Experiences like Zandile’s were increasingly typical. In the 1970s and 1980s, the church had expanded rapidly in Latin America and the Philippines. By the 1990s, waves of growth were also underway in Africa, some of Asia’s industrializing economies, and the Global South more broadly.⁵ Many members saw the growing presence of the church throughout the world as a fulfillment of both Jesus Christ’s commission to teach and baptize “all nations” and Joseph Smith’s prophecy that “the truth of God will go forth boldly, . . . till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear.”⁶

The church’s growth in these areas came at a time of significant cultural crisis for many communities. Globalization, including shifts in the global centers of industrial production, proved deeply disorienting to many people and often served to erode traditional social structures. The church’s message of strong religious faith combined with a structure for community and collective action resonated deeply in many societies in the Global South.⁷ People like Zandile wanted opportunities to worship alongside others, to serve, and to experience mutual improvement through new relationships. Latter-day Saints’ willingness to share their knowledge and experience within branches and wards helped people who were moving into cities and trying to find their place in the world. Church organizations strengthened individuals and communities, and new branches, wards, and stakes in turn strengthened the church. In 1996, shortly before Zandile’s experience with Young Women began, church growth in the Global South had led to a major milestone: the number of church members outside the United States surpassed that of members inside the United States for the first time. Only a few years later, church leaders marked another milestone, noting that a majority of Latter-day Saints spoke something other than English as their primary language.⁸

Erika Aza was among the rapidly increasing number of young Latter-day Saint women growing up in the Global South. Baptized when she was eleven years old, after her family had been brought back into church activity by full-time missionaries in her area, she was one of a handful of young women in her tiny branch in Ipiales, Colombia, on the border with Ecuador. Because of the difficulty in traveling, Young Women leaders talked frequently with the girls over the phone to offer support and review goals. They also met all together in the branch one Saturday each month to work on Personal Progress and learn skills like cooking and sewing. Leaders helped Erika and other young women raise money to attend large youth conferences in Pasto, an hour to the north. One leader, Mary Rosero, helped the young women plant flower seeds to teach about faith and initiated a program for them to unite in daily prayer each morning: the girls knelt to pray each day at a designated time, then reported to Rosero over the phone about their experiences. These leaders guided Erika in becoming a faithful Latter-day Saint woman.⁹

As the church grew internationally, however, it maintained a strong association with the United States. The church was headquartered in the United States, and most church leaders were enmeshed in American culture; both facts had profoundly affected the culture of the church. Generations of North American church members had worked hard for acceptance, which had often involved emphasizing their American and European roots in a society that gave strong preference to white residents.¹⁰ Norms and assumptions that were legacies of the Saints’ efforts to be accepted as exemplary Americans sometimes complicated their embrace of a global identity.

General church leaders in Salt Lake City were increasingly aware of these challenges, even if they hadn’t yet resolved them. Removing Americanisms in church policies and organizations and creating more globally relevant programs had, by now, become a decades-long goal. For leaders of the Young Women organization, part of working to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse membership included efforts at both continuity and simplification. In earlier eras, Young Women general presidencies and board members spent much of their time traveling to local stakes and wards or bringing local MIA leaders to Salt Lake City for instruction in running the complex and highly structured programs. Young Women general leaders in the 1990s, by contrast, followed the lead of Kapp by employing satellite technology to speak to youth directly.¹¹ Local leaders now worked to carry out a much simpler but less familiar program. General board members sometimes conducted training visits in stakes and wards within the United States, and the general presidency conducted them outside the United States, though these visits were less frequent than in previous decades.¹²

Continuity, simplicity, and emphasis on basic principles of belief became critical because, by the 1990s, Young Women general leaders served for a much shorter period. Kapp’s eight-year presidency made her the last Young Women general president to serve longer than five years, a marked departure from the long tenures of women such as Martha Horne Tingey (twenty-four years) and Bertha Reeder (thirteen years). Standardized five-year terms allowed presidencies to anticipate and prepare for the completion of their service, but the brevity of the terms could mean releasing leaders just as they hit their stride in the positions.¹³

The first of these shorter presidencies, spanning from 1992 to 1997, was that of Janette Hales (who remarried during her time as president and thereafter went by Janette Hales Beckham). Hales was no stranger to high-profile leadership. She had served in the Utah state legislature, on the Primary general board, and as a counselor to Kapp in the Young Women general presidency. Hales saw her presidency’s mission as continuing to implement the Kapp presidency’s changes and further simplifying programs.¹⁴ She chose as her counselors Virginia Pearce, who had served with her on the Primary general board, and Patricia Pinegar, to whom Hales had served as counselor in a ward Relief Society presidency. Pinegar had also served with her husband in leading the church’s mission in south London and later the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah. These experiences gave her some understanding of the needs of Latter-day Saints outside the United States.¹⁵

As the presidency considered ways to simplify participation in the Young Women organization and make it accessible internationally, they took to heart the refrain repeated to them by general priesthood leaders: “We cannot export culture.”¹⁶ While some distinct Latter-day Saint practices were encouraged worldwide, by the 1990s church leaders worked to avoid Utah-centric practices like exporting elocution lessons to Australia or teaching young women around the world not to go out in public with curlers in their hair. To keep church programs relevant for Zandile and members like her, leaders in every church organization needed to find ways to recognize the life experiences and needs of church members around the world, especially in the Global South.

During the same period that the church was expanding in the Global South, there were growing tensions between the church’s values and those of the Global North. Latter-day Saints and other observers watched with growing concern as an emphasis on sexual freedom and personal autonomy seemed to threaten the stability of family and community structures in new and more troubling ways.¹⁷ Beginning in the late 1970s, internal church studies had been commissioned and committees formed to study issues affecting youth and their families, including teen intercourse and pregnancy, temple marriage rates, abortion, and homosexual relations. Metrics church leaders cared about often trended in directions that worried them; for example, rates of teen pregnancy in the 1980s were increasing even as rates of temple marriage were decreasing. Still, other indicators offered hope: Latter-day Saint teens in the United States tended to engage in premarital sex much less frequently than their peers, and marriages between Latter-day Saints were less likely to end in divorce.¹⁸

By the 1990s, two decades of rapidly shifting norms regarding family structure had led to major transformations in the lived experience of the church’s young women. In the United States, overall divorce rates peaked in the 1980s, while divorce rates for individuals over age thirty-five continued to rise in the 1990s.¹⁹ American teens and young adults, including members of the church, were increasingly likely to come from households with divorced parents. Even teens and young adults with married parents often worried about the possibility of their parents divorcing.

As marriage diminished in importance in Western society, Latter-day Saints continued to emphasize its centrality in their belief and practice. Members and leaders regularly affirmed that marriages sealed by the proper authority would remain intact through the eternities, which added weight to the project of building strong marriage partnerships in mortality.²⁰ Church leaders’ investment in marriage was not only theological: they had long emphasized marriage, family, and parenting as vital to the health of a society. They believed stable two-parent families benefited people socially, emotionally, and economically. They also used the hope of a future family to motivate responsible choices and moral purity among the church’s youth.²¹ Both church members and leaders sought out forums for conversations with representatives of other religious and social organizations about how to promote the healthy function of families within supportive communities.²²

During the same period, the gay rights movement in the United States was shifting its emphasis to advocate for legal recognition for same-sex relationships. Proponents of such changes were spurred to action in part by heartbreaking experiences during the AIDS epidemic, where life partners with no clear legal relationships were denied spousal rights during hospitalization or at death.²³ Hawaii was one of the first states to broach the question of whether marriage could be newly understood to encompass same-sex partnerships. In 1993, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that unless the state could provide a compelling rationale otherwise, a ban on gay or lesbian couples entering into durable legal agreements as intimate life partners was likely against the state’s constitution.²⁴ Church leaders, however, had been speaking out against same-sex marriage since at least the 1980s, and in the coming years they would dedicate significant resources and energy to advocating against it.²⁵

As the cultures of the Global North increasingly promoted individualism on matters of sexuality and reproduction, some scholars in the early 1990s began formulating a distinction between biological sex and gender. They argued sex was a biological assignment that was generally, though not always, made at birth, whereas gender was an identity constructed through social norms and behaviors, and it was something individuals could discover and create on their own.²⁶ Church leaders rejected these ideas, citing longstanding teachings that “the distinction between male and female . . . was an essential characteristic” of individuals’ premortal and mortal existence that continued after death and resurrection.²⁷ Apostle Dallin H. Oaks taught in 1993 that gender differentiation—what he referred to as “maleness and femaleness”—was a fundamental reality of God’s plan for His children.²⁸ Gender and family were deeply connected to Latter-day Saint beliefs about the purpose of life. Generations of Latter-day Saint leaders had taught about a Mother as well as a Father in Heaven.²⁹ The Young Women value of divine nature reflected the Latter-day Saint understanding of humans’ literal parent-child relationship with God and the belief that humans could grow ultimately to become gods like their heavenly parents.³⁰

In the 1990s and early 2000s, church teachings reflected a growing concern over maintaining defined and separate gender roles, with a continuing emphasis on motherhood. These teachings had obvious implications for young women, who were learning what it meant to be faithful Latter-day Saint women. In general conference addresses throughout the first half of the 1990s, the term gender appeared more than four times as often as it had in any previous decade, and in the decade as a whole, use of the terms mother and motherhood increased by approximately 30 percent and 38 percent, respectively.³¹

On the evening of 23 September 1995, Relief Society general president Elaine Low Jack rose to address millions of women and young women gathered in groups around the world. As the first speaker in the general Relief Society meeting the week before general conference, she called on women to “make strengthening and nurturing your family your first priority.” Jack and her counselors all spoke forcefully on the importance of families, and the meeting rose to its climax as recently ordained church president Gordon B. Hinckley read aloud a momentous new document: “The Family: A Proclamation to the World.”³²

This statement—a proclamation issued by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles—did not introduce any new doctrine or policy but instead reviewed and summarized Latter-day Saint beliefs about the family.³³ “Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God,” it declared, and “the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.” The proclamation then outlined that “plan of happiness”: human beings are beloved spirit daughters and sons of heavenly parents, and God’s plan is for His children to come to earth, obtain physical bodies, and progress toward increasing perfection and eternal life. Temple marriage was the key to this destiny: “Sacred ordinances and covenants available in holy temples make it possible for individuals to return to the presence of God and for families to be united eternally.”³⁴

The proclamation reiterated the church’s longstanding opposition to sex outside of marriage and made explicit the assumption that heterosexual marriage was God’s will. The proclamation made clear the church’s stance that gender is an “essential characteristic” of individual identity and purpose and therefore discouraged conceptions of gender as fluid. Most of the proclamation’s language, however, focused on the shared role of mothers and fathers as parents. Only two sentences of the proclamation described gendered roles: “By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children.” These descriptions were immediately followed by three sentences of qualifying language: “In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners. Disability, death, or other circumstances may necessitate individual adaptation. Extended families should lend support when needed.” The text reflected the tension that had grown in the previous decade between the effort to promote a vision of equality and partnership in marriage and the desire to maintain defined gender roles and patriarchal leadership in families.³⁵

The announcement of the family proclamation, as it came to be called, became a pivotal moment in clarifying and affirming the church’s stance on issues surrounding gender, marriage, sexuality, and reproduction. The text itself was a concise 605 words, but in the years and decades after its publication, the proclamation was highly influential in defining church members’ perspectives. Members were encouraged to display copies in prominent locations in their homes, and the statement readily lent itself to use in church classes, talks, and programs.³⁶

Women from many parts of the world found the ideals of equal partnership and shared investment in family life transformative in their marital and familial relationships. In Japan, for example, Natsume Inagaki saw the focus on husbands and wives working together as equal partners as a refreshing change from a cultural expectation of wives serving husbands.³⁷ A woman from Botswana likewise appreciated the model of equal partnership and felt grateful for the larger role her husband took in caring for their children.³⁸ In South Africa, another woman delighted in the strength that mothers and fathers parenting as equal partners gave children and families, as well as the freedom it gave mothers and fathers to accomplish more in and outside the home.³⁹

In Erika Aza’s estimation, the descriptions of gendered expectations in the family proclamation simply supported what church leaders and her Colombian culture had already taught her. For her, as for many church members in the Global South in the 1990s, debates over issues such as gender stereotypes and legalizing marriage for same-sex couples held little resonance, if they made it into the news at all. More frequently, concerns over gender roles in Latin America had to do with cultural norms of male alcohol consumption and its effect on household economic stability. Men were seen as the head of the household and expected to provide for the family, even as their drinking habits frequently left their wives few financial resources to raise and care for the children.⁴⁰ Given this gendered reality, many female church members welcomed an official church document emphasizing male responsibility to home and family.⁴¹

For young women, the proclamation spoke mostly to future expectations. Marriage and childbearing were clearly delineated as the pinnacle of mortal and eternal achievement, elevating a rhetorical emphasis that had long permeated the Young Women organization. The ideal was a young woman who believed her eternal destiny was to participate in a family as a daughter, wife, and mother, with her roles based on the foundation of a mother and father who placed family at the center of their lives. In this ideal, a young woman anticipated a primary role of raising children, even though she was encouraged to prepare to provide economically for her family in case of need.

Still, many factors might interrupt a young woman’s hope for the ideal. In the 1950s, when American young women watched friends marry at an average age of twenty and marriage rates were high, it had been easier to focus on marriage in the Young Women organization. By 2000, the average age of first marriage for American women was twenty-five—well past the age of participation in Young Women—and overall marriage rates were declining.⁴² These and other demographic, social, and economic realities impacted individual expectations. In her ward or branch, a typical young woman saw many lives that did not follow the path presented as ideal—she encountered faithful women who had never married, had divorced, or had been unable to bear children. Economic circumstances could make the idea of one parent sufficing as a provider feel out of reach. And a young woman’s sexual orientation or gender identity might affect her interest in being part of a male-female couple.

Young women’s responses to the ideals laid out in the family proclamation were as varied as the young women themselves—some wrestled with them, while others felt assured of their truth. Bridey Jensen from Oklahoma, for example, had deep roots in the church and had served in Young Women class presidencies, but still she was told by a close friend that her feelings of same-sex attraction were the result of a “weak testimony.” Grappling with such sentiments from some church members, Bridey felt different, lonely, and confused.⁴³ Other young women, such as Suzanne Fei, experienced loneliness in their desire to pursue a career. As Suzanne interacted with and observed the Latter-day Saint women she knew in the small towns she grew up in on the West Coast of the United States, she noted that none of the mothers she knew had careers—especially not in the science and technology field where her interests lay. Most of them had chosen motherhood over career, and she felt some pressure to abandon her ambition to pursue a career and follow the same path. This pressure was based in part on some members’ belief that the proclamation’s statement that “mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children” meant a woman’s highest calling—to raise children—precluded a career. Suzanne felt grateful, though, for the flexibility she found in the proclamation’s clause on individual adaptation and for the support of teachers and parents, who helped her pursue her goals.⁴⁴ Finally, some, like Angela Fallentine in New Zealand, felt an assurance of the proclamation’s truth and divine provenance. When she watched a video of Gordon B. Hinckley presenting the proclamation, she felt a powerful witness of its truth “literally from head to toe.”⁴⁵

A month after the family proclamation was issued, Glenn L. Pace of the Quorum of the Seventy visited a meeting of Janette Beckham’s Young Women general board with this directive: “See that it [the proclamation] is spread and does not fade.” He shared many leaders’ feeling that the family proclamation offered an effective solution to many of the world’s problems.⁴⁶ The presidency and board members felt they had independent spiritual confirmation that a focus on family was the right direction for their organization, and they began planning ways to incorporate the proclamation into their work.⁴⁷

As they considered family issues, board members discussed the disruptions of divorce and abuse, the need for role models, and the differences between ideals for how families could function and the realities young women lived. Although they may have been aware that teen pregnancy and teen abortion rates were in dramatic decline in the United States after a twenty-year high in 1990, the presidency still worried about early sexual activity and childbearing.⁴⁸ In February, board members held a special group retreat on Temple Square to discuss family life. They covered common challenges, demographic trends, and parenting best practices. After hours of discussion, the participants concluded that Young Women activities and camp could strengthen families, reinforce parents’ teachings, and provide good role models.⁴⁹

Despite sincere efforts to create a globally relevant program, cultural assumptions from the United States still informed many church programs and communications. The Personal Progress booklet’s recommendation to bake a cake for a new neighbor, for example, made assumptions about cultural norms and available infrastructure. In India in the mid-1990s, Vilo and Gurcharan Singh Gill, who presided over the country’s mission, had to remind American senior missionaries who wanted to teach cake baking that Indian church members didn’t typically have conventional gas or electric ovens.⁵⁰ In France, a local Young Women leader named Deolinda Duriez helped young women adapt requirements from printed booklets because recommendations like making a cake for a neighbor were socially foreign.⁵¹ The fire-building requirement in the camp manual similarly assumed a setting in which people didn’t build fires at home but had reason to do so in outdoor settings. In rural parts of Africa, many young women built fires daily for cooking. In Japan, there were few outdoor settings where fire building was allowed or appropriate.

Amid the Young Women organization’s efforts to adapt to a more global membership, a new Young Women general presidency was appointed in 1997, two years after the release of the family proclamation.⁵² The new president, Margaret Dyreng Nadauld, had served in five ward Young Women presidencies and was serving on the Relief Society general board at the time she received her new assignment. Her first counselor, Carol Burdett Thomas, had been appointed only a few months earlier to serve as a counselor to Beckham. Second counselor Sharon Greene Larsen had served as president of her stake Young Women organization.⁵³ Like their predecessors, the new presidency made the family proclamation a priority. They regularly studied the document, and it informed their approach to teaching, training, and program design.⁵⁴

In 1998, the Young Women general presidency announced a yearlong worldwide celebration under the theme of “turning hearts to the family.” Over the course of the year, young women were invited to focus on family in several ways. They could, for example, study the family proclamation, interview a grandparent, research ancestors for whom temple ordinances could be performed, or perform acts of kindness and service for family members. Each ward or branch was to hold a culminating celebration activity at the end of the year designed to “help young women develop increased love for and understanding of the eternal nature of families.” These activities could include plays, art exhibits, musical presentations, talent displays, and personal stories and testimonies.⁵⁵

The presidency also emphasized the theme of families at the general Young Women meeting in March of that year. From 1978 to 1994, young women had been encouraged to participate in the general women’s meeting, which took place before the October general conference and included all women ages twelve and up. Beginning in March 1994, the church started holding a separate meeting exclusively for young women a week before April general conference that was broadcast around the world through the church’s satellite network system. The first general Young Women meeting featured the theme “Young Women of Faith.” The meeting’s format set the precedent for subsequent annual Young Women meetings: each member of the Young Women general presidency spoke, as did a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.⁵⁶

At the 1998 general Young Women meeting, Nadauld taught that girls were part of three families—their current family, their future family, and their heavenly family—and that they should prepare in their youth for their future roles. Thomas reflected on numerous ways young women around the world supported their families, including by contributing to the spiritual tenor of their homes and doing family history and temple work.⁵⁷ Larsen invited the girls to become “titles of liberty” (a Book of Mormon term for a banner rallying people around a righteous cause) in their families by striving to protect against intruders such as selfishness, harshness, anger, and strife. “Your banner stands for peace and love and service to your families,” she declared.⁵⁸

The presidency believed young women’s personal aspirations found ample accommodation within the principles of the family proclamation. In that same meeting, Nadauld connected education to the central focus on families, envisioning young women “who are getting an education and are preparing to bless others through it.” For the sake of themselves and their future families, she exhorted, “Choose a fine education. Be qualified. Be well rounded. Work hard.”⁵⁹ In a document the general presidency prepared to describe the Young Women organization and its goals, they presented education and marriage as complementary goals for young women that would bless a future family. “As opportunities for women increase,” they wrote, “young couples seem to be developing a greater capacity for shared experiences.” They noted that fathers were more involved in caring for young children than in previous generations, and they praised examples of high-achieving young women. The recently elected student body president at Stanford University, for example, attested that she had learned leadership skills in the Young Women organization. “This is the greatest time in the history of the world for young women,” the presidency affirmed. They taught that with all the options available to them, young women needed to “be wise and set appropriate priorities for their lives.”⁶⁰

After what they felt was a successful yearlong effort to increase emphasis on the family, the Young Women leaders began considering lasting changes to achieve that end.⁶¹ Since Kapp’s presidency, the Young Women values and theme had been the expression of both young women’s identity and the purpose of the organization. During an October 1998 board meeting, a committee on Personal Progress revisions proposed adding “nurture future generations” to the theme’s list of priorities for which young women were preparing.⁶² Upon further discussion, however, board members rejected the revision, concerned that nurture might be read as too exclusively connected with motherhood and might exclude those who never became parents.⁶³ A later proposal referenced “divine roles” in an “eternal plan” to evoke a wider range of meanings, but it was not until 2001 that they finally settled on a solution by adding “strengthen home and family.” Unlike “nurture future generations,” this phrase did not strike board members as too closely connected with future motherhood. “Young women,” they believed, “can right now strengthen their families and prepare for the temple.”⁶⁴ In announcing the change, Nadauld stressed its applicability to young women in any phase of life. “Strengthen the home of your youth and later your own family,” she said.⁶⁵

Over the course of the 1990s, public use of the internet skyrocketed and began to reshape the world. By the year 2000, just over half of American households had a computer, and 40 percent of homes had access to the internet.⁶⁶ By 2011, over 75 percent of Americans lived in a household with a computer, and 71 percent of households had internet access. With the increasing prevalence of smartphones in the 2010s, even households without computers could access the internet.⁶⁷ From the mid-2000s on, several key developments shaped users’ online experience. High-speed internet connections made it easier to share large media files. Web platforms became more interactive and focused on user-generated content: blogs and social media channels rose to prominence and took on new life as people transitioned to mobile technology. By 2010 it was estimated that 30 percent of the worldwide population used the internet; by 2019 that number had grown to 57 percent, with half of internet users accessing it by mobile phone.⁶⁸

Latter-day Saint leaders quickly embraced the internet’s potential to connect Saints around the globe. In 1996, the church’s first website for members, lds.org, went live, followed in 2001 by mormon.org, a site aimed at the general public.⁶⁹ By the end of the decade, the church had developed mobile apps like Gospel Library, which made scriptures, general conference reports, church magazines, lesson manuals, and many other resources available on users’ devices.⁷⁰ In January 2010, a website dedicated to young Latter-day Saints (youth.lds.org) debuted in English, followed soon thereafter by versions in ten other languages. The site featured videos of young people sharing their experiences, messages from church leaders, and inspirational videos. It also contained resources for leaders and links to web content such as scriptures and the New Era magazine.⁷¹

During the same time period, people were quick to recognize the commercial potential of a system that allowed for the rapid flow of information around the world. Figures in the pornography industry were among the first to build personal fortunes in a digital attention economy.⁷² Pornographic websites were certainly not the first ventures to tap into sexual desire for profit, but their scale of distribution was unprecedented.

Church leaders and secular experts were concerned about the objectification of women and girls in pornography and other media. In February 2005, the American Psychological Association convened a task force with the charge to identify, study, and summarize the best research on the impact of cultural messages that sexualized girls. The study concluded that sexualization—that is, the tendency to view women and girls as sex objects and to evaluate them based on their physical characteristics—impeded the development of healthy sexuality and self-image. Psychologists linked sexualization with eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression, which were the mental and emotional problems most common among women in the United States and other countries in the Global North at the time.⁷³

Warnings against pornography became a regular theme of church leaders’ addresses during the late 1990s and early 2000s.⁷⁴ Much of that focus was on the temptation that access to pornography posed for men, since men were its primary targets (though women were also part of the global audience for the industry).⁷⁵ Such concerns also opened rhetorical space for discussing the dangers posed by a culture that objectifies women through pornography and other tactics. The resulting discussions often emphasized modest dress as a defining standard for Latter-day Saint young women. Church leaders for decades had emphasized an equal standard of chastity for both young women and young men, but some members felt that discussions of modesty, which largely focused on young women, often created a double standard. These messages, both by implication and by direct statement, asserted that young women’s clothing choices could lead men’s minds toward unchaste thoughts. This could place the responsibility of men’s purity of thought on young women who already struggled with image and identity issues.

Some leaders recognized this problem and worked to change the conversation about gender and chastity. In 1998, James E. Faust of the First Presidency spoke at the priesthood session of April general conference, building his remarks around the thirteenth article of faith. He pleaded with the men of the church to work toward greater consistency between their beliefs and their actions. This included standards of moral cleanliness. “There is no different or double standard for moral cleanliness for men and women in the Church. In fact, I believe holders of the priesthood have a greater responsibility to maintain standards of chastity before marriage and fidelity after marriage.”⁷⁶

In conjunction with discussions of sexual morality, dress had always been part of Young Women discourse. When the For the Strength of Youth booklet was first published in 1965, dress standards also addressed questions of formality and decorum, but by the end of the twentieth century, the cultural context for young women’s clothing choices had shifted drastically. Young women were participating in sports, exercise, and physical activities at higher levels than ever before.⁷⁷ As a matter of course, they dressed in uniforms and athletic wear that might have been considered immodest by earlier standards but were increasingly regarded as practical and acceptable attire. At the same time, clothing standards in general had become more relaxed and oriented toward comfort.⁷⁸

General-level church leaders around the beginning of the twenty-first century tried to focus the modesty conversation on identity. When Elaine Schwartz Dalton, second counselor in the Young Women general presidency, spoke to BYU students in 2004, she explained that modesty was more than dress, though the implication was that dress was still a central component. “When we truly know that we are daughters of God and have an understanding of our divine nature, it will be reflected in our countenance, our appearance, and our actions,” she asserted. “It is an outward manifestation of an inner knowledge and commitment.”⁷⁹ Speaking a year and a half later in October general conference, Young Women general president Susan Winder Tanner framed modesty in similar terms but invoked Paul’s counsel to the Corinthians, which equated the sacredness of bodies with that of the temple. “We should dress and act in ways that reflect the sacred spirit inside us,” she admonished. Then, echoing Dalton, she insisted, “Modesty is more than a matter of avoiding revealing attire. It describes not only the altitude of hemlines and necklines but the attitude of our hearts.”⁸⁰ Tanner and Dalton taught that when young women had a clear understanding of their divine nature and the sacredness of their bodies and were committed to their covenants, they would naturally choose modest dress.

In a culture that increasingly valued individual expression, a person’s sense of taste in music, film, or fashion was often seen as an important aspect of their personality.⁸¹ Still, the standards promoted by church leaders resonated with many young women, and some shared leaders’ concerns enough to adopt a more modest aesthetic as their own, even developing a niche market in the early 2000s for clothing that was intended to be both modest and stylish.⁸² Divisions among young women over adherence to modesty guidelines could be painful. For a young woman who wore a tank top or sleeveless dress without intending to draw sexualized attention, it could feel like charges of immodesty were contributing more to objectification than the clothes were. What virtually all young women seemed to agree on, however, was that they did live in an atmosphere where their physical appearance was under regular, often discomfiting, scrutiny.

As they weaved principles from the family proclamation into their organization, members of the Nadauld presidency also sought to understand and address unexamined American cultural assumptions in Young Women programs. They thought the programs were often unnecessarily complex and, despite past efforts, remained difficult for many young women globally. Nadauld’s counselor Sharon Larsen was particularly concerned. Larsen had decades of experience with Young Women, having served on Ruth Funk’s twenty-eight-member general board and later on Janette Beckham’s eight-member board. She was also Ardeth Kapp’s sister and had followed the Personal Progress program from its infancy. She was blunt about the need for continuing modification. While traveling internationally, Larsen saw how specific aspects of Personal Progress failed to translate. She made it a habit to run through global contexts in her mind and name specific places where a requirement or proposal simply would not work.⁸³

For Zandile Qinisile in South Africa, for example, multiple obstacles complicated Personal Progress. Language was one. While a survey from church headquarters would have reported that most South African members spoke English, language fluency exists on a spectrum. Zandile was much more comfortable with the isiZulu spoken in church meetings than the written English of her Personal Progress materials. The Personal Progress booklet used vocabulary a young woman would never learn in a school class or through mass media. For Zandile, concepts like divine nature, individual worth, and charity were initially more mystifying than motivating. Her leaders, who were her source of mentoring and support, did not seem to understand the program well either, so informal spoken clarification was not a reliable alternative to print materials.

Other Personal Progress challenges were economic and logistical. Zandile and her oldest cousin, Zama, both had heavy cleaning responsibilities at home in addition to school assignments. Finding time to fulfill Personal Progress requirements was hard. The program’s assumption of parental availability was also a barrier. Even when Zandile was able to understand and complete requirements for a Personal Progress goal, she felt unsure who should certify her completion, perhaps not realizing that the booklet allowed for an adult other than a parent or guardian to sign off. Her aunt was too busy to help, so Zandile felt stuck.⁸⁴ While many of her peers in the ward were economically better off, which gave them advantages in education and home life, they too struggled with the program. The result was that participation in Personal Progress never became a norm in the ward. Few girls completed the requirements.⁸⁵ Despite the steep learning curve, however, Zandile grew to appreciate the program as a reminder to look beyond the day-to-day concerns of her adolescence and prepare for a hopeful future.⁸⁶

Tackling challenges like Zandile’s proved difficult from church headquarters in Salt Lake City. One way Nadauld hoped to help members throughout the church was to maintain a critical mass of consistent participation in the program, so young women who finished would have the understanding and confidence to administer them as they grew up and were called to lead.⁸⁷ But she had to balance that ideal with the need for alteration and adaptation. To revise the Personal Progress program, Nadauld established a committee whose members included individuals with experience in the international church. Julie Bangerter Beck, who headed the committee, had lived in Brazil as a child when her parents oversaw a mission there.⁸⁸ Silvia Henriquez Allred, who also served on the committee, was born in El Salvador, had served as a public affairs missionary in Spain, and had led the church’s mission in Asunción, Paraguay, with her husband.⁸⁹

The presidency and committee worked on the project over several years. They were willing to sacrifice some of the physical, social, and intellectual breadth of the program for a simpler, more flexible version of Personal Progress that focused on devotional behaviors and a relationship with God. Like leaders before her, Nadauld felt progress depended on divine guidance accompanied by careful, attentive work. Reflecting on her administration, she emphasized that changes came by inspiration: “We have felt that these different things needed to happen,” she explained. “Then we have put forth the effort, put pencil to paper, done the work and the homework, talked to people, researched, and done everything we needed to so that we would be able to receive the inspiration when it was time.”⁹⁰

Revisions to the Personal Progress program made requirements simpler and more specific, and the materials required to complete the requirements were pared down. The committee knew that not everyone could afford their own paper, so they decided to send a small journal with each Personal Progress booklet.⁹¹ The required experiences for each value could all be accomplished with scriptures, the journal, and discussion with a parent or leader. For example, one faith value experience asked young women to read specific scriptural passages dealing with faith, pray each morning and night, discuss their experience with a parent or leader, and write about it in their journal.⁹² Revisions also embraced flexibility. Following the required experiences for each value, young women were to complete three additional experiences, either from a list of proposed experiences or of their own creation. Young women could then design their own culminating value project or choose from a list. Example projects for the faith value included taking a church family history class and compiling stories of people who showed great faith, memorizing the apostles’ recent proclamation titled “The Living Christ,” or creating a story, poem, song, or artwork depicting faith. Next to these suggestions, the booklet provided space to describe a proposed project.⁹³ Providing this blank space gave young women clear permission to adapt the program to their circumstances rather than worry about doing the program incorrectly.

The new booklet also emphasized alternative options whenever it mentioned a parent.⁹⁴ It was clearer than ever before, for example, that young women could discuss how to prepare for motherhood with any mother they admired. A leader rather than a parent could sign off completed requirements.⁹⁵ The program also cut the age-specific aspects of previous versions, allowing young women to work through the program at their own pace. Once a young woman completed the requirements and received her Young Womanhood Recognition medallion, she became a mentor for others, so she could continue serving and growing while building unity within the group.⁹⁶ Nadauld explained that the young women who serve as mentors “don’t move in and take the place of the parents, but there’s another voice, another encouragement.”⁹⁷ Subsequent revisions of the program introduced another award, the Honor Bee, for young women who mentored others, performed service, and fulfilled additional requirements.⁹⁸ The medallion itself was also redesigned. Instead of featuring a woman with European features and a long, flowing dress, the new medallion bore an image of the Salt Lake Temple.⁹⁹ While the temple was in Utah, it was perhaps the most well-known temple among Latter-day Saints worldwide, and its image symbolized temple covenants that were becoming increasingly available as the church expanded temple building throughout the world.

The members of the committee that worked on the Personal Progress revisions proved to have an extended influence on women’s future experience in the church. Julie Beck and Elaine Dalton later served as counselors to Nadauld’s successor, Susan Tanner. Beck also served as the Relief Society general president, with Silvia Allred as a counselor.¹⁰⁰ Nadauld felt the continual crossover of leadership among the women-led organizations—at both the general and local levels—provided consistency and helped young women transition more comfortably into Relief Society, which had been an area of concern since the separation of the programs for older and younger members of what had been the MIA in the 1970s.¹⁰¹

Although participating in the organization took less time by the beginning of the twenty-first century than it had in the decades when spiritualized recreation dominated the church’s youth programs, young women still participated in Sunday classes and weeknight activities. Each year, local leaders used one of three Young Women manuals, each covering similar topics, to guide their Sunday instruction. An annual resource guide or supplement provided fresh ideas and support from the words of current church leaders, male and female. Nadauld’s presidency began publishing the annual resource guides because they had not been authorized to prepare new curriculum but were concerned that the aging manuals, dating as far back as 1994, lacked up-to-date material on social and moral issues confronting young women.¹⁰² By the early 2000s, the resource guide for the Young Women manuals was available online, with links to recent talks related to lesson topics like “Living the Gospel Daily,” “Creating a Spiritual Environment in the Home,” “The Priesthood Can Bless Families,” and “Learning to Share the Gospel.”¹⁰³

Important events such as New Beginnings and Young Women in Excellence continued as yearly traditions.¹⁰⁴ These evenings were especially memorable for Erika Aza in Colombia. Her leaders used them as an opportunity to talk about the values and their associated colors. At one such activity the young women dressed up for a fashion show, for which leaders helped them find stylish clothing and did their hair and makeup. As each girl walked in front of parents and leaders, the Young Women leaders announced her name and positive qualities, emphasizing her “true beauty.” They wanted these young women, many of whom came from poor and rural circumstances, to see themselves as beautiful, feminine daughters of God.¹⁰⁵

Youth conferences also continued, allowing young women and young men to gather for spiritual uplift and to meet and befriend other young church members, which remained especially important in areas where the church was less established.¹⁰⁶ Alongside such major events, weekly activities offered an opportunity to put Sunday lessons into practice or just bond as a group. For example, young women from several stakes in Southern California created a special fashion show of modest formal gowns that garnered headlines in the Los Angeles Times.¹⁰⁷ An article in the New Era featured activities from youth around the world as suggestions. Young women in Chile visited widows; youth in England hosted a “living history” evening with elderly ward members; youth in the state of Georgia in the United States held a cook-off starting with assigned ingredients; youth in Missouri made cakes and decorated them with scenes from the Book of Mormon. The article also recommended games, career nights connecting youth with ward members’ work experience, and a scavenger hunt for service activities.¹⁰⁸

Just as Zandile Qinisile had struggled with Personal Progress, members around the world often struggled to make camp work, in part because they were unprepared for the complexity of planning and carrying out such an undertaking. In American culture, camping was considered a “back to the basics” wilderness experience, which made it easy to miss how much infrastructure was involved. Camping required accessible wilderness space where groups could get permission to stay, transportation to that space, and specialized supplies like tents, sleeping bags, and foods suited to camp preparation. Besides the physical infrastructure, Young Women camp required general camping experience. In countries where camping was common, the church could lean on skills people already had. Where group camping was not a common tradition, they had to work from scratch. Preparing for camp in such places could be exciting and baffling, frustrating and fulfilling.

In Mongolia, a decade of rapid church growth began when six senior missionary couples entered the country in 1992. Converts were disproportionately young and mostly lived in Ulaanbaatar, the nation’s capital and home to half its population. In 1995, a mission was organized in the country, led by Richard and Mary Nielsen Cook.¹⁰⁹ That summer, Doka Tsedendorj and other Young Women leaders in Ulaanbaatar gathered at the Cooks’ apartment to plan the church’s first Young Women camp in their country. They were proud of the Mongolian steppes and often spent time during the summer riding horses and milking cows in the countryside, but the idea of a large, shared camp experience was new.¹¹⁰ Most local leaders were barely older than the young women and the only church members in otherwise Buddhist families, and they didn’t have any reference point for what a church camp might look like. Still, they enthusiastically participated in planning meetings as Mary Cook struggled to share her vision.¹¹¹

The group needed shelter for the forty-three girls, seven leaders, and four senior missionaries who attended. Two young women were able to bring tents to share. Thanks to the church’s developing Scouting program for young men in Mongolia, the Young Women had access to four more tents, making six tents for over fifty people. Transportation to the campsite over fifteen miles away was difficult. August monsoon rains had made the rough rural roads muddy. On the morning they planned to go, the bus they had hired did not arrive. It took two and a half hours for Tsedendorj and other leaders to persuade the driver of another bus to fulfill their unusual request.¹¹²

Food was simpler. Young women picked wild strawberries and cooked mutton dumpling soup over a fire. They drank warm sweet milk, a substitute for the traditional fermented mare’s milk the young women had given up to adapt to their new religious commitment against alcohol. After sharing their sweetened milk, the group squeezed into a tiny cabin for a testimony meeting.¹¹³ As night descended, so did the monsoon rains. Water quickly seeped through the tents and onto the young women crammed head to toe inside. Fortunately, their heavy wool blankets provided some protection.¹¹⁴

Return transportation was also difficult. With their chartered bus nowhere in sight after hours of waiting while the rain created muddy pools in the roads, the Young Women leaders worked to flag down another bus—no easy task so far outside the city. The next driver to pass by initially agreed to transport the group but balked when he saw the dozens of young women rushing up to the doors with huge bundles of equipment. Tsedendorj and another leader soon caught a ride to Ulaanbaatar in a vegetable truck, and at 5:30 that evening, the group was relieved to see the same bus from the day before bouncing down the road. Though they had to pay the driver again, the weary group was able to return home.¹¹⁵ As in other places, leaders would need time to decide whether the benefits of camp justified the challenges in the long term.

Local leaders in other countries often looked to missionaries for help in planning or adapting camp activities. In Albania in 1995, missionaries and local leaders scaled camp down to a day trip for their first attempt. Edlira Kocani, leader of the young women in a branch in Tirana, worked with two missionaries, Louise Holman and Patricia Cryer, to plan the event. After traveling by bus to a lake near Tirana, they found some shade and began with simple spiritual activities—a hymn, prayer, and recitation of the Young Women theme—before moving on to simple games with religious lessons.¹¹⁶ That same summer, Elizabeth Adei-Manu, the stake Young Women president in Accra, Ghana, led ward and branch leaders in planning the country’s first Young Women camp. Though there had been Latter-day Saints in Ghana for decades, girls’ camp had not been a priority to that point. Adei-Manu acted with help from Lilian DeLong, an American expatriate living in Ghana. With about $400 from the stake, they rented a boarding school in Tema, to which they transported around one hundred young women and twenty leaders for a camp experience with various games and activities. Adei-Manu felt the camp was an overall success.¹¹⁷

Erika Aza was unable to participate in camp because her area in Colombia did not have the resources or the know-how to hold one, but she did join combined-gender youth conferences, during which she sometimes slept in a tent.¹¹⁸ Likewise, Verónica Battista in Buenos Aires, Argentina, experienced combined-gender youth conferences rather than camp during her teenage years. When she became a Young Women leader herself in 2003, however, she and other local leaders tried holding a Young Women camp. They had no idea how to camp because no one in the stake had ever done it. But she and the other leaders pored over the manual, learning as much as they could, and jumped in. Her group ignored the camp certification requirements—they had no experience in them and no one to teach them. Still, Battista enjoyed the opportunity to find meaning in novel traditions. She loved the experience of cooking together with the girls, hearing their testimonies, and feeling the unity of the group.¹¹⁹

Members’ experiments adapting an unfamiliar tradition often yielded powerful moments and greater unity for the young women who attended. In Ghana, Adei-Manu saw spiritual and social benefits to the camp she’d led with guidance from DeLong. The young women had learned Book of Mormon stories through fun skits. When she visited different wards after camp, young women knew her and were excited to see her, and she was pleased that she knew them as well. Members in Ghana continued camp after DeLong left. In Albania, Kocani valued the experience of the first camp in her country, but she did not plan a camp the next year because Louise Holman, who had helped organize the first camp, had returned home.¹²⁰ Though the experiment was fruitful, the degree of difficulty didn’t justify continuing without outside energy and experience.

These kinds of challenges were on the minds of new Young Women general president Susan Tanner and her counselors, Julie Beck and Elaine Dalton, when they were appointed in 2002. Tanner had extensive experience traveling internationally with her husband in his academic work and had served in several ward and stake women’s leadership positions, including as stake Young Women president. In addition to her childhood years in Brazil, Beck had served on the Young Women general board before her appointment, as had Dalton, whose service also included time as a stake Young Women president.¹²¹ The women considered both international issues and questions about the internet and media as they contemplated revising the camping program. During World War II, YWMIA leaders had viewed camp as a retreat from the stress of wartime realities. Now the Young Women presidency felt youth were facing a different kind of embattled reality: the constant bombardment of technology and media.¹²² Tanner and her counselors understood that the internet’s pressure was a constant, nearly inescapable presence that affected young women’s mental health and commitment to religious virtue.¹²³ In almost every meeting with her board, Tanner discussed ways to combat internet pornography and sliding standards of dress and behavior portrayed in the media and to discourage Latter-day Saint young women from following such trends.¹²⁴ With these concerns in mind, the presidency sought ways to make camp less of a rugged outdoors experience, advocating instead for a peaceful retreat in nature.

Though practical questions remained about how to create an experience of refuge in different global settings, Tanner’s presidency began to arrive at some clarity about camp’s purpose. Young Women leaders felt an urgent need to create spaces where young women could escape the spiritual dangers that leaders saw encroaching ever more tenaciously.¹²⁵ Camp could be a space away from messages about female body image and objectification that pervaded online and broadcast media, a space where young women could find purpose and renewal.

In 2006, the church finished building a new Young Women camp in Heber Valley, Utah, as part of an ongoing investment in camping infrastructure. For decades, local church leaders in different areas had worked to secure and develop campsites. Some sites, such as Mia Shalom in central Utah, served several individual stakes, whereas others, such as Brighton in Big Cottonwood Canyon near Salt Lake City, and Oakcrest in the mountains near Kamas, Utah, offered a supplement to ward and stake camps. In the early 2000s, over a dozen sites throughout the United States and Canada were being developed. In New England, for example, Gordon B. Hinckley enjoined leaders to purchase property and develop a camp for use by several stakes.¹²⁶ The Heber Valley camp, however, was the largest and reflected the latest thinking on the purpose of girls’ camp.

Tanner and her counselors attended the new camp’s dedication on 22 June. After driving past the seven Young Women value flags that welcomed visitors, they took their seats on the stage of the Lucy Mack Smith Amphitheater beside Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Merrill J. Bateman of the presidency of the Seventy, and the two previous Young Women general presidents, Ardeth Kapp and Janette Beckham. Hundreds of campers and the facility’s staff had left their activities to join the ceremony, taking their seats on split-log benches to listen to talks and a dedicatory prayer.¹²⁷

The service demonstrated leaders’ priorities, which were clearly no longer about certification. Tanner spoke on grounding young women in a sense of divine identity. She expressed her hope that camps would be a refuge where young women would learn about who they are as children of God and feel His love for them.¹²⁸ Bateman gave the dedicatory prayer, asking God that the camp be a haven from the evil in the world.¹²⁹

Positioning camp as a place apart from an increasingly evil world reflected a resurgent feeling of the need for defense and separation in the Young Women organization. Much discussion focused on what young women ought not do. Many young Latter-day Saints in the early 2000s did their best to uphold an identity that was often noteworthy in social situations for what it asked them not to drink, watch, or wear. One popular T-shirt at the time read simply, “I can’t . . . I’m Mormon.”¹³⁰

For young women and young men, premarital sex and many physical expressions of passion were foremost on the list of don’ts. Not least because of the faith’s continued strong emphasis for both genders on marriage and raising children, the ideal life path presented in church lessons involved abstinence until temple marriage. By the early 2000s, however, these ideals were competing with other prevalent cultural beliefs surrounding sexual experience. One analysis of how young Americans thought about virginity in film and in their own lives identified three main patterns: Some viewed their first sexual experience as a milestone in the maturation process. Others viewed virginity as having a stigma, suggesting immaturity or a lack of desirability. And still others viewed their first sexual experience as having heightened meaning as a gift and a marker of true love.¹³¹ All three models left room for social pressure toward premarital sexual expression as a sign of maturation or a demonstration of the authenticity of deep romantic feelings. Researchers who studied religion and teenage sexuality found that Latter-day Saints had exceptionally high rates of commitment to chastity both in their intentions and in their behaviors.¹³² Nevertheless, when the Young Women general presidency visited local congregations, local leaders regularly cited chastity as the top challenge facing their young women.¹³³

Tanner and her presidency tried to focus the youth programs on positive formulations of sexual standards. They presented chastity not as simply the absence of sexual experience but as an active choice leading to increased spirituality. The 2007 theme of Especially for Youth—a BYU-sponsored program for high school students—was “Power in Purity.” This theme was complemented by the 2007 churchwide theme for youth, “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God,” which echoed the theme of a church antipornography booklet published the year before.¹³⁴ These messages emphasized the benefits of living a chaste life, like power and confidence.

Even with the church’s strong emphasis on chastity, not all Latter-day Saint youth lived the ideal. About one in eight teenage Latter-day Saints who responded to the National Survey of Youth and Religion in 2002–2003 reported having had at least one sexual experience. More than half of that group reported returning to abstinence after a single experience.¹³⁵ In some cases, however, framing chastity as a matter of purity could lead to all-or-nothing thinking, discouragement, and complicated relationships between young women and local leaders.¹³⁶ Young women who were or had been sexually active were sometimes left feeling alienated. Because church messaging presented chastity as a defining feature of a good Latter-day Saint, their sense of self and their relationship with God could be disrupted by premarital sex.

Equating chastity and moral purity with virginity laid an even greater burden on young women who experienced sexual abuse or rape. Elizabeth Smart was a member of the Young Women organization in her ward when she was kidnapped from her Salt Lake City home in 2002 and repeatedly raped over the course of nine months. In later interviews, she praised the power of faith to bring hope and healing but also spoke frankly about how discussions at church that associated virginity with future desirability had been difficult for her. Smart’s own internal dialogue after she was raped was influenced by past lessons on purity: “One of the first thoughts I had was, No one is ever going to want to marry me now: I’m worthless, I’m filthy, I’m dirty. I think every rape survivor feels those same feelings, but having that with the pressure of faith compounded on top—it was almost crippling.”¹³⁷

Long after her rapist was arrested and she was back with her family in safety, Smart found it difficult to listen to church lessons on chastity. In their attempts to discourage premarital sex, teachers sometimes used analogies implying that premarital sexual experiences changed a young woman in a permanent, negative way. “I just remember thinking, This is terrible. Do they not realize I’m sitting in class? Do they not realize that I’m listening to what they’re saying? Those are terrible analogies,” Smart said. While she recognized that teachers had no malice for victims of sexual assault, she found herself discouraged by the lack of consideration for the substantial percentage of young women who experienced rape or other abuse.¹³⁸

In the early 2000s, church leaders made additional efforts to be mindful of diverse experiences among members, including young women. Leaders like Chieko Okazaki, former counselor in the Relief Society general presidency, and Richard G. Scott of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles began to address the social and spiritual needs of sexual abuse victims in venues with higher visibility.¹³⁹ Church leaders also worked to be more mindful of young women who had chosen not to follow their religious standards of chastity for a time and then returned to living church standards. Increasingly, leaders worked to define attributes like purity as renewable, differentiating their calls for virtue from cultural conceptions of virginity as a quality that could be irretrievably lost. A 2006 general conference address on purity by Susan Tanner’s counselor Elaine Dalton, for example, heavily emphasized repentance. Far from presenting a mistake as irreversible, she reminded listeners that “the Savior has promised forgiveness” and the path to the temple is made possible by “the redeeming and enabling power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ.”¹⁴⁰ Over the next decade, general and local leaders continued to adjust how they presented chastity to better reflect this understanding.¹⁴¹

Elaine Dalton was sustained as the new Young Women general president at the April 2008 general conference. She selected Mary Cook as her first counselor, with whom she had served in Tanner’s presidency since 2007.¹⁴² An educator by profession, Cook had also served with her husband as a mission leader.¹⁴³ Her second counselor, Ann Monson Dibb, held a degree in elementary education and served on the Young Women general board. As the daughter of church president Thomas S. Monson, Dibb had unique insight into general church leadership and the stories of Latter-day Saints worldwide.¹⁴⁴ A few days after being sustained, the three women donned hiking boots for their first meeting: a snowy, slippery morning hike up Ensign Peak. The landmark, a hill overlooking the Salt Lake Valley, was given its name because Brigham Young had said, echoing language from Isaiah, that the peak was “a proper place to raise an ensign to the nations.” Dalton and her counselors invoked Young’s memory by surveying the valley from the same place he confirmed the future location of the Salt Lake Temple, which he later announced with the words, “Here we will build the temple of our God.”¹⁴⁵

While looking toward the temple, Dalton told her counselors, “We are going to help parents prepare the young women to be worthy to make and keep sacred covenants and receive the ordinances of the temple. That’s our vision.” Echoing Brigham Young’s literal raising of an ensign in 1847, the Young Women presidency lifted and waved a gold shawl as “an ensign to the nations.” They sang “High on the Mountain Top,” a hymn that includes the words “a banner is unfurled. / Ye nations, now look up; / It waves to all the world.”¹⁴⁶ For Dalton, the new banner they were waving stood for virtue.¹⁴⁷

Years earlier, Dalton had arisen from a sleepless night with the conviction that the young women needed a return to virtue and a focus on the temple. When she explained her spiritual impressions to her husband while on a run the next morning, he stopped in the middle of the street and said, “Turn around and go home. You have to write this down.”¹⁴⁸ The thoughts Dalton recorded that day guided her throughout the years of her presidency. As she later remarked, using virtue as a rallying cry was inherently linked with her impression to focus on the temple: “Virtue’s the key that unlocks temple doors.”¹⁴⁹

At the October 2008 general conference, Dalton gave an address entitled “A Return to Virtue.” Afterward, she and her presidency proposed adding virtue as one of the Young Women values—the first addition to the Kapp administration’s inaugural 1985 list. To define the new value, Dalton used the broad definition of virtue found in Preach My Gospel, the missionary guide in circulation since 2004, as “a pattern of thought and behavior based on high moral standards,” while noting “it encompasses chastity and moral purity.”¹⁵⁰ That definition both reinforced the importance of chastity in Latter-day Saint belief and behavior and also allowed young women and leaders to think about broader patterns of moral behavior. Adding virtue as a value thus imbued it with a uniquely Latter-day Saint significance for the church’s young women.¹⁵¹ The Personal Progress revision incorporating the virtue value was the first version of the program released online.¹⁵² “We are looking to a day,” Dalton said of the new digital format, “when, at a click, anyone, anywhere in the world, will be able to access those things that are virtuous and lovely, that bless and strengthen homes and families, and that prepare young women everywhere to make and keep sacred temple covenants.”¹⁵³

For Dalton, the addition of virtue as a Young Women value was a kind of restoration, echoing the founding ideals of retrenchment at the origin of the Young Women organization. “I looked up the word retrench as we were thinking about a return to virtue,” she remembered. “The dictionary says it is an additional interior fortification. That is really what virtue is going to do for the young women. It’s going to give them a fortification, a strengthening, to stand as a witness of God in an ever darkening world. It is going to help them have strength and courage.”¹⁵⁴

The structure of the new Personal Progress value experiences developed the virtue theme more fully. Some of the required value experiences overtly addressed chastity. Young women were to study the family proclamation, the section on “sexual purity” in For the Strength of Youth, the thirteenth article of faith, and Proverbs 31:10–31 (on the worth of a virtuous woman), and they were to write in their journals about the blessings of committing to be chaste. Other experiences involved broader spiritual strengthening. These focused on recognizing and maintaining the influence of the Holy Ghost, preparing to participate in temple ordinances, and gaining greater appreciation for repentance. For the capstone value project, young women were to read the entire Book of Mormon and record their thoughts, particularly regarding Jesus Christ’s example of virtue. Two pages were provided for young women to write their testimonies of the Book of Mormon.¹⁵⁵

Many Young Women groups celebrated the new value. In the Ipiranga Stake in São Paulo, Brazil, Tatiana Christina dos Reis Dintof helped organize an activity about virtue. She told the stories of Brigham Young identifying the Salt Lake Temple site and the Young Women presidency raising a gold flag while looking toward the temple and proclaiming a return to virtue. Channeling virtue’s broad definition, leaders asked the young women to develop three habits: praying every morning and night, reading daily in the Book of Mormon, and smiling. They painted a logo representing these goals on a banner. “Each young woman stamped her hand on this banner. We are excited to prepare our young women to make covenants with the Lord in the temple and help them come unto Christ,” Dintof said.¹⁵⁶

In practice, young women who chose to prioritize virtue often noticeably broke with the social, dating, and sexual expectations of their peers. Zandile Qinisile in South Africa was known as umfundisi, meaning “pastor’s wife,” in school because of her knowledge of scripture and the standards she maintained. The feeling of not fitting in with her peers was sometimes very difficult for her. She even turned down a young man who wanted to date her, because he did not have the qualities she had decided she wanted in a future husband. This made him angry, but Zandile was later grateful for the Young Women lessons that taught her to expect something more. When she met the man who would become her husband, she recognized those qualities in him. “It was as simple as that,” she realized.¹⁵⁷

Almost four years after Dalton introduced virtue into the Young Women values, young people of the church experienced another major change. At the opening of the October 2012 general conference, it was announced that young women could serve missions at age nineteen, instead of age twenty-one, as had been the case since 1964.¹⁵⁸ Young men’s age of eligibility was changed from nineteen to eighteen.¹⁵⁹ The announcement was greeted with excitement as well as an immediate outpouring of missionary applications from young women. Within a year of the age change, the female missionary force had risen over 140 percent, from about 8,100 to over 19,500.¹⁶⁰

The 2012 age change for young missionaries marked the beginning of a new era in which Latter-day Saint youth engaged more with the core mission of the church, including through more outward-facing service and ministering efforts. But the concerns guiding leaders of young women continued much the same as before. As the church grew globally and faced rapid technological and social change, leaders sought ways not only to help young women grow and progress as they prepared for their future but also to protect and safeguard them in that journey.

As the first decade of the new millennium came to a close, the retrenchment efforts of recent presidencies gave way to an increased focus on expanding young women’s horizons—and to consideration of what that might look like for young women in different parts of the world. Certainly, part of that expansion would be greater numbers of young women serving as missionaries, as well as a greater emphasis on preparing and encouraging young women to serve. Yet the next decade would see even greater changes to the organization for young Latter-day Saint women throughout the world, ushering in new opportunities for them to participate in the work of the church.