new items. The Red Cross Service Club requested yarn donations, made afghans for veterans hospitals, and knit sweaters for the Red Cross.²⁰⁰

In wards and branches around the church, young women of the YWMIA engaged in countless service projects and war-support efforts. Writing letters to soldiers was one popular activity. The Gleaners of the Mill Creek Ward, south of Salt Lake City, attempted to write to all the young men serving from their ward, but with the number at fifty-six and counting, it was impossible to keep up. Consequently, they compiled a two-page newsletter that included news items, a birthday page, humorous items, and messages from the bishopric, stake presidency, and young men’s parents. With funding from the high priests quorum, they mimeographed the letter and sent it to the local young men in the service.²⁰¹ Young women in another ward held a clothing remodeling evening, deeming it patriotic to “conserve on clothes.”²⁰² In May 1943, the MIA invited participants to sponsor an aircraft rescue boat by purchasing stamps and war bonds.²⁰³ The Wasatch Ward in Salt Lake City reported that in June and July 1943, forty-eight girls spent 124 hours sewing for the Red Cross, twenty girls attended Red Cross nutrition classes, and eighteen girls wrote letters to soldiers in war zones.²⁰⁴ Around the same time, the YWMIA distributed a new plan for summer work entitled “The Wartime Summer Way for M.I.A.” The first part of the book covered first aid, home nursing, welfare gardens, home kindergarten for neighborhood children, and war bonds and stamps. The second portion covered recreational activities.²⁰⁵

Even in wartime, recreation was an important part of the YWMIA calendar, and camp was no exception. By the beginning of the war, camping was becoming a prominent part of the summer YWMIA program, particularly for Juniors and Bee-Hive Girls.²⁰⁶ During the 1930s, the MIA general boards had helped spread ideas about summer camps from a few stakes to the broader organization, launching a summer agenda that included sunset services and campfire programs, as well as plenty of outdoor activities such as hiking and folk dancing.²⁰⁷ In 1940, the efforts of central YWMIA leadership to extend camp experiences throughout the organization marked a turning point. The Bee-Hive committee of the YWMIA general board made their slogan “Every Girl in Summer Camp” and planned a separate camp experience for Bee-Hive Girls.²⁰⁸ The MIA Leader noted, “It is hoped that the [summer] Homes already established will be maintained with new interest and enthusiasm, and that all stakes will plan some activity in the out-of-doors for their girls.” More than nine thousand Bee-Hive participants attended camp in the summer of 1940.²⁰⁹ The crowded 1942 schedule for Mutual Dell, the summer home owned by the Lehi, Alpine, and Timpanogos stakes in Utah, demonstrates the increased popularity of camp during the war years. Mutual Dell was in constant use by these three stakes throughout the summer.²¹⁰

To help leaders produce a good camping experience, the general board introduced a camping manual, Camp-O-Rama, which served as the basic manual for summer camp in the YWMIA throughout the next two decades.²¹¹ Subsequent editions contained updates, including supplemental booklets such as Cooking Out-of-Doors, Camp Standards, and Camptivities.²¹² The introduction to Camp-O-Rama established what the general leaders hoped young women would experience through summer camping. “The beautiful out-of-doors,” it explained, “belongs to all as a gift of the great Creator.” In this setting, young women could build deep and lasting friendships.²¹³ The rest of the manual offered dozens of activity ideas and some detailed instructions on health, sanitation, and first aid, many of which assumed prior camping experience and knowledge. In describing basic sanitation at camp, for example, the book offered advice on disposal of waste, including the use of latrines, but without explaining what a latrine was or how to build one.²¹⁴ Recommended foods included peach shortcake, “pioneer roasting corn,” “camp chowder,” and a version of baked beans.²¹⁵ The influence of the Camp Fire Girls and Boy Scouts remained evident: the activities recommended in Camp-O-Rama included building a campfire next to a wigwam, or dome-shaped hut, and telling “Indian legends.” Other activities included handcrafting items to represent Native and pioneer cultures as wilderness archetypes.²¹⁶

During the war, leaders viewed camp as a vital retreat from troubled conditions and a way to develop leadership skills.²¹⁷ Camp, they declared, could help relieve emotional stress and help young people work through their problems. It could also serve as a place to instill qualities in young people that, it seemed, were lacking in their wartime behavior, such as tolerance of other creeds, races, or even those permanently injured in the war.²¹⁸ Young people could likewise build leadership through planning and participating in camp activities. The Camptivities booklet was intended to help in these efforts.²¹⁹ Encouraging leaders to provide a “camp democracy,” the booklet recommended including young women in the planning process and providing them several activity options from which to choose as they helped plan their camp.²²⁰

In summer 1945, the Second World War ended with physical and economic devastation in Europe, the aftermath of fierce battles and fallout from two atomic bombs lingering in Japan, and a changed sense of global purpose in the United States. Apostle Ezra Taft Benson traveled to Europe to oversee church relief efforts, and by the end of February 1946, Latter-day Saint women had sent more than eight thousand quilts and blankets to European countries other than Germany, with another one thousand to be sent as soon as shipping to Germany was possible. Women in the Norwegian Mission sent food to church members in Germany and Belgium, while Belgian members shared their welfare supplies with starving German Saints.²²¹ In Soviet-occupied East Germany, local church leaders used a church meetinghouse in Cottbus and purchased a villa in Wolfsgrün to house members and families who had been driven out of the eastern regions of Prussia, Pomerania, and Silesia.²²² After working and fighting alongside the rest of their nation, American Latter-day Saints at war’s end were more fully integrated into the fabric of the country’s culture than ever before, and they embraced this integration even as they remained ambivalent about some of its implications.²²³

At the church’s first general conference following the end of the war, Stephen L Richards captured the sense of sober hopefulness with which Latter-day Saints faced the new era. “We stand on the threshold of a new day,” he said. “We look out into the morning and see the rays of the rising sun tint the sky with the hopes of humanity.” The night had been long and the work had been slowed, but sentinels had stood watch and safeguarded the church. “Now in the daylight of peace,” he affirmed, “we go back to our work.”²²⁴

As the war reached its close, the YWMIA was ready to enter an era of renewed organization and expansion. Membership stood at nearly seventy-two thousand in 1,056 ward associations—an increase of four thousand over the previous year but still considerably lower than before the war.²²⁵ Average attendance of 65 percent in 1944 and 1945 likely reflected wartime displacement of members. At least in the United States, the Bee-Hive, Junior, Gleaner, and Special Interest (adult) departments were well organized and conducting activities, meetings, and courses.²²⁶ In summer 1945, the boards once again reviewed their programs to determine how they could best meet the needs of the church’s young people. They were making plans for the first June Conference since 1941, and development of new manuals and publications proceeded accordingly.²²⁷

“The hand of the Lord has been in the affairs of the world,” Lucy Cannon testified to her board in January 1946. “We should be grateful we have the gospel during such times, for we have had peace in our hearts.”²²⁸ But some wartime concerns persisted. “There is a new spirit that has come into the world with this war,” J. Reuben Clark Jr. warned YWMIA leaders in 1946. Sexual expectations that had shifted during the war, he felt, were unlikely to change with the decline in military mobilization. Young women would need church support to preserve religious standards.²²⁹ Other leaders focused on countries’ increased familiarity with one another. Latter-day Saints had been given a long geography lesson as they followed the course of the war, and many felt that the eyes of the world were on the United States. “The world has come to us,” Marba Josephson observed. “We must receive it and teach it.”²³⁰

Twenty thousand youth, MIA leaders, and spectators participated in the 1946 June Conference.²³¹ General MIA leaders wished to honor returning servicewomen and servicemen. Accordingly, church apostle Harold B. Lee, who chaired the church’s servicemen’s committee during the war, opened the conference with an official welcome to returning servicepeople, and several speakers at the conference addressed these young people specifically. While introducing the new MIA theme, YMMIA general superintendent George Q. Morris spoke of the devastation of the war, offering it as proof that human wisdom was not enough to promote peace and healing. Only turning to the Lord, he insisted, could do that.²³²

As the world attempted to heal the wounds of war, the church reached another centennial, this time of the arrival of the first Latter-day Saint pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.²³³ The YWMIA general board expected over twenty thousand Bee-Hive Girls to participate in pioneer-themed summer camps and called on local groups to design their own centennial symbols, the best of which would be honored at June Conference.²³⁴ In the church’s missions, local leaders planned events adapted to their identities and environments. In Britain, the commemoration was not planned for 24 July but for the public holiday weekend of Whitsun (Pentecost) in late May, with reenactments focusing on early British converts preparing to emigrate rather than on pioneer arrivals in North America. Young women and men in Hawaii planned to hike to the summit of Haleakalā to sing the hymn “High on the Mountain Top.”²³⁵ As the world emerged from years of war, Latter-day Saint youth claimed both the history and the future of the church as their own.