Months of intensive effort preceded the meeting in the temple in March 1973. Funk, Child, and Kapp were committed to correlation ideals and came to their new assignments with a willingness to question the status quo and make changes. The APMIA presidencies took office with the mandate to develop a full structure for the new APMIA organization in time to be approved and announced at general conference in early April 1973, with details and materials to be distributed to local leaders at June Conference that same year.⁴ It was an almost superhuman task, Child felt, to work everything out so quickly.⁵ The executives—Funk and her counselors, Backman and his counselors, and the Presiding Bishopric—met many times between January and March 1973, sometimes working late into the evening to shape a new vision for the church’s youth programs.⁶

When Lee appointed the new Young Women leaders, he expressed a need to involve youth more directly in leadership and to orient them toward service more than “fun and games.” This directive departed sharply from the 1920s designation of the MIA as the recreation arm of the church and from the longstanding emphasis on teaching the gospel through spiritualized recreation. Church leaders in the early 1970s felt that the youth of the church needed to take more stewardship over their own programs and the activity of their peers.⁷ Harking back to Lee’s “program of defense,” they asserted that Latter-day Saints were living in the “perilous times” foreseen by the apostle Paul and that young people needed a stronger spiritual foundation. “For too many this has been a social gospel,” one executive committee member observed, echoing a long history of similar concerns about the youth programs. “We need a program that will help the youth understand that they can draw upon the power of God through personal revelation.”⁸

The plan presented to church leaders in the temple envisioned the APMIA being structured around a few basic principles. It would have direction and oversight by priesthood leaders and allow for flexible local administration and leader accountability. It would serve the individual, involve youth in planning, and develop youth leadership through activities focused on service. The bishop’s youth committee (a carryover of the bishop’s youth council established a few years earlier) would work closely with a small activities committee made up of adults to plan service projects and activities. Local congregations would draw from a “recipe book” of ideas to tailor the program to their needs and resources. “Everything that is done should be done with the purpose of building youth,” APMIA leaders emphasized. “Through service leading to spiritual experiences is where youth start to become true Latter-day Saints.” The programs would be administered by the ward, with youth presidents of the age groups—still called Beehive, Mia Maid, and Laurel in the Young Women organization—taking the lead, supported by adult leaders.⁹ There would be no more detailed, prescriptive calendars and program outlines issued from church headquarters.

After the concept for the realigned organizations was approved and announced at general conference, the APMIA leaders went back to work, sprinting to prepare further guidance for local leaders to be distributed at June Conference, just over two months away. So hurried was the preparation that some of the materials were delivered directly to the Tabernacle from the printshop just before the conference’s first session.¹⁰ During the conference, leaders laid out both the goals and the logistics of the APMIA, clarifying the roles of various youth and adult leaders and offering guidance on what materials ought to be used. They explained that traditional recreational events should continue to be part of the program depending on local need, capacity, and desire, while indicating that a major shift in approach was underway. The report of a panel discussion at the conference shows that stake leaders came with many questions about how the new APMIA organization was going to work.¹¹

The organization was still in flux when church president Harold B. Lee died suddenly in December 1973. Lee was succeeded by Spencer W. Kimball, a beloved apostle known for his personal ministry to individuals and particularly to Native Americans. Kimball had not been closely involved with Lee on correlation or on the youth organizations. After Kimball became church president, Victor L. Brown approached him with the concern that continued use of the name MIA seemed to be keeping ward and stake leaders from recognizing the extent of the changes envisioned.¹² At the 1974 June Conference, Kimball announced that the name MIA would no longer be used. The youth organizations had been separated, he said, and would be known simply as Young Women and Aaronic Priesthood. The term MIA persisted in colloquial use to refer to youth activities, but its elimination signaled the end of an era in church administration.

Along with the name change, Kimball also announced another structural revision to the youth organizations. Having both the Presiding Bishopric and an APMIA presidency oversee the organization for young men had created a double-layered leadership structure, so the Young Men general presidency was released and discontinued.¹³ The Presiding Bishopric was assigned to directly oversee the Aaronic Priesthood organization, and a director of Aaronic Priesthood would serve under the Presiding Bishopric to handle the administrative details of the young men’s program. The Young Women general presidency remained in place and would report to the Presiding Bishopric.¹⁴ For three years, the Young Women presidency worked under the direction of and in close collaboration with the Presiding Bishopric. During that time, giving adequate leadership and attention to the youth organizations was the Presiding Bishopric’s highest priority.¹⁵ The bishopric developed what Child called a “marvelous working relationship” with the Young Women presidency and board.¹⁶ The bishopric came to Wednesday night board meetings and met regularly with the board committees. That collaboration gave Young Women leaders a strong sense of support and guidance that Child believed could have been a model for helping Young Women leaders at all levels learn to work within the priesthood line.¹⁷

Ultimately, however, this structure for the youth organizations proved unsustainable. The Presiding Bishopric had extensive responsibilities beyond the youth organizations, and those duties were in the process of being redefined.¹⁸ The Presiding Bishopric expressed concerns about the mismatch between their responsibility for the youth and their overall focus on the church’s temporal and logistical needs. Furthermore, it did not make sense, as Brown explained, for the Twelve Apostles to “be responsible for the entire ecclesiastical program of the church—except for six years in the lives of boys and girls.”¹⁹ In 1977, the Aaronic Priesthood organization was renamed Young Men, and a general presidency was reestablished. Responsibility for the youth organizations shifted from the Presiding Bishopric to a member of the Quorum of the Seventy, Marion D. Hanks, who was made Managing Director of Youth and reported to members of the Quorum of the Twelve.²⁰ General Young Women and Young Men leaders reported to Hanks.

In contrast to historical practice, the Young Women presidency and their new counterparts, Neil Schaerrer and counselors Roy Doxey and Quinn McKay, never established a strong working relationship. The members of the 1977 Young Men presidency had served as mission presidents, bishops, and stake presidents, but they had little experience working with the church’s youth programs. They were unaccustomed to working closely with a women’s organization and did not share the women’s vision of collaboration.²¹ As reflected in the organization’s previous official name, Aaronic Priesthood, Young Men programs focused primarily on priesthood duties and missionary preparation, though the organization retained Boy Scouts as a mainstay for activities. Although he did allow that some joint activities were desirable, Schaerrer saw few overlapping interests. “We’re not a corresponding organization with the Young Women,” he said, “and we ought to have much less activity with the women than there has been over the years.”²²

The years from 1973 through the end of the decade were characterized by rapid administrative change that made collaboration difficult and long-term planning almost impossible. While she supported the overall goals of the organizational changes, Child described these years of change as challenging and dynamic. “First we changed prophets,” she recalled, “and secondly we changed from the Bishopric, and then we changed to having a Young Men’s presidency whose working relationship with us was very, very scant and brief. And not only that, but the Correlation procedures were changing constantly. . . . We changed names three times. We changed facilities four times.”²³

Kapp acknowledged that from the outside, the Young Women organization must have appeared chaotic and uncertain at times. But Lee had told Funk, Child, and Kapp when they were first appointed that it would take five years for the new youth programs to be understood, and Kapp preferred to look at the bigger picture. “Five years isn’t very long in the course of Church history,” she said.²⁴ Both Child and Kapp believed that the period of change ultimately led to youth programs more centered in the church’s branches, wards, and stakes and more responsive to local needs.²⁵

For the first one hundred years of its existence, the Young Women organization had operated through lines of transmission that ran in both directions from the Young Women general presidency to stake and then ward Young Women leaders. Before the 1970s, the annual June Conference had brought Young Women general leaders together with other church leaders who had responsibility for youth to make announcements, explain policy changes, and discuss the year’s programs in detail; general leaders’ visits to local conventions and conferences had provided further opportunities for training, mentorship, and the building of relationships. They had periodically issued circular letters and published important information in the magazines and the MIA Leader and MIA in the Missions newsletters. In addition, the general Young Women office received many letters and phone calls from local leaders and responded directly to many of them.

In the first three years of Funk’s presidency, almost all these channels of communication were abruptly severed and rerouted to mirror the change in reporting lines.²⁶ Crucial avenues of communication were lost—right when major changes in the organization and its programs made communication vital.²⁷ Between June 1974 and October 1975—the period when the structural changes to the Young Women organization were taking hold—general leaders were permitted to send almost no written communication to local leaders, and visits to local units were sharply curtailed. These changes were undoubtedly intended to establish the new order in which local youth leaders were to counsel with their bishops and stake presidents rather than relying on central directives. But the perhaps unintended consequence was almost no communication at all. “There was a vacuum and a dearth of any directing material from headquarters,” Child lamented.²⁸ Bishop Victor L. Brown, feeling the same struggles, observed that the travel and meeting restrictions constrained youth leaders “to the point of eliminating an effective introduction of the program.”²⁹

The discontinuation of June Conference was felt particularly keenly. Spencer W. Kimball announced the change to a surprised audience of youth leaders during the 1975 June Conference; the Young Women general presidency knew the announcement was coming but had not been informed when it would take place.³⁰ “With distances growing greater and membership greatly increasing, it seems high time to take another long stride in our decentralization,” Kimball declared. Henceforward, the church would focus on reaching people where they were rather than on events in Salt Lake City. “Truly we have become a global church,” he said. Even as June Conference had grown in size and scope, it served an ever-decreasing percentage of the globally expanding, increasingly non-English-speaking church membership. It seemed unfair, he said, that so few could attend and get the benefits that so many others wanted and needed. The church had already held area conferences in Europe, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina and had planned several more. Kimball suggested that such local and regional conferences would replace the need for centralized auxiliary conferences.³¹

Even more than the name change and new reporting lines, the discontinuation of June Conference marked the decisive end of the mutual improvement movement. June Conference had been more than a yearly event—it had been a structuring mainstay for the MIA organizations and their programs. It had long served as a fountainhead of guidance for creating strong programs, and its absence further limited connections between general and local leaders and left local leaders pleading for direction and training.³² Young Women leaders adhered to the communication protocols of the new priesthood-oriented structure, but it would be a few more years before they could send new guidebooks and training materials to stake and ward leaders.³³

At headquarters, Young Women leaders found themselves with heavy responsibilities but little decision-making authority and few opportunities to communicate directly with key leaders. Funk recalled that in her early days on the YWMIA board, she found it deeply meaningful to see Lucy Cannon and Bertha Reeder meet regularly with the First Presidency and the organization’s apostolic advisers. Her close work with Harold B. Lee in the early part of her administration also brought her great joy because she felt it brought women into what she called “the fold of the Priesthood.” With the shift from APMIA to Young Women, however, she found much less opportunity for such interactions. For example, she had only sporadic, informal opportunities to interact with church president Spencer W. Kimball.³⁴ Especially after the Presiding Bishopric was released from direct oversight of the youth organizations, the presidency found themselves having to implement directives made without their input.³⁵

The Young Women general presidency was by this time several layers down the leadership hierarchy, giving them limited access to key decision makers.³⁶ Even when they managed to arrange a meeting, the interactions were sometimes unsatisfying. Funk and her counselors once requested a meeting with senior leaders; they rehearsed carefully to be concise and effective in their presentation, hoping to receive helpful direction. Instead, Funk began her explanation but was immediately interrupted. “Then the whole meeting became a discussion between those to whom we were to be presenting it, while we just observed,” Kapp recalled.³⁷ Brown likewise recalled meetings in which the Young Women leaders were not allowed to make their presentations without interruption.³⁸

Another change the presidency experienced was the need to submit training materials or other documents through proper correlation approval channels before those documents could be published or distributed—a process they unequivocally supported. “Correlation in my mind was like a group of experts who by assignment check your parachute that you yourself have folded before you jump,” Ardeth Kapp observed. “Really they protected us from a lot of falls that we could have had without that body of people who were so thorough.”³⁹ At the same time, those approval channels—various reading and review committees and staff gatekeepers—were themselves in process of development. Rapid change created inconsistency, inefficiency, and some unpredictability. After preparing one document and finally seeing it through all the approvals, the presidency would use the same guidelines for their next project, only to find there was a new set of criteria.⁴⁰ “It wasn’t that we were resisting the direction,” Kapp said. “It was that we weren’t clear about the direction.” The presidency recognized that the problem was not personal. “When I say ‘Correlation,’ I don’t think of it as people who were doing it,” Kapp clarified. Their interactions with other staff members were positive and conducted in a spirit of mutual support. The difficulties, Kapp believed, came from “an organizational structure that needed to be refined.”⁴¹ Nonetheless, Funk, Child, and Kapp worked persistently to complete projects and secure approvals.

Chief among the projects for which Funk and her counselors sought approval was a new goals program. A Personal Achievement Program for youth of both genders had been implemented in 1970.⁴² For young women, the core of the 1970 program was a set of seven paperback booklets called journals, one for each year from age twelve to eighteen, that contained guidance and tracking for goal setting. Their titles evoked stages of development: Beginning, Growing, Discovering, Believing, Aspiring, Achieving, and Fulfilling. These journals, along with envelopes for awards and mementos, were to be placed in a three-ring binder labeled with the traditional title Treasures of Truth. The entire binder was intended to record a young woman’s personal history through her goals and their fulfillment.⁴³ The 1970 program also introduced a central role for the bishop, in keeping with the correlation vision of priesthood oversight. It instructed bishops to interview young women and young men each year, on or near their birthdays, to discuss moral standards and to help youth review and set goals.⁴⁴ As interviews with the bishop became a standard feature of young women’s experiences, Young Women leaders hoped the regular conversations would better equip bishops to understand and advocate for young women.⁴⁵

By 1974, however, it was clear the achievement program wasn’t working. Over-burdened bishops struggled to adequately oversee young people’s goals, and many local leaders felt parents should take more stewardship over goal setting.⁴⁶ The program was too rigid and complex, and most significantly, young people didn’t seem to like it.⁴⁷ In late 1973, executives of what was then APMIA had discussed a sobering internal estimate that fewer than 10 percent of young Saints were engaging with the program. “Youth want to be involved in goal setting and achievement, and in keeping a record of important events in their life,” leaders reported, “but they don’t want to do so by answering questions prepared for them by adults.”⁴⁸ In some international areas, the journals piled up on distribution center shelves because people could not afford to buy them.⁴⁹ Leaders recognized the program fell short of its goals and determined that “when something is not working it either needs to be changed or done away with.”⁵⁰ Early in 1974, they decided to phase out the unpopular Personal Achievement Program.⁵¹

Eager to move away from the failed program but unwilling to leave local groups without a new one to follow, the Young Women presidency hastily assembled what they said was not a replacement program but rather a “new focus for young women.”⁵² They called it Behold Thy Handmaiden, a reference to the biblical account of Mary’s response upon being told she would become the mother of Jesus Christ. The presidency felt that Mary’s submission to God’s will was a beautiful ideal for young women.⁵³ Behold Thy Handmaiden introduced a new framework for the Young Women organization, but it was not yet a fully developed achievement program. It included six areas of focus that would encompass the life of a well-rounded young woman: spiritual awareness, homemaking arts, service and compassion, recreation and the world of nature, cultural arts and education, and personal and social refinement.⁵⁴ In the process of creating Behold Thy Handmaiden, Young Women leaders met with teachers in various fields and leaders of organizations such as 4-H and Future Homemakers of America to get a sense of what would best help young women develop spiritual strength, a positive self-concept, and practical skills and talents.⁵⁵

The presidency introduced Behold Thy Handmaiden in a multimedia presentation at the 1974 June Conference, where they distributed a short booklet for young women describing the program and a separate companion guide for leaders.⁵⁶ The guidebook for leaders presented ideals in each area of focus and offered suggestions for incorporating those ideals into all aspects of Young Women experiences and activities. It recommended that a “New Beginnings seminar” be held each year to welcome first-year Beehive members, create an atmosphere of love and friendship, introduce class presidencies and adult leaders, and present the areas of focus in creative ways. While Behold Thy Handmaiden introduced some new ideas, it included holdovers from previous programs as well—the guidelines encouraged young women to continue to create Treasures of Truth books and mentioned the availability of binders and the personal achievement journals, but these were offered only as suggestions.⁵⁷

In the Behold Thy Handmaiden booklet for young women, each area of focus was introduced in a two-page spread, illustrated with a full-page painting of a young woman. The paintings depicted young women of various races and ethnicities, reflecting awareness of the increasingly multiracial membership of the church. The opening spread also included a relevant scriptural passage, a short aspirational phrase, and a description of the qualities embodied in the area. The spiritual awareness section, for example, cited a Book of Mormon verse exhorting believers to “seek ye first the kingdom of God” and described a spiritual young woman as one who used the scriptures as guidelines for her life, knew she was a daughter of God and looked to Him for comfort and guidance, and recognized the power and authority of the priesthood. The accompanying painting showed an apparently Latina or Indigenous young woman looking up, her face joyously alight, her hands clasped in prayer. “To live thy word, to teach thy word. To praise thy name on high” appeared in calligraphy at the bottom.⁵⁸

Behold Thy Handmaiden responded not only to the shortcomings of the 1970 program but also to changing cultural beliefs in the United States regarding women’s place in society.⁵⁹ In the early 1960s, Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique had sent shockwaves through American culture by arguing that the ideals of domesticity and femininity that structured many women’s lives also caused them to suffer from loss of identity and lack of meaning. Around the same time, President John F. Kennedy created the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which investigated the many ways women were disadvantaged in the law, education, employment, and other arenas. Throughout the decade, many efforts began to address these problems through legislation and regulation. The National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan and like-minded associates, took on a high profile in pushing for reforms that would dramatically restructure gender relations in American society. Efforts to address issues of equality in employment, education, and legal standing birthed a “rights revolution” for women in the United States.⁶⁰ While there was general support in American society for women’s equality under the law, some feminists also advocated for the right to abortion and for homosexual rights—causes that were much less popular and sparked heated opposition. By the mid-1970s, many of these energies had become focused on the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Many women, however, began to see the problem of gender inequality as something that laws and regulations alone could not address. It was a matter of confronting deep structures of society and psychology and of recognizing the norms that led both women and men to internalize the idea that women were inferior and dependent. Women who had participated in the civil rights movement and antiwar protests adopted “liberation” as the watchword for their cause, and the women’s liberation movement caught fire. At its core was the idea of consciousness-raising—making women aware of the many manifestations of sexism in their lives and giving them the language to describe it.

Some women’s liberation activists took an aggressive approach to confronting sexism in society. They loudly disrupted the Miss America pageant, for example, calling it a cattle auction and crowning a sheep the winner. Such extreme tactics, which played directly against the traditional expectation that women would be polite and agreeable, garnered attention and created a popular image of feminists as radical and threatening. But even feminists with less theatrical methods spoke out strongly about previously taboo subjects such as rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence, and many advocated for women’s sexual freedom and for liberation from what they saw as the oppression of traditional gender roles. Some eschewed marriage altogether.

Latter-day Saints were generally cautious about the women’s movement. One group of Latter-day Saint women formed their own discussion group and acknowledged that they read feminist literature with interest. It caused them to search their souls, but ultimately they reaffirmed their commitments to faith and family. As mothers of large families, they were busy working in the church themselves and supporting their husbands’ service. They considered themselves “not particularly down-trodden,” and they claimed no affiliation with any radical feminist group. “Some of us are so straight as to be shocked by their antics,” wrote one participant.⁶¹ Even the most progressive in the group saw themselves as falling somewhere in between the extremes of the day’s rhetoric.⁶²

Other Latter-day Saint women were even less moved by feminist arguments. Profoundly committed to a view of gender they believed reflected eternal identities, they saw feminist agitation as an attack on women’s divinely appointed roles as wives and mothers—roles they believed extended into the hereafter because of the Latter-day Saint belief that the family forms the basic unit of eternal life in God’s kingdom. They saw the feminist movement as a tactic inspired by Satan to confuse women and divert their attention away from God’s plan of happiness. Apostle Thomas S. Monson criticized the prioritization of personal freedom or professional aspiration over religious duty and gendered roles in family life. “Equality of rights does not imply identity of functions,” he argued.⁶³ Funk assertively aligned herself with this view. “Women of the world can gain the liberation they seek only by recognizing within themselves the gifts of womanhood, the gifts of motherhood, and satisfying them in the natural and divine role as found within the priesthood,” she declared. “This is the only key to our identity—the role we play in the priesthood of God.” Quoting one of her board members, she added, “I am not interested in liberation. I am interested in exaltation.”⁶⁴ This positioning would fundamentally structure the Young Women leaders’ approach to their service and their messaging to young women.

When they introduced Behold Thy Handmaiden, Young Women leaders warned that “many forces in the world today are trying to destroy or change the feelings of young women about the sacred roles of womanhood.” Each young woman was born “uninfluenced by the ways of the world,” they said, and had spiritual characteristics that could be diminished by such influences. “The new focus is designed to help the young women regain their celestial status.”⁶⁵ The next year, in what would be the final June Conference, a handout for Behold Thy Handmaiden took on a more dire tone. “We are exposed on every side to propaganda,” it warned, “which is aimed at making women feel that they should seek ‘liberation’ from their traditional role.” This propaganda, it asserted, demeaned marriage and homemaking and offered divorce as “the easy answer to marital problems.”⁶⁶ Such rhetoric illustrated much of the thinking behind the new program for young women, which sought to dignify caregiving and honor motherhood, in opposition to what leaders saw as misguided and dangerous notions of women’s liberation.

After introducing Behold Thy Handmaiden in 1974, the presidency and board continued to work toward a fuller achievement program. They wanted to create something that would provide structure, guidelines, and accountability but also allow girls to have agency and self-direction.⁶⁷ They insisted that they did not want to consider it a program but rather a process, one fully integrated with the total curriculum of the Young Women organization; they especially did not want to structure it around awards but rather around individual progression.⁶⁸ “We wanted it to include the mold of the individual award and the detail of the personal achievement programs,” Child explained, “but to establish a freedom within it so that every girl, no matter where she was in her development in the gospel, could relate to the program and pick up where she was and move on from there.”⁶⁹

As the new program neared completion late in 1976, however, concerns developed about the name. The presidency had intended to retain the title Behold Thy Handmaiden, but in the context of the mid-1970s turmoil over women’s rights, the term handmaiden, which seemed to imply subservience, felt out of place. Priesthood leaders advised the presidency to reconsider the program’s title.⁷⁰

In 1977, the organization introduced the new program, which they called My Personal Progress.⁷¹ It retained the six areas of focus and descriptions of ideals but expanded and structured the program with suggestions for goals in each area and a recording sheet to track progress. The new booklet’s first page featured a painting of the Annunciation, in which a young Mary gazes intently at the angel Gabriel—an implicit but clear reference to Behold Thy Handmaiden.⁷² The opening sections of the sixty-four-page booklet offered instruction in how to set goals, outlined church standards, and provided guidelines for achieving the yearly certificates of recognition, with space to record attendance at church and weekday seminary classes, keep a journal, and track goals completed. These elements echoed requirements of past programs, but now they were significantly simplified. Yearly certificates were intended as records of progress. Participants became eligible for the culminating Young Womanhood Recognition at the end of their first year as a Laurel. The application for the recognition was found on the last pages of the booklet, where young women could read and reflect on it as a goal throughout their years in Young Women. The recognition application did specify requirements—75 percent attendance at church meetings and two completed goals in each area of focus each year—but bishops were allowed to adjust the requirements. Eligible young women submitted an application to the bishop and discussed it with him in a personal interview. When it was approved, they received the certificate from the bishop in sacrament meeting and could purchase the Young Womanhood medallion, a gold disk engraved with an image of a young woman in a flowing dress—the same image that was embossed on the cover of the new booklet.⁷³

With the completion and approval of the My Personal Progress program, the presidency was able to send out several new, much-needed publications to stake and ward leaders: courses of study for the classes (two each for Beehives, Mia Maids, and Laurels), a Young Women handbook for adult leaders, a Young Women guidebook for youth leaders, the My Personal Progress booklet, a new resource for youth activities called The Activity Book, a new camp manual, and a new manual for physical fitness, sports, and recreation in Young Women and Relief Society. They also released several training tapes and a filmstrip.⁷⁴

Even after the My Personal Progress program was introduced, the concept behind Behold Thy Handmaiden remained largely intact. The emphasis on building young women’s identity around their personal relationship with God, their respect for priesthood leaders, and their roles as mothers and homemakers undergirded changes in other aspects of the Young Women organization, including activities and curriculum. The 1977 changes and the materials disseminated to facilitate them helped stabilize the organization and paved the way for it to begin moving forward more effectively after several challenging years of transition.

Although this decade of extensive change required difficult adjustments for general and local Young Women leaders, and for young women themselves, it was largely one of continuity and personal development. Events like road shows, regional music and dance festivals, sports programs, and camp remained staples of the Young Women experience. Three sisters, Sharon, Karen, and Rama Taylor, participated in all these activities in their ward in Barstow, California, throughout the 1970s. With eleven children in their family, money was tight, so the sisters participated with other ward members in fundraising events, such as selling homemade bread or fried chicken. With the proceeds, they were able to join regional music and dance festivals in venues like a large concert hall in San Bernardino or the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena. The funds also helped send them to youth conferences in distant destinations like Catalina Island off the coast of California and Zion National Park in Utah.⁷⁵

For Dottie Boone in Northern California, strong traditions established in the MIA years likewise remained a central part of her Young Women experience, even though she entered Young Women in 1973, just as APMIA was rolling out. Like the Taylor sisters, she participated in road shows and regional dance festivals. Yet she found the achievement programs in their various iterations between 1973 and 1977 uninspiring and did little with the booklets.⁷⁶ In Southern California, Merydith Garfield felt similarly. She entered Young Women the same year as Dottie and felt confused by the frequent changes. She accomplished some goals like learning to crochet and keeping her nails groomed, which she marked in her booklets, but her efforts were sporadic and infrequent, and eventually she gave up.⁷⁷ Many young women undoubtedly had more positive experiences with the programs, but anecdotes such as these demonstrate that there was a need for a reevaluation.

While young women were still experiencing traditional MIA activities in their local organizations, general leaders were admonishing local leaders to place less emphasis on recreational and cultural programs and greater emphasis on youth leadership and service within the ward or larger community.⁷⁸ The youth organizations sought to put young women and men in positions of leadership, with adults acting as mentors. Leaders wanted youth to have responsibility and accountability not only for themselves but also for other young people.⁷⁹ Hortense Child felt that this reorientation toward youth leadership was an inspired step, taken at a time when young people generally were demanding a stronger share of responsibility for themselves and the world. “If we don’t give youth the opportunity to carry responsibility, to be accountable for their actions,” she said, “we will reap the whirlwind.”⁸⁰

The general leaders attempted to introduce the concept of “shadow leadership,” in which adults, like a shadow, should be always present but in the background.⁸¹ Largely because of the difficulties in communication at this time, the idea was not well understood. Adopting a paradigm of youth leadership required a significant shift for adult leaders, who were used to doing everything themselves, and some adult leaders seemed to use the leadership focus as an excuse to place responsibility on the young people’s shoulders with little support.⁸² Shadow leadership was deemed a failure by many.⁸³

The inclusion of “service and compassion” as one of the six areas of focus in Behold Thy Handmaiden and then My Personal Progress helped cement service as a major emphasis of the Young Women organization. Service activities and projects began featuring in ward and stake youth programs, for young women separately and combined with young men. Stories of service shared in church publications reinforced the activities’ importance. As reported in the New Era, the youth of the Torrance California Stake worked to clear a large area of tumbleweeds and trash in preparation for its becoming a park.⁸⁴ Young women in Dingle, Idaho, helped three families with cleanup and fundraising after the families’ homes had burned down.⁸⁵ In Maryland, young women and young men in the Bowie Ward conducted a night of service for the senior citizens’ group in their community. They brought the guests to the meetinghouse, where they served a special dinner and presented their road show for the evening’s entertainment.⁸⁶

Charlene Holmstrom, who served as the Young Women president in the Ithaca New York Stake throughout the 1970s, felt that the greater emphasis on leadership and service was exactly what young women needed. She saw young women develop strong relationships with their leaders and learn to lead in planning and executing activities. She also believed the changes facilitated a much more spiritual experience for young women and allowed young women and their leaders to spend less time away from home than the earlier elaborate programs had required.⁸⁷

One way many youth served was by working on church-owned farms, which were run by Latter-day Saint volunteers and helped provide food for those in need.⁸⁸ In Sharon Taylor’s early morning seminary class, announcements asking young women and young men to work at the local church farm were sometimes met with moans. But Sharon dutifully met with other youth at the church early on the appointed Saturday mornings to drive an hour to the farm and pick oranges or grapefruit or pull weeds from among the vegetables. Her sister Karen also went without complaint, despite her dislike of the prickly vines on some of the vegetables and the early morning cold. She did, however, enjoy the smell of the orange groves and was fascinated when she worked in the cannery to see peaches and other fruit go through the preserving process.⁸⁹

Staffing of the youth organizations was pared back to reflect the shift away from culture and recreation and toward leadership and service. Instead of the extensive staff of directors and specialists that had traditionally overseen MIA activities, the youth programs in the 1970s allowed for a small service and activities committee in wards and stakes, which was to serve as a resource to youth and adult leaders in carrying out activities.⁹⁰ Speech, music, drama, and dance directors had traditionally taken the initiative in designing and conducting the cultural activities of the MIA; now, in a reversal of previous practice, the service and activities committee was to act only when called upon.

Church members struggled to strike the right balance with cultural activities, which had long been the bedrock of the MIA. With so many rapid changes in the programs, it was probably inevitable some long-held traditions would be lost. Ardeth Kapp acknowledged that recreation and cultural activities essentially fell by the wayside as other matters absorbed leaders’ time. Stakes and wards that had strong traditions of MIA programs, with trained, capable leaders, carried on road shows, Gold and Green Balls, and other traditional activities. But in many other places, such things dwindled—a source of much regret by general and local leaders who had overseen or participated in such efforts in the past.⁹¹

The once-central conjoint relationship of Young Women and Young Men organizations also atrophied during the transition years in the early and mid-1970s. As both organizations scrambled to redefine themselves and deal with the relentless pace of changes—and in the absence of stronger guidance for maintaining conjoint activities and relationships—the two entities continued to find themselves with little relationship to each other.⁹² As the organizations began to stabilize in 1977, the newly released Activity Book recommended hundreds of potential activities for young women and young men and helped local leaders think about how to align weeknight activities with the current priorities of the youth organizations. Notably, it also provided ideas for combined activities and encouraged casual mixed-gender socialization because it could “help young men and young women develop wholesome and proper relationships in a Church setting.”⁹³

Painful though the transition had been, it seemed the organization was finding its footing by the time The Activity Book and other new materials made it to members. Kapp found that local leaders did eventually take ownership of their programs, adapting them to local needs. One stake president in Arizona told her the new directives had revolutionized his stake’s entire youth program—though it had taken two years to get the picture. But the success had come with strain for everyone. In the same note in which he celebrated his stake’s success, the president added a simple, weary plea: “Don’t let them change it.”⁹⁴

As the new Activity Book made its way into wards and branches, Funk and her presidency turned their attention to one of the most significant issues facing young women in that moment—the deep divisions arising from opposition to the women’s movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. In her role as president of the Young Women organization, Funk felt she was almost a magnet to women in the church who felt hurt and confused by the church’s ardent opposition to the movement and the Equal Rights Amendment. Many were single and some were not young women at all, but those who communicated with her struggled to see where they fit in the church if their lives had not followed traditional paths into marriage and motherhood.⁹⁵ Though she lacked direct access to the church’s highest leadership through regular meetings, she took every opportunity she found to discuss these women’s challenges with church president Spencer W. Kimball. She felt great love and compassion from him, even as he remained firm in his commitment to the church’s stance, and she believed women of the church should hear directly from their prophet as they worked through these issues. By February 1978, Funk had organized a committee to compile Kimball’s writings on women from over the years and prepare them for publication, and plans were in the works for him to speak to women and girls ages twelve and up in a churchwide fireside in September.⁹⁶

Funk’s expectations were suddenly disrupted, however, when she and her counselors were released and a new presidency was appointed in July 1978, just two months before the special fireside was to take place. Funk felt both surprised and confused. The fireside was only a short time away, and she had served for just six years, while most previous presidents of the Young Women organization had served for a decade or more.⁹⁷ Still, plans for the meeting went forward, even as Funk handed leadership over to the new president, Elaine Cannon, and her counselors, Arlene Barlow Darger and Norma Broadbent Smith.

The invitation to serve as president of the Young Women organization was less unexpected for Cannon than Funk’s release was for her. In the weeks before receiving the official invitation, Cannon had awakened frequently in the night with a sense that she would serve in that capacity. When she told Spencer W. Kimball of this, he responded, “The time will come when you will be glad to know that it’s the Lord Jesus Christ who wants you in this position, and not just me or the Brethren, though we’re happy to have you working with us.”⁹⁸

The new presidency brought together a range of experience and skills. In addition to Cannon’s long experience with church publications and educational work geared toward youth, she had served on several general church committees, including the Youth Correlation Committee and the Young Women general board. Her two counselors likewise had ample experience with youth and church service, though neither had served on the general board. Darger, a longtime friend of Cannon, worked as a psychologist counseling troubled youth. Smith had previously served on the Primary general board and helped write curriculum for the worldwide church.⁹⁹

One of the first things Cannon did after her appointment was change the lettering on the office doors of the Young Women organization. Already four years out of date, the lettering came from a time when Young Women and Young Men leaders shared office space, and it read, “Aaronic Priesthood Young Men and Young Women of Same Age.”¹⁰⁰ Cannon was a staunch supporter of correlation and had served on one of the correlation committees. At the same time, with all the emphasis on male-held priesthood, she worried that youth programs were not providing young women sufficient opportunity to fully develop their identities within the church. Attendance statistics reinforced her sense that there was cause for concern. A downward trend in attendance among youth had emerged in the mid-1970s as the old MIA model was discontinued at the same time questions over gender roles became more prominent in American society.¹⁰¹ Cannon felt that her “sole purpose . . . was to give a place and an identity to the young women.”¹⁰²

Cannon had been thinking deeply about how the church might best organize to support women since at least 1973, when Harold B. Lee had asked her to propose a new churchwide program for women over eighteen. Cannon had wrestled with how to effectively integrate single women with married women and minister to their needs. She called her proposal an “Overall Womanhood Program.”¹⁰³ While her proposal was not adopted, the exercise continued to shape Cannon’s thinking. “I was already thinking of this concept of looking at the whole woman, from birth till the grave,” she said. Cannon and succeeding Young Women presidents would focus on spiritual engagement and confidence for the church’s young women as women.¹⁰⁴

At the press conference announcing her appointment, Cannon acknowledged that questions about women were loud and urgent. “There are many unhappy women today and much confusion concerning women’s roles,” she said. “We want to help our young women discover who they are and what they can do, and understand their relationship with their Father in Heaven.”¹⁰⁵ Indeed, Cannon and Funk had both undergone a watershed experience involving women’s issues when they participated as delegates to the National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas, in November 1977. Witnessing the strident and uncompromising rhetoric from both conservative and progressive women had been for Funk “a searing and difficult, difficult experience.”¹⁰⁶ Funk and Cannon had each experienced the inherent tensions pulling women to opposing sides, and both sought ways to bring women of the church together on common ground during the late 1970s.

The special fireside for women in September 1978 offered Cannon an opportunity to reinforce her message of unity over division. Messages at the fireside focused on the roles of women as wives and mothers and on Latter-day Saint women’s responsibility to promote those roles even as they sought peace and unity. Church president Spencer W. Kimball and Relief Society general president Barbara Bradshaw Smith spoke most directly about the political divisions in the United States over women’s roles. After encouraging women to follow basic principles such as keeping the commandments and holding family prayer, Kimball told women they should be grateful to be women, particularly at that moment in time. “To be a righteous woman during the winding up scenes on this earth, before the second coming of our Savior, is an especially noble calling,” he declared. “The righteous woman’s strength and influence today can be tenfold what it might be in more tranquil times.”¹⁰⁷ In her message, Smith entreated women to be part of the solutions to society’s problems, which she delineated as the issues of abortion, the Equal Rights Amendment, homosexuality, and pornography. She taught that women must work alongside men and use their own talents in every way to do God’s work.¹⁰⁸

Funk and Cannon focused their remarks on fostering peace and unity. Funk, who spoke even though she had recently been released, shared her own harrowing experience of deciding whether to undergo an abortion when serious complications in her third pregnancy became life threatening. She related that she received a spiritual affirmation to continue the pregnancy to delivery, and she eventually gave birth to a healthy boy. “Others in similar situations may well receive a different witness,” she noted, in keeping with the church’s opposition to abortion except in cases when “the life or good health of the mother is seriously endangered or where the pregnancy was caused by rape and produces serious emotional trauma in the mother.”¹⁰⁹ Then, encouraging women to turn to Christ’s love as the path toward peace, she said, “May we, as women of all ages, as daughters of God, as wives, as mothers, as contributing members of society whose identities are being challenged, seek to know him well enough to love him, well enough to serve him.”¹¹⁰ Personal revelation and a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ were, in her view, the way to find peace when facing difficult questions.

Cannon’s message illustrated her concern over contention and division among the women of the church. She understood that Latter-day Saint women had different life experiences and different perspectives. “We may even clash at times on opinions regarding temporal trends,” she said. But she encouraged women to promote harmony over discord. “I urge us all to provide powerful unity as women for those things we can agree upon—family, chastity, accountability to the Lord, responsibility in the community, sharing the gospel.” To do that, she felt women must focus first on their own testimony and relationship with Christ, and then they should serve and share.¹¹¹

Moving forward from building unity at the fireside, Cannon turned her attention to the Young Women curriculum. By the late 1970s, young women received religious instruction at least twenty times per year during weeknight meetings, but there was no provision for their Sunday instruction.¹¹² Young men, in contrast, met with adult priesthood holders on Sundays for instruction in their priesthood quorums. In the 1960s, Cannon and other YWMIA and correlation leaders had proposed adding a Sunday class for young women, but for nearly twenty years the idea remained on the drawing board.¹¹³

Some leaders felt young women received plenty of instruction—they studied scripture and Latter-day Saint teachings in Sunday School and at weeknight meetings, and those who attended weekday seminary classes studied yet more. Debra Hovik, who participated in Young Women in Atherton, California, valued the instruction she received during weeknight meetings. “The intimate conversations I had during our classes not only taught me about the gospel and helped build my testimony,” she said, “but my leaders were so good to me that it helped me believe in my personal value and learn how to love.”¹¹⁴ Cannon valued such settings, where young women could be undistracted and unintimidated by the presence of young men. To her, mixed-gender settings like seminary failed to give young women instruction calibrated specifically to their needs. As for weeknight lessons, she found the environment inconducive to meaningful discussion. Cannon was frustrated knowing that young women and their leaders were trying to discuss spiritual matters with the sounds of pounding basketball games and other young men’s activities in the background.¹¹⁵

A few years into Cannon’s presidency, church leaders introduced a new consolidated meeting schedule churchwide. To save on travel time for members who lived far from a meetinghouse, in 1980 the church consolidated sacrament, Sunday School, Melchizedek and Aaronic Priesthood, Relief Society, Young Women, and Primary meetings into a three-hour block. Under this new Sunday schedule, Young Women and Relief Society members met in their groups at the same time as their male counterparts.¹¹⁶ This change made Sunday instruction for young women possible.

Cannon was happy to have the more focused Sunday meeting environment for instruction. Her next major focus was flexibility and individual adaptation in the curriculum. Lessons had long been laid out according to a centrally prescribed calendar, but Cannon felt leaders could do more than follow a manual. “You do not teach chastity on the Sunday after one of the girls’ mother just died,” she said. In her ideal, “a Young Women leader didn’t teach the lesson assigned by headquarters for that week. The leader chose a lesson from the unit of study that was relevant to the girls’ lives that week.”¹¹⁷

For many young women, these Sunday lessons became the central aspect of their experience in Young Women. Patty Brown, who grew up in Sandy, Utah, recalled how her leader, Shirley Bradfield, made her feel loved as she entered the Beehive class in 1980. Through Bradfield’s well-prepared lessons, Patty began to develop a desire to be married in the temple one day. A few years later, though she participated in a few big activities such as road shows and youth conference, she stopped regularly attending weeknight activities. She had a busy schedule, with drill team, student government, and an after-school job; additionally, she felt disliked by the other young women in her class. She also didn’t feel particularly compelled to dedicate serious time and effort to the My Personal Progress program, put off by the notion of doing good things simply to pass off tasks on a list and get an award. Despite this, leaders like Laurel adviser Jacklyn Wheat worked to connect with Patty on a personal level, and Patty frequently felt that Wheat was speaking just to her in her lessons. Those connections were special to Patty, and she carefully arranged her schedule so she rarely missed Sunday classes. In turn, those Sunday lessons and her personal connections with her leaders became foundations of her budding commitment to the church and her witness of the truth of Latter-day Saint teachings.¹¹⁸

While Cannon and her counselors sought to emphasize family care roles amid significant social change, Cannon’s own background did not conform with the church’s messaging about the importance of women staying out of the workforce and home with their children. In addition to her career as a writer for the Deseret News and her work with the Improvement Era, she had launched and operated several small businesses, all as she raised her family and served in the church.¹¹⁹ Seeking to help young women navigate the tension between economic realities and prophetic counsel, she emphasized not only the sanctity of the home and motherhood but also the theme of preparedness, telling young women, “This is who you are, but this is what you have to be ready for.” Women had, of course, always worked, Cannon noted. By the late twentieth century, however, women had fewer opportunities to have their children around them while they worked, putting different pressures on the family. What people needed, she felt, was help learning how to manage those pressures.¹²⁰ In this, Cannon was already signaling directions she and future female leaders would take in coming years as they worked to strike a balance between the ideals preached by church leaders and the reality of women’s lives.

Rhonda Shelby felt the pressure of those ideals. She joined the church as a seventeen-year-old in 1981 in the rural community of Moses Lake, Washington. Her father’s death about a year before her baptism had led to serious financial uncertainty for her family.¹²¹ She had always aspired to a career, and before her conversion, she was determined to maximize her income. After she was baptized and joined Young Women, her priorities shifted. She decided she could be happy with enough income to live comfortably, and her goals expanded to include a temple marriage and a good family life. Rhonda looked at women in her new religious community who were able to balance a career and family life and wondered if she could maintain a similar balance: “It just makes you sit back and think about yourself, ‘Can I be a super woman? Can I do this?’”¹²²

As a Black Latter-day Saint, Rhonda also found herself navigating evolving racial attitudes in the church. As the only Black member in her ward, Rhonda quickly learned that the emphasis on marrying within the faith clashed with opposition to interracial marriage from some of her fellow Saints. Almost immediately after her conversion, she ran into resistance from Latter-day Saint young men’s parents whenever she’d go on a date. “Even if they said they liked me, they had eight or nine fits because they were willing to take me into their house as a member but not as a daughter-in-law,” she recalled.¹²³ She had to find her own way to navigate such conflicting expectations. Because Rhonda accepted the repeated emphasis in Young Women and other church curriculum on dating and marrying within the faith, she learned to look for men who could resist the widespread social pressure and occasional counsel to avoid interracial relationships.¹²⁴

In 1978, just three years before Rhonda’s baptism, church president Spencer W. Kimball announced that he had received a revelation extending the opportunity for priesthood ordination to all worthy men regardless of race or color and opening all temple ordinances to Black members. The revelation made it easier for Black young women to join the church in multiracial countries like the United States and Brazil and opened the door for Young Women classes to be organized for the first time in countries like Ghana and Nigeria, as people who had long believed in the church’s teachings were finally organized into official branches. The Young Women organization had always sought to prepare girls for the future, and after the 1978 revelation, the contours of a life of church service and participation changed dramatically for Black young women. For the first time, their plans could align with the aspirations encouraged by Young Women lessons. They could receive their endowment and be sealed in the temple, as Rhonda hoped to do and as Linda McCahon had trusted would happen one day. Because missionaries were generally required to receive their endowment before embarking, the revelation also opened the way for young Black women to serve as full-time missionaries. Within months of the revelation’s announcement, the first Black female missionary, Sareta Dobbs, was called to serve in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.¹²⁵

Mindful of the toll exacted by changes in the 1970s, Cannon and her board were selective in their modifications to My Personal Progress for a 1983 edition. Rather than asking members to learn a new system, they made some targeted changes to help young women develop a strong identity. First, they replaced the image of Mary with a picture of a contemporary young woman with an open Book of Mormon on her lap, imagining Book of Mormon scenes such as Jesus Christ’s appearance in the Americas. Following that opening image came a page where a young woman could insert her own photo with her name underneath. The 1983 edition also included a change in tone. The narrative perspective in the book changed from that of a leader addressing a young woman—“You are a child of God. You have a vital role to fill in God’s eternal plan”—to that of a young woman herself—“I am a daughter of God. I have a vital role to fill in God’s eternal plan.”¹²⁶ With these changes, Cannon and her presidency had begun a process—one that would continue to be a focus for subsequent presidencies—of establishing a fundamental identity for young women throughout the world as daughters of God.

The year after the 1983 changes to My Personal Progress were published, Cannon was released as the Young Women general president. Though she had anticipated having a shorter term than some past leaders, the release was bittersweet. Cannon had been involved in efforts at church headquarters since college, when she’d worked on a public relations committee.¹²⁷ At the time of her tenure, church leaders wanted the Young Women presidency to be publicly visible to show that women had a place in the church. Cannon traveled extensively with the First Presidency for public conferences held around the world.¹²⁸ She and her counselors took part in church press conferences and held their own press conferences.¹²⁹ They helped receive visiting dignitaries who came to tour church welfare facilities in Salt Lake City.¹³⁰

By the time of her release, some of the changes she had recommended had not been realized. She wanted to take the September 1978 special women’s fireside further by bringing the church’s women together regularly in a way that established a more defined place for them in the church framework. While Funk had envisioned a one-time event for the prophet to speak to women, Cannon proposed that a meeting of all the church’s women become a regular part of general conference each year.¹³¹ Though this did not happen during her tenure, a yearly meeting for the women of the church, near the time of the October general conference, did become standard for the next several years. She had also proposed that young women and Relief Society women share opening exercises the same way men of different ages met together before dividing into different groups for Sunday instruction and was saddened when an initial decision to introduce the practice was reversed.¹³² She took comfort, looking back, from Spencer W. Kimball’s counsel that she would need to know it was not he but the Lord who had called her. As she reflected on her role in the church’s structure, she thought of a biblical story in which a captive Israelite young woman persuaded the Syrian general Naaman to seek healing from the prophet Elisha. Cannon unequivocally supported the president of the church as a prophet and priesthood leader but saw in that narrative an instigating role for a young woman or the Young Women general president. “The goading and provoking to good deeds and so on is part of our role,” she said, “and I’m content with that.”¹³³

Cannon’s concern that certain issues remained unresolved was well founded. Though much progress had been achieved, questions of women’s relationship to the priesthood and their place in church structures remained somewhat ambiguous. Still, the Young Women organization had at last achieved a level of stability after significant upheaval and reorganization. The new My Personal Progress program had been established, and with the inauguration of Sunday classes for young women, leaders could take advantage of greater flexibility in teaching and opportunities for spiritual development. Funk’s and Cannon’s presidencies established a new central priority for the Young Women organization that would guide it for the next several decades: helping young women develop a foundational identity as daughters of God.