Kapp felt she experienced an outpouring of divine inspiration about her new stewardship almost as soon as she was invited to serve. “I’m seeking to know the Lord’s will concerning the mission for young women of the Church at this time in church history, a mission upon which we must base all of our decisions for training, planning, activities, programs, and preparation for their future,” she wrote in her journal the week after being sustained in general conference.¹⁵ “It seems to me the heavens are opening and thoughts, directions, spiritual promptings are coming so fast.”¹⁶

Kapp’s first task was to form a presidency.¹⁷ For first counselor, she selected Patricia Terry Holland, who had served as a ward Young Women president and Relief Society president. Maurine Johnson Turley, Kapp’s choice for second counselor, was the principal of the church seminary program at a junior high school in Bountiful, Utah, and was working toward a graduate degree in education.¹⁸ The presidency worked closely with their administrative assistant, Carolyn J. Rasmus, an experienced teacher who earned a doctoral degree in physical education and special education before teaching in the College of Physical Education at BYU. She then served as administrative assistant to BYU presidents Dallin H. Oaks and Jeffrey R. Holland, Patricia Holland’s husband, before coming to work for the Young Women presidency.¹⁹ Because the counselors had heavy responsibilities beyond their Young Women assignments, Kapp and Rasmus often worked together to develop and implement ideas the full presidency had formulated. Over the course of Kapp’s administration, her counselors changed three times, and a total of eighteen women served on the general board.²⁰

Kapp, Holland, Turley, and Rasmus approached their new responsibilities methodically. Kapp had been told she would serve for about five years, and she was determined to establish a lasting foundation for the organization—something that would “fit all over the world” and still be relevant in ten years because, she knew, “it might take us that long to get the water to the end of the row.”²¹ Kapp understood that the review and approval processes established as part of the correlation movement might move slowly, but she also knew that the processes could result in broad support from church leadership, giving this new foundation staying power that had eluded other recent efforts at change.

Through this process of study and assessment, the presidency identified what they believed were clear deficiencies in the organization. On the ward level, the position of adult adviser for each Young Women class had been discontinued, leaving only the four members of the Young Women presidency to administer the entire program and build relationships with the young women. Responsibility for activities had been moved to the ward activities committee, which often did not coordinate with the youth organizations. There were therefore two entities—the Young Women organization and the activities committee—competing for the time of young women. Combined activities with young men—a hallmark of the program Kapp had helped design a decade earlier—had diminished in prominence. Kapp was also concerned that attendance rates for young women decreased as they grew older. Internal church studies showed that Latter-day Saint young women developed their identity in relation to the church through the Young Women organization, yet it seemed that fewer young women were becoming involved and that the organization had less to offer them.²² As Kapp and her board considered these challenges, they gathered information from academic studies and from people in the community who worked with girls in organizations such as Girl Scouts and 4-H.²³

Immediately upon her appointment, Kapp felt she needed to emphasize a few principles to guide young women: leadership experiences, responsibility and accountability in decision-making, prioritizing for eternal purposes, and developing a sense of values as a measuring stick. She also felt the Young Women organization needed a mission statement parallel to the scriptural mandate for the Aaronic Priesthood.²⁴ Based on their research, the presidency identified a list of twelve needs for the organization; emerging as the most important of those needs were a stronger sense of identity and increased recognition for young women, a developmental approach to personal progress that included more faith-building experiences and family involvement, and an increased feeling of worldwide sisterhood among young women.²⁵

Kapp and her team set to work to put these principles into usable form. She knew it would be impossible to do everything they identified. Rather, they intended to focus on the unique spiritual needs of young women. In past generations, the organization had provided wide-ranging social and cultural experiences, but young women now found many of those types of activities through school and extracurricular channels. Changed times required a new vision. “What we were responsible for was to give them what no one else could give them,” Kapp affirmed. The mission of the organization would be to help young women come to know God and realize their divine potential.²⁶

On 6 and 7 August 1984, Kapp, Holland, Turley, and Rasmus held a retreat at a cabin in the mountains in Utah to begin solidifying a set of guiding values for the Young Women organization. They fasted in preparation and took time to share their feelings before engaging in quiet individual study in the scriptures. Then together they brainstormed concerns, desires, and needs of young women, which yielded a long list. Each woman then went individually into the woods to ponder and record what she felt the most important priorities were, and when they returned, they found that they had all identified the same principles. “The Spirit was unrestrained. We went home rejoicing,” wrote Kapp.²⁷ A few weeks later, the entire board held an all-day working session in which board member Maren Mouritsen led the group in identifying the values the board thought were most critical for the organization, modifying and adding to those the presidency had previously identified. The resulting list served as the foundation for the rest of their work. They chose faith, divine nature, individual worth, knowledge, choice and accountability, and integrity; good works would be added to the list by the time the values were officially announced.²⁸

The choice of mostly internal values was a contrast to prior approaches, which often focused on observable virtues. The areas of focus in the My Personal Progress program released in 1983 emphasized consistent devotional behaviors, cultural refinement, and domesticity.²⁹ While these emphases were consistent with the broader teaching in the church, Kapp wanted a different way to articulate what was important specifically for Latter-day Saint young women.³⁰ Though Kapp shared with other church leaders a concern about the moral challenges young women faced, the list of values did not include perennial moral categories such as chastity and modesty. Kapp and her board believed those virtues could be taught as examples of underlying spiritual characteristics. Sexuality, for example, could be discussed as an element of humans’ inherent divine nature. Within the value of individual worth, young women could find motivation to respect their bodies and not seek validation through sexual attention. The value of integrity could encourage them to honor commitments to chaste living. The life pattern Kapp wanted to teach young women was fundamentally focused on a relationship with God—and morality would be a consequence of that focus. She believed a strong spiritual foundation would help young women address the moral dilemmas they faced. “They need a strong testimony to meet the challenges and to resist the temptations of these days,” she said, echoing the words of generations of her predecessors.³¹

Unexpectedly, the term values became a sticking point as the proposed changes to the organization worked their way through the correlation approval process. By the 1980s, the term values was prominent in American culture, but it had several different associations. Politically, the term family values had been adopted by the Christian Right in the United States to express their opposition to abortion, feminism, and homosexuality, which they saw as threats to the traditional family. Latter-day Saints shared many of these same concerns.³² Values had also become associated with the movement known as secular humanism, which argued that people were capable of being moral and ethical without religion and advocated a reliance on science, technology, and human cooperation and goodwill to solve the problems of humanity. Humanists believed that their values, such as “the preciousness and dignity of the individual person,” were obstructed by religion.³³ In contrast to the use of values by the religious Right, secular humanists employed the term to separate morality from religion.

In a talk given in 1978, Neal A. Maxwell, one of the presidents of the Quorum of the Seventy, denounced secular humanism for engendering what he characterized as an intolerant, dangerously orthodox imperialism that would disallow a person’s opinion when it was based upon a religious conviction. Maxwell also worried about secularized “value education” in schools.³⁴ In objecting to the term values, the correlation committee had identified a potential source of tension between Kapp’s proposed framing and Maxwell’s public messages. “It was at a time in the world when people were talking about humanistic values,” Kapp recalled, “and so they [correlation staff members] felt that to use values in the context of the Church was totally inappropriate, and they also felt that we were establishing a new program that was placing more emphasis on values than it was on the gospel.”³⁵ In the correlation process, however, such an objection did not end the conversation. Kapp had time to consider whether to choose an alternative label with less complex connotations or to make the case for keeping the term values in her proposal.

Kapp decided to make the case for retaining the term values. She had seen how some Latter-day Saints in business consulting were expanding conversations about values in yet another direction. She had been part of this trend while working with Charles Hobbs, whose major innovation in the time management field was to recommend that clients define their values and then organize their time around them.³⁶ Kapp’s advocacy of values for young women built on her professional experience and her own ideas about the power of shaping one’s life around one’s most deeply held values.

Kapp felt that values provided a sound organizing principle for young women’s religious and self-improvement efforts. Values were something one internalized (or already had), so they had more meaning in the short term and greater staying power later. Kapp also thought the shift she championed—from “areas of focus” to “values”—provided young women with a more specific Latter-day-Saint framing.³⁷ Kapp had been concerned since her service in Funk’s presidency that Young Women materials were not teaching principles unique to the church.³⁸ The areas of focus in the existing My Personal Progress program (spiritual awareness; service and compassion; homemaking arts; recreation and the world of nature; cultural arts and education; and personal and social refinement) would have been relevant for young people from a variety of religious backgrounds. In contrast, the Young Women values Kapp proposed were formulated to express Latter-day Saint doctrine, building on one another. Divine nature, for example, expressed the belief that all human beings are literal spirit children of God and have the potential to become like Him. Individual worth grew out of this truth—a young woman’s identity as a daughter of God gave her inherent worth that was not dependent on worldly accomplishments or validation. Choice and accountability expressed the Latter-day Saint view that agency—the ability and responsibility to choose good over evil—was a central purpose of this life; young women who understood their divine nature and individual worth would be better prepared to make choices that would help them draw nearer to Christ. Each of the values was reinforced by scripture references. Divine nature, for example, was linked to 2 Peter 1:4–7, which speaks of Christians becoming “partakers of the divine nature.” Individual worth reflected one of Joseph Smith’s revelations that declared, “the worth of souls is great in the sight of God.”³⁹ The secular humanist use of values distanced conversation about ethics and morals away from a religious center, but Kapp’s move to derive values from church doctrine and make them central to the identities and decision-making of young women was a reclaiming of values in the other, explicitly religious, direction.

Kapp embraced the correlation principles she had learned during her tenure on the Youth Correlation Committee and in Funk’s presidency a decade earlier. In the early months of her presidency, Kapp was part of a coordinating effort in which the presidents of the women-led organizations met with priesthood leaders to discuss the role of auxiliaries within the church structure. This group composed a document that set forth some basic principles for how auxiliaries were to work within the priesthood line. According to this document, the auxiliaries were to be the “eyes and ears” for the lead decision makers in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, reporting their observations and making recommendations. They were also to represent to those leaders the needs of those within their stewardship, and they were to help prepare resource materials for their organizations. The coordinating group also explored the need for more input from women when decisions were being made and considered forming a women’s advisory council for that purpose.⁴⁰

While the ideas presented in the document did not become binding, the process of creating it helped Kapp further internalize the principles it articulated, reinforcing her understanding that the Young Women general presidency was “a resource to the priesthood committees of the Church,” rather than a decision-making body in its own right.⁴¹ She told her board, “I believe our responsibility is to study the issues, to identify the concerns, and then, when we meet with the priesthood leaders, to be prepared to ask the most relevant questions,” and, if asked, “be prepared to make a recommendation.”⁴²

Kapp believed this same relationship between priesthood and auxiliary leaders needed to exist at every level of church leadership—from general leadership down to wards and branches—if the organization was going to be effective. She insisted that Young Women “had to be just a piece of the priesthood organization, directed by the priesthood, with the responsibility for the success of this program resting upon the bishop and the stake president and the message being carried by the General Authorities.” It was vital that priesthood leaders understand, as Kapp put it, “that the Young Women program is just the gospel of Jesus Christ for young women”; only then would they be as committed to its success as they were to that of the Aaronic Priesthood program for young men.⁴³ Kapp knew these ideals had been present in the 1970s when she helped reshape the organization through correlation principles; she also knew there was still some distance to go in realizing those ideals.

Kapp was also keenly aware of the limitations of her position within the larger structure of the church. The Young Women organization now reported through the Priesthood Department, which was led by a member of the Quorum of the Seventy as executive director and one or more additional seventies as managing directors, and then up to the Priesthood Executive Committee (PEC), which was made up of members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.⁴⁴ Usually referring to the executive and managing directors of the Priesthood Department as the Young Women presidency’s “priesthood leaders” or “advisers,” Kapp viewed them not only as supervisors in the sense that they oversaw the presidency’s work within the church’s lines of reporting but also as counselors and advocates who facilitated, supported, encouraged, and made important contributions to the work of the Young Women.⁴⁵

While this understanding brought clarity and a sense of direction, it also presented challenges. Kapp once wrote to the executive director of the Priesthood Department that the presidency wanted “to be as helpful and aggressive as is appropriate in doing our part to build the Kingdom.”⁴⁶ But how aggressive was appropriate? Assuring male leaders that they were willing to take initiative in filling their responsibilities, the female leaders also felt it necessary to affirm that their assertiveness was not to be feared and would be expressed appropriately. Within those parameters, Kapp was determined to press forward and accomplish as much as possible. “I didn’t want us to do more than we should, but I didn’t want to do less,” she explained, knowing she was not the final arbiter of where the line would fall.⁴⁷

The Young Women organization’s position within the lines of authority running through the Priesthood Department meant there were layers of hierarchy between Kapp and the ultimate decision makers who would render final approval on the organization’s proposals. There was no provision for the Young Women presidency to meet regularly with the PEC. Instead, the executive director of the Priesthood Department represented them in regular meetings and arranged for the presidency to meet with the PEC only on some occasions. Likewise, the executive director often represented the work of the Young Women leaders to correlation committees. Members of the Young Women general presidency, therefore, were often not present in meetings that were vital to approval of their plans. When an item finally made it to the PEC or a correlation committee for approval, if anyone had a question that the executive representing the Young Women presidency could not answer, the Young Women presidency might have to wait another month or two before they or their representative would be on the agenda again and could answer it.⁴⁸ These dynamics were further complicated by the fact that during the eight years of Kapp’s presidency, the executive director of the Priesthood Department changed five times. The person coming into the assignment needed to be oriented before issuing any approvals, and the time required for that orientation meant substantial delays and repeated work.⁴⁹ It was not until the month of Kapp’s release that the women presidents of auxiliaries began meeting with the PEC.⁵⁰

Kapp and her team approached these challenges with confidence and persistence. In September 1984, as they were preparing for the general women’s meeting to be held in conjunction with October general conference, Kapp received a message that one of the speakers wanted to cede his time in the meeting to a video highlighting Sharlene Wells, who was recently crowned Miss America, the first Latter-day Saint to win that title since Colleen Kay Hutchins in 1951. For their first opportunity to speak to the young women of the church, however, the presidency wanted to send the message that young women did not have to be beautiful, popular, or academically successful to be valued. Their whole idea, Kapp said, “was to minimize the physical beauty that the world was putting such emphasis on.” At the same time, only a few months into their administration, Kapp’s presidency wanted to proceed carefully in questioning the decision because they were also trying to build trust and goodwill with priesthood leaders.⁵¹

As Kapp and her counselors discussed the matter, they wondered whether the decision to show the video had been a hasty one or something its originators felt was inspired. After reviewing an article by Spencer W. Kimball in which he decried swimsuit contests, they decided it had likely been hasty.⁵² The four leaders—Kapp, Turley, Holland, and Rasmus—knelt together and prayed to know how to handle the issue, and while they were still kneeling, Kapp stated, “I feel a strong impression I should call Elder [Thomas S.] Monson.” He was very warm on the phone and even called back to invite her to meet the following morning with several members of the Twelve who were in town at the time. He also asked her to bring the Relief Society and Primary general presidents. Kapp and her presidency decided to fast until after her meeting. She learned at the meeting that the decision had indeed been hasty and that it would be reversed. Additionally, Monson said it was important that priesthood leaders receive more input from the auxiliary leaders, and some of the leaders present thanked the women presidents for “keeping our feet to the fire.”⁵³ Through her efforts, Kapp built trust and strong relationships with priesthood leaders, even if her interactions with them were sometimes intermittent and mediated.

The Young Women general board formally adopted the seven values and a preliminary five-year plan for the organization in November 1984.⁵⁴ The next step was a presentation to the PEC for their approval to move forward with the values and other aspects of their plan, including a satellite broadcast to reach young women throughout the church. The presentation would be a high-level, high-stakes opportunity.

On Sunday, 6 January 1985, Kapp awakened early and began to write as quickly as she could as ideas and inspiration flowed into her mind. All the pieces and parts, the data, problems, proposals—all these small, separate efforts came together in what seemed to her “like a magnificent mosaic.” Eventually, she felt the elements fall into place for her proposal to the PEC, which she described as being presented “in behalf of the youth of the Church, particularly young women.” After she finished her rough outline, she felt that this proposal had come after six months of careful labor but ultimately by revelation. She felt spiritually uplifted but physically and emotionally exhausted. She offered a prayer of gratitude, and then she called Carolyn Rasmus. “I’ve been to the mountain,” she said, invoking scriptural stories that depicted revelation coming in mountain settings.⁵⁵

Two days later, the presidency met with Dean L. Larsen, executive director of the Priesthood Department, and he scheduled the PEC presentation for 20 February 1985.⁵⁶ This gave Kapp and her team six weeks to prepare. Kapp’s proposal document represented the culmination of almost a year’s work as the new presidency had taken time to study, assess, and formulate ideas before presenting any proposals.⁵⁷ Because of Kapp’s experience working with correlation processes as a member of Funk’s presidency, she believed that priesthood leaders were looking to simplify and reduce church operations and did not want new programs. While in practice they retained little of what had come before, Kapp and her associates firmly maintained that they were refining the program already in place, enriching it so it had a distinctly Latter-day Saint focus and relating it to ordinances and covenants.⁵⁸

The presidency had purchased a computerized system called VideoShow that displayed images and graphics.⁵⁹ Once the machine was loaded with materials about the state of the Young Women organization and the proposed values, Kapp began inviting members of the Twelve and the Seventy to stop by and see what the new system could do. Whenever Kapp met a decision maker in the lunchroom and he asked her how things were going, she told him the Young Women office had a new piece of equipment that she would love to show him if he ever had thirty minutes to stop by. One by one, about fifteen men came, and as each saw how the machine worked, he also learned about the presidency’s plans. Most of them stayed an hour and offered advice so that by the date of the presentation, the materials were polished, and several priesthood leaders understood and acted as advocates for the Young Women presidency’s plans.⁶⁰

On the morning of 20 February, Kapp and her counselors met in a small room and knelt to pray one last time. They were preparing to meet with apostles Thomas S. Monson, David B. Haight, Neal A. Maxwell, and Ezra Taft Benson and with Carlos E. Asay of the Seventy, presiding bishop Victor L. Brown, and Dean L. Larsen.⁶¹ “We sensed that this was really going to launch us in a direction, if it was approved,” Kapp recalled. Kapp and her counselors, however, had no desire to see their plan adopted if it was a poor fit for the priorities of the church as a whole. They prayed that if it was right, the others at the meeting would hear them and understand and accept the proposals. If what they had prepared did not align with the will of God, they prayed that the priesthood leaders would not hesitate to stop them and that “their ears would be closed” to the proposal.⁶²

The presentation unfolded in three sections: the current status of young women, perceived problems affecting them, and recommendations to address those problems. “We are anxious to share our findings so we might receive your counsel and direction and determine how you would wish us to serve as a resource and in what areas we have shared concerns,” the introductory statement read.⁶³ The first section of the presentation identified a central question regarding the Young Women organization and the girls themselves: “What are they receiving as young women that will increase their conversion and commitment to the gospel?” Kapp listed five needs of young women: acceptable role models, positive learning experiences, recognition, appropriate validation and identity, and faith-promoting and spiritual experiences.⁶⁴

Kapp then compared the experience of young women in the church with that of young men. While emphasizing that she was not suggesting young men and young women should have identical provisions, she laid out quantifiable disparities. Young men had at least six avenues of public recognition in the church, including priesthood ordination and duties, Scouting awards, and regular attention from the bishop. Young women had only two—one of which amounted to an attendance award. The Young Men organization was allocated up to eighteen adult leaders in the ward; the Young Women, only four. Priesthood leadership training for Young Men leaders was much more extensive than the minimal local training provided for Young Women leaders. By Kapp’s count, the Young Women organization had 17 pages of published resource material, compared with 191 for Young Men (not including Scouting materials). And comparison of budget resources expended on each organization showed a “notable” difference.⁶⁵ Kapp cited academic studies showing that girls’ self-esteem was significantly lower than boys’ and posited that dynamics within the church were contributing to young women’s problems. “Current Church practices appear to contribute to low self-esteem,” she asserted. “The apparent ambiguity of the Young Women program may encourage many to seek approval and validation through popularity in the ways of the world.”⁶⁶

Having laid out this alarming picture, Kapp raised the issue of Young Women members and leaders having only limited access to people in positions of authority since the structural reorganization of the 1970s. She affirmed her support for having bishops, stake presidents, and general authorities more directly involved with Young Women while noting that the desired involvement was not always realized. She invited listeners to consider, “In what settings could Young Women leaders and priesthood leaders meet regularly (at every level) to address needs and hear the ‘whole story’ as well as serve as a resource to the priesthood leaders so that needs of young women might be considered in a responsible way?”⁶⁷

She then offered the presidency’s recommendations. Young women needed a structured program for validation and recognition, within an organization that allowed them to contribute to the mission of the church and that was based on fundamental gospel principles and guiding values. She listed and briefly explained those values: faith, divine nature, individual worth, knowledge, choice and accountability, good works, and integrity.⁶⁸ The values were the heart of the proposal, the culmination to which the rest of the presentation led. After presenting the values, Kapp ended the presentation with an offer and a call to arms. “Brethren, if you want to know about Young Men, you can hear about them at the annual priesthood restoration commemoration. If you want to know about Young Men, you can be aware of their annual Scouting conference. . . . But if you want to know about Young Women,” she said, “the satellite screen is dark, the message vague, and the statistics alarming. . . . How can we help?”⁶⁹

The leaders’ responses were eager and heartfelt. Monson said, “We must address the challenge. . . . We must put our attention to this problem. . . . You have our strong endorsement of what has been said here.” Maxwell emphasized that he believed they needed to delete nearly all other items from the PEC agenda, saying, “This is how strongly I feel about this.” Benson asked the men to stand to signify the importance of what they had heard. Especially meaningful to Kapp was a comment by Benson, which she heard as a direct response to the presidency’s prayer. He said that the men’s “ears [were] opened.”⁷⁰

By the time Kapp returned to her office, someone from the meeting was already on the phone asking how soon the Young Women could have a satellite broadcast ready to present the new values to the worldwide church. In the chronology she wrote for her presidential tenure, Kapp wrote next to 20 February, “Today the key has been turned in behalf of young women”—an allusion to Joseph Smith’s words at an early meeting of the Relief Society organization.⁷¹ She saw the meeting as a crucial moment that would enable the Young Women organization to fulfill its potential in the lives of its young members, integrate more fully into the structure of the church, and help the young women of the church fulfill their own destinies.

The fireside itself would be a dramatic event. Kapp said it could not take place until November because she wanted everything to be thoroughly vetted and polished for the values launch. She wanted to present the values in a way that young women, their parents, and their leaders, male and female, would remember and understand. Knowing how long approvals could take, she wanted to be sure the presidency and board had enough time to produce a film for the fireside and a special issue of the New Era to distribute at the end of the event.⁷²

Over the next several months, the Young Women presidency and board worked hard to prepare. Kapp and her team composed first-person statements for each value. The statement for choice and accountability, for example, read, “I will remain free by choosing good over evil and will accept responsibility for my choices.” Kapp later explained that these statements were designed to be an affirmation, to identify a relationship, and to set an expectation.⁷³ The statements went through several drafts, and apostle Russell M. Nelson eventually sent a letter to the head of correlation staff to say they had been approved by the PEC, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and the First Presidency.⁷⁴ But correlation committee members had two concerns about the approved statement for faith, which read, “I am a daughter of Heavenly Parents.” The first was that this value statement would be the only one without some action involved for the young woman reciting the statement. The second concern was the reference to heavenly parents. While there was a long history of Latter-day Saint leaders teaching about a Heavenly Mother, those teachings did not appear in scripture.⁷⁵ Each value statement was paired with a scripture in the proposal, so the board discussed the statement until they came to consensus on a revised draft—“I am a daughter of Heavenly Father, who loves me, and I have faith in His eternal plan”—and they proposed an accompanying scripture about God the Father. References to heavenly parents were retained in some other materials related to the values, but the final version of the values statement referenced faith in Heavenly Father rather than the more distinctively Latter-day Saint belief in heavenly parents.⁷⁶ The values worked their way through the approvals process, finally receiving full approval in August 1985.⁷⁷

During this process, Young Women board members came to think a statement such as a pledge would be appropriate for young women and leaders to recite in conjunction with the values. With her background in curriculum design, Kapp understood that this statement should be built on a developmental sequence that addressed the questions Who am I?, What am I to do?, and Why am I to do it? The values were arranged in the statement to follow that sequence: understanding one’s relationship to God engendered faith, faith brought a sense of divine identity and individual worth, and these principles built knowledge, which provided a basis for choices and good works. Integrity was a summation of all the values. The board members hoped that as young women repeated the pledge, they would internalize it and the values would become part of their core identity.⁷⁸

Kapp’s presidency formulated the pledge—which came to be called the Young Women theme—in collaboration with general authorities. J. Thomas Fyans, who had replaced Dean L. Larsen as the executive director of the Priesthood Department early in 1985, played a crucial role as facilitator. Fyans had told Kapp that her job was to seek and receive revelation for her assignment. Of his own role, he said, “You tell me where the big rocks in the road are, and my job is to try to remove the obstacles.”⁷⁹ Fyans promised to facilitate general authority approval despite objections to the proposed theme and values from a forceful staff member of a correlation committee. As the theme struggled through the approvals process, Fyans took the unprecedented step of inviting the Young Women presidency to lunch at the temple with the seven presidents of the Quorum of the Seventy for a working meeting. In that setting, Fyans talked through the values with the male leaders. Then the women and men worked together to formulate the theme into almost-final form. This working session was exactly the kind of male-female engagement and collaboration Kapp hoped for, echoing the dynamics that had prevailed in the early years of correlation, as those in attendance collaborated to solve a problem and furthered Fyans’s goal of removing obstacles.⁸⁰ The meeting was an important step for Kapp and her counselors in building support for their vision. Fyans served as managing director for only six months, but he played a crucial role in helping realize the Young Women presidency’s plans. When he was transferred to serve as an area president in South America, Kapp listed over two dozen changes he had facilitated, including the theme, several publications, and “enough exposure with the general authorities that they are aware and supportive of the concern for young women.”⁸¹

An announcement made at the 9 October 1985 PEC meeting made clear that the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had approved the Young Women presidency’s proposals. The presidency of the First Quorum of the Seventy also gave approval.⁸² A year after the Young Women board first determined the values, the presidency had all the approvals they needed to launch those values, their accompanying value statements, and the Young Women theme at their satellite fireside, which had been scheduled for 10 November. The idea for two other events—an evening focused on values called “Young Women in Excellence” and a worldwide Young Women Day—were also approved.⁸³ The wording of the Young Women theme, as approved and presented at the satellite fireside, read as follows: “We are daughters of a Heavenly Father who loves us, and we love him. We will ‘stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places . . .’ as we strive to live the Young Women Values.”⁸⁴

On the evening of 10 November 1985, the lights in the Salt Lake Tabernacle dimmed, and a video began to play, with voice-over narration by Kapp. The scene was an ocean, with waves rolling dramatically against large rocks, sweeping onto the beach. “Stand with me at the sea shore,” she invited. “Feel the breeze. Look out over the mighty ocean. . . . I can see the crest of a wave forming, a wave that will move across the earth, reaching every continent and every shore: Young women, we send out a call throughout all the world, a call that you hear with your heart and spirit. . . . Prepare to take your place in a great forward movement among the young women of the church.”⁸⁵

The fireside unfolded in an array of music, spoken word, and pageantry, broad-cast by satellite to many of the organization’s three hundred thousand members in meetinghouses around the world. The live audience in the Tabernacle also included many of the church’s prominent leaders. Initially, some had been hesitant to accept Kapp’s invitation. Apostle Boyd K. Packer explained that they worried a heavy presence of male leaders would contribute to the criticism that the church was run by men. But Kapp explained that she hoped general authorities would attend the fireside because she believed that collaboration between women and men created effective programs; Packer saw her reasoning.⁸⁶ Kapp also recognized that some of these men were the ultimate decision makers when it came to church programs and policies; she wanted them to understand the organization for young women and young women’s needs when they made their decisions.

The support from priesthood leadership ultimately exceeded Kapp’s expectations. Just five days before the fireside was to take place, ninety-year-old church president Spencer W. Kimball died.⁸⁷ Kapp initially thought that the fireside would be canceled altogether, but Russell M. Nelson called the next morning to assure her it would proceed. Furthermore, general authorities who had not planned to attend the fireside because of travel plans now canceled those plans to attend Kimball’s funeral. Seven members of the Twelve, thirteen members of the Seventy, and Ezra Taft Benson, who succeeded Kimball as the church’s president, attended the fireside.⁸⁸ Gordon B. Hinckley of the First Presidency and Nelson of the Twelve delivered earnest, optimistic remarks highlighting young women as daughters of God and daughters of Zion. Kapp delivered a stirring call for young women to stand up and lead out for righteousness. “To every young woman, throughout the entire Church, in every corner of the land: You are important, each one of you,” she proclaimed.⁸⁹

The video presentation in the Tabernacle then opened a sequence that formed the heart of the evening: an introduction of the Young Women values and theme. As viewers experienced the narration and orchestral music, a young woman named Astrid S. Tuminez appeared on the screen, walking along the shore. A twenty-one-year-old majoring in Russian and international relations at BYU, Astrid had trod a long path to the Tabernacle. The sixth of seven children, she spent her early childhood in the slums of Gomez Beach in Iloilo City on the Philippine island of Panay. Her makeshift home had no electricity or running water, and when the soles of her shoes wore out, she used candy wrappers to fill in the holes. Astrid joined the church as a child and attended the Iloilo Second Branch alongside fifty to sixty other Saints each week. Beginning when she was eleven, Astrid served as secretary of the Primary and Sunday School; at fifteen, she taught seminary. In 1982, she came to Utah, and her two older sisters—who were already in the United States—worked to fund her first year of college. Thereafter she obtained scholarships, working her way toward what would become a distinguished career in international relations and education.⁹⁰

The choice to feature Astrid prominently in the video highlighted the presidency’s desire to build a sense of worldwide sisterhood among young women and brought a vibrant global awareness to the production. This theme continued as the video introduced the values. Each value statement was recited by a young woman who then invited the audience to internalize it and live by it, as each value appeared on the screen in Spanish, French, and English. These young women represented a wide array of cultural backgrounds, including a young woman from the Catawba Nation in South Carolina, another from Mexico City, identical twins from Arizona, an African American young woman from Louisiana, and others from England, British Columbia, and Utah. Each young woman offered meaningful personal testimony of how each value pertained to the gospel of Jesus Christ as well as how it applied to everyday life.⁹¹ While the speakers, choir, and other participants were mostly white, the clear message of the video was that Latter-day Saint young women lived all over the world, with varied heritages that were something to celebrate. Compared with racial representation in past churchwide events, the fireside was resoundingly diverse, though the board received some criticism that the event was not racially diverse enough.⁹² For decades, as the church grew dramatically around the world, the primary model had been to export programs and an accompanying self-image that were fundamentally white, American, and Utah-centered. The Young Women presentation, consciously shaped by a more racially and geographically diverse sensibility, symbolized growing awareness of the need to balance the flow of influence between the church’s cultural center and its global membership.

As the video faded, the lights in the Tabernacle came up to show Astrid standing at the front. “As young women of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and daughters of a loving Heavenly Father,” she said, “we believe as we come to accept and act upon these values, we will be prepared to make and keep sacred covenants, receive the ordinances of the temple, and enjoy the blessings of exaltation.” As she named each value, groups of young women in the congregation stood to repeat the value and its statement, and a banner unfurled bearing the name of the value in English and one other language (a different one for each value). Maurine Turley then stood and led the congregation in repeating the Young Women theme. “Dear young women, we hope with all of our hearts that you will memorize this theme, write it in your journal, talk about it, ponder it, repeat it until it becomes a part of you,” Turley urged.⁹³ A chorus of 130 young women then sang “I Walk by Faith,” a song written especially for the event.⁹⁴

In the fireside’s grand finale, the choir (later joined by the congregation) sang an extended medley of well-known church hymns, featuring Ruth May Fox’s anthem for youth, “Carry On,” as the theme connecting them all. Dozens of young women filed in from the wings and marched up and down the aisles waving flags in all the colors representing the new values. The song and the waving flags, reminiscent of the 1930 centennial June Conference in which young women and young men first sang Fox’s hymn, combined to offer a display that reflected both the heritage of the Young Women organization and its members and their new focus on identity and values.

The fireside itself was a multimedia spectacle, and its use of mass media and innovative technology was part of a broader churchwide movement. In 1974, newly ordained church president Spencer W. Kimball had urged the use of advances in media technology to further missionary work and other church efforts. He declared it imperative for leaders to make full use of these advances, particularly in broadcasting messages of faith to members and other interested people around the world.⁹⁵ By the 1980s, leaders were rolling out campaigns that included purchasing television spots for inspirational public service messages and invitations to receive church literature, which generated referrals for local missionaries. Satellite broadcasts also became increasingly prevalent. For example, the technology was used for seasonal broadcasts of church movies to local meetinghouses and for missionary open houses where apostles and other leaders could speak directly to individuals considering joining the church.⁹⁶

Kapp’s use of mass media and new technology became a hallmark of her tenure. Deeply aware of the impacts of popular media on young women, she harnessed newly available technology to combat the negative influence of media. Her emphasis on participatory experiences contrasted with traditional mass communication forms that worked in a one-way flow, such as a broadcast speaker sharing ideas to a passive listening audience. Participatory gestures such as having the fireside audience recite the new Young Women theme together or imagine themselves on the seashore helped Kapp cultivate a worldwide sense of sisterhood. She and her presidency mixed striking imagery and strong rhetorical approaches with these participatory elements to make the most of the available media. Kapp’s presidency also prepared participatory training videos for Young Women leaders, including one interactive video that instructed participants to pause the video and discuss the principles being presented.⁹⁷

Kapp also understood the importance of music in communicating the new message and pushing back against other negative messages. In the late 1970s and through the 1980s, an explosion of popular Latter-day Saint music began making musicians like Lex de Azevedo and Janice Kapp Perry into household names for Latter-day Saint families in the United States. Months before the fireside introducing the values, Kapp had approached Perry, to whom she was distantly related by marriage, to write a song incorporating all the new values for the satellite broadcast. The lyrics of Perry’s song included each value in order, but having been written in early March before the wording of the value statements had been altered, it preserved the original language referencing both a Heavenly Father and a Heavenly Mother. “I Walk by Faith,” it began, “a daughter of heavn’ly parents.” It continued with the description of the remaining six values before concluding with a reminder of life’s purpose: “Some day when God has proven me / I’ll see Him face to face / But just for here and now I walk by faith.”⁹⁸

In the years after the November 1985 satellite broadcast introducing the Young Women values and theme, similar worldwide events further demonstrated the Kapp presidency’s approach to mass communication.⁹⁹ The first was scheduled nearly a year after the fireside. Themed “The Rising Generation,” the event was intended to help young women feel powerful, understand the potential of their influence, and increase their experience of young sisterhood as they participated together.¹⁰⁰ With these ideas in mind, the presidency invited young women around the world to write religious messages of testimony and hope, tie them to balloons, and gather locally on the same day to release them. They asked local groups to release their balloons in the morning to symbolize “the dawning of a new day for young women.”¹⁰¹ Some young women who were alone in a branch or who otherwise could not release balloons mailed their messages to Utah so they could still be included in the event.¹⁰²

On the morning of 11 October 1986—according to their various time zones—tens of thousands of young women around the world released helium balloons, each with a personal message expressing their hope and faith. Many local leaders carefully chose the site of the balloon release to create for young women a connection between local landmarks and their faith. In Washington, DC, young women gathered at the Washington Monument to release balloons. In New York, they met at the Statue of Liberty. A group from the Cairo, Egypt, branch planned to snorkel in the Red Sea and release their messages sealed in bottles.¹⁰³

In Los Altos, California, sisters Anne, Jane, and Rebecca Bennion were among the young women who participated. After gathering early at their stake center on 11 October, they boarded charter buses to San Francisco, where they joined hundreds of other young women from the region atop the Coit Tower hill. At the designated moment, they released balloons with their personal testimonies attached and watched them float into the distance. Fourteen-year-old Jane sent her balloon off with hopes that someone would find it. But for her, the experience was more about the sense of fellowship she felt. She was one of a small handful of members in her school, and the balloon release helped her feel connected with young women all over the world who were doing the same thing. That thought helped her feel less solitary in her faith. Her younger sister, Rebecca, who had turned twelve only a few months earlier, felt similarly. The Rising Generation event was one of her first experiences with the Young Women, and she loved it. Like Jane, she reveled in the feeling of worldwide sisterhood as she watched the balloons float across the bay.¹⁰⁴

The messages of young women across the globe showed both their faith and their hope that the notes they wrote would reach someone who needed that message. Some wrote of their faith in God’s love for everyone and of His perfect knowledge of His children’s needs. Many emphasized the worth of each individual, the importance of family, and the common family of God’s children, urging those who might read the note to promote love and peace. Many also wrote of their sincere belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of the church to which they belonged.¹⁰⁵ Kerelayani Kalou Salaca from Lautoka, Fiji, shared her witness of Jesus as the Savior, of living prophets, and of the Book of Mormon before encouraging her reader to follow Paul’s advice in Ephesians 4:32: “Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” Valencia, from Italy, described how joining the church three years earlier had changed her life for good. “I want you to be able to have all this as well,” she wrote. “For this reason I am writing this message, hoping that you will want to turn your own life around.”¹⁰⁶

After the event, Kapp’s presidency received letters from some of the young women and their leaders, as well as from a few individuals who had found the messages and been touched by them. While visiting Henefer, Utah, a family who were not Latter-day Saints found three notes written by young women living in Jerusalem. These notes had been sent to Orem, Utah, and released from there.¹⁰⁷ A man from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, wrote to Mary Smith, who released her balloon from Fordyce, Arkansas. He explained that he almost ran over the message with his tractor but got off to see what it was. He told her, “That was the first time I ever found something like this, and it really gave me a good feeling inside knowing there was still some good people left in the world today.” Mark Hilton from Salt Lake City wrote to Laura West to thank her for her note. He found it on the ground while working as a serviceman for a utility company and had a feeling he should pick it up. “I’m glad I did,” he wrote. Already working to return to regular church participation after more than a decade away, Hilton said that Laura’s letter inspired him to continue in his path. Several years later, another sister of Anne, Jane, and Rebecca Bennion learned personally of Mark’s success in changing his life when she served a mission with his daughter, Antigone Hilton, in the Virginia Richmond Mission.¹⁰⁸

Kapp’s presidency held several other worldwide broadcasts and celebrations in the 1980s and early 1990s to make announcements and foster a sense of global sisterhood. In a 1987 broadcast, Kapp introduced a new Young Women logo, a colorful flaming torch that formed the profile of a young woman’s face. She hoped the logo would spur young women to positive action: “Let this Young Women logo remind you,” she said, “that every Christlike act, every kind word spoken, every vulgar word not spoken, every good thought, every honest act, every righteous choice, every scripture read, every prayer offered, every act of forgiveness, every effort to lift another will add to the light and through your righteous influence and your courageous example, even when it may not be popular, will help light the way for others.”¹⁰⁹ In November 1989, members celebrated the 120th anniversary of the establishment of the Young Women organization. The presidency decided to announce the celebration a full year before the event—on 29 November 1988, church president Ezra Taft Benson went to the Lion House and rang the same bell that Brigham Young had rung over a century earlier to call his daughters in to establish what would become the Young Women organization.¹¹⁰ The next year, as part of the commemoration, young women received little bells as a reminder of that heritage. They also listened to recorded messages from Benson and Kapp that were sent out on cassette tapes before the local celebration events.¹¹¹

One of Kapp’s early goals had been to update the My Personal Progress program, and it was to this that she and her presidency turned after establishing the values and theme. At the end of the pivotal PEC presentation in February 1985, Thomas S. Monson had said, “We don’t want a quick fix,” and Kapp agreed.¹¹² For the next four years, even as the Young Women leaders planned and carried out fireside broadcasts and worldwide celebrations, a Personal Progress committee and then Kapp’s presidency carefully revised and honed the program to directly address concerns about parental involvement, identity, and establishing developmental progress markers.¹¹³

The new Personal Progress committee held its first meeting on 13 March 1985.¹¹⁴ Most of the members of the committee were married couples, both because Kapp had valued the cooperative insights of men and women during her time on the Youth Correlation Committee and because she wanted men involved to make sure the program facilitated a relationship between fathers and daughters. “We felt very strongly that a father and a mother have shared responsibility for a young woman,” she said.¹¹⁵ The committee’s task was to carefully review the old program and recommend a new achievement structure and associated activities that were developmentally appropriate and globally minded.¹¹⁶ For nearly two years, Jim and Louise Olsen Baird, the committee cochairs, met weekly with the dozen committee members, all of whom, like the Bairds, had significant professional experience in education and psychology.¹¹⁷ Pulling from their professional backgrounds and considering their own family experiences, the committee decided they would refocus the program on the new values. They wrote and rewrote their proposal before submitting it to the presidency for further polishing.¹¹⁸

Committee members structured the program around stages of adolescent development and sought to make it meaningful to youth around the globe. One of their important changes was increased focus on the temple. Despite added production cost, leaders chose to add to the new Personal Progress booklet a translucent onionskin page printed with an image of the Salt Lake Temple, which was designed to be overlaid on a depiction of Jesus Christ on the first page. “Through the temple you could see the Savior,” Kapp said, describing the effect of the two opening pages. “And that is the message of the book: You prepare to make and keep sacred covenants, receive the ordinances of the temple, and go through the temple to develop that relationship with the Savior. Everything else that followed had that one goal in mind.” Some leaders also instructed young women to paste their own image on the inside of the cover, so when the onionskin fell against it, they would see both Christ and themselves in the temple.¹¹⁹

The effort to orient young women toward the temple aligned with a new era of emphasis on the temple among Latter-day Saints. The church was beginning to mature in many places, as reflected in the creation of stakes and, especially, the construction of temples. In fact, the years 1983–1984 saw the dedication of twelve new temples in ten countries, including Australia, Guatemala, the Philippines, Samoa, and Taiwan.¹²⁰ By the end of the decade, forty-nine temples were in operation or under construction around the world.¹²¹ This meant that an ever-increasing proportion of church members could participate in temple ordinances.

Kapp also believed that emphasizing the temple could address some of the concerns over complementarity of the programs for young women and young men. “If both young men and young women are preparing for the temple ordinances and exaltation, doctrinally and fundamentally there should be some principles in the programs for each group that are close,” she explained.¹²² She was not the only church leader in the era who saw the temple as the bridging link between young women and the broader doctrinal emphasis on priesthood. In a special issue of the New Era dedicated to Young Women, Russell M. Nelson referenced the temple endowment and sealing ordinances as central spiritual aspirations in a Latter-day Saint life.¹²³

In addition to its temple emphasis, the new Personal Progress booklet presented three consequential changes. First, the Young Women values replaced the areas of focus as the basic structure for goal setting. As in the earlier program, the young women were to choose and work toward two goals related to each area of focus, or value, every year. Second, age-group awards and medallions replaced yearly progress certificates. Young women completed the Beehive, Mia Maid, and Laurel requirements as they worked toward the culminating Young Womanhood Recognition award. Finally, although young women still retained a great deal of autonomy in choosing the goals related to each value, which were called value experiences, they chose from a list of options; the instructions allowed them to replace one value experience per year with a goal of their own design.

For Beehives, suggested value experiences included learning with friends or family members to sing a song about faith, committing to love and serve others for two weeks, and looking up the terms moral and courage in the dictionary and discussing them with parents or young women leaders. For Mia Maids, value experiences could include participating in a performance, reading a book on a gospel topic written by a general authority or general officer of the church, or spending a minimum of five hours in service outside their family (suggestions were provided).¹²⁴ Each year, young women also kept up regular practices such as scripture reading and journal writing. Laurels continued these practices, but instead of choosing and completing value experiences, they designed and carried out value projects.¹²⁵ The manual offered suggestions for the projects, and at least one per year had to involve service to others. Otherwise this part of the work remained largely up to the young women themselves, with the guidance and support of their parents and church leaders.

The new Personal Progress manual did maintain some elements of the old program, including its orientation toward service and family. The booklet continued to emphasize women’s role as mothers, but now it referred to motherhood as a “sacred mission,” adding a more powerful sense of divine calling, rather than focusing on natural gifts and cultural expectations.¹²⁶ In a section reflective of earlier booklets’ focus on the process of setting and achieving goals and of Kapp’s previous work in time management, the new booklet also provided a project plan sheet to guide young women through the steps of effectively establishing and carrying out goals.¹²⁷

Young women throughout the church began working on the new Personal Progress program following its 1989 release. Some who had already been working on the previous program found they had to repeat some of the requirements and then fulfill new requirements to receive the Young Womanhood Recognition medallion.¹²⁸ Local papers occasionally reported on young women receiving this medallion and included descriptions of the service projects completed to attain it, so readers in places such as Utah, Texas, and New Jersey learned of Latter-day Saint young women achieving the highest award offered them by their church.¹²⁹ The projects included things like organizing a quilt drawing to raise money for a family whose children had a rare disease or studying sign language and teaching the other young women in the ward to use it in songs.

Katie Bennion, the younger sister of Anne, Jane, and Rebecca Bennion of Los Altos, California, was initially less enthusiastic. She entered Young Women in 1989, and for her, the Personal Progress program felt like little more than a massive checklist. But her mother prodded her to continue, and eventually the service she rendered as part of her culminating Laurel project became a life-changing experience. Katie’s mother connected her with two elderly women who lived alone, neither of whom were Latter-day Saints. Katie’s task was to visit them each once a month. One of these women was a Holocaust survivor named Sonja Loebner. Squeezing in the visits was difficult for Katie, who was involved in several extracurricular activities and had an after-school job. She found it challenging to carry on a conversation with the older woman, and sometimes she didn’t want to go. But she felt good once she was there, and Loebner’s willingness to share her life stories touched her. Katie already had an interest in World War II, but hearing Loebner’s personal stories of surviving the Auschwitz concentration camp left her stunned. When Loebner passed away a few years later, she left Katie a painting she had done of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Russia, because Katie had often admired it. Loebner’s warmth and kindness gave Katie strength when she was just beginning to establish her religious identity.¹³⁰

Elisabetta Calabrese, in the Florence district in Italy, was fourteen years old when the new program was introduced. Its focus on the temple was reinforced in her district by combined youth trips to the temple in Bern, Switzerland, nearly every year. Dozens of young men and young women, along with leaders and parents, boarded buses that drove them more than ten hours north to Bern. They stayed for a few days, lodging in nearby World War II–era underground bunkers that had been converted into youth hostels. The youth participated in baptisms for the dead at the temple, and they also enjoyed outdoor activities including swimming and biking. For Elisabetta the testimony meetings held in the local chapel were among the most meaningful aspects of these trips. As she listened to young people from her district share their testimonies, her own convictions were strengthened.¹³¹

The young women in Elisabetta’s district did not meet regularly because of the small number of young women in her branch in Siena and the strain of traveling two hours to meet with other branches in Pisa, but they did work on Personal Progress and gather occasionally for activities. Their yearly camp provided an opportunity to complete value experiences. Church members in the district supported the young women in these efforts by holding a yearly bazaar where they purchased some of the goods the young women had made as part of their Personal Progress experiences. Pulling from their tight budgets, members purchased bookmarks, pillows, and other handmade goods, such as a painting depicting how the artist felt about a particular Young Women value. The funds they raised helped the young women save money for their camp or temple trip that year.¹³²

Another update to the Young Women organization that began early in Kapp’s tenure but that likewise took several years to come to fruition was an updated version of the For the Strength of Youth booklet. Originally released in 1965, this guide to Latter-day Saint standards in areas such as dress, grooming, dating, and sexual purity had not been revised or given much attention in the youth organizations since 1972. In summer 1986, Kapp had a discussion with Thomas S. Monson about the need for a new edition.¹³³ The older version of the booklet talked about girls not wearing curlers in public, boys not wearing “grubbies,” and other concerns that seemed trivial when compared with the temptations facing youth two decades later. “We thought about the challenges of today and felt like there really needed to be an updated version,” Kapp recalled.¹³⁴

The project became a collaborative undertaking with the Young Men general presidency, and it went through several stages and delays. One of the most difficult issues was striking the right balance in what to say and what not to say on matters of sexuality. One draft was rejected because reviewers felt it was too frank and could tempt young people to experiment by introducing sexual information they might not yet know. But the next draft received criticism for not dealing with “things of real consequence.” The presidencies held focus groups with BYU freshmen, who told them the drafts used unclear and antiquated terminology. Eventually the Young Women and Young Men presidencies composed a draft they felt struck the right balance, but when they sent it for approval, it was rejected and lay dormant for several years. Meanwhile, the organizations continued to receive questions about standards for youth. Kapp felt mounting urgency about producing a definitive resource.¹³⁵

She found an opportunity to express her concerns to Monson in a meeting on another subject in March 1990.¹³⁶ Kapp had previously resolved that if ever she had an opportunity to discuss For the Strength of Youth with top decision makers, she would be ready. When Monson asked whether she had anything else on her mind that day, she raised the issue, reminding him of their conversation years earlier. He asked how long it would take to prepare a new booklet. When Kapp answered that the new version was already prepared, Monson replied, “Leave it with me.” A short time later, an assignment came from the PEC to prepare the publication. This time the Young Women and Young Men presidencies worked with a larger group that included representatives from the general leadership of the Sunday School, Church Education System, and even Welfare Services—every entity that had any responsibility for youth. It was the first time representatives of those organizations met together for a single purpose, as far as Kapp knew.¹³⁷ After years of waiting, the booklet was published in time for October 1990 general conference, where Monson spoke about it in two addresses.¹³⁸

The cover of the new booklet conveyed a message of universality through its illustrations of many young women and young men of various races and ethnicities, and it was distributed in eighteen languages. The updated For the Strength of Youth booklet was divided into fourteen sections covering topics such as dating, dress and appearance, honesty, language, media, sexual purity, and spiritual help, among others. Each section contained a brief discussion of the topic, based in scripture. The language was direct and admonitory, though not harsh, combining definitions of standards with counsel about dos and don’ts. “Because sexual intimacy is so sacred, the Lord requires self-control and purity before marriage as well as full fidelity after marriage,” the section on sexual purity stated. “Always stay in control of yourself and your physical feelings.”¹³⁹ While the booklet addressed perennial concerns about modesty, chastity, and honesty, it also reflected worries that had arisen or intensified in the United States in the 1980s; the 1990 booklet admonished against profane language, sexual content in media, Satanism in music, and drug abuse.¹⁴⁰

The rollout of For the Strength of Youth was designed to ensure it would be widely used and find a permanent place in the church’s messaging to youth and parents.¹⁴¹ Regional representatives and stake presidents received training from general authorities on how to use the booklet and teach its standards. Bishops, branch presidents, and parents were likewise encouraged to use For the Strength of Youth in teaching and counseling.¹⁴² Bishops were instructed to personally ensure that the booklet had been distributed to every young person in their wards and to report back when the assignment was completed.¹⁴³ Within a few months of its release, one and a half million copies had been distributed. “This is not a one-time thing,” affirmed Jack H. Goaslind of the Seventy, who served as Young Men general president at the time.¹⁴⁴ The Church News, the Ensign, and the New Era all supported the effort with regular articles discussing the booklet and the standards. A small wallet-size card that listed the standards and accompanied the booklet was intended to be easy for young people to carry with them, refer to often, and pull out in church settings for lessons and discussion.¹⁴⁵

In the era after the introduction of the 1989 Personal Progress booklet, young women participated in weekly lessons and activities much as they had for the last decade. In contrast to the past eras of packed MIA calendars detailing weekly activities, more recent guides for leaders, like the Young Women Handbook, did not include explicit instructions concerning the activities themselves, leaving activities and planning up to local Young Women leaders.¹⁴⁶ The handbook advised them to make the new Young Women values a central focus of activity planning and included a new section titled “Planning with a Purpose,” which included five steps for planning, carrying out, and evaluating activities that would help fulfill carefully chosen value experiences.¹⁴⁷

The new handbook established “Help Strengthen Families” as one of the organization’s basic principles and listed nine suggestions for accomplishing that goal. These included encouraging young women to take what they learned in lessons and apply it in their families—for instance, by planning activities that could include parents and other family members—and urging parents and families to become involved in the Personal Progress program with their young women.¹⁴⁸

Three recurring annual events involving parents—New Beginnings, Young Women in Excellence, and a “standards event”—were part of the updated activity calendar. The New Beginnings meeting originated during Ruth Funk’s tenure, and the overall format hadn’t changed much: on an evening each January, the parents and bishop joined the ward or branch’s young women to orient new members to the program and introduce the year’s scriptural theme. Later in the year, at Young Women in Excellence, young women presented projects they had worked on to their parents and leaders. Projects might be anything—including arts and crafts, design, or engineering—so long as they reflected understanding of one or more of the Young Women values. Young women’s parents also joined them for a yearly standards event that helped young women consider moral conduct, including sexual conduct, in light of eternal goals.¹⁴⁹

Older elements of the organization carried over as well. Young women could participate in the Young Women sports program, under the direction of the ward sports director. The tradition of an annual Young Women camp remained, though in 1985 the board began to discuss how to integrate the Young Women values into camp and increase its focus on overtly religious experience.¹⁵⁰ The outdoor-skills emphasis of the 1960s also continued, with Campcrafter clinics and certifications remaining in place through the 1980s.¹⁵¹ For Rebecca Bennion, the new values were meaningful, but it was the yearly camping, including the emphasis on outdoor skills, that became a formative part of her time as a young woman. She and her sisters attended Camp Liahona each year in the Sierra Nevada, where they could learn horseback riding and canoe on a lake. Like countless young women before her, Rebecca built campfires and sang songs ranging from the silly to the spiritual as she sat with her peers around the fire. Even more, Rebecca’s stake had its own strong camp traditions that included increasingly difficult hikes each year, culminating in a three-day, two-night backpacking trip. Rebecca loved these. She loved recognizing that she could do hard things. She also loved being able to participate in activities, like backpacking trips, that she usually saw only the young men doing.¹⁵²

General leaders continued looking for ways to emphasize the spiritual aspects of camping. While they continued to view connection with God as a by-product of time in nature, they began to treat spirituality as a skill that could be fostered through concrete goals and tasks. By 1992, when a new camp manual was released, it included directives such as “Each day while in camp, find a quiet spot and read from the scriptures for at least fifteen minutes. . . . Share your thoughts about God’s creations with a leader or friend.”¹⁵³ Traditional camping skills, supplemented by new references to caring for the environment, still formed the majority of requirements, but the spiritually focused activities established a new trajectory. Future Young Women general presidencies would build on this vision until they dropped certification altogether.

In the late 1980s, Elisabetta Calabrese experienced both the older outdoor-skills focus and the emerging religious emphasis at camp. Her local leaders felt strongly about the importance of camp, and the young women gathered as often as possible in the months leading up to it to prepare. This preparation included cultivating camping skills such as building fires and tying knots, as well as participating in activities focused on physical fitness.¹⁵⁴ In 1990, young women throughout Italy were invited to participate in a special countrywide camp called Fiaccola Novanta, or Torch 90, in reference to the Young Women logo and the year of the camp. Elisabetta’s district spent the entire year planning for the massive event, dedicating every activity to some aspect of the preparation. This time, camp preparation included a challenge to read the entire Book of Mormon before the camp. When the young women arrived at the camp near a nature reserve in Abruzzo, Italy, they found open fields surrounded by wooded mountains with a nearby stream, but not a single building or camping accommodation. The young women were responsible for building basic structures such as bathrooms and tables. They cooked outside each day and undertook a difficult hike of several miles, for which they had prepared throughout the previous months. And although they were unable to bathe during the five days of the camp, the young women took turns washing in a small fountain of cold water. In these seemingly austere conditions, Elisabetta felt herself developing a sense of unity and sisterhood as she talked and shared faith with young women from different parts of Italy.¹⁵⁵

Leaders also moved to restore a closer relationship between young women and young men in church activities. Coordination between the Young Men and Young Women organizations had fallen off in the 1970s, but in subsequent years leaders felt the previous tradition of social and spiritual interactions had served an important socializing function for youth, and they saw mixed-gender activities as preparation for compatible and lasting marriage.¹⁵⁶ From the earliest days of her tenure, Kapp looked for ways to refocus activities that included both young women and young men (now called “combined activities”) on helping the youth develop relationships, including those that would lead them toward marriage. By 1988, the handbook guided leaders to plan joint activities where young people could “learn to support each other in righteousness and develop relationships as brothers and sisters in the ward family.”¹⁵⁷ Combined activities were not intended to revive the vibrant conjoint programs and contests of the past, but leaders recognized that young women and young men would seek each other’s company and looked for settings in which the church could “accommodate the need for the shared relationship between young men and young women.”¹⁵⁸

Changes to the Young Women organization during the 1980s had helped the organization find its footing in the more centralized church structure. The Young Women values introduced a welcome stability after the rapidly changing names, achievement programs, and emphases in the 1970s. The use of a theme provided an anchor point through which young women could affirm their significance both in God’s eyes and within the church. Creative strategies for using broadcast media gave general leadership new means to communicate with local leadership, recovering the lost communication lines between general and local leaders. Young Women general presidents’ inclusion in settings like general conference provided another new avenue to communicate not only with young women and their leaders but also with the broader membership of the church.

Using both media promotion and memorable symbols, Kapp and her counselors had helped make Personal Progress recognizable to women of every age. For the next three decades, the values and theme would shape the experience of many young women and influence the broader sense of what it meant to be a woman in the church. Without any formal program encouraging them to do so, some women chose to work on Personal Progress after their teens—especially if they had a responsibility in the Young Women organization. Winnifred Cannon Jardine, born into the church many decades too early for Personal Progress, worked on the requirements from her home near Salt Lake City while she was in her nineties. In Rostov, Russia, where the church itself was young during the early 2000s, Relief Society members found satisfaction in pursuing the requirements and asserting their identities as daughters of God.¹⁵⁹

In February 1993, a new Young Women general presidency gathered at the church’s publishing facility to inspect the newly printed camp manuals and discuss the significance of the changes for an article in the Church News. Janette Callister Hales, who previously served as a counselor to Kapp, along with her counselors, Virginia Hinckley Pearce and Patricia Peterson Pinegar, posed for photos with the manuals, commenting on how the manual differed from past versions. Hales expressed a hope that the manual’s basis in gospel principles and scripture would make it both adaptable and enduring.¹⁶⁰ It was, they noted, intended for an increasingly international cohort of young women. The work of helping young women all over the world develop strong individual identities as daughters of God would only grow in importance in the years to come.