Myrna Petersen’s early years in the YWMIA—she turned twelve in January 1949—coincided with a period of organizational restructuring, beginning with new general leadership. In spring 1948, the First Presidency appointed Bertha Stone Reeder as the fifth general president of the young women’s organization. In contrast to the previous three presidents, who had each served as counselors in the presidency for over a decade before assuming general leadership, Reeder had no experience with the YWMIA at the general level. She had served some years earlier as president of her ward YWMIA, as a counselor in a stake Primary presidency, and for a short period on the Primary general board. Most recently, she had returned from presiding with her husband over the New England Mission.¹² Perhaps reflecting a consciousness of church growth, Reeder’s appointment was the first in what became a pattern in the following decades: general leaders for the church’s women’s organizations increasingly came from the ranks of women who had led missions alongside their husbands. Reeder served with counselors Emily Higgs Bennett, who had served on the YWMIA general board, and LaRue Carr Longden, whose dynamic leadership of the Highland Stake YWMIA in Utah had garnered the attention of general leadership. Reeder knew neither of them personally before their assignments, but the three women worked well together.¹³

These new leaders inherited the task of updating the YWMIA structure for a changed world. In a 1946 report, YWMIA leaders had noted that fourteen-year-old young women were losing interest in Bee-Hive work.¹⁴ Leaders had long been concerned that the needs of young women in their midteens were not being adequately met, so Reeder and her board set about restructuring the YWMIA age groups.¹⁵ In 1950, YWMIA leaders redefined the Bee-Hive class to include only twelve- and thirteen-year-olds.¹⁶ They also introduced two new classes—Mia Maid for ages fourteen and fifteen and Junior Gleaner for ages sixteen to eighteen.¹⁷

Almost as soon as it was announced, the unusual new name Mia Maid demanded explanation. Some local leaders reported that the young women in their wards hissed and booed when the new name was announced.¹⁸ The foreword to the new Mia Maid manual explained that the first part of the name came from the organization’s initials (MIA), but some individuals proposed alternative explanations. One local leader sent the board a five-page document she had written, proposing that the name could stand for “My Inner Awakening.”¹⁹ The chair of the Mia Maid committee of the general board initially tied the name to the “AIM” (“MIA” spelled backward) of building better wives and mothers.²⁰ These explanations indicate that the resonance of the phrase “mutual improvement” may have been receding as cultural values changed, reflecting a growing emphasis on personal development and domesticity, rather than collective betterment, as values for women.²¹

Myrna Petersen turned fourteen in 1951, making her one of the first cohort to start out as Mia Maids. The Mia Maids adopted the traditional Junior class symbol of the rose, and Myrna included a leaflet called The Symbolism of the Rose in her Treasures of Truth book. The general presidency worked with the rose imagery as they sought to deepen a sense of identity for Mia Maids. YWMIA leaders collaborated with a horticulturist to breed a new variety of rose specifically for the Mia Maids.²² An image of the resulting pink rose was then printed on various Mia Maid materials, and a new achievement program called Mia Joy allowed young women to work for a rose pin during their first year as Mia Maids. In their second year, they could earn a guard, which was a small gold-plated pin containing the words Mia Joy that attached to the rose pin with a chain.²³

A new formal event called the Rose Tying Ceremony acknowledged group achievement. When Myrna’s younger sister LaRene was a Mia Maid in 1954, her ward met the qualifications for the event, which meant that 50 percent of class members had received their individual Mia Joy award and the class as a whole had achieved 50 percent attendance at Sunday School and 35 percent attendance at sacrament meeting that year.²⁴ Cultural refinement and feminine qualities remained driving YWMIA values: at the 4 June ceremony in which LaRene participated, the young women, dressed in formal gowns, gathered around a “beautifully appointed” tea table to serve candies, punch, and wafers to their mothers and friends as they arrived at the ward chapel for the evening’s ceremony. Following a program of musical numbers, readings, and talks, attention turned to the rose table, covered with a lace cloth and tiny roses and set with tall green and white tapers in crystal holders; a white satin ribbon lay ready. With Myrna providing piano accompaniment in the background, each young woman in turn presented a rose to the class leader, Catherine Eastin, and expressed a wish for herself and all present—wishes for kindness, understanding, joy, and perseverance, among other things. Catherine accepted the roses, tied them into a bouquet with the white satin ribbon, and presented it to Leah Wells, ward YWMIA president.²⁵ A churchwide Rose Tying Ceremony at one 1950s June Conference celebrated the fact that 60 percent of Mia Maids throughout the church had received their individual awards, indicating active involvement in the program and adherence to church standards.²⁶

The other YWMIA class introduced in 1950 was the Junior Gleaner class, which paralleled the Junior M Men group introduced in the YMMIA. The Junior Gleaner class served young women ages sixteen to eighteen—what would typically be through the end of American high school years, which reflected the emerging cultural significance of high school graduation as a milestone in maturation. These new junior departments carried on much of the same work that the Gleaner and M Mengroups continued to do for young people ages nineteen to twenty-five, which for the young women included sheaf-binding ceremonies and a new Silver Gleaner award. In part because dating held a place of prominence in the teen culture of the day and because church leaders wished to foster relationships that could lead to temple marriages, the program for Junior Gleaners and Junior M Men emphasized mixed-gender activities such as dances, parties, firesides, and athletics on ward and stake levels. The two groups also joined in a single course of study called “We Believe.” The Silver Gleaner achievement program aimed to help young women become well balanced and happy and develop what it called “sterling qualities.” They could also earn a Silver Gleaner pin.²⁷

Manuals for the two new classes overtly described how YWMIA leaders saw typical developmental needs in each age range. Young women of Mia Maid age were seen to be at a crucial stage. For many, as for Myrna, it was between the ages of fourteen and sixteen that church either took on added significance or gave way to other priorities. Life for Mia Maids, the manual noted, was “curious, difficult, wonderful, and important,” and they found “so many problems to be answered, so many situations to meet, so many thrills to anticipate.” The growing-up process was to be the leaders’ emphasis in their work with the Mia Maids—with a positive, optimistic tone set by the course of study, “Life to Enjoy.”²⁸

Junior Gleaners were likewise considered happy, active, and inquisitive. At their age, they began to make decisions that could affect their lives in the long term, so leaders felt they needed direction and guidance. Because Junior Gleaners were likely to be busy with schoolwork and secular activities, leaders were aware their spiritual lives might be neglected. MIA lessons and the accompanying Silver Gleaner program were meant to provide crucial balance in their development.²⁹

YWMIA activities could guide young women only if they attended; hence, encouraging attendance grew in emphasis. Since the inception of the young women’s organization, membership had been voluntary—the YWMIA attracted many but not all young women in the church. In 1950, however, the church announced a policy of enrolling all young women ages twelve through twenty-five in the YWMIA, including those twelve and older who had not been participating in the organization previously. The policy also underscored the importance of leaders’ reaching out to all the young women under their stewardship.³⁰

The new policy had its roots in earlier efforts. The wartime transfer card system had tracked young women through moves to help keep them involved in YWMIA. After the war, the church experimented with a “Program for Latter-day Saint Girls” (also referred to as the “Girls’ Program”) to include young women who did not belong to the YWMIA. The local bishopric and a female leader oversaw the program and selected advisers, who each acted as a “big sister” to groups of no more than fifteen young women. These advisers not only monitored attendance but also established relationships of trust and confidence.³¹ In 1950, Reeder, Bennett, and Longden wrote to the First Presidency proposing that the YWMIA assume stewardship over the Girls’ Program and laying out a detailed plan for how the merger would work.³² The YWMIA began appointing new attendance secretaries in each ward; the attendance secretary and the regular YWMIA secretary worked together to keep attendance records and ensure every young woman was accounted for on the rolls.³³

The YWMIA merged the awards of the Girls’ Program with the existing Honor Bee, Mia Joy, Silver Gleaner, and Golden Gleaner achievement programs. Individual award requirements that originated with the Girls’ Program and became part of YWMIA achievement programs give a sense of which markers of religious activity postwar leaders prioritized. Requirements included observing the Word of Wisdom (primarily by avoiding tobacco and alcohol), paying tithing, giving a spiritual talk in any church meeting, and participating in a large MIA activity from one of several categories.³⁴ To receive an award, young women were also required to meet certain attendance thresholds. The attendance goals were set at 75 percent for Mutual and Sunday School but only 50 percent for sacrament meeting—in 1950, sacrament meeting attendance for young women averaged just 48 percent churchwide, while average YWMIA attendance was already 65 percent, and Sunday School was close behind.³⁵ As the difference in attendance percentages illustrates, young women participated in the church more through the MIA than through other meetings. One explanation for this difference is that at this time, the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was administered both in Sunday School and in sacrament meetings, so many members of all ages attended only one meeting or the other to participate in that ordinance. Furthermore, there was no Sunday instruction specifically for young women at this time, making weekday YWMIA meetings a primary source of gospel learning for young women. In order to encourage young women to support each other’s attendance, the program also gave an award to each class for 50 percent class attendance at MIA meetings and Sunday School and 35 percent at sacrament meeting.³⁶

Youth attendance at church meetings did increase over the course of the decade. In 1959, young women’s average attendance at YWMIA meetings churchwide rose to 70 percent, and sacrament meeting attendance was up to 60 percent. Overall, attendance was typically higher in historically Latter-day Saint communities in the region stretching from Alberta, Canada, through Idaho, Utah, and Arizona to Chihuahua, Mexico. Attendance percentage gains during the 1950s were most dramatic, however, in areas within the United States where Latter-day Saints were a minority but with an expanding presence due to convert baptisms and migration. In 1950, for example, YWMIA attendance in Oakland, California, averaged 38 percent, but by 1960, it had risen to 63 percent. In Seattle, attendance rose from 49 percent to 64 percent during the same period, and in Chicago, the gain was from 47 percent to 64 percent.³⁷ Church president George Albert Smith had charged the MIA boards with making young people proud of their religion and proud to be part of the church so that they were happy to participate in its meetings and activities. Increased attendance was one measure of the success of that effort.³⁸

The activity structure at the time was designed for consistent rather than intermittent attendance. For young Latter-day Saints and their leaders in the postwar years, the MIAs maintained an ambitious calendar of weekly lessons and activities, all of which necessitated highly structured organizations and detailed instructions. The general boards coordinated the event calendar and instructions for joint efforts but also prepared lessons and manuals specific to each age group in their respective organizations. While the MIA Leader offered local leaders ideas for upcoming events, and June Conference provided in-person training and inspiration, the manuals were the source of specific information on coordinating the complex MIA program at the local level. Newly published each year, the sizeable manuals were packed with explanations and details, including the organizational structure and purpose of MIA, weekly activities and lessons, and suggested program outlines for special events. The 1950–1951 Executive Manual for Officers, for example, contained a forty-five-page calendar of events and lessons that covered each age group.³⁹ The manuals kept growing—by 1959, the executive manual was 229 pages. Local leaders studying these manuals for guidance often saw it as their duty to follow the calendars and outlines with careful precision, and general MIA leaders seldom spoke of any room for local adaptation. As one leader reported, “If it was written in the manual it was gospel truth.”⁴⁰

The two-hour weekly MIA meeting was to begin at seven thirty in the evening with an assembly program where all the youth gathered for an opening hymn, an opening prayer, the presentation of the year’s MIA theme, and sometimes the sharing of a scriptural passage or short thought. From there, the classes went their separate ways to do classwork for fifty minutes.⁴¹ For Gleaners (ages nineteen to twenty-five), this time might be filled with a gospel lesson like the one titled “Take Time to Be Holy”⁴² or a combined activity with the M Men, such as a Gleamenight (a word derived from combining Gleaners, M Men, and night). For these activities, the young women and men might participate in a progressive dinner party, traveling together to several different destinations to eat courses of a meal.⁴³ The calendar for Junior Gleaners similarly included many activities with the Junior M Men, but Mia Maids held fewer mixed-gender social activities. Instead, they held project nights, when young women could work together on their Treasures of Truth books or on goals for their Mia Joy awards.⁴⁴ In most months, young women also participated in an activity that included all members of the MIA in the ward. This might be a holiday party, dance, or festival in which young people could showcase their development in music, dance, drama, speech, or athletics.⁴⁵ Preparation for these festivals occupied the remainder of most Mutual nights. After the fifty minutes of lesson or project work, the young people of the ward came back together to rehearse for another fifty minutes.⁴⁶

Outside of historically Latter-day Saint communities, young women’s experience in the MIA varied based on how established the organization was in their area and how many members lived there. A pamphlet entitled M. I. A. in the Missions advised MIA leaders to pattern their Mutual schedules after those of wards in more established areas, but the pamphlet also offered three options for how members living in the church’s missions might organize the MIA. For areas in which church members lived at a significant distance from one another, members were advised to conduct “Home Mutuals,” where they could participate “in such features of the program as are adaptable to their needs.” If a few families lived close together, they could hold “Neighborhood Mutuals,” joining at regular intervals to participate in cultural activities like dancing and musical performance. Otherwise, members should organize “Branch Mutuals,” patterned more closely after those in a larger ward but combining age groups when numbers necessitated.⁴⁷

Outside the United States, the cultural component of the MIA proved to be a mainstay. Missionwide youth conferences offered a venue for young people to join in sports competitions and to showcase their carefully rehearsed performances in dance, music, drama, and speech. Youth in the West German Mission began saving money months in advance for the July 1956 MIA conference in Wiesbaden. American missionaries participated alongside German youth in choir rehearsals and speech contests. The conference also held a Gold and Green Ball, to which German young women, whose communities were still recovering from the devastation of war a decade earlier, wore gowns donated by Gleaners from wards in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. As many as one thousand people reportedly participated in the conference.⁴⁸ That same year, the New Zealand Mission reported an attendance of thirty-five hundred at its annual MIA conference, which included plays, speeches, dances, and sporting events.⁴⁹

The Pittsburgh Branch in Pennsylvania, located in the Eastern States Mission, offered a picture of members’ creative and consistent efforts to implement MIA programs in their small branch of fewer than eighty-five members. The MIA organized activities for the entire branch, including the Gold and Green Ball in April, an MIA carnival in September, and a drama night in December. Many of these events required a small entrance fee, proceeds of which the youth donated to a fund for building a local chapel. Other activities, such as the annual Rose Prom, were intended only for MIA-age members.⁵⁰ Even in such a small branch, MIA work required a large investment of adult leadership. The Pittsburgh Branch assigned fourteen women and twelve men to serve in the branch’s MIA organizations in 1955. The branch minutes indicate that an average of seventy people attended sacrament meeting each week; if twenty-six of those served in MIAs, running this complex and dynamic organization involved nearly 40 percent of adults attending the branch.⁵¹

YWMIA leaders were responsible not only for festivals and weekly YWMIA activities but also for special events like sports competitions and camp. When leaders in the early 1950s discovered that some Latter-day Saint young women were joining outside groups to play sports, Bertha Reeder worked to expand MIA sports programs, previously focused primarily on young men, to include more young women. Soon, young women were participating in church-sponsored team sports such as basketball, softball, and volleyball, as well as individual sports like tennis, swimming, and archery, all led by newly appointed YWMIA sports directors.⁵² In 1956, Reeder reported that the YWMIA had organized fifteen thousand sports events in the last year, with an average of 250 young women in each stake participating.⁵³

One of Reeder’s major goals was to provide each young woman a camping experience, and she took a special interest in the efforts of the camp committee of the general board.⁵⁴ During her time heading the New England Mission with her husband, she had attended meetings of the Camp Fire Girls, consulting with the organization’s leadership as YWMIA leaders had done decades earlier, and had worked to institute in the local districts of the church camping programs for young women that incorporated many of the fundamentals of Camp Fire Girls.⁵⁵ Reeder was pleased to see so many stakes purchasing sites for summer camps, and she encouraged the leaders of stakes with no such summer camp to procure one.⁵⁶ She counseled leaders to provide young women with what she referred to as a “primitive” camping experience, which meant an overnight experience outdoors.⁵⁷

Leaders continued to use Camp-O-Rama for guidance, along with other manuals (such as Camptivities and Cooking Out-of-Doors). These manuals sought to use camping to “create a deeper sense of God as our Maker and a loyalty to His great plan.”⁵⁸ Building and sharing testimony had become a fundamental part of the young women’s camping experience, and fireside testimony sharing had become a beloved tradition. Other camp activities—like the Bee Hive class’s inspirational sunrise meetings—also encouraged spiritual development. “Who can spend time in the woods and mountains,” the leaders reasoned, “without feeling the majesty and grandeur of the universe!”⁵⁹

Encouraging young women to feel the grandeur of the universe during camp required a great deal of behind-the-scenes planning. The YWMIA provided substantial training and support for local leaders preparing for camp. Articles in the MIA Leader and the Improvement Era regularly offered ideas and instruction on how to create a satisfying outdoor camp, listing directions for making a tin-can stove and packaging food for easy carrying.⁶⁰ Each June Conference provided additional guidance and training for camp leaders and included camp institutes that instructed leaders over two or three days in the fundamentals of camp activities such as nature hikes, camp songs, and games. Since the camp and sports programs were essentially intertwined in this period, leaders who participated in the institute might receive instruction in the young women’s sports program in the morning and then later make tin-can camp stoves and sing campfire songs. They might also learn how to engage in specific camp handicrafts such as weaving, ceramics, quilting, rug making, and beading.⁶¹ Helping young women feel a sense of belonging, accomplishment, and pride within the sphere of MIA activities was a major priority.

Lia Davis, who attended the Twentieth Ward of the Salt Lake Ensign Stake in the 1950s, felt that church recreation and activities kept her and her cohort out of trouble and fostered strong bonds of friendship among them. “I hope Heavenly Father counts rehearsal time for doing good, because I spent my life in rehearsals when I was younger,” she later said.⁶² Those rehearsals helped prepare Lia and her peers for regional and central gatherings promoted by Reeder’s administration to provide young people with wholesome, church-sponsored entertainment. For over three decades, the annual June Conference in Salt Lake City had featured music, dance, drama, and athletic events. In 1952 and 1953, the YWMIA appointed division and district supervisors for different activities to improve the quality of regional events. Ruth Hardy Funk, who was then serving as the chair of the music committee, remembered youth arriving for June Conference by the carload and busload from about 80 percent of the church’s stakes. These young women and men had qualified for the central June Conference by distinguishing themselves at both the local and regional level. “The thrilling thing about June Conference was that it was a culmination of so many local events,” Funk said.⁶³ And all the hours of preparation and competition were hours spent in a protective church environment.

June Conferences were seen as offering both secular and religious benefits to participants. In keeping with the tradition of “teaching the gospel through activities”—or “spiritualized recreation,” as it was now often called—leaders hoped the preparation for these events, and the culminating spectacular performances, would plant in the hearts of these adolescents a sense of Latter-day Saint identity and solidarity that couldn’t be instilled by any amount of talking.⁶⁴ Leaders also believed that as the young women worked together with adult mentors to prepare their performances, they learned important leadership and social skills and developed valuable character traits.

This view of youth leadership development differed from those of both earlier and later periods. Early in the organization’s history, the grassroots nature of local associations meant that young women commonly served in leadership positions. Then, as general MIA leaders sought to incorporate their understanding of adolescent development, and especially with the increasing complexity of the programs, the role of young women and men became solely that of participants. Though the needs of small branches in areas where church membership was less established allowed for some exceptions, the massive program required a host of capable and dedicated adult officers and presidencies at the local, stake, and general levels to run it.

This was particularly true as wards and stakes prepared for June Conference, where events also presented an opportunity for leaders to devote their talents to church service, giving religious meaning to their artistic and athletic work. Over two dozen women and men were credited with producing a dance festival associated with the 1956 June Conference; they oversaw everything, including costume design, ticket sales, and sound recording.⁶⁵ Each of those general-level producers represented large cohorts of local and regional leaders who devoted their time and talents to helping youth prepare—not to mention all the teaching, coaching, leading, and counseling that went into their work in the other aspects of the program. At all levels, leadership in the MIA engendered strong devotion to and camaraderie within the church.

Between 1953 and 1959, the number of individuals registered for June Conference nearly doubled from around eighty-five hundred to almost seventeen thousand. By 1959, the live audience for the dance festival reached forty thousand. Starting in 1952, the dance festival also began to be broadcast on television, giving the event additional visibility at a time when television was rapidly rising in popularity in the United States.⁶⁶ “These were the golden years of festivals,” Funk recalled. “There is no question about it. And it was under her [Reeder’s] marvelous vision and supervision that this was allowed to grow.”⁶⁷ The massive performances offered observable, dramatic evidence of the fruits of MIA labor in the form of the many smiling, happy, vibrant young people who sang, danced, spoke, performed, and testified.

As showcases for the church’s youth, June Conference spectacles helped the church project confidence at a time when it sought to burnish its public image. While the persecution and social stigmatization that characterized the nineteenth century remained a vivid presence in the faith’s collective memory, the 1950s were largely marked by public relations successes. David O. McKay, tall and white-haired, charismatic and forward thinking, became president of the church in 1951 and soon established a national profile as a respected religious leader, forming friendships with United States presidents and high-profile celebrities such as Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston. Ezra Taft Benson, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, kept a high profile in United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s cabinet as the secretary of agriculture. National Boy Scout leaders attended June Conference and praised the church’s successes in building young men through its ongoing affiliation with Scouting.⁶⁸ In addition to presenting its weekly television and radio broadcast across the nation, the Tabernacle Choir undertook an international tour and released best-selling albums. A number of national publications turned their attention to the Saints, with headlines such as “Those Amazing Mormons” and “A Mighty People in the Rockies.” The latter article, published in the New York Times, highlighted the church’s growth and prosperity and labeled the MIA as “undoubtedly one of the most efficiently organized youth movements in the world.”⁶⁹

YWMIA leaders received similar praise firsthand. Reeder’s counselor LaRue Longden was well received by attendees and the press at the 1956 World Congress of Recreation and Leisure, where she presented on the church’s recreation programs.⁷⁰ During the Cold War, physical recreation became a high-profile issue in the United States. Studies suggested that American youth compared poorly with their European counterparts in physical fitness, even as the American military continued to conscript an average of a quarter of a million young men per year. Dwight D. Eisenhower ultimately established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness to address the issue.⁷¹ A Latter-day Saint, Ott Romney, was selected as the program’s deputy director, while Marion D. Hanks, of the First Council of the Seventy, served on the council. The council’s executive director, Shane MacCarthy, not only took time to meet with the MIA boards to discuss how to promote fitness but also praised their pioneer legacy.⁷² Elaine Anderson Cannon, a well-known writer and speaker to Latter-day Saint youth audiences, had previously participated in the White House Conference on Youth.⁷³

Some of the praise and recognition board members received was directly related to June Conference. Ruth Funk was flattered by the enthusiastic reception she was given by the president of the Chicago Tribune when she visited to study the organization of the Chicagoland Music Festival, which the Tribune sponsored. Funk showed him a scrapbook of news articles and statistical information on the recent MIA event. “Look what they’ve done!” she remembered him exclaiming. “Why, they do things we can’t even do. She came to learn from me and look what I’ve learned from them.” A similar experience took place in 1956, when distinguished professor of music Grace Spofford came to Utah for a week prior to June Conference. Spofford, who also worked with the National Council of Women and Hull House, was interested in the process of putting on June Conference. “I want to know how it happens and what happens in the lives of people to make it happen,” Spofford told Reeder. During her visit, Spofford spent all day with Funk, even helping feed and bathe Funk’s children. “It was an extraordinary thing for her to see how a woman could carry on her duties and responsibilities and care for a family and still do all of these things,” Funk said. “I told her this was repeated a thousand times all over the Church.”⁷⁴

The developing image of Latter-day Saint women drawing on the power of faith to excel in both domestic and cultural activities was not confined to general YWMIA leaders. In 1951, when Colleen Kay Hutchins, a twenty-five-year-old YWMIA member, was crowned Miss America, her faith and values were a recurring theme of media reception.⁷⁵ Elated, Latter-day Saint leaders reflected the positive attention back through church media channels. The June 1952 Improvement Era featured Hutchins’s photo on the cover, and an article in the issue detailed the positive publicity her reign as Miss America was bringing to the church. The magazine praised her as an ambassador for the value of being raised in a good Latter-day Saint home combined with continuous activity in the church. It noted that the pageant’s director had called Hutchins “the busiest and most popular of all Miss Americas” and suggested she had garnered the most favorable publicity of any church member of the era.⁷⁶

As a missionary faith, Latter-day Saints considered religious conversion the most highly prized form of attention. By the next decade, “Come to play and stay to pray” had become a common refrain in church articles highlighting the MIA’s potential to provide for the world’s social and spiritual needs.⁷⁷ Church members hoped that the power of their faith demonstrated in the lives of youth could draw others to participate in the MIA organizations and eventually join the church. Examples were easy to find. One stake president reported that thirty-three people in his area joined the church in one year after being introduced to it through the MIA.⁷⁸ While that anecdote is noteworthy for its scale, many Latter-day Saints during the period—especially those who lived outside Utah—would have known at least one person who had converted after participating in the MIA. Reflecting on the role of festivals, competitions, and conferences throughout the church, longtime YWMIA board member Marba Josephson expressed hope that the success of these events would assist in the church’s missionary work by leading to greater numbers of participants and spectators who would feel the spirit of the occasion.⁷⁹

The pride 1950s leaders felt over happy, clean, and committed Latter-day Saint youth was accompanied by anxieties about whether young people would maintain faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ and fidelity to the church’s standards. Mindful of the increasingly visual culture youth encountered in television and magazines, leaders began using visual media to express both the ideal and the anxieties. Beginning in the mid-1950s, the foyers in church meetinghouses displayed large posters featuring vivid, colorful scenes of young people, accompanied by aphorisms extolling the virtues of righteous living. A 1956 poster, for example, depicted a happy bride and groom, with smaller images in the background of later joyful family life. The headline on the poster proclaimed, “Virtue Is Its Own Reward.” A short text on the benefits of moral living and the dangers of sin appeared on the back of each poster. These posters were also published as pocket-size cards.⁸⁰ For some young people, at least, these visual messages resonated. Myrna Petersen’s Treasures of Truth book preserves several of these cards, highlighting themes such as respect for parents, careful driving, prayer, and observance of the Word of Wisdom.

The constraints of the poster or card form, however, meant that each could focus only on a single principle. In the mid-1950s, YWMIA leaders turned to film, which offered the potential to create something more holistic. The 1956 film How Near to the Angels was a major milestone in the church’s efforts to communicate with its youth. Commissioned by YWMIA leadership to showcase the connection between YWMIA programs and temple marriage, the forty-two-minute film was the longest produced at Brigham Young University’s Motion Picture Studio to that point.⁸¹ YWMIA leaders advised local units to screen the film as part of their activities calendar, giving it a huge potential audience among members and their families.⁸² The YWMIA built on prior theatrical experience as it launched into film. Playwright Ruth Hale, the MIA regional drama director for Southern California, had years of experience mixing church messaging with story in MIA stage productions.⁸³ In the script for How Near to the Angels, she represented both the temptations leaders worried about and the value of YWMIA programming. The finished film is a window into leaders’ cultural fears and their organizational responses.

How Near to the Angels opens with a young woman putting on her wedding dress and reflecting on the choices that led her to that moment. The film traces its protagonist, Janet, from her time as a Bee Hive girl to the day of her temple wedding. “I shall always be thankful to my Heavenly Father for those wonderful people who pointed the way for me,” Janet says, speaking to a photo of her fiancé. “For without them, darling, I’d never have had you.”⁸⁴ The interlocking stories of her YWMIA and social experiences then unfold in flashback, giving the film’s audience of young women and their leaders an affirming overview of the program.

As a Bee Hive girl, Janet is driven by a longing for peer approval but finds a wise and caring “big sister” in her YWMIA leader and needed perspective through her experience at camp. As a Mia Maid, she dates a high school football star named Ted, who is not a member of the church, only to realize at the Gold and Green Ball how much meaning she finds in her contributions to her religious community. At a later stake athletic event, she meets a Latter-day Saint young man named Kent. The two have an extended romance, but the film depicts their relationship as cut off from the larger community. Kent and Janet spend time alone together rather than with their Latter-day Saint peers. A YWMIA lesson and a personal visit from her leader help Janet rethink this relationship. At a stake fireside, she meets a religiously active and family-oriented Latter-day Saint named Tim. Instead of skipping MIA for time alone together, Tim and Janet court through church activities: a ward outing in the canyon, MIA meetings, an MIA dance, an MIA softball game, and a testimony meeting. Janet sees how Tim interacts with multiple generations of his family members and meets his grandmother, which underscores the importance of family ties. Her choice of a husband who is active in the church community and shows respect for his extended family is presented as her greatest expression of faith.

The depiction of YWMIA teachings on marriage in How Near to the Angels leaves no room for doubt as to its centrality as a topic for the era’s Latter-day Saints. The film shows a leader asking during a lesson, “What are the three most important dates in your life?” She stands at a chalkboard to record the answers, and the young women quickly supply the desired responses: birth, marriage, and death. Out of these three days, the leader points out, marriage is the only one individuals have much control over. “Never settle for anything less than temple marriage,” she admonishes.⁸⁵ For young Latter-day Saint women, temple marriage was constantly held up as the foremost goal of their lives, and ages sixteen to eighteen were considered prime courtship years—in the film, Janet is a Junior Gleaner when she makes the choices that will lead her to marriage.

Young adults in the 1950s married younger than their early-twentieth-century predecessors. The median age of first marriage for American women was twenty-two in 1900 but dipped to twenty during the 1950s before rising again to twenty-five by the year 2000.⁸⁶ High marriage rates at earlier ages meant that many American YWMIA members in high school were considering marriage or had friends who were. Myrna Petersen’s best friend, Wilma Mead, began talking about getting married in their junior year. When Wilma did send out a wedding invitation just after graduation, Myrna placed it in her Treasures of Truth book, a physical indication of how intertwined marriage and YWMIA experience were for 1950s young women.

Some MIA teaching on marriage was not restricted to just young women or young men. A popular series, “If I Were a Teen,” ran in most issues of the Improvement Era from July 1953 to June 1955, featuring short articles written by youth leaders. Most of the pieces did not identify their audience as male or female and seemed to give counsel meant equally for both. In these pieces, marriage was presented as an ideal for both young women and young men. Carol Hinckley Cannon of the YWMIA board encouraged young people, without reference to gender, to envision their future companion and the day when they would kneel with that companion at the altar of the temple to be sealed together.⁸⁷

The focus on temple marriage included an emphasis on chastity as a crucial aspect of preparation, and an emphasis on modesty began as an outgrowth of chastity. While the 1950s are often seen as a period of cultural conservatism in the United States, a strong movement for sexual liberalism also took hold, and discussions about sex and morality unfolded alongside it.⁸⁸ J. Reuben Clark Jr., a member of the church’s First Presidency, had warned that a “new spirit” had entered the world with the war. The bestselling Kinsey reports on human sexuality in the late 1940s and early 1950s detailed high rates of sexual experimentation among thousands of interviewees, thereby weakening taboos against directly discussing sexual subjects. Those taboos, in fact, were blatantly flouted by the advent of sexually provocative magazines and the increasingly open treatment of sexual themes in movies.⁸⁹

Prominent church leaders, such as apostles Mark E. Petersen and Spencer W. Kimball, led out in addressing sexual subjects from a church perspective. Speaking from his own experience interviewing thousands of church members, Kimball decried unchastity and sexual impurity as “the great demon of the 1950s.”⁹⁰ Petersen gave an address to students at BYU that attempted to help young people understand the admonitions about chastity in a broader context. Sex, he said, was sacred. It was what he called the “spark of the Deity” within each person, through which mortals cooperate with God in His creative work. Misuse of this power before marriage was therefore a serious sin, ranking below only murder and adultery in gravity. Knowing that procreation was one of the most important and sacred parts of God’s plan for this life, Petersen taught, Satan sought to exploit it. Satan was inspiring the world to place a demoralizing emphasis on sex, either turning it into a degraded plaything or making sexual sin alluring, both of which destroyed God’s great objectives for sex and procreation. Petersen’s talk was subsequently distributed as a pamphlet called The Sacredness of Sex, extending its influence on Latter-day Saint discourse.⁹¹

The frankness of discussions of such subjects, especially those using the word sex itself, reached new levels in the 1950s, reflecting the urgency with which leaders viewed the problem and, likely, the greater frankness with which sexual subjects were being discussed in the broader society. In the 1940s, the YWMIA had considered but did not publish a booklet on sex and morality, because church leaders believed that discussion of such subjects should be conducted only by parents in the home.⁹² But by the next decade, leaders such as Kimball and Petersen spoke openly of “necking and heavy petting” (or passionate kissing and sexual touching), challenging what they believed was a common view that such behaviors were not serious.⁹³

In principle, church teachings insisted on the same standard of sexual purity for young women and young men. And indeed, in mixed-gender settings, there was a clear message that young men and young women bore equal responsibility for maintaining sexual morality. “There are no privileged classes, nor is there any privileged sex under the Lord’s moral code,” stated one lesson designed for both young women and young men.⁹⁴ But in discussions directed specifically at young women, the emphasis was often different. One lesson, for example, stated that the sex urge is stronger in boys, “so it is the privilege of you girls to keep the standards high in your association with them.”⁹⁵ The result was a mixed message that established a single standard of chastity for both genders but also suggested that women bore a disproportionate responsibility to maintain sexual purity in relationships, a view that aligned with the double standard prevalent in the broader culture.

Local YWMIA groups held dedicated events for discussions of sexual standards in the 1950s. Junior Gleaners held Sacred to Me evenings, and Mia Maids attended Dear to My Heart nights, both of which were intended for mothers and daughters to attend together and sometimes referred to informally as “chastity nights.”⁹⁶ The program might include music, recitation of the class’s theme, refreshments, and distribution of a booklet or other handout for the young women to take home. The featured element was a guest speaker who would address the young women on chastity or clean living. How explicit these talks were is hard to gauge and probably depended on the sensibilities of the speakers. If the booklets themselves are any indication, the ideas of clean living and choosing good friends and marriage companions were emphasized, without mention of specific sexual activities.⁹⁷ Myrna Peterson taped into her Treasures of Truth book a booklet entitled Whene’er My Heart Is Pure, which was intended for distribution to young women and young men at their respective chastity-themed events.

Virtually every talk on chastity by church authorities included comments about modesty as well, since anxieties over sexual behavior gave rise to concern about modest dress and rapid changes in fashion. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, French designer Jacques Heim had introduced a new two-piece swimming suit called the atome. Playing on the public fascination with atomic energy in the wake of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the piece was advertised as the world’s smallest swimming suit, which had been split just like the atom. A competitor, Louis Réard, soon introduced a competing and even more controversial design, called the “bikini” after the United States’ nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll.⁹⁸ While the new suits were widely viewed as scandalous at the time of their release, they were among the many signals that public norms of appropriate dress were widening.

These shifting norms created both confusion and tension among church members. Lueen Jensen King and her counselors in the Moapa, Nevada, stake YWMIA wrote to Bertha Reeder in December 1950, declaring that they were “a little bewildered.” They explained that they had held their Gold and Green Ball near Thanksgiving. “Some of our lovely girls came in formal dresses unbecoming to Latter-day Saints and in total opposition to church standards.” What was worse, the inappropriately dressed young women were students at the church-sponsored BYU; young women from the University of Nevada in Reno had all been modestly clothed. “We know this is a very sensitive subject,” they wrote, “especially inasmuch as parents do not seem to understand.” But they wondered whether church schools were placing adequate emphasis on modesty and whether the YWMIA leaders could do something to help.⁹⁹ Reeder and her counselors forwarded the letter from the Moapa leaders to David O. McKay, as well as to Ezra Taft Benson and Mark E. Petersen, the two apostles assigned to oversee the YWMIA. Along with the letter, the presidency sent their own message explaining that the letter was typical of correspondence they’d received from other leaders about the same issue, and they wondered what they could do to remedy it.¹⁰⁰

Increasingly, church leaders decried immodesty as a gateway to sexual sin. In a 1951 address titled “A Style of Our Own,” Spencer W. Kimball pled with female BYU students to keep high standards, denouncing in detail low necklines, form-fitting sweaters, all shorts, immodest evening gowns, and beauty pageants with their bathing suit competitions. Immodesty encouraged what he called “mental adultery” and contributed to the rising tide of sexual immorality.¹⁰¹ Mark E. Petersen linked the need for modesty to the sanctity of the body, emphasizing that sacred things were not for public display. He reported that young men had told him their downfall began with temptation on the dance floor when they saw parts of young women’s bodies that were not covered up.¹⁰² These talks made an impression. For example, Bertha Clark, a sophomore at BYU in 1951, recalled that she and many of her friends altered their dresses to make them more modest in keeping with Kimball’s teachings.¹⁰³

Young Women leaders were equally concerned about modesty and sexual morality. In 1955, counselor LaRue Longden published a piece in the Improvement Era called “It’s Smart to be a Latter-day Saint,” in which she took a proactive, positive approach to the subject while upholding its importance. She lamented that many young women felt they were receiving mixed messages on modesty. Some reported that their mothers had told them, “You are only young once; your lovely body is beautiful. It is now or never if you want to wear one of ‘those’ dresses.” In response, Longden quoted Brigham Young exhorting women to cover their bodies neatly and in good taste. Still, definitions of what constituted modest covering were in flux, and some styles that had been considered acceptable were later discouraged. Leaders tried to clarify boundaries without being overly prescriptive. In her article, Longden wrote disapprovingly of young women who would have one kind of dress for church functions but choose more worldly styles for other occasions.

Longden acknowledged the emerging difficulty of finding sufficiently modest dresses in stores and offered several suggestions. Mothers and daughters could make their own clothes, for instance. Longden mentioned one woman who spent every Monday evening helping women design and sew what Longden called “smart and beautiful” dresses that met the right standards. She also told of a young woman in one stake who had started a business tailoring ready-made clothing to make it more modest. Finally, Longden reported that she herself had made a project of collecting pictures of modest clothing for all occasions from top fashion magazines. “Believe it or not,” she said, “there were as many modest dresses as there were ‘uncovered look’ ones.” She encouraged each young woman to use her own ingenuity and fix her clothes to fit her personality.¹⁰⁴

“Women carry the responsibility of blessing the world with their gentleness, their kindness, their mercy,” observed the Bee Hive manual in 1956. “It is good to be a girl who will some day grow to be a lovely woman.”¹⁰⁵ This statement could stand in for many similar expressions of female aspiration found in YWMIA sources in the 1950s. But while its tone is positive, its substance is ambiguous—what did it mean to be a “lovely woman”? Themes of faith, testimony, high standards, and a positive outlook on life were woven throughout messages disseminated to young women in the YWMIA; the messages took for granted that marriage and motherhood were the source of women’s highest honor and aspirations.¹⁰⁶ The most direct messages about gender ideals appeared in the Bee Hive and Mia Maid courses, since the Junior Gleaner and Gleaner programs focused on activities and were almost entirely conjoint with their young men counterparts. Lessons instilled in younger girls the messages about femininity that leaders felt were essential to prepare them for their high school years and life beyond.

The societal focus on family and domestic life in the United States profoundly influenced ideals of femininity. The ideal home and family were built around women creating happy, well-run homes and devoting their lives to service toward husband and children as educator, counselor, cook, nurse, housekeeper, manager, and chauffeur. Homemaking was extolled as a career for women—the career for women—and increasingly professionalized through reliance on experts in child-rearing and domestic efficiency.¹⁰⁷ Throughout the country, young women like Myrna Petersen spent considerable hours of their free time learning cooking, sewing, and other domestic skills in clubs and organizations such as 4-H.¹⁰⁸

YWMIA lessons and programs underscored the importance of homemaking through their perennial emphasis on marriage and through requirements for achievement awards that centered on domestic skills. In the 1954–1955 Bee Hive manual, for example, eight of the ten suggested activities under the category of “Value Work” focused on cooking and cleaning; under “Honor Womanhood,” four focused on childcare and household management. “Safeguard Health” likewise included activities in home nursing and planning nutritious meals.¹⁰⁹ Encouraging a serious study of homemaking, board member Marba Josephson wrote that “there is no activity that can mean more to the world as a whole than that of building safe, sound, happy homes.”¹¹⁰

The emphasis on marriage and homemaking in American culture appears to have also affected educational attainment among women: in the 1950s, two-thirds of women who went to college dropped out before graduating, and fewer women sought advanced degrees or pursued professional careers than in the preceding two decades.¹¹¹ Nevertheless, YWMIA lessons did give some attention to choosing a vocation. “You will want to have a feeling of making a contribution to the world,” advised one lesson. Women who married would make their greatest contribution through their home and children, it said, but once the family was raised, the mother would want to have a vocation and take up her own interests again. The lesson went on to conduct a substantial discussion about obtaining an education, choosing a career, and starting a business, sprinkled with examples from real women’s lives.¹¹²

In addition to preparing young women for their future lives, YWMIA voices counseled them to develop moral courage and sufficient independence to resist cultural pressures at odds with church norms. At the same time, those voices also reflected other cultural pressures as they encouraged young women to pursue charm and attractiveness. Iris Parker, an associate editor of the Improvement Era, asserted that “every girl is beautiful in this happy time of life” and admonished readers to stand tall, let their intelligence shine through, and pray for beauty within. She addressed hypothetical young women in a spirit of helping them overcome their insecurities and highlight their good features. But much of her advice still sounded like it could have come from a teen magazine or a charm class. The slender blonde should “discreetly turn down malts and candy bars” so she could maintain a willowy and trim figure. Young women should be fresh and neat and keep their voices gentle, smiles frequent, and laughter soft. They should wear little makeup, wash their faces nightly, and use a soothing cream.¹¹³

YWMIA lessons gave heavy emphasis to personality development, including a good amount of popular psychology, and virtually every year young women studied lessons on social skills and etiquette.¹¹⁴ Such lessons stressed appropriate feminine behavior in various situations. Young women were not to call young men unless absolutely necessary, for example, and they were not to act possessively or expect young men to spend too much money on them. They should let men “see the feminine” in them by waiting for them to open doors, pick up things they drop, and seat them at the table. “Enjoy being looked after,” the lesson advised.¹¹⁵ Such lessons sometimes included lists of dos and don’ts based on surveys of what boys found attractive in girls. “Boys insist that they like a girl who is feminine,” according to one such discussion. “By this they mean that they like a girl who can play a bang-up game of tennis or skate all around them or ski down a mountainside, but who at the same time never forgets for one instant that she is a lady.”¹¹⁶

As church membership expanded rapidly in the 1950s, YWMIA messaging developed in Utah did not always resonate elsewhere. Church growth during the years when Bertha Reeder led the YWMIA was dramatic, with the most rapid growth taking place outside Latter-day Saint majority areas in the Intermountain West. In the 1890s, the church had reached a tipping point in which more members were added by birth than by conversion; in the postwar era, that trend reversed again as missionary work increased substantially around the globe.¹¹⁷ In 1947, the year before Reeder’s tenure as general president began, church membership had reached one million, with just one in three members living outside the Intermountain West. By 1963, two years after Reeder’s release, church membership doubled to two million, with half of those members living outside the Intermountain West (though most still lived in the United States).¹¹⁸ Because of the faith’s strong missionary impulse, leaders and members enthusiastically embraced the growth, even as it raised questions about how to adapt to be more representative of members’ realities.

June Conference, for example, was scheduled to accommodate youth in Utah—it took place following the school year, during an extended summer vacation. California schools, however, were still in session through June, meaning that prospective participants could not attend the conference unless they took time off from school.¹¹⁹ This dilemma took on added meaning by the mid-1950s, as California’s unusually rapid membership growth meant it accounted for 10 percent of total church membership at that time.¹²⁰

Bernadine Wallace, the stake YWMIA president in the East Los Angeles Stake, and Mark Ross, the YMMIA superintendent from the Glendale Stake, proposed a solution—a separate event, modeled on June Conference, to be held in Southern California in August. The general board supported the plan, pledging to provide the same trainings and speakers as at the central June Conference, while relying on Wallace and Ross to oversee the local organization and fundraising.¹²¹ Around seven thousand young women and men participated in the conference, and around sixteen thousand spectators attended sessions in the Hollywood Bowl in August 1954. On Monday, 9 August, the second page of the Los Angeles Times opened with a large photo of the crowd at the Hollywood Bowl and an accompanying article about the event.¹²²

A second Southern California conference in 1955 followed the same model, and a third in 1956, with California leadership providing more of the programming. Many leaders viewed the events as successes. YWMIA general leadership even chose the 1956 Southern California conference as the venue to share the first public preview of How Near to the Angels.¹²³ But the conference’s success also brought concerns. In 1954, some Arizona Latter-day Saints wondered about coming to the Southern California conference rather than June Conference in Salt Lake City, but church leaders discouraged them because of concerns over housing logistics.¹²⁴ Church leaders also grappled with how to balance support for local initiative and adaptation with a desire for more consistency and uniformity. After the 1956 conference, David O. McKay discouraged large-scale events in California out of a concern for fairness to other areas.¹²⁵ Without their own high-profile conference, however, California members once again faced the prospect of holding activities designed to build toward a June Conference that most of their youth would not attend.

For youth like those of the El Paso Third Ward in Texas, there were other, more serious obstacles to advancing through regional celebrations to June Conference. The El Paso Third Ward was the church’s first Spanish-speaking ward, one unit in an English-speaking stake. Third Ward members took pride in their pioneering position. Many Anglo Latter-day Saints, including leaders like Spencer W. Kimball, were also pleased and saw the advancement of groups with Indigenous American ancestry as fulfilling prophecies in the Book of Mormon. But while Latter-day Saints often formed positive relationships across racial lines through missionary work and shared worship, concerns about interracial marriage and family relationships remained strong and created some anxiety about stake and regional MIA activities where romantic relationships might develop across ethnic lines.¹²⁶

Sensitivities about ethnic distinctions sometimes played out in other ways. According to the process laid out by the general MIA organizations, wards that performed well in drama, dance, athletics, and other activities were supposed to advance to regional competitions, with the winning groups there moving on to final all-church events held in Utah. During the 1950s, however, members of the Third Ward realized that some Anglo leaders involved in the adjudication process were nervous about having them advance. “Instead of helping you out, they would deter you,” said Sandra Gonzalez, a YWMIA member from the Third Ward. While MIA activities created positive memories within the ward, she felt that some of the racism that shaped her experience growing up in Texas also affected her experience in stake MIA. This was particularly difficult since church was an empowering aspect of her life, a place where she was encouraged to pursue education to prepare for service in the community and church.¹²⁷ “So it left a little acid in your throat when these things happened,” she said. Attitudes changed over time, and in the 1960s, a group from the ward was able to participate in a regional competition.¹²⁸

By the end of the 1950s, roughly 10 percent of church members lived outside of the United States, which presented additional challenges to existing assumptions that went well beyond attendance at June Conference.¹²⁹ Travel, even within a given country, was often a barrier to full participation in the church, including MIA programs and activities. Growing up in Melbourne, Australia, Margot Butler remembered families in her branch who had to rely on buses and trains—and sometimes a combination of the two—to attend church meetings. “Some who could come on Sundays,” she noted, “couldn’t come on Thursday [for MIA] because they couldn’t get home after. It was too late to come out at night, especially by themselves.”¹³⁰ Such experiences were common; Utah leaders’ assumptions about the accessibility of MIA meetings rarely held up in places where the church’s presence was smallest. In most international areas that filed reports, Sunday School rather than MIA had the highest attendance for young women. While in Utah YWMIA attendance exceeded 70 percent in many stakes, international missions reported attendance averaging 50 percent.¹³¹

Margot herself was able to attend MIA and remembered local leaders providing positive mentoring. She enjoyed activities but noticed gaps between her experience and the assumptions built into YWMIA materials. These gaps were particularly evident to her in lessons taught from YWMIA manuals on topics related to cultural refinement. She remembered local members dutifully carrying out elocution lessons, for example, which involved repeating certain words to practice their pronunciation. Without the unwritten contextual information about differences between Utah accents and the culturally dominant accent many Americans aspired to, Australian members found themselves totally mystified by the word choices and wondered why they were being asked to practice words that everyone they knew pronounced the same way.¹³²

Some YWMIA lessons were designed to teach American Latter-day Saints about the wider world. Members outside the United States, then, got a view of the world through an American curriculum writer’s frame of reference. “That’s why I was disappointed when the manual came out, and it showed the four stars of the Southern Cross—obviously written by a Northerner in Salt Lake who didn’t know there were five stars,” Margot recalled. While the error was minor, it made her reflect on the overall reliability of what she was learning through MIA. “Maybe we can’t trust these manuals,” she remembered thinking, “when the only thing I know for sure is wrong.”¹³³

Experiences like Margot’s highlighted the mismatch between centrally produced materials and local circumstances. During the 1950s, YWMIA leaders were more focused on communicating to the historical core of their membership than on adapting to the church’s growing diversity. Nonetheless, questions arose during this period that became increasingly urgent through subsequent decades of growth, and leaders gradually became more concerned about how to manage messaging for members’ varied circumstances.

Following the release of How Near to the Angels, for example, David O. McKay objected to the script’s depiction of temple marriage followed by familial bliss. In many countries, Latter-day Saints made up such a tiny numerical minority that the film’s narrative seemed unrealistic. “It was my judgment that it would be better not to use it for showing in the Missions of the Church,” he wrote of the film, “as it will only intensify the problem that our young girls are now facing with relation to meeting young men who are worthy to take them to the Temple.” McKay worried that too heavy an emphasis on temple marriage as the only acceptable path might interfere with members’ marrying at all in some areas. In a Utah setting, it was easy to dismiss Janet’s passing thought that a boyfriend might convert as wishful thinking, but that same situation would feel different for a global audience. “There is a question in our minds whether it is best for them to go through life unmarried rather than marry outside of the Church as we feel there are many good men in the world that they could marry with the possibility that they may bring them into the Church later,” McKay noted.¹³⁴ His objection revealed that the combination of church growth with changing use of communications technologies was creating more complex conditions for messaging. In the long term, old systems for coordinating messaging would need to adapt to those emerging dynamics.

Church leaders began looking for additional ways to help leaders connect with youth around the world. Perhaps the most ambitious media effort of the era was launched in 1960, when general authorities mounted a massive three-month program of weekly firesides to reach as many MIA-age Latter-day Saints as possible in all 290 stakes of the church. A fireside chat or fireside was a special evening program that aimed to bring speakers and listeners together in a more conversational, intimate tone, similar to United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio-broadcast fireside chats during the Depression and World War II.¹³⁵ Established at the local level as early as 1906 and popularized by the 1930s, firesides took on a new role in this 1960 initiative, giving young people opportunities to connect more personally with apostles and members of the First Presidency.¹³⁶ The opening event was a general meeting on Sunday, 3 January 1960, held at the Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City. It was broadcast by closed-circuit wire to many stake buildings. Audiences farther away received a tape-recorded version. In each location, an hour-long program featuring talks and music by local young women and men, prepared under the direction of MIA leaders, preceded an address by David O. McKay on ideals of courtship and marriage. Conservative estimates placed the total audience for the fireside at two hundred thousand in 170 locations, as far away as New Zealand and Mexico.¹³⁷ Twenty radio stations in the western United States, Hawaii, and Canada also broadcast audio of McKay’s remarks and the subsequent fireside series.¹³⁸ Over the next twelve weeks, youth met each Sunday evening in ward groups to listen by radio to another talk and then engage in a discussion, led by the bishop, about how the counsel applied to their own lives.¹³⁹ Speakers included Mark E. Petersen, Spencer W. Kimball, Howard W. Hunter, and Harold B. Lee, of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and Marion D. Hanks, a popular speaker and member of the Quorum of the Seventy.¹⁴⁰ Their messages focused on dating, marriage, and chastity.

Top leaders like those who spoke in the fireside series began to develop a higher public profile. McKay was charismatic and popular, eminently photogenic and quotable. The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, likewise, featured several vigorous leaders—like Petersen, Kimball, Lee, and Benson—whose strong personalities and prolific output of sermons and writings would shape church culture for the rest of the century. Church media outlets, especially the Church News, published as a section of the Deseret News, covered their activities assiduously, and church-owned Deseret Book published many of their writings.¹⁴¹

These leaders began speaking more directly and extensively to the youth. In past generations, apostles had overseen the YMMIA and had spoken at June Conference, but when it came to direct counsel, young people heard primarily from the leaders of their organizations rather than apostles. As a young girl in Melbourne in 1945, Margot Butler remembered feeling shaken when she heard about Heber J. Grant’s death, because his was the only voice representing the whole church that she was accustomed to hearing, and with his death she thought the church was left without such leadership.¹⁴² Now, through such channels as the churchwide fireside program and BYU devotionals, youth heard regularly from apostles and other priesthood leaders, and MIA leaders served a supporting role. Even at June Conference, general authorities took precedence as the featured speakers at many sessions.

As general authorities’ voices gained greater prominence in MIA events, their words also became more prominent in publications by or about the MIA. In 1957, for example, the Church News coverage of June Conference included excerpts or full-text addresses by seven members of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the Improvement Era published three of the addresses in full. YWMIA president Bertha Reeder, on the other hand, appeared only in three photographs in the News; her words were not reported.¹⁴³ By the end of the 1950s, YWMIA leaders were rarely published or featured in church publications, even in relation to their own organization. This broader change in church conventions that allowed youth to hear and read the words of the church’s general authorities more often had unintentionally limited the opportunities church members had to hear from female leaders.¹⁴⁴

In 1960, the Church News published a glowing retrospective on the previous ten years. The first decade of David O. McKay’s tenure as church president had witnessed the most growth and development of any decade in the church’s history, writers exulted. “The Church also stands today on the threshold of a glorious new decade—likely to reach startling proportions in growth and expansion.”¹⁴⁵ Rapid membership growth, coupled with praise from outside organizations and individuals, seemed to confirm the sense that something special was happening in the church in general and the MIA in particular. In 1950, the Deseret News celebrated when YWMIA enrollment surpassed one hundred thousand for the first time.¹⁴⁶ By the decade’s end, the YWMIA had doubled in size to over two hundred thousand participants.¹⁴⁷ And yet, growth also meant that questions arising from geographic and cultural diversity—which had been on leaders’ minds for thirty years without being fully addressed—would continue to rise in prominence. As the 1960s began, leaders grappled with the question of whether the same model that had brought the YWMIA increased acceptance and prominence within the United States could continue to carry the organization into the future.