Shortly after being sustained, Jacobsen and her counselors met with the First Presidency to discuss priorities. As they had in the past, the First Presidency counseled the YWMIA leaders to “guide the destinies of the girls of the church, using gospel principles.” In keeping with the long tradition of spiritualized recreation—teaching the gospel through activities—Jacobsen understood that a primary mission of the YWMIA was to help young women build faith and testimony through participation in meaningful activities. During this meeting, Jacobsen and her counselors also asked about changing the size of the YWMIA general board. The First Presidency said they saw no reason for change but deferred to Jacobsen’s judgment. Thinking of the many conferences, conventions, and committees run by the YWMIA, Jacobsen determined more board members were required.⁸ While Lee’s address on a new correlation effort suggested organizational change was on the horizon, Jacobsen’s tenure began with the old system virtually intact.

Still, Jacobsen and her counselors were mindful of the growth of the church and changing needs of youth. In considering members for a board, they sought to avoid insularity. “We did not want it to be a little local group,” Jacobsen said. Women from California and Idaho joined the board, despite the challenges of semiregular travel to Salt Lake City.⁹ Jacobsen also sought out women with a range of life experiences—the board included married, single, and widowed women; professionals and homemakers; and women who were financially affluent as well as those of modest means. All had extensive church service experience, though not necessarily in the YWMIA.¹⁰

Among those asked to join the general board was Chieko N. Okazaki. The daughter of Japanese American parents, Okazaki had grown up as a Buddhist before joining the church in Hawaii at age fifteen. She and her husband lived in Salt Lake City, where she worked as an elementary school teacher. Many church and community leaders lived in Okazaki’s neighborhood, and she had won parents’ trust despite widespread postwar prejudice in the United States against Japanese Americans.¹¹ When apostle Ezra Taft Benson interviewed her for the assignment, he noted that she was the first “non-white” person to serve in that position or any similar position in church hierarchy.¹² Okazaki also appears to have been the first person from a non-Christian background to serve in general church leadership. Before 1960, only white Americans and Europeans had served at the highest levels of church leadership—as apostles, in the Presidency of the Seventy, in general presidencies of the auxiliaries, or on general boards. Okazaki’s appointment preceded even the appointment of the first nonwhite mission and stake presidents.¹³

At the outset of Jacobsen’s presidency, board members served on a wide range of committees, focused on different age groups or activity programs.¹⁴ For instance, Okazaki was assigned to the committee that focused on the class for young women ages sixteen to eighteen.¹⁵ The decisions of this committee substantially influenced the church experience for young women in this age group. In 1958, for example, the committee had considered how to redefine the identity of the Junior Gleaner group. They wanted the class to feel more like the capstone to a life stage. Committee member Sara Yates presented a plan to make the thirteenth article of faith, with its emphasis on virtuous conduct and the pursuit of goodness, the focus for the group.¹⁶ The class symbol would be the pearl, symbolizing purity, and the course of study would be titled “We Believe,” in reference to the Articles of Faith. The first new name proposed for the group was Zionas.¹⁷ Ultimately, however, a laurel leaf was added alongside the pearl as a class symbol, and the name Laurel was introduced instead. A statement in the new manual with the heading “What It Means to Be a Laurel” emphasized developing integrity and building a foundation of knowledge, good judgment, and connection to the divine.¹⁸ Just as there was a committee to oversee the Laurel program, there were also committees of general board members assigned to the Beehive, Mia Maid, and Gleaner programs.

Florence Jacobsen retained past camp committee members on the new board and gave them permission to introduce a certification program—which Bertha Reeder had been reluctant to adopt—to reinforce a sense of achievement for young women.¹⁹ Bette Lou Sims, who cochaired the committee, recalled taking groups of people to a park up Emigration Canyon, in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains east of Salt Lake City, to observe them as they practiced different skills the committee was considering teaching to young women.²⁰ The new certification program, called Campcrafter, focused on outdoor skills, such as first aid, fire making, and knot tying, while also aiming to help young women develop transferrable leadership skills. Jacobsen saw camp as an ideal setting for experiential learning—she felt that if there were flaws in the planning, natural consequences would quickly make them plain.²¹ The first certification booklet, published for summer 1963, proclaimed another objective on its cover: “Be Aware of—Not Beware of Nature!”²² The manual promised that young women could banish fear through expertise, live confidently in the outdoors, appreciate nature, and grow as leaders. Instructions recommended that young women with more camp experience help younger girls complete their assignments.²³

Other committees managed areas of recreation such as dance, music, and drama. These committees produced publications and trainings, and they prepared activities for the annual June Conference. The work was demanding. Members of the committees served as organizers and producers of elaborate events, and they were serving in a huge, vibrant organization. Enrollment of young women reached 272,370 in 1963, the year in which total church membership surpassed two million.²⁴ Growth was steady and impressive: young women’s enrollment increased by almost one hundred thousand before the decade was out.²⁵

For many of the young women who spent weeks in rehearsal, performances became treasured memories. Vicki Noyce, a young woman in the Valley View Stake in Holladay, Utah, remembered rehearsing on the University of Utah football field in sweltering heat for her stake’s June Conference dance number, sweating in a costume made by a stake member. “I just remember standing on the field thinking ‘Please be done,’” she said. The actual performance, however, culminated for her in a transcendent moment. “At the very end, we sang ‘Shall the Youth of Zion Falter?’ I’m telling you, we were all in tears,” she said. “To be with so many that were in the same mindset and situation as you were. It made you feel like there’s a bigger entity out there than even our ward.”²⁶

Just before June Conference in 1962, Ruth Funk of the music committee found herself “up to my eyebrows” in coproducing a major musical production, Papa and the Playhouse, which was to be rolled out at the conference as a model for churchwide production in local units during the following year. Even by the high standards set in the massive festivals she had worked on since 1947, Papa and the Playhouse was ambitious. For the month preceding the conference, Funk practically lived at the huge warehouse where the production was being prepared. When she received a call asking her to attend an unrelated church meeting on a weeknight during this hectic period, it was only with difficulty that she made room in her schedule.

The meeting was an exploratory session, one of three similar gatherings held to gauge the thinking of potential participants in the nascent correlation effort announced by Harold B. Lee in 1961. Funk was distracted and anxious to get back to her work, but near the end of the meeting, the man conducting called on her, saying, “Sister Funk, you haven’t expressed yourself.” Summarizing her thoughts on the discussion, she said, “I feel that every stop should be pulled to emphasize the strength of the family, to bring our youth back into the cradle of the family as far as possible, to make the father the patriarchal head of the family in every way and put the priesthood where it belongs.” She then went back to work on the play. The Monday after June Conference, once her work on the production had ended, Funk received a phone call from apostle Marion G. Romney, who asked her to serve on the Adult Correlation Committee.²⁷ “Little did I know,” she later recalled, “how dramatically this telephone call would change my life.”²⁸

The original mandate of the All-Church Coordinating Council, issued by the First Presidency in 1960, was to facilitate “a correlation of studies among the Auxiliaries of the Church”—that is, a correlation of the curriculum of each organization, which was how previous correlation efforts had been framed.²⁹ But Lee brought a much broader vision to his leadership of the council. As the auxiliaries had expanded their vibrant programs in the first half of the twentieth century, they had become largely autonomous entities with independent budgets, curricula, publications, and reporting lines. Overlap, redundancy, and cost had become serious problems, as had the propensity of some auxiliary leaders to advance the missions of their individual organizations rather than pursue a unified direction for the whole church. Lee wanted to use both the council and the new correlation committees for adults, youth, and children—each of which was headed by a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—to bring a centralizing force into church administration.³⁰

In the 1960s and 1970s, the church came to use the term correlation for three linked concepts. First, correlation was an ideal—one in which interdependent parts of the church worked together. Critical to this vision was the idea that all church efforts would be overseen at the highest level by ordained priesthood leaders. In service of that ideal, correlation was also a process by which separate organizations working on different problems coordinated to make sure they were contributing effectively to a larger shared vision. Finally, the process of correlation involved oversight committees, which sought to ensure that activities and curricula were aligned across organizations. Thus, the word correlation could describe the ideal, the process, or the committees.³¹

A few days after the exploratory meeting, Funk attended an orientation meeting conducted by Harold B. Lee for members of the new correlation committees. Seated amid apostles, stake presidents, former mission presidents, directors of church departments, professors from BYU, and auxiliary general board members, she quickly realized it was no ordinary meeting. In a manner that Funk felt was visionary, Lee described the decadent conditions of the world, the church’s destiny to spread Christ’s teachings, the growth missionary work would bring, and the need for a strong foundation based on family and home. He spoke of the priesthood in a way Funk “had never heard nor understood before,” calling it an all-encompassing force that would guide the affairs of humankind and power the expansion of the church. Lee outlined the necessity for correlation of the church’s curriculum and explained the roles of the committees. He then pronounced a blessing upon those present, praying that they would have the capacity to serve God in the work of correlation. “As he spoke, a luminous radiance seemed to emanate from his countenance,” Funk recalled. “I had never had such an experience before, and I’ve never had one since. I knew this was no ordinary man who had been called by the Lord to correlate and orchestrate all the elements of the gospel.” From this moment, Funk felt that the term correlation took on a sense of “tremendous sacredness and worth.”³²

Like Funk, many women who served on the early correlation committees quickly developed a deep appreciation for the effort and a broad vision of its goals. As correlation efforts advanced, each committee member was released from all other church assignments. The committees operated independently of any other church entity. They acted as a “think tank” organization to thoroughly evaluate every aspect of the church and make recommendations for greater consistency and cooperation among the various quorums and auxiliaries.³³ “It was exciting,” recalled Hortense Hogan Child, who, like Funk, had been released from the YWMIA board to serve on the Adult Correlation Committee, “because we were discussing the heartbeat of this Church and the things that would affect its future organization and administration.”³⁴ No topic was off limits, and participants were free to evaluate and critique. Elaine Cannon, who served briefly on the Youth Correlation Committee, considered it a “catalyst situation” that laid the groundwork for future developments, and Ardeth Greene Kapp, who served on the same committee later in the 1960s, felt that the experience helped the participants see the church as a whole organization, rather than focusing on a single part.³⁵

Women may have been particularly impressed by their service in correlation because they felt that they were full partners on the committees. In Funk’s experience, the Adult Correlation Committee was an open forum where all participants strove to listen with objectivity and without judgment or argumentation.³⁶ Wendell Ashton, who served with Hortense Child on the adult committee, characterized it as a “great partnership,” where women had “equal voice and equal authority.”³⁷ Child concurred, describing “a total committee of men and women who sat around the table and discussed things of a universal nature.” Women did not hold leadership positions on the correlation committees, but they apparently felt like full and equal participants. Both Child and Funk were sure Lee had a vision for empowering the women of the church.³⁸

While Lee’s announcement of the All-Church Coordinating Council and the correlation committees was not the first attempt to streamline church administration, participants felt they had a new vision, and Lee’s organizational experience and sense of divine direction energized the effort. Church president David O. McKay, who had been involved in virtually every previous correlation effort, generally supported Lee’s vision.³⁹ Latter-day Saint leaders felt a growing divergence between their values and those of their contemporaries in wider society, and that sense of difference gave urgency to Lee’s efforts. His call for a program of defense against the forces of iniquity positioned correlation as a spiritual and theological imperative.⁴⁰ Even as it simplified and streamlined programs under priesthood leadership, the correlation movement signified a more defensive posture by Latter-day Saint leaders and a departure from the optimism of decades when they felt more at home in the larger American society.⁴¹

In the early 1960s, many Latter-day Saint leaders already shared Lee’s sense of the need for a program of defense against emerging dangers. Concerns about sexual standards and modesty in dress continued to proliferate, and leaders worried not just about premarital sex among young people but also about the flouting of societal norms and the general atmosphere of sexual permissiveness. Even before the late-1960s hippie aesthetic emerged, the more formal clothing styles of the 1950s were giving way to the increasingly casual “mod” style of simple miniskirts and shift dresses. Pantsuits and culottes (divided skirts) came into style for women, and slacks were increasingly accepted for everyday women’s wear.⁴² The Twist dance craze in 1960 paved the way for other partnerless dance styles like the Watusi, which were often considered sexually suggestive.⁴³ At the same time, a series of court cases involving issues of free speech and obscenity expanded the range of sexual media available in the United States.⁴⁴ During the mid-1960s, discussion of sexual behavior became more open, with such dramatic effect that the term sexual revolution rose to prominence in American popular media.⁴⁵ For Latter-day Saints, who preached abstinence before marriage and fidelity within marriage, combating changing sexual mores was viewed as a fight against evil.⁴⁶

MIA publications advocated a positive, rather than reactive, focus. “Let us teach and promote positive thinking and living, positive seeking, positive choosing,” YMMIA leader Marvin J. Ashton urged in 1962.⁴⁷ As Latter-day Saints applied this counsel in family discussions and at church events, however, questions about concrete boundaries invariably surfaced. In 1962, church leaders added to the broad counsel to avoid early dating the specific guideline not to date before age sixteen.⁴⁸ In 1963, general authorities asked MIA leaders to establish standards for dress, music, dancing, and dating. In response, the MIA general boards consulted about developing trends with, among others, religious educators who worked with young people in high school and college. Initially, the boards resisted taking specific stances, opting instead for a continued emphasis on Latter-day Saint principles and a strong MIA program.⁴⁹ “We cannot set hard and fast rules in every little detail such as—how long? How close? How dark? How loud? How wide?” they wrote in the May 1964 MIA Leader. “We ask you as MIA leaders to maintain standards of modesty, culture, and refinement in dancing, music, dress, entertainment, and actions.” If the youth were taught correct principles, leaders believed, they would make good choices on their own.⁵⁰

Nevertheless, calls to delineate clear church standards in appearance and behavior only grew. A month after the MIA Leader declined to lay out detailed guidelines, apostle Delbert L. Stapley remarked at June Conference that “it seems in the church-prepared lessons the subject of chastity has been somewhat neglected.” He warned that the old ways of teaching chastity seemed insufficient: “There has developed among many young people a feeling that it is not too serious to break the law of chastity. . . . Perhaps we need a new personal vision, a new approach, a field of teaching with a positive application for the values and the joys of a clean, moral, and upright life.”⁵¹ Spencer W. Kimball, also serving in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, believed that general leaders needed to step in. “The time has come when MIA officers and teachers and others should unitedly rise as a single voice to assist parents and youth in changing the pattern of social life among the youth in our communities,” he urged in 1965.⁵²

That same year, the MIA issued a new booklet: For the Strength of Youth. The booklet was created by members from the MIA general boards, a selection of young people, and representatives of the church’s educational system (including BYU) and then reviewed by the Youth Correlation Committee.⁵³ Intended for both young women and young men, the booklet was billed as “an authoritative code of conduct so that all may know what is of Church standard in the way of conduct, speech, dress, etc.”⁵⁴

For the Strength of Youth was the first MIA publication on chastity to address youth directly, rather than speaking to their leaders.⁵⁵ Leaders still hesitated to discuss sexual matters openly in For the Strength of Youth, for fear they would introduce ideas some youth had not yet considered. At the same time, the Youth Correlation Committee expressed concern that if they did not include specific prohibitions, young people might take omission as permission.⁵⁶ In the end, the booklet focused more on gateway behaviors that could lead to premarital sex. It included the standard of not dating before age sixteen and encouraged young people to go on group dates before pairing off. Beyond warnings against necking and petting, little was said about sexual behaviors directly.⁵⁷

The booklet placed special emphasis on restraint in dance and dress. For the Strength of Youth discouraged the types of movements that had driven recent dance crazes. “The dance should not be a grotesque contortion of the body such as shoulder or hip shaking or excessive body jerking,” the booklet said.⁵⁸ Florence Jacobsen, who served on the committee that prepared the booklet, reported that they wanted to raise standards of conduct by raising dress standards.⁵⁹ Despite an opening disclaimer that modesty could not be defined by inches or fit, the instructions were detailed. Young men were not to wear tight pants and, even when working in the yard, were expected to wear trousers and shirts. Guidance for young women was far more extensive: Shorts were to be worn exclusively for participation in athletic activities. Young women might don slacks or shorts with hems that were not too far above the knee for hiking, sports, and yard work but not for shopping, attending school, going to the library, or dining out. Tight-fitting or “figure-hugging” clothing was never appropriate for a Latter-day Saint young woman, nor were dresses that were backless, strapless, or held up by spaghetti straps. Housedresses were to be worn only at home.⁶⁰ For the Strength of Youth instructed women to look feminine: “They should not dress like boys or try to give a masculine appearance,” it said.⁶¹

The booklet did not settle all questions, and after its release MIA leaders continued to wrestle over how to offer practicable guidance without seeming too prescriptive or creating unnecessary conflict with youth over clothing choices. In November 1965, after receiving continued queries regarding sleeveless dresses, leotards, and tights, the booklet’s writers explained that they had purposefully omitted a pronouncement on sleeveless dresses, adding that blouses and dresses were not immodest so long as shoulders and underarms were covered. “In other words, while we permit, we do not promote the wearing of sleeveless clothing,” they said. Leaders’ thinking on sleeveless clothing had evolved quickly—just nine years earlier, the main character in the YWMIA-produced film How Near to the Angels wore a sleeveless dress in a climactic scene—but after November 1965, leaders asked that youth wear shirts with sleeves in performances before the public, such as road shows and dance festivals.⁶²

Leaders had come to take pride in Latter-day Saint youth—they were the public face of the church as it attained broader acceptance and even acclaim in American society. Leaders wanted youth to belong as Americans in a way that marginalized early Latter-day Saints never had, but the standards they advocated would set Latter-day Saint youth apart from their counterparts outside the church. Leaders believed the standards in For the Strength of Youth could help counteract alarming cultural trends—including counterculture, drug culture, and radical student movements—and anticipated that the wholesomeness of their youth would advance the Latter-day Saints’ public image. As the booklet explained, “Personal cleanliness of body and cleanliness of one’s clothing builds morale and a good name.”⁶³ The final paragraph was even more direct: “The world judges the whole Church by the actions of its youth. . . . They must live up to their responsibilities as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by being kind, clean, thoughtful, refined, dignified, and obedient.”⁶⁴

The church experienced rapid growth outside the United States in the 1960s, allowing more people than ever before to judge the church by the actions of its youth. Membership numbers rose in long-established missions in Protestant-majority countries in the Pacific and Western Europe. The church’s missionary efforts also expanded in Catholic-majority countries in Latin America and around the world, as well as in some East Asian countries, where Christians were a minority.⁶⁵ In all these places, the positive relationships fostered by the MIA attracted new members and gave them a sense of belonging in the church.

When the first full-time missionaries arrived in the Philippines in 1961, the MIA operated under the system outlined in the newly published Mission MIA Manual—which gave a comprehensive overview of the elaborate program and guidance for adapting it to different circumstances—and helped make crucial inroads with local communities. “I wasn’t a member yet when I first attended the Mutual Improvement Association,” recalled Nenita Reyes, who became one of the first people baptized by those early missionaries.⁶⁶ In keeping with the MIA counsel to promote local leader-ship, Nenita was quickly assigned to lead the music at MIA activities. At first, she felt so shy she would hide behind the hymnbook, but she gradually became more comfortable. A young man named Ruben Gapiz attended an MIA caroling activity because he played guitar and thought he might get paid. He soon learned that MIA activities were purely volunteer but decided that being around a singing leader like Nenita was compensation enough. Ruben accepted an assignment as MIA dance director even before his baptism in 1962. He and Nenita became the first Latter-day Saint couple married in the Philippines. Both fondly remembered the sense of community in the MIA. “Everybody in our branch joined us in the MIA,” Nenita said, noting that even parents came. “It was beautiful.”⁶⁷

Elaine Lewis Jorgensen, an American Latter-day Saint living in Italy, oversaw the YWMIA in the Italian Mission, and just three years after the mission was organized, Jorgensen wrote to Florence Jacobsen to report that every branch in the mission had already organized an MIA group. Jorgensen noted some difficulties in implementation: Many activities outlined in the MIA handbook used in Italy at that time, she wrote, held no cultural relevance for Italian youth.⁶⁸ Travel between branches was also an obstacle for her, but she had created a checklist for local leaders and missionaries to fill out and send to her, which helped her monitor progress across the mission. The YWMIA leadership in the mission facilitated travel for members, which connected young Italians from different regions and helped foster a shared sense of Latter-day Saint identity. Despite the challenges of introducing an organization to a new place, there were signs of success. The MIA age group boasted the largest number of church members in Italy, and MIA programs were bringing in friends, parents, and relatives of those who participated.⁶⁹

MIA groups in the church’s missions also helped train future leaders in the faith. In 1964, church members Cornelia van Mondfrans and Willy Beekhuizen undertook a last-minute voyage from the Netherlands to the United Kingdom when the mission president invited them to attend a youth leadership conference taking place in Wales. Van Mondfrans was serving as YWMIA president of the Dutch Mission, and Beekhuizen was serving as a young missionary. With less than a day’s notice, they made arrangements and set off. At the weeklong conference, the two women participated in trainings on various aspects of the MIA program, including road shows, elocution, and music contests. Afterward, Van Mondfrans and Beekhuizen traveled through the Dutch Mission to train other local leaders. They also planned and conducted a summer camp in 1965 outside the Dutch city of Assen, expressly to mentor future church leaders, both young women and young men.⁷⁰ Beekhuizen worked with her future husband there, and after marrying, they continued together to lead camps and train youth and leaders on how to carry out church camping and youth conference events.⁷¹

Throughout the world, the MIA offered young people an identity and a culture that were distinct from those of their peers. Linda McCahon, a Black Latter-day Saint, remembered that while late 1960s youth culture in her hometown of Birmingham, England, was focused on individuality, it also fueled subcultures based on recognizable shared styles. Taste in clothing and music could identify a person as a mod, a rocker, or a hippie. Youth identity often involved following one’s own tastes into the loose fellowship of an established cultural category.⁷² Linda herself felt drawn to the community of the YWMIA after meeting Latter-day Saint missionaries in 1966. The first time she attended church, she was aware of how her large Afro, short-sleeved shirt, denim skirt, and flip-flops contrasted with the prevailing Sunday styles in the meetinghouse. She thought she probably struck others as a hippie. “I looked so different,” she said. Instead of judgment, however, the members showed curiosity and interest. As Linda attended activities, she quickly found herself fully accepted into the group. “We gelled very, very well,” she said. Peers in her MIA group came from different economic backgrounds and different family situations. Some were from Latter-day Saint families, some were the only Latter-day Saints in their families, and some were not members of the church at all. Spending time together, though, gave them a powerful feeling of unity. Linda remembered the young women her age wandering off to sing hymns together, enjoying the feeling of harmonizing.⁷³

Among all the other youth subcultures represented in her school, Linda and her friends felt they came across as oddballs for being so enthusiastic about their church activities. At the same time, they noticed that their peers at school were often surprised by how much they did with the MIA. Their travel across Britain for MIA conferences and activities was a particular point of difference. “Our school colleagues were so envious,” she said. “Half of them had not been out of Birmingham.”

The local leaders and ward members who arranged the trips and invested in the youth played an important role in Linda’s life. Her friend Yvonne Bogle’s parents often welcomed the whole group into their home. Linda also looked up to her YWMIA leader Maureen Cuthbert. Linda recalled that if she was worried about something, “My first port of call would be Maureen.” Cuthbert had a gift for listening without judgment and then sharing scriptures in a way that helped young women find their own answers. Linda treasured that kind of mentoring. “It doesn’t just affect your Church life, it carries over into your professional life,” she said. Years later, feeling the weight of her responsibility as a senior nurse managing other workers, she continued to imagine how her YWMIA leaders would react to the challenges she experienced. Linda also appreciated the supportive presence of male priesthood leaders. “We knew they cared for us,” she said. One week, when Linda and most of her group decided to stop at a newly opened pub for lemonade instead of continuing to MIA, a YMMIA leader arrived to invite them to attend. Rather than feeling intruded upon, Linda felt noticed. For most of her life, her home situation had been difficult. “I needed the gospel in my life at that time. MIA kept me going,” she said. “The church became my family.”⁷⁴

The sense of belonging Linda felt in her YWMIA experience was not unique. Many young women felt a strong sense of support from their religious community in the organization. Such experiences left them with largely positive attitudes about authority in the church, even as growing numbers of young people became more vocal and even militant in challenging traditional authority in society. “It was like I had two lives,” one young woman growing up in California in the late 1960s said. Her church life was highly structured and involved meeting expectations set by adults: “I did the whole Campcrafter thing, got all the awards, and graduated from seminary.” In the other part of her life, among her peer group, such traditional structures were viewed with suspicion. “I also was around all these self-styled radicals and Marxists in high school,” she said.⁷⁵

As students at the University of Utah in 1968, Carol Clark, Maurine Jensen, and Mary Frances Watson were mostly surrounded by fellow Latter-day Saints and felt somewhat insulated from the international upheaval on college campuses. They were curious, however, about the counterculture. “I wanted to know what other people were so passionate about,” Maurine recalled.⁷⁶ While serving in student leadership at the University of Utah, they helped approve a series of speakers that included civil rights activist Julian Bond, counterculture poet Allen Ginsberg, and pop artist Andy Warhol, as well as a debate between LSD advocate Timothy Leary and drug researcher Sidney Cohen.⁷⁷ Though Utah did not see the same turbulence as campuses in Western Europe and across much of the United States, the same issues captured people’s attention. “I also felt like the world was unraveling,” Maurine said, but she saw that maybe some aspects of that world did need to change.⁷⁸

The questions about race, war, authority, drugs, sex, and consciousness that were fueling the broader youth counterculture in the 1960s, however, were not generally discussed in church settings. “It was like two communities that in some ways didn’t interface all that much,” Maurine recalled. Carol felt resistance in one church class when she tried to open a discussion: “I remember asking some questions that were kind of things that were buzzing around campus . . . the teacher just blew me off. It’s like, why would you even ask questions like that?”⁷⁹

At times, though, these young women’s experiences crossed between those parallel worlds in jarring ways. Maurine’s best friend, who had gone through YWMIA with her, became interested in the Vietnam War and began attending antiwar rallies. She became more involved in activism and then surprised Maurine by dropping out of church and other activities they had shared. “She didn’t want any more of that structure in any way, shape, or form,” Maurine recalled. The women tried to maintain a relationship, but it proved difficult. At the friend’s apartment-warming party, the guests sat in a circle and passed around marijuana. Maurine wouldn’t take any, and her friend berated her for clinging to the values they’d been taught. “I felt that campus culture at that time in a very real and personal way, because my friend, my sister, my alter ego defected to another way of thinking.”⁸⁰

Even for devout church members, attitudes about structure were in flux. Carol was not at all interested in pursuing the Golden Gleaner award or participating in the Gleaner program, designed for young women over eighteen. “None of that was relevant to me. . . . I was very keen, at that point, on exploring more who I was,” she said. “I certainly wanted to learn more about the gospel, but that was a very personal thing for me. It wasn’t throwing me in another program.”⁸¹ Her experience was increasingly typical. The Gleaner program also failed to engage Maurine and Mary Frances. Another young woman, Jan Christiansen, felt that her mother was more invested in young women activities than she was. During high school, Jan had come to feel that she was more a consumer of YWMIA activities rather than an active participant. By the time she was a Laurel, she gravitated toward school clubs where she could take a more proactive role.⁸²

In college, each of the four felt more attracted to church organizations where they could have some influence and autonomy. Both Mary Frances and Jan were called into ward YWMIA leadership as teachers for younger classes. Mary Frances, Maurine, and Carol also had positive experiences with the Latter-day Saint Student Association (LDSSA) at the University of Utah, which was launched in 1960 to involve student leaders in fostering Latter-day Saint life on campus through firesides and social events. LDSSA—which was not connected to the MIA—was provided with a budget to cover activities. Student leaders also had open lines of communication with general church leadership.⁸³ The year Mary Frances chaired the LDSSA Women’s Council, the group invited Harold B. Lee to speak. Not only did he accept the speaking invitation, she recalled, but he invited the committee to meet with him in his home to discuss what they wanted him to speak about.⁸⁴

The young women’s eagerness to contribute to their church experience corresponded with shifts in the way they saw themselves and their communities. “Being on the campus at the University of Utah in 1968 enlarged my thinking,” Mary Frances said. “I was happy with societal traditions and wasn’t looking to make changes in the world. However, the changes I saw and the discussions I heard made me realize that I needed to change.”⁸⁵ She wanted particularly to understand better the experiences of African Americans. The same broadcast media that had brought the dance festivals from June Conference into families’ living rooms had also brought searing images of protest and police brutality from the American civil rights movement into homes across the country. “Our world was a white world,” Jan Christiansen recalled, but the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. shook her.⁸⁶ Carol Clark didn’t know anyone who was Black until after she finished college, and her initial feeling was that the civil rights movement was something happening in the seemingly distant American South. Racial issues became more real for Maurine, however, when she attended a national convention for her sorority and discovered that membership was restricted to white women. Coming from such a heavily white community and school, it had not occurred to her how much racism might be shaping the world around her. On her return, she and her friends began discussing ways their local chapter could lodge complaints about the sorority’s national policy.⁸⁷

Postwar patterns of migration also played a role in bringing racial issues into more white Latter-day Saints’ lives in the United States. A survey of articles in the Improvement Era near the end of the decade offers a few glimpses into the growing individual social connections between white Latter-day Saint women and Black communities: A brief sketch of Gloria Wheeler, a YWMIA officer in Michigan, mentioned that she led a predominantly Black Girl Scout troop.⁸⁸ A letter to the editor from another woman, Lucy Caley, noted how she used articles in the Improvement Era to answer questions from her students at an all-Black school in Antigua.⁸⁹ An article by G. Homer Durham, a Latter-day Saint university president in Arizona, invoked the growing diaspora of educated young Latter-day Saints in multiracial cities to argue that readers had a spiritual stake in addressing the racial inequalities, both social and economic, that young families would encounter. “They cannot stand apart from the issue,” he wrote.⁹⁰ Though nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints had gathered to Utah precisely to stand apart from the larger society, the combined forces of church growth, migration, and shifting youth culture were making it harder to avoid engaging with broader social issues and trends.

The issue of race affected young women outside the United States as well. As a biracial Latter-day Saint in England—her father, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, was Black—Linda McCahon was personally affected by racial policies and attitudes in the church. Between 1852 and 1978, the church did not ordain Black men to the priesthood or offer the temple ordinances of endowment and marriage sealing to Black women and men of African descent.⁹¹ So although Linda embraced the Latter-day Saint ideal, prominently championed by the YWMIA, of longing for a temple marriage and an eternal family, she was told she would not be allowed to marry in the temple. As a young woman, Linda regularly participated in temple trips to perform proxy baptisms for the dead, but that was the limit of her temple access.

The Latter-day Saint missionaries who taught Linda had told her about the restrictions before her baptism. They were not the only voice on the issue: a classmate sharply questioned Linda’s decision to affiliate with a church that the classmate labeled as racist. But as Linda navigated the issue, she was anchored by a feeling of peace she attributed to divine reassurance that all would be well.⁹² In her Treasures of Truth book, Linda recorded the feeling she had on the day of her baptism at age fifteen: “I sat on the front row all clothed in white and shaking with fright now the actual baptising was to take place.” Nevertheless, she wrote, “As I stepped into the water all my body was at ease.”⁹³ She felt a similar sense of peace and comfort when she received her patriarchal blessing at age eighteen. A patriarchal blessing, given to church members only once in a lifetime and usually when they are teens, gives counsel and promises future blessings. Linda’s included a promise that her children would serve missions, which led Linda to conclude that the racial restriction would be lifted within a generation.⁹⁴

On Friday, 27 June 1969, at six o’clock in the morning, a chorus of five hundred young women from sixty-two stakes in the Salt Lake Valley—the Centennial Girls’ Chorus—lifted their voices to sing at the YWMIA Centennial Sunrise Service in the Tabernacle on Temple Square, performing pieces written specifically for the event. The sunrise performance was one of many special events held in conjunction with June Conference that year to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the young women’s organization.⁹⁵ The previous evening, over six thousand attendees—including stake, general, and civic leaders—had danced beneath 124 miles of crepe paper that had been strung to create a decorative ceiling in the Salt Palace arena. Attendees could choose from six refreshment parlors and any of three dance floors, each with a live band.⁹⁶ On Friday and Saturday, over six thousand young dancers performed in the huge dance festival in front of thirty thousand spectators, and an all-girls dance depicted the theme “An Ideal Girl Is Feminine As Well As Modern.”⁹⁷

Connection to the past was a natural theme. Florence Jacobsen and her counselors were dressed in 1869 period costumes as they were presented for a sustaining vote in the afternoon joint executive session.⁹⁸ Young women in similar period costumes conducted tours of the Lion House for conference goers, showing off both the historic rooms where the organization had its beginnings and a five-layer cake Jacobsen had baked to share at the conference.⁹⁹ Together, the founding home and the cake suggested the spirit of familial closeness the organization still tried to foster. YWMIA board members had commissioned artwork and created publications to celebrate the centennial. Among the items on display were a centennial quilt block designed around the YWMIA symbols; oil paintings of all six YWMIA general presidents; a china plate, linen towel, and medallion, all decorated with an image of a young woman of 1869 side by side with a young woman of 1969; and A Century of Sisterhood, a one-hundred-page, lavishly illustrated softcover book recounting the history of the organization year by year.¹⁰⁰ In an article reflecting on the centennial, Jacobsen shared stories of the MIA’s influence—stories of young people connecting with each other, adopting a greater vision for their own futures and those of their community, and working to bring their lives into harmony with their values.¹⁰¹

Two months later and over two thousand miles away, the iconic rock music festival known as Woodstock also drew young people searching for a sense of belonging in a larger movement, reaching for a greater vision for their future, and wanting to live in harmony with their values.¹⁰² While the YWMIA centennial celebration and Woodstock addressed overlapping human longings, their organizing logics stood in sharp contrast to one another. Where the MIA celebration promised an orderly, choreographed experience, Woodstock focused on spontaneity to the point of logistical chaos. Both focused attention on dress, sexuality, and drug use, but from opposite points of view. In each area, the MIA championed restraint or abstention, while the counterculture celebrated freedom and experimentation. Though they championed opposing approaches, these two festivals in 1969 provided a vivid demonstration of the rising cultural trends among youth.

Latter-day Saint leaders, while largely critical of the excesses they saw in youth counterculture, did their best to understand youth and anticipate what the rising generation might best relate to. Young people’s “great emphasis on genuineness,” wrote Latter-day Saint religious educator Kenneth Godfrey, reflected “a genuine concern for that which is really real.” Their resistance to authority and institutional mandates grew out of a respect for agency and a desire to be involved in decision-making processes.¹⁰³ Recognizing these trends, church leaders sought to engage young people on their own terms, inviting them to become “gospel activists” and channel their energies into strengthening the Latter-day Saint community and finding their identity within it.¹⁰⁴ “Great youth and outstanding leaders can work together within the framework of the restored gospel,” Godfrey affirmed.¹⁰⁵

This impulse was manifest in the establishment of class presidencies in the YWMIA and the creation of the bishop’s youth council. Young women already served in leadership roles in their YWMIA classes, but officers and representatives were typically chosen by their peers.¹⁰⁶ The new class presidencies introduced in 1969 were appointed by the bishop instead of elected, in a direct parallel to young men’s leadership in priesthood quorums and in keeping with the principles of correlation, which dictated that everything should be done by priesthood authority. The bishop was instructed to counsel with the adult YWMIA president of the ward about whom to appoint as president for each class. New class presidents were then to decide who should serve as their counselors and recommend them to the bishop so that he could issue a formal invitation to serve. Class presidencies were to serve for six or twelve months, at the bishop’s discretion.¹⁰⁷

Class presidents and their counselors were also asked to serve on the bishop’s youth council, a new planning body in each ward. An article discussing the new council stated that “a recently conducted survey by the Presiding Bishopric showed that more than 75 percent of the youths questioned, wanted to be more involved in the planning of their own activities.” Giving youth greater ownership and responsibility represented a significant departure from decades of MIA practice in which adult leaders, starting with the general boards, outlined, scripted, scheduled, and prescribed Mutual activities, often down to the last detail. The bishop’s youth council was intended to enable young women and men to work directly with the bishop to plan activities according to their needs and interests. Leaders also hoped the council would improve communication and provide greater leadership training to youth. Altogether, the bishop’s youth council included eighteen young people—three presidency members from each YWMIA class and Aaronic Priesthood quorum. Adult leaders of the youth were invited only when necessary and were “never to dominate the council members.”¹⁰⁸

To foster a culture of youth leadership, the YWMIA also held a leadership conference for Laurels in 1970. A committee of young women, headed by a young woman from a stake in Salt Lake City, was assigned to do the actual conference planning, while a general board committee played a supporting role. The general board committee trained the young women in communicating with others, writing agendas, and conducting meetings. The young women themselves then conducted meetings, organized subcommittees, collected information, and wrote memos. The committee requested that the president of each participating stake select five young women to send to the event. The young women, in turn, were to plan a local leadership conference in their own stakes for all young women ages twelve through seventeen.¹⁰⁹

More than three thousand young women from the United States and Canada attended the August 1970 conference on the BYU campus.¹¹⁰ In September, a message in the MIA Leader reminded stakes to look to the five young women from their stake who had attended the August Laurel conference for leadership. “Delegates to that conference have information on how to schedule and conduct the stake meetings,” the notice said, reminding local adult leaders that their role was to assist and advise.¹¹¹ Together with the bishop’s youth council, the leadership conference represented a significant attempt to reorient the YWMIA experience toward individual initiative and away from the centrally directed rhythms that had dominated the previous decades.

Other organizational rhythms were also in flux. Church leaders working on correlation implemented a major overhaul of the church magazines in 1971. The Relief Society Magazine, Children’s Friend, Instructor, and Improvement Era magazines—each published by auxiliary organizations—were all discontinued, to be replaced by three magazines that represented the correlation vision of teaching religious truths to church members in three life stages. The Ensign magazine would serve adults, the New Era would be for youth, and the Friend would be oriented toward children. Elaine Cannon, who had previously helped oversee the Era of Youth section of the Improvement Era, became the associate editor of the New Era, which offered inspirational and doctrinal content geared toward youth, as well as items of general interest.¹¹² The first issue, published in January 1971, presented articles on pop music and an ambitious service project, as well as poetry by young people, crossword puzzles, questions and answers about religious topics, and even recipes. It also highlighted academic work being done by young Latter-day Saints, including studies on young Latter-day Saint women’s attitudes toward fashion, factors in successful marriages, and the effect of athletic shoes on performance in basketball. Young men and women from various places were highlighted for their accomplishments.¹¹³ This basic pattern defined the magazine for many years to come. However, the magazine did not always provide equal attention to young women and young men. By April, Cannon had already contacted Young Women general leaders over a concern that the magazine focused on young men more than young women. Leaders were to meet with Cannon and offer suggestions on topics and articles that would be interesting for young women.¹¹⁴

One of the most visible effects of Harold B. Lee’s vision for correlation was the centralization of auxiliary budgets. Until 1970, each auxiliary, including the YWMIA, had independently raised and disbursed funds within its organizations. Despite the autonomy this fundraising enabled, it was both time consuming and onerous at all levels of the organization. In the latter half of the 1960s, correlation leaders considered ways to bring all church organizations under a central budget as part of their effort to decrease the overlap and burden of these fundraising efforts. Jacobsen felt strongly about keeping the YWMIA budget under YWMIA control. Despite her insistence that elaborate programming elements were necessary and that YWMIA leaders knew the needs of their organization best, all auxiliary money was turned over to a central budget in September 1970.¹¹⁵ As part of this centralizing effort, the MIA also had to abandon plans to construct a headquarters building in Salt Lake City, and in 1971, the churchwide dance, theater, and sports programs were discontinued, though they continued on the regional level.¹¹⁶

Several months after Harold B. Lee became church president in July 1972, Jacobsen and her counselors were asked to come to his office. They had served in the YWMIA presidency for eleven eventful years, and Jacobsen had been telling her counselors she was worn out and ready for a change. During their tenure, they had overseen the highly detailed programs and massive events that had come to characterize the MIA and had helped the organization continue to adapt to international growth. They had helped advocate for newly articulated church standards on dating and modesty while searching for new ways to engage youth during a time of seismic cultural change. The years of work had taken a toll.

When they arrived at the First Presidency’s office, they found that the YMMIA superintendent and his counselors were also there. “We’ve prayed a great deal about this,” Jacobsen remembered members of the First Presidency saying, “and we feel that we should release all of you from the MIA.”¹¹⁷ While not unprecedented, the choice to replace both leadership groups at once was unusual.

The change in leadership corresponded with changes to how the MIA would fit into the larger church. When Victor L. Brown was appointed presiding bishop of the church in April 1972, he was specifically charged with oversight of both boys and girls of Aaronic Priesthood age—twelve through eighteen years old. By November 1972, when the new general presidencies were announced, the Presiding Bishopric and First Presidency had already agreed that in wards, the bishopric would now oversee the youth, assisted by ward presidencies for the young women and young men. This structure formalized the growing correlation emphasis on the role of bishops by giving them, rather than MIA presidents, ultimate oversight. They had also directed that the large MIA boards of the past be reduced at all levels.¹¹⁸

Details remained to be worked out, but the same issue of the Church News that announced Jacobsen’s release and the appointment of a new presidency also announced changes to the organizations for young people. The 1972 restructuring created a new organization—the Melchizedek Priesthood Mutual Interest Association (MPMIA)—for young people over age eighteen, who had historically been served by the YMMIA and YWMIA. The MPMIA would operate at the stake and regional levels and not have a general presidency. Under this new structure, church members aged twelve to eighteen would still be served by the YWMIA and the YMMIA, but those organizations would be collectively called the Aaronic Priesthood Mutual Improvement Association (APMIA). The division of MPMIA and APMIA at age eighteen reflected that age’s growing significance as a marker of adulthood. It was the age at which young men usually advanced from the Aaronic to the Melchizedek Priesthood.¹¹⁹ It was also the age at which most young people in the United States graduated from high school. The APMIA was to be overseen by the Presiding Bishopric, in keeping with scriptural principles that designated the bishopric as the presidency of the Aaronic Priesthood.¹²⁰

The leaders appointed to replace Jacobsen and her counselors were Ruth Funk, Hortense Child, and Ardeth Kapp. Funk, Child, and Kapp were veteran young women’s leaders who had also served on correlation committees.¹²¹ That experience would influence the organization’s immediate future. Over the course of the 1960s, the YWMIA had made changes to meet the changing needs of the faith’s youth, but during the 1970s, the focus would shift from changes within the MIA to a full realignment of the organization within the structure of the church.