Organised in 1842, on an Unusually Broad Charter

The Female Relief Society of Nauvoo was organised on 17 March 1842 in a room above Joseph Smith's store, with Emma Smith as its president and about twenty founding members. The minute book kept from that day, in Eliza R. Snow's hand, is one of the most closely read documents in Latter-day Saint history, because the charter recorded in it is broader than a nineteenth century benevolent society would suggest: the society was to relieve the poor, and also to save souls, and Joseph Smith is recorded as telling the women he was turning the key to them.

What that phrase meant has been argued about ever since, and the argument is not academic. Read narrowly it authorises a charitable auxiliary. Read broadly it grants the women of the church an authority of their own, and it is regularly cited by Latter-day Saints who want the role of women in the movement expanded. The church published the minute book in full in 2016, in a scholarly edition from its own historical press, which put the whole text into the hands of everyone having the argument.

The society lapsed during the expulsion from Nauvoo and the crossing of the plains, and was reconstituted in Utah from 1867 under Eliza R. Snow, who had kept the minute book and used it as the founding charter of the revived organisation.