Relief Society

The Relief Society was organized in Nauvoo, Illinois, on March 17, 1842, when a group of women led by Sarah M. Kimball had already begun meeting to sew clothing for men building the Nauvoo Temple and sought Joseph Smith's approval to formalize their group. Smith proposed instead organizing the women 'after the pattern of the priesthood,' with a president and counselors, and Emma Smith, his wife, was elected the society's first president. Minutes from these founding meetings, preserved and later published in full as The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, record Joseph Smith addressing the group directly on several occasions, including remarks Latter-day Saints understand as extending significant religious authority and responsibility to women within the society's charitable and educational mandate.

The society's early Nauvoo activity centered on relief for the poor and sick within the rapidly growing city, but tension between Emma Smith and Joseph Smith grew during 1842 and 1843, connected to disputes over the practice of plural marriage that Emma Smith opposed, and the society's meetings lapsed after Joseph Smith's murder in 1844 and were not formally reconvened for decades. Brigham Young revived local Relief Societies in the Utah territory beginning in the 1850s and 1860s, and under Eliza R. Snow, who had also been a Nauvoo-era officer, the society was reorganized on a churchwide basis in 1867 and has operated continuously since.

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.

Under Utah territorial leadership in the later nineteenth century, the Relief Society expanded well beyond charitable relief into direct civic and professional roles unusual for a women's religious auxiliary of its era: it ran a grain storage program that supplied wheat during regional and, later, wartime shortages, published its own periodical, the Woman's Exponent and later the Relief Society Magazine, and helped sponsor women's medical education, sending several Latter-day Saint women to study medicine so they could serve Utah's rural communities directly. The society was also active in the national suffrage movement, and Utah women, Relief Society members prominent among them, gained the vote in the territory in 1870, decades ahead of the federal amendment.

Today the Relief Society operates as the church's organization for all women eighteen and older, paralleling the Young Women organization for teenage girls, with a chapter meeting in every ward and branch worldwide and a general presidency at the church's Salt Lake City headquarters that reports to the church's global leadership. Its contemporary work centers on weekly religious instruction, visiting and welfare ministry to individual women and families, and coordination with the church's broader humanitarian and welfare programs, making it, by the church's own account, among the largest women's organizations in the world by membership, though it functions as an integrated auxiliary of the church rather than an independent body.

Between 1867 and the early twentieth century the Relief Society operated as something close to an autonomous institution inside the church. It ran a grain storage programme, buying and holding wheat against famine, and in 1918 sold about two hundred thousand bushels of it to the United States government for the war effort. It published the Woman's Exponent from 1872 and later the Relief Society Magazine. It financed and operated the Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City, sent women east to train as physicians and brought them back, and ran midwife and nursing training for a territory that had almost no other provision.

Its leaders were public figures. Utah women voted from 1870, the second jurisdiction in the United States to enfranchise them, and Relief Society leaders were central to that campaign and to its restoration after the federal Edmunds-Tucker Act stripped the vote away in 1887. Emmeline B. Wells, later the general president, edited the Exponent and corresponded with Susan B. Anthony.

The correlation programme of the 1960s and 1970s ended most of it. The society's finances, its magazine, its curriculum and its independent projects were absorbed into central church departments under priesthood direction. The church presents this as an alignment of effort in a global organisation, and that is a real argument. Historians of the movement, including Latter-day Saint historians publishing with the church's own press, also describe it as a substantial loss of institutional independence, and both descriptions are accurate.