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Church History Matters
200 - Priesthood & Women During the 20th Century | Church History Matters I Women & Priesthood Series
01:39:21
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- [00:00]
Lisa
Gender is just one of those things in the human condition that we're always navigating and trying to figure out.
- [00:06]
Scott
We're in an era of dynamic change.
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Lisa
They embrace what's called progressive recreation.
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Scott
And as we're kind of seeing right now, there is a kind of panicked freakout from the adults. And this becomes what's known as the social advisory.
- [00:19]
Casey
So some innovative things happening in Relief Society to become more energetic, involved and attractive group to become a part of.
- [00:26]
Scott
This is sort of the first stirrings, right, of them saying, let's all get on the same page.
- [00:30]
Casey
Most of the traditional elements of the MIA were explicitly discontinued or faded.
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Lisa
It's probably a necessary step, even if painful.
- [00:39]
Scott
They've got to become cognizant of the fact that the church isn't just an American church anymore. It's becoming a global faith.
- [00:45]
Casey
What do women gain? What do they lose?
- [00:51]
Scott
Hello, Scott. Hello, Lisa.
- [00:53]
Lisa
Hey, guys.
- [00:54]
Casey
Hey, Casey and Lisa. We're back.
- [00:57]
Scott
We're back.
- [00:58]
Lisa
Back and better.
- [01:00]
Scott
Back. Better and bigger than ever before. And heading into. Well, this has been pretty complex, but heading into an even more complex era where we're talking about women's ecclesiastical positions in the church. Today. We're covering the 20th century. Our last episode, we covered the 19th century. All kinds of fascinating, lesser known history here, I'll say. But let's recap that really fast so that we have time to get into the developments in the 20th century, which is going to lead us into our era as well here. So we mentioned last time that prior to 1842, there were no female officers in the church. But when the Relief Society was organized in 1842, we not only had female officers in the church, but we now had women organized after what Joseph Smith referred to as the patterns of the priesthood, meaning they were organized with a presidency who could call officers who were authorized to perform duties within the Relief Society. In fact, the Relief Society was sometimes referred to as a quorum. There's an Eliza R. Snow quote where she said that, and some women were called deaconesses and there was a teacher's quorum, et cetera, things like that. In other words, the Relief Society was really kind of a parallel structure to be a holy order for women, just as priesthood was a holy order for men. And in both cases, these orders pointed to and shepherded women and men to the temple. Now, after the Relief Society was re established in the 1860s under the direction of Eliza R. Snow and Brigham Young, this led to the creation of other women's organizations that came under the umbrella of Relief Society as well. And these specifically were groups like the Ladies Cooperative Retreat Retrenchment association, the Young Ladies Department of the Ladies Cooperative Retrenchment association, which was later renamed the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association. That is a word salad right there.
- [03:12]
Casey
Not to be confused with other organizations, but this is the Young Ladies Department of the Ladies Cooperative Retrenchment association of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Just so we're clear.
- [03:22]
Lisa
There you go.
- [03:23]
Scott
Which we shortened to when I was growing up. It was mutual and now it's Young Women's. So we are, I guess, streamlining as we go, which is part of the overall theme for today. And let's not forget another organization, the Primary association, one of the most important and vital organizations in the church, the Primary and one of my personal faves, by the way. Relief Society also was engaged in other initiatives like grain storage and silk production and medical education and care. The Deseret Hospital was affiliated with Relief Society. And these were not equal institutions adjacent to one another. They were all under the Relief Society, thus all under the jurisdiction of the Relief Society president, who was referred to as the president of all Women's Work. So much broader back in the 19th century than it is right now.
- [04:19]
Casey
So fascinating. Now, one of the questions of this whole series is the relationship between women and priesthood. And so what does this all have to do with women and priesthood? Good question. We've talked about how the definitions of priesthood have shifted over time. And with those definitional shifts, along with a couple other factors, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly, affected the status of women's organizations and their relationship to the larger church, actually. So today we're going to look at three different time periods to get a sense of how things evolved over the 20th century. So like the turn of the century, 1900s, we're talking priesthood reform movement. That's kind of time period one. Then the 1920s, we'll be talking about a decade of unprecedented development. We'll mention more details in a minute. And then the 1960s to the 70s, we're talking about what we often refer to as the correlation era, and with its major implications of realignment with how men and women work together in the church, with maybe some positive upsides and some negative downsides. And we'll have to kind of think through both at the same time. And so, Lisa, maybe would it be okay if we started by considering what, what the church and its organizations look like at the turn of the 20th century? Do you want to kind of pick it up from there?
- [05:45]
Lisa
Sure. In a Lot of what we talk about today, we're going to be talking on a structural level about how the church is structured and the organizations and how they're related to each other and so forth. And one analogy that I have found kind of helpful, I made this up and I'm perfectly willing to be challenged on it. If, you know, I'm sure it's not a perfect analogy, but the way I think about it is that by the turn of the 20th century, the church is structured according to what we could call a federal system or a federal structure, which means that there are internally independent, autonomous entities who affiliate around a shared principle, commitments and so forth. So there's a central authority, you know, there's always a first presidency, there's always that priesthood hierarchy in the church. But the organizations themselves are affiliated in kind of a federal way. Like we think of states, right? States have their own government, their own systems, but we're all affiliated as the United States on the basis of the Constitution. And then what happens over the course of the 20th century is that we shift to more of a corporate structure. And a corporate structure could be defined as like a company or a group that are authorized and are recognized legally as a single entity. And so it's a more centralized authority structure and the entities become subordinate to that central structure. And since the church's corporate structure is based on priesthood, which is male identified, then this shift to this more corporate structure has implications for women's status and authority within the larger whole. So I don't know if that's helpful. That's been helpful to me to think about it that way. At the turn of the 20th century, we're primarily in the Intermountain West. Your ward is your neighborhood or maybe your whole town. If it's a small town, maybe there's two or three wards in your neighborhood in your, in your town. But the point being that like community and congregation are co extensive. It's small, it's, you know, we all know each other. Now thinking about the way that meetings went and like, what are the touch points here? So contrary to how we think about it today, sacrament meeting is probably the least attended meeting in the church. But around the turn of the century, so it's the auxiliaries, Relief Society, Sunday School, mia, primary, there was something called religion classes at the time that was considered an auxiliary and that was weekday instruction for children. These are the most vibrant entities within the church and for most people, their touch point, their connection with the church is through the auxiliaries. So for example, on Sundays here's what it looks like. Priesthood meeting, 8 o' clock in the morning. The men go to that. The men and the boys, especially as the century goes on, the boys are more involved in that. 10 o', clock, Sunday school. Everybody goes to Sunday school. It's the whole family. There's junior, senior adult, Sunday school and so forth. And importantly, the sacrament is administered in Sunday school. And so you did not have to go to sacrament meeting to partake of the sacrament, and a lot of people didn't.
- [09:28]
Casey
Why, why would you go to a sacrament meeting if you already took the sacrament in Sunday school? Right, I can see that logical.
- [09:36]
Lisa
And I'm gonna. I'm not gonna let myself go on off on a big tangent here, but there are really interesting reasons why sacrament meeting was what it was, you know, at the turn of the century. But then by the 1920s and really into the 1950s, there's a big push by the church, by church leaders, to make sacrament meeting more of the central meeting. And there's an emphasis on bring your kids. It's something for the whole family. Let's get better speakers. I mean, there's a lot that goes on to make that happen. But Even in the 1950s, when we did our research on the young women book, we found that attendance at sacrament meeting, at least for young women, was still lower than Sunday school or young women. So there's a process going on there of what it looks like to participate in the church and what is considered active during the week. You'd have Relief Society Tuesday afternoon, you'd have Mutual Tuesday night, you'd have Primary Wednesday afternoon, for example. I mean, there are generations that grew up where you went to church almost every day because of these auxiliary activities and meetings and so forth. So, as I say, this is what it looks like at the turn of the century, and we're going to talk about then how we got to where we're at now.
- [11:08]
Scott
It seems like some of the changes start when Joseph F. Smith starts initiating the priesthood reform movement in the first decade of the 20th century, correct?
- [11:19]
Lisa
Yeah, that's right.
- [11:20]
Scott
Okay. And I can relate to that. He seems to have felt things were a bit out of balance and he wanted to see priesthood quorums reinvigorated and placed at the center of the governing structure of the church. For instance, this is a quote from Joseph F. Smith in 1903. He said, the priesthood, after the order of the Son of God, is the ruling presiding authority in the church. In other words, there is no government in the Church of Jesus Christ separate And apart, above or outside the holy priesthood or its authority. We have our relief societies, mutual improvement associations, primary associations and Sunday schools. But these organizations are not quorums or councils of the priesthood, but they are auxiliary to and under it, organized by virtue of the holy priesthood. They are not outside of, nor above it, nor beyond its reach. They acknowledge the principle of the priesthood. I get him saying this because it's in the Scriptures. Right. It seems like he's a scriptorian and he's trying to systematize the theology of the Church. But that does lead to his insistence that the Relief Society is an auxiliary. He said it had a special place because it's the first one. But he insisted that it was subordinate to the priesthood. And I mean, basically, Eliza R. Snow had always said the same thing. Remember last week we had that quote where Eliza R. Snow said that Relief Society could not exist without the priesthood. But in her framework, Relief Society was of a parallel organization to priesthood quorums. And within that way of thinking about it, women exercised a lot of autonomy and initiative. Whereas now the subordination was being emphasized and put into practice through policy and procedure. So we're shifting from that federal structure to that corporate structure right here. And it's not explicitly framed in those terms, but this model of order and harmony among the organization of the church still fits well within the male headship paradigm that we spoke of in earlier episodes.
- [13:22]
Casey
Yeah, let's kind of sketch out maybe a high level snapshot of what this would look like in this era. We'll focus on Relief Society and the Young Ladies Organization, but the picture is essentially true across the board. So we talked last time about how general presidencies for the women's organizations were established in 1880. And this sets them on a trajectory to become independent entities as opposed to dependent subdivisions of the women's sphere presided over by the Relief Society. Right. So young women's, for instance. Let's talk about them. In the 1890s, the young ladies Mutual Improvement Association Board expanded in kind of a synergistic relationship with developments such as, like standardizing lessons, grading of classes, conjoint, the conjoint movement, and the establishment of conferences and conventions to train local leaders. This is a decade. From the 1890s to 1900 is a decade of great activity. When, as Susan Young Gates put it, when a vital force and uplift was felt in every part of the work, she said, the organization becomes this centralized, standardized organization. The same trend takes hold in all the organizations of the church, along with what Tom Alexander has called administrative modernization. These developments reflect generational change. Like, think about this. The pioneer generation, you know, the ones who joined the church and crossed the plains. That generation is fading very quickly. Their children, who we might call the frontier generation, are now about midlife. They're now leading the community. And then the younger generation. What, Lisa, don't you call them the railroad generation. They're now coming of age, and they've grown up in very different conditions than their parents. They're a huge generation. And in the 1890s, we begin adding more members by birth into the church than by baptism. And they have had more education. They're more exposed to the outside world. They're less interested in building walls around Zion. They're more interested in building bridges out to the larger society. So it's a really interesting dynamic that has developed here. And we talked last time about this conjoint movement that brought the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement association into a sibling relationship, if you will, with the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association. They're becoming the church's youth organizations. Right in the context of developing ideas about adolescence, changing life patterns. They're talking about extended school work, missionary service for young men and young women. By the first decade of the 20th century, these two organizations are now starting to work really closely together, and they're starting just to be known as the mia. The Mutual Improvement Association.
- [16:15]
Lisa
Yeah. And it's going to be known as the MIA. Until the 1970s, there's always a separate organization of young ladies, young women and young men, but for all intents and purposes, they work together. And everyone in the church refers to it as the mia, and we'll actually talk a little bit more about that as we go along here. But what happens is when this conjoint movement takes hold in the 1890s and the young Men's board and the Young ladies board start meeting together, this starts to raise questions. It's one thing when they're separate and doing their own thing, but when they meet together the very first meeting, Joseph F. Smith is there, and he feels it necessary to clarify this relationship. And he says, quote, there can't be two heads. And he'll repeat that many times. So you have two heads here. You have a young lady's president and a young men's president. But he's saying there can't be two equal heads at the same time. He says there must be one to begin and end, meaning to conduct a meeting. But where the priesthood is, they have the authority to preside. Now, we can see how this is of A piece with all this thinking that he's doing about priesthood and structures in the church and so forth. And in the 1890s, he gives this really interesting talk about what he calls the principle of presidency and how the priesthood has the principle of presidency. He says, but then as he makes this statement about not having two heads, then he continues and says, but the priesthood presides, but they also have the right to call upon others to preside. And so each of the heads of these organizations is honored in their position as long as we're clear that the priesthood always presides. Now, in practice, what does this mean? It means that apparently the male leader has the prerogative to call on the female leader to preside or to conduct a meeting. Right.
- [18:24]
Casey
And so, yeah, I was a little confused. Is he using the word preside to mean conduct the meeting?
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Lisa
Yeah, I think he means more than that. I think by preside he means that in the fact that they are the priesthood, that that has the right of leadership and authority. And everybody needs to recognize that once that's recognized, we can take turns conducting meetings. And he says that many times. We have some quotes in the young women book about this. We talk about it at some length. But how he would say the young women should be given at least equal chances to conduct the meetings. And in practice, it seems to have been pretty equitable. It's like, okay. Everybody's like, yep, okay, priesthood presides. And then we don't really have to talk about it anymore because the MIA is not a priesthood organization either. That not the young women for sure, but the young men is not a priesthood organization. They're not priesthood quorums. There's no priesthood office required. It's not a priesthood organization. And so that kind of takes priesthood out of the equation a little bit, other than establishing this principle of presiding. Once that's established, then these two organizations, as they're working more closely together, they establish like committees that have equal numbers of men and women to plan the activities, the lessons, the conferences, the conventions, the. And the activities of the organizations are just expanding exponentially in this period as well. And it's men and women working conjointly to make that happen. And so priesthood's mostly not a factor in how the two interact. And this, I think, allows the MIA by the middle of the 20th century to become the most gender equitable, gender balanced organization that the church has had or has ever really had at that point. But it's because the priesthood element is kind of taken out of the equation.
- [20:41]
Scott
Interesting. Because we, I mean, today we'd always associate the Young Men's Organization with priesthood.
- [20:46]
Lisa
Right.
- [20:46]
Scott
But hadn't quite realized that dynamic.
- [20:50]
Lisa
We will talk about that because that's something that comes to pass in the correlation era.
- [20:56]
Scott
Okay, well, let's focus on Relief Society for a second then. Generational dynamics are playing out of the Relief Society. Also, the president of the relief Society in 1900 is Zina D.H. young, who's born in 1821. And she'll be succeeded in 1901 by Bathsheba Smith, who was born in 1822. I mean, she is married to George A. Smith. This is going all the way back to the beginning of the Restoration. And then in 1910, Emmeline, well, who's born in 1828, will take over. And meanwhile, the General Board is becoming younger and being filled with more progressive women like Amy Brown Lyman, who are taking a stronger hand in leadership and pressing for modernizing changes. So one of Bathsheba's counselors was Ida Smoot Dusenberry, who was 28 years old and very progressive minded, with a special interest and training in the Kindergarten movement, which, kindergarten being a movement, is a whole other thing I wish we could explore. Like you said, there's so many things here to talk about. Bathsheba has been. She's a little bit older and she's been less involved in Relief Society activism in recent decades. In fact, she spent most of her time at the temple where she presided over the female workers. So to be honest, she's not attuned to the times and might have had a little bit more difficulty leading the board in changing times. And some of this is reflected in contemporary sources like Emmeline Wells. In her diary, August 28, 1904, she writes how awful the change has been for the Society since the death of Zina. Never peace and union, scarcely at all. Vexation and annoyances all the time. And she also writes several other diary entries reflecting a bit of her frustration and irritation at the younger women's lack of deference to the older women. So we're getting again this transitional period between generations. And data we have from the time indicate that attendance and participation in Relief Society are low. Board members who traveled to various stakes reported that the average attendance was about one third of the women enrolled in Relief Society. And this was a time when membership was voluntary. But it seems like the younger women especially were staying away in droves and they kind of thought of the Relief Society as a place for old fashioned ladies. So this generational dynamic is playing a Big role in that, too.
- [23:35]
Casey
And so the Relief Society leadership realizes we got to do something to attract more involvement and to help Relief Society, frankly, be more attractive. And so they develop a couple initiatives. One was nursing classes, actually. In fact, this was a high point for Relief Society sponsored nursing classes in the Salt Lake area. So women would come to Salt Lake City, receive training as nurses, and then they would go back to their communities and provide care and training to others. Interesting. Another initiative was MOTHER education classes. Emmaline B. Wells and others had resisted creating any sort of standardized lesson plans. But around the turn of the century, the board finally implements these MOTHER education classes, again largely in hope of attracting younger women to Relief Society. From there, various Stakes began developing their own slate of lessons on a wide variety of modern topics. And in 1914, the Relief Society Bulletin began publication with curriculum for every weekly meeting. At least one stake created a library from which teachers could borrow materials to create lessons on things like Great Women in History and things like that. All of this serves to establish education, both secular and spiritual, as a fundamental purpose of Relief Society. And that's different, right? That goes beyond the traditional sewing and charitable work and testimony bearing that typically filled Relief Society meetings in the 19th century. So we're taking on much more of an educational bent here. And then Moving into the 1910s, the Relief Society began its involvement in broader community efforts, such as something called milk depots in Salt Lake City, where poor children could receive clean, safe milk. During the Great War OR World War I, Relief Society Women worked closely with the Red Cross in war relief activities. And behind a lot of this is Amy Brown Lyman and Clarissa Smith Williams. They become leaders in these efforts. Amy is particularly drawn into the developing field of social work, which is where they would apply modern scientific principles and charitable care together. And this becomes a driving passion for Amy Lyman. Just before his death, Joseph F. Smith actually asks Amy Lyman to establish a Relief Society social service department. Heber J. Grant approves of that. And in 1919, this is actually created. So some innovative things happening in Relief Society to become more energetic, involved, and attractive group to become a part of, right?
- [26:23]
Scott
Yeah. And it's not surprising that during this time, one of the results of this priesthood reform movement was an early attempt at correlating church curriculum between all the auxiliaries. So correlation is an inside baseball term in the church, but this is sort of the first stirrings, right, of them saying, let's all get on the same page, let's be unified, moving from that federal to that corporate structure. So in 1908, the Priesthood Committee on Outlines was established with David O. McKay as the chair. And its purpose was to create curriculum for the priesthood quorums like it was already happening in the auxiliaries. Then in 1912, the Correlation Committee was organized where the head or representative of each auxiliary board participated on the committee. And they began looking at church organizations, activities and curriculum in relation to each other and seeking to define their purpose and agenda. And then in 1970, the Social Advisory Committee was established in response to the initial panic over changing standards of dress, dancing and decorum. This particular time, from World War I to the 1920s, was a time of huge social change, social revolution on the same order as what we think of in the 1960s. So, I mean, we went back and forth on whether or not we should use this. But Downton Abbey, if you've watched Downton Abbey, or I'm going to throw one out that I know my, my, my, my family will know that thoroughly Modern Millie, where they're, they're shifting dress standards to kind of like these sleeveless, short and more sheer dresses. Then new technology where all of a sudden there's this new technology called an automobile. So young people can go joyriding and they can, you know, do what young people sometimes do in automobiles. There's record players, there's movies, there's cheap magazines making popular entertainment more accessible and starting to create a youth culture that's really different from previous generations. And oh my gosh, going through this, I'm sitting here and thinking, history is a cycle, isn't it? Because I feel like you could take out automobiles and record players and we'd be talking about the 2000s right now, not the 1920s. But as, as is understandable. And as we're kind of seeing right now, there is a kind of panicked freakout from the adults who are worried about the morality of the rising generation. So Joseph F. Smith calls the heads of the three women led organizations to create and promote the standards of dress, dancing and behavior. And this becomes what's known as the Social Advisory Committee. And the Social Advisory Committee includes representatives from all the auxiliary boards. So this is another way they're coming together. Stephen L. Richards is the chair and they engage in this ambitious sociological study of the church. And this is interesting, but some of the members of the committee are professors at the U with training in sociology and related fields. We should know this is kind of the peak time of affiliation between the church and the University of Utah. They do some studies showing that an alarming number of young Latter Day Saints are not marrying in the temple, for instance. That's one of the things that they find out. So by the late 1910s, the work of the Social Advisory Committee is overlapping quite a bit with the Correlation Committee, and the two are combined into an amalgamated committee. Their state of purpose is to consider and report on the relationship of the quorums to each other and the auxiliaries to each other, to define their functions and fields of endeavor and outline a program or survey of their work. So we see this happening in large degree in the church today, where we're moving the chess pieces around the board trying to adjust to changing conditions, and that causes a ripple effect on the other organizations within the church.
- [30:22]
Lisa
Yeah, we'll come back and pick up that thread here in a minute. But let's continue with kind of our snapshot of how things are looking at this point, because then we'll be able to make sense out of the changes a little bit more. So what happens is that in the first decade of the 20th century, we talked about the YL and the YM, the conjoint movement, them coming together and increasingly cooperatively working together. And in the first decade of the 20th century, they embrace what's called progressive recreation. And Casey, just like we're not going to go down the rabbit hole on the kindergarten movement or the progressive era and social work and all these contextual things that we could talk about, this idea of progressive recreation is very much in the air in the early 20th century. And I mean, we could say a lot about it, but the basic idea is that organized recreation will help people, especially young people, but also like immigrants and poor people and factory workers, but especially young people, to develop health, character, citizenship, morals, and productive skills. Like, if your city has parks and playgrounds, it dates to this era. If you have, you know, like municipal, like, recreation programs and so forth, all the seeds of that are in this progressive recreation movement. And this is when groups like the Boy Scouts and the Campfire Girls are formed and take hold. As we know, the YMIA affiliates with the Boy Scouts in 1913. Meanwhile, the YLMIA is really interested in doing something similar for girls. And so they start studying these different groups. They look at the Girl Scouts and then they really like the Campfire Girls. And again, not going to go down the rabbit hole, but Google it because it's really interesting. But they decided that it would be better to have their own program. They did not want. They said they didn't want to be beholden to an outside organization and they did not want their members to have to pay Dues and raise money for an outside organization. And I'm just going to put that out there. And we, some of us will have a memory of how that played out with Boy Scouts and some of the heartburn people had over that. So instead they form what's called the Beehive Girls program, which is initially the summer work for all young women. And then by the 1920s it becomes the class for the youngest girls, which at this time is 14 to 16 years old. Also around this time in 1912, the first girls camp is held, Liberty Glen Camp. And it's held in the wilds of Murray. So you could take the streetcar from Salt Lake City down to where the line ended, which was in Murray. And then it was about a 20 minute walk to this wilderness area at the time where they had their first girls camp. And by the 1920s, the stakes are building what they call summer homes. So there's the Brighton camp some people may be familiar with. I grew up going to Mutual Dell in American Fork Canyon. There are still some of those homes around. They were camps, summer homes, whatever you called them, for the camp program. And then jointly the MIA begins holding contests at June conference. Athletics, music, dance, speech, storytelling. And the weekly work of the MIA is increasingly organized around these activities and the contests that they lead up to. So then this becomes by the 1920s where these iconic elements of MIA are implemented. So things like golden green balls, road shows, and we eventually get dance festivals, music festivals and so forth at June conference. You guys are probably young enough that you didn't encounter any of that, but we still had road shows and golden green balls when I was growing up.
- [34:41]
Scott
So I was in a couple road shows. I remember that.
- [34:44]
Lisa
Yeah, that was fun.
- [34:46]
Scott
It was great.
- [34:46]
Casey
Yeah. I mean there's a lot of, a lot of stake sitters still today that still have that stage that nobody knows what to do with. Right. So I guess nervously hold classes up on the stage. I guess, I guess that's what they're for.
- [34:57]
Lisa
Well, it's where we send them in since we can't figure out how to build a priesthood room like we have for Relief Society. I mean, I'm just saying, I'm just saying. Anyway, so what, what it is with all of this stuff, like it's super interesting in its own right, but what it does is it shows that the Latter Day Saints feel like they have the resources within their community to address these generational concerns, this changing culture, this revolution that they're living through. There's that initial moment of freak out, but then they Kind of mobilize and go, no, wait, we have the resources. We can do something about this. And they really do take this on with a spirit of optimism and energy. And they feel really good about the kids and they're going to help the kids come along. So anyway, by 1922, then this social Advisory Correlation Committee, they issue a statement that defines the scope and the mission of each auxiliary organization. And at this time, then on the basis of that, the first Presidency assigns the MIA to be the recreation agency of the church. It's really important to understand that because from the 1920s to the 1970s, the youth programs are going to be organized around what they called spiritualized recreation. They had a whole theory, I would call it a theology of teaching the gospel through activities. The idea is you go to Sunday school and you get the lecture and you learn the principles and then you come to MIA and you put them into practice. It's the laboratory of the church. And so teaching the gospel through activities, spiritualized recreation, that becomes the animating mission purpose, understanding for the MIA of what they're doing.
- [36:51]
Casey
Meanwhile, the Relief Society is also doing some exciting things during this time in the 1920s, under the leadership again of Amy Brown Lyman and Clarissa Smith Williams, they're intensifying their progressive engagement with social work and community improvement, as I mentioned, but let me add a couple other things they're doing. So they start focusing in the 1920s on maternal and child health. They'll create these things called maternity chests or maternity bundles with supplies that are needed for childbirth that can be loaned out as needed. When the Shepherd Towner act passes in the early 1920s, which was actually sponsored by Amy Brown Lyman in the Utah legislature, the Relief Society starts sponsoring clinics where mothers can bring their children for medical evaluation and education in nutrition and medical care. Super cool. Utah then goes from having one of the highest to one of the lowest maternal mortality rates in the country. Wow. Amy Lyman also teaches social service institutes at BYU during the summer. And the stakes start sending women to be trained. And then they return to their stakes to serve as social service aides. Over a thousand women receive this training. And at headquarters, the Relief Society social services department begins hiring young women with training in social work. And they take a leading role in assessing need and referring families for help in the Salt Lake City area, working closely with public and government agencies. So a lot of now connections and bridge building with government agencies. The Relief Society connecting on the level of maternal and child health to get everyone the resources that they need during this time. Very cool. Not everyone was on board with this. There was some pushback from older board members like Susan Gates, but church leaders and Relief Society members themselves overwhelmingly supported these progressive efforts. Traditional Relief Society charity efforts do continue. Visiting teachers will be out soliciting donations on their monthly visits, and then those donations are then distributed locally as needed. So some of that traditional stuff is still happening, but now adding more layers of this medical outreach.
- [39:10]
Lisa
And we actually. If you look at volume three of Saints, we actually have an extended character who is one of those social workers in Salt Lake City during the Great Depression. So it really shows how this played out on the ground.
- [39:23]
Scott
Now, what was her name? Just so we can.
- [39:25]
Lisa
Yeah, her name is Evelyn Hodges.
- [39:26]
Scott
Okay. So let's try and fit this into our theme of women in priesthood. So, as we mentioned previously, the priesthood reform movement seeks to more firmly define the lines of authority within the church. And that leads to the. This might be seen as an ugly word, but subordination of women's organizations. Emmeline B. Wells, for instance, was worried about the loss of autonomy and prerogatives within the Relief society by the 1920s. The auxiliary organizations have advisors from the quorum of the 12, a move that was actually initiated by the primary. And they're coming under greater control. So we go from having all these sprawling organizations that are off kind of doing their own thing to a more tight, more central control. One incident that illustrates kind of these changing dynamics is the story of the women's building a church headquarters. So around 1900, the leaders of the women's organizations had begun planning to build their own building to house their offices and operations, because at the time, they were meeting in rented rooms or private homes. So Lorenzo Snow, who's the president of the church at the time, told them that if they raised $20,000, the first presidency would give them the deed to a lot just across from the temple. And within three years, they'd raised over $14,000, and they were picking up steam in the movement. But then they heard through the grapevine, they weren't consulted on this move, that the first Presidency had decided instead to build a presiding bishop's building on that lot. And the women's organizations would just be given space within the building. And according to the Relief Society board minutes, some members felt very much grieved over the way matters stood. In fact, it was said that Bathsheba Smith was overcome with grief and possibly fainted at this news. But there wasn't a lot they could do. And so they accepted the new plan as graciously as possible and they moved into the Bishop's Building at the end of 1909, and it remained the headquarters for the Relief Society and the young ladies, Mia and the Primary, among others until the 1950s. The current relief Society building that's on Temple Square, was dedicated in 1956, but all three organizations didn't have offices there until the. Until the 1980s. So that just kind of illustrates how we're streamlining, we're coming together. But that means that this autonomy that these organizations have had previously is starting to lessen as well. They can't have their own building. Let's utilize the space. Let's put everybody together in one building, which I could see both sides of that argument, to be honest with you. It's just a shame that they didn't sit them down and counsel with them. That might have been the mistake there.
- [42:19]
Lisa
Exactly, exactly. And the women were like, we've raised all this money and promised our sisters that this money they're donating is going to go towards this building. How can we go back and tell them, oh, never mind on that? So it was a touchy situation for him. And along those same lines, some people may be familiar with the story of how the Presiding Bishopric sold the wheat that the Relief Society had been storing for all these many years near the end of World War I. And the government had been asking anybody that had stores of grain to turn them over to the government. And then that request became a demand. And so the Presiding Bishopric just went ahead, made the sale in the name of the Relief Society without consulting them. And you can imagine, again, I mean, like, common courtesy, people that just didn't go over very well. But to his credit, Presiding Bishop Charles Nibley went to one of the board meetings, kind of with his hat in hand, apologizing, acknowledging that they hadn't handled it right. He said, I wish you would give me thunder, meaning I'll take whatever chastisement you have to give me, because we know that we did this wrong. But it just goes to show, you know, the men in their priesthood structures the lines of authority and whatever, they're just used to acting, to doing what they think is best. And now things are in flux, and they're still not necessarily recognizing how what they're doing is affecting. You know, they're not thinking to involve women in these. In these decisions. So in 1914, our friend Susa Young Gates publishes an editorial. It's at the time, it's the Relief Society Bulletin that becomes the Relief Society magazine. And she publishes this editorial that lays out this new Order. And remember last week, we, I think it was last week that we quoted her saying that, you know, women in this church do not hold the priesthood. They must face this fact calmly. It's this same article where she, where she says that. And here's what I mean, this is what she lays out. Relief Society leaders consult with bishops, stake presidents. They take the men's guidance as law. And this is a shift because back in the 19th century, Eliza R. Snow is saying the Relief Society is a self governing organization and it has its own lines of authority. And if the ward president has a question, she should ask the Stake Relief Society president, and then the Stake Relief Society president can consult with the General Relief Society presidency. But now, as Susan's laying it out, no, it's that all along the women need to be governed by what the men, the priesthood leaders are saying. And so it's a time of real adjustment. There's stepping on toes, there's uncertainty about how to navigate this. It does mean some loss of autonomy, there's some missteps. But it does begin to create this model, this idea of a cooperative partnership between priesthood and Relief Society. And this story about the woman's building and the bishop's building is emblematic of how this plays out. We could say spatially or geographically within the church, because under that earlier separate spheres model that they operated ON in the 19th century, this is what Emmaline and the leaders are thinking of when they say, let's have a, a woman's building. Let's have a physical space that is the woman's sphere within the church. But instead the bishop's building is built, and that serves to kind of integrate the, the male and the female spheres spatially within the church. And in the 1920s, this same thing is taking place in the wards, because this is an era of boom building of church buildings in the 1920s. There's a lot of church buildings being built during this era. And this is when we start building Relief Society rooms inside the ward building. As opposed to.
- [46:39]
Casey
What was it before that?
- [46:40]
Lisa
Yeah, as opposed to in the past, the Relief Society would have a hall. They would build, a lot of times build their own building, a Relief Society hall that would be sometimes adjacent to the ward building, but not necessarily. There's still a lot of these old Relief Society buildings around in Utah, if you know what to look for. So we go from this idea of a separate space, a separate sphere, to literally physically integrating the organizations of the church into one physical space. So like you said, Scott, there's the stage there are classrooms. So there's a provision for the mia, for the Sunday School, for the Relief Society, the priesthood, all within our buildings. And it's a step. It's kind of an integrative step that's part of this larger movement that's taking place at the time.
- [47:34]
Casey
Yeah. And there's another thing maybe we should talk about, too, that seems like it could be perceived as a slight toward the Relief Society, and that is the development of the Welfare plan. Now, I don't know that we think necessarily that it was a slight, but I just want you to walk through this with me, because prior to the 1930s, when the welfare plan is implemented. Right. In fact, to be specific, in 1936, the First Presidency announces what they called the Church Security Plan, which then later becomes known as the Welfare plan or welfare program. But prior to that time, care for the poor, the sick, the needy. Remember, this was the stated purpose of the Relief Society. I remember when Joseph Smith established it. Right. He pulled out. I can't remember if it was a dollar or how much he pulled out, but he said, if I'm going to donate to the poor, I'm going to do it through the Relief Society. And then he kind of exemplifies that in that moment. But that's all starting to shift with the implementation of the Welfare plan, which, by the way, the Relief Society leaders were not consulted in the planning and the establishment of the welfare program. But it was assumed that they would play a role, but they weren't consulted in its formation. And so, again, stepping on toes. Lisa, I liked how you said that is happening here again. So, for instance, the First Presidency charges bishops with making sure that every member of their ward has enough food, clothing, and bedding to make it through the winter by October 1, 1936. They charge the bishops with that, but of course, then the bishops are going to charge the Relief Society presidents with that. So most of the work to make that happen actually falls on the Relief Society. Welfare integrates many of the women's traditional charitable activities and pulling them into the larger program. I think this. This is the good thing, right? Let's synergize, let's cooperate. Let's bring all of our gifts together. I think the vision's good. By the mid-1940s, it's decided that Relief Society visiting teachers are no longer going to go collect donations. They don't collect anymore. This is an example of how traditional Relief Society work starts being superseded by the Church welfare program centralization. Right. Bringing it all together. Corporate welfare serves to further Intensify the emphasis on partnership between Relief Society and priesthood, rather than separate entities doing mutually good work. And now we're a partnership. We're coming together. But again, the idea is good. But the lack of consultation with Relief Society leaders in implementation or in the creation of it maybe is one point that if they could go back and do it again, they might want to do that. When serving as stake president in a Utah stake, the Pioneer stake. Harold B. Lee, who's going to come into church leadership even more prominently after this. But he said this. He said the most important object that is to be achieved by the church welfare program is the promoting of a spirit of cooperation and unity throughout the entire church. To the extent that Relief Society organizations and wards are operating in cooperation with priesthood quorums and bishoprics, just to that extent, is there a welfare program in that ward? So that's the ideal. Right. Bringing those together.
- [51:02]
Lisa
You know, we should remember that, yes, charity care and those kinds of things were the charge for the Relief Society. But if we go back to the 1830s, caring for the poor and needy is also the charge of the bishops. And so what we're doing is we're bringing those functions together instead of the bishops having, you know, like, it's not entirely clear to me, like, how it always worked on the ground, but what we're doing is we're establishing this scripturally mandated care for the poor and needy to be something that's done in partnership between men and women, as opposed to how it had maybe been before, where the bishops are kind of doing something, the Relief Society is doing something, but they're not necessarily doing it in partnership.
- [51:54]
Casey
That's interesting, because in the 1830s, there was no Relief Society. Right. So that work would fall upon the shoulders of the bishop.
- [52:01]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [52:02]
Casey
I wonder about that ambiguity. Right. When the Relief Society is established.
- [52:06]
Lisa
Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is when Relief Society is established. I've never really seen any discussion about the implications of that for bishops. And that's true in the 1860s and 70s when it's reestablished in Utah as well. I. You know, maybe somebody needs to do a real study on that to see, like, how are we talking to bishops about caring for the poor after the organization of the Relief Society. That would be interesting to see.
- [52:32]
Casey
Yeah. Because Joseph Smith is explicit. Right. He said, when it comes to donating to the poor, I'm going to donate through the Relief Society from now on. So what does that mean?
- [52:42]
Scott
And there is that Brigham Young quote from the 1860s where he says with these immigrants coming in, establish female relief societies and they'll be able to find places for the poor faster than even the bishop can. But again, that doesn't explain the relationship. It just makes it sound like, oh, yeah, they can get the job done, but doesn't say who's serving under whose direction or how they're supposed to coordinate together. That could be a really interesting study. So any graduate students out there listening? This is a good thesis topic for you.
- [53:14]
Casey
Just, there you go.
- [53:15]
Scott
Go get them. And then, then send us your thesis so we can pretend like we did the research.
- [53:21]
Casey
Let me ask you a question, Lisa. So it seems like from from this time forward, especially in the post war era, the focus shifts in the relief society from like being this outward looking bridge to the community. It seems like it's now starting to pull back into becoming more of a, like a privatized, domesticated unit. Do you want to comment on that? Like, is that fair? Do you want to expand, push back? What would you say about that?
- [53:51]
Lisa
Yeah, totally. And again, without going down rabbit holes, this is kind of a shift that happens in the larger community as well, the larger society as well, where in the early 20th century, in the progressive era, there's so much emphasis on community and collective solutions to problems. And how can we structure society, how can we create institutions, how can we create the channels for helping people and for improving society and so forth. And we talked about how that played out in the relief society with the emphasis on social work and maternal and child health and all of those kinds of things. And then after the war, it kind of starts happening. Before the war, I think the welfare program is part of what initiates the change. But after the war, and I think this is largely a product of the boom conditions after the war, where everyone's just focused on the nuclear family and the house in the suburbs and all the new appliances and the consumer goods and all of that kind of stuff. That becomes what domesticity is, that becomes what women's role in the home is. And so it's all kind of privatized. It's like everything falls on the individual woman in her. Her home. Instead of women looking collectively together to see, like, what can we do for the community, how can we help to improve things Generally now it's all just put on individual women in individual homes. And that's where we get this neo, it's been called, like neo Victorian domesticity of the post war era kind of a thing. And you can totally see that playing out in the church if you just Go read the Relief Society magazine from the 1940s, 50s, 60s. So there's definitely a shift there in how we think about who is responsible and where does the stewardship lie for solving problems and helping people. And it's one step in what's become a highly individualized society where we don't necessarily think collectively anymore. And the Relief Society's really affected by that shift.
- [56:13]
Scott
And you're just making me think of, like, popular media from that time, you know, Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and all those shows where, you know, the focus is the family and the dad's in charge and he. He's directing things that, you know, it's not necessarily bad. It's what we still kind of think of as wholesome when we think about families, but we don't realize, oh, what are the other sides of this? Kind of.
- [56:37]
Lisa
Well, and even then, Casey, it was a fantasy. Like, that was not really what the overwhelming majority of people experienced. I mean, it became more common as economic conditions improved. There was this blip on the radar screen of history where there was this generation where a man could have a job that would support a family and it was enough to buy a house and all of these things. That was not historically true. It hasn't been historically true since then, and it wasn't true for a large proportion of the. Of the population. Even when it's being glorified in the media in the 1950s, it's kind of
- [57:16]
Scott
presented as the ideal to strive for.
- [57:19]
Lisa
And we have to. We need to. We need to get that really clear in our head. And I won't go off on my soapbox about that, but what we think was the 1950s was a construct, not a reality.
- [57:34]
Casey
I feel like you have a lot of soapboxes that you could go off on.
- [57:38]
Lisa
Lisa, have you picked up on that? Scott?
- [57:41]
Scott
We should start a podcast called Lisa's Soapbox, where she hates.
- [57:45]
Casey
I was just gonna say, Lisa, maybe you should start a podcast. I'm just throwing it out there, me
- [57:50]
Lisa
and the two other people that would be interested in hearing that. Yeah,
- [57:56]
Casey
soapbox.
- [57:57]
Scott
Let me take this back to church history, because this is where we're starting to get into my area of research, which is, you know, late 20th century internationalization, which dozens of people are interested in. But part of this is the correlation movement. So this post war prosperity that we've been talking about, this kind of boom time is a boom time for the church, too. The church starts to grow really fast in the post war era and in new and interesting places. The church starts to truly become international and expand out of the intermountain West. And that causes some responses. For instance, in October 1961, Harold B. Lee announces the correlation movement at General Conference in a priesthood session. And here's some of the motivation behind that. So each year, enough people were being added to the church through conversion and birth to create 17 to 20 new stakes. And dealing with this explosive growth was overtaking a lot of other considerations in the church. So these new missions and congregations didn't have the traditions or the institutional memory that were a big part of how church programs ran, nor did they have the numbers or members required to run them. So you got to simplify somehow. And the organizations themselves had grown into massive operations with independent budgets and curriculum and publications and their own lines of authority. There was a lot of overlap, and there was a lot of redundancy, as well as a few gaps. And some auxiliary leaders seem to be more interested in building their own little kingdom than contributing to the kingdom as a whole. Or at least this was part of the perception that led to correlation. So if you were a young women's President in the 1950s, for example, you were responsible for over 1,000 pages of manuals, handbooks, other materials, all of which were updated and published every single year. And that is a lot of resources, and that's a lot of demand on people's times. And by the way, I'm reading all this, and I'm thinking, man, I remember hearing the exact same speech when I was a curriculum writer in seminary that the curriculum writers were brought in, and there were like six tables full of manuals. And the correlation people were basically saying, how do we get this simplified? How do we get this down? So it's something that we can translate and share in different languages easily. We've just got so much stuff. And that was just from the seminary and institute side of things. So at first, the mind frame seems to have been simply that the programs were too big and they couldn't be duplicated in areas where there were fewer members. But over time, there was a recognition that it wasn't just a matter of size. The programs were also saturated in American culture, and they didn't translate well to other settings. So Harold B. Lee kind of frames correlation as a program of defense. This is another angle. Program of defense. As the world became increasingly wicked and disordered, so unity among church organizations would be essential. For instance, President Lee says, quote, the forces of our opposition to the forces of evil must be consolidated in order to give them the most effective possible Defense. And we're going to quote from your book, Lisa, carry on, where it talks about correlation and says while it was unmistakably an organizational response to the demands of growth, it was also, as Lee articulated repeatedly, a matter of spiritual and theological imperative intended to fortify church members against the rapidly deteriorating conditions of the last days. Scholars have noted that the correlation movement represented a retrenchment by Latter Day Saints away from the more expansive ecumenical optimism of earlier decades, when they felt more at home in the larger society. It was another iteration of the need to define community boundaries and to manage the levels of tension between the Saints of the world. It also reflected the Saints continued progressive belief in. In the power of institutions to promote the full development of human capacity, including spiritually. So we're streamlining because we're growing and expanding, and that is completely understandable and natural. But again, there's casualties along the way.
- [62:23]
Casey
So the two basic reasons for correlation, if I'm hearing you're at Casey, were number one, to make it more portable throughout the international church. Making the church programs portable, but also as a way to circle the wagons and defend against the encroachment of the world. Something like that, yeah.
- [62:41]
Scott
And there's lesser reasons. Like, again, internationalization of curriculum was a big thing. You know, when you're writing curriculum, are you going to say, tommy went to the football game on Tuesday night, when football means different things in different countries. And in New Zealand, they might not understand what you're talking about. So you see this when you listen to General Conference, when they mention something that's strictly American, they'll be very cautious to say the American Civil War, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because again, they've got to become cognizant of the fact that the church isn't just an American church anymore. It's becoming a global faith.
- [63:18]
Casey
Yeah. Let's quote some more from Lisa's book. Can we just put another plug in for this book? You can get a Deseret book. It's called Carry on the History of the Young Women's Association. But here's another good quote about this era. It says Lee, that is, Harold B. Lee, believed these vigorous entities, that is the auxiliaries of the church, which are vigorous. That's a good thing. They're vigorous. But he said they had pushed the priesthood aside unintentionally, I suppose, here. And he was determined to bring it back, the priesthood back to its rightful place, to get the priesthood fully defined and to work out the scope of its program, he said, and then determine the Relationship of the auxiliaries to this central authority. I'm still quoting from your book. This meant establishing direct priesthood leadership over every aspect of the church's work. That is, every organization and function would have a defined line of accountability through ward, stake and general priesthood lines of authority, bishops, stake, presidents, and general authorities. From an initial mandate to simplify and streamline church curricula, then correlation became an all encompassing movement that addressed all aspects of administration and policy. Close quote. So, Lisa, that's a lot when you talk about your analogy of going from federal kind of equal entities, states inside of a country that have their own autonomy to a more corporate structure of where it seems like this is the moment, isn't it? From here, from the 1960s on, this is where we're going from federal to corporate. Would you say that's a fair way to talk about it?
- [65:09]
Lisa
Yeah. And can I make one other observation really quick that relates to our ongoing discussion about women in priesthood. We've talked about this idea of male headship.
- [65:18]
Casey
Yeah.
- [65:18]
Lisa
In the past. And it's not explicitly framed in these, these terms, although it's close. But what this is doing is reiterating male headship within the church structurally and in the past. Okay, let's see if I can, if I can tease this out. So we talked about how we didn't need to ask the question in the 1830s about women in priesthood because everybody knew that men were the head of women. And so our understanding of priesthood grows out of this male headship paradigm. Now we're saying that it's because of priesthood that we have male headship. So you see what I'm saying. The correlation movement is putting priesthood at the center, which means putting men more firmly in charge. And so there's a little bit of, a little bit of a shift in the horse, in the wagon there maybe over time.
- [66:24]
Casey
That's what you're saying. Back in the, in the 1800s, it was men are the head of women. And since men are the priesthood, then that's why that was in that since
- [66:36]
Lisa
men are the head of women, that's why men have priesthood.
- [66:39]
Casey
That's why men have priesthood. Okay, okay, okay. And now you're saying the 1960s, it's starting to sound like now it's because
- [66:46]
Lisa
men have priesthood, they're the head.
- [66:49]
Casey
Got it.
- [66:50]
Lisa
But either way, we're enshrining this principle of male headship. And I can personally attest, growing up in this era that there was, there were times where male headship was explicitly asserted and taught and it grew out of this correlation movement in this emphasis on priesthood. And Lee talked about placing the Father at this head of the home where he belongs and that kind of thing. So it's just another iteration. But it's kind of interesting to trace again that male headship line and how it plays out here.
- [67:29]
Casey
But that's a bit circular then, isn't it? In the 1800s, it's men have priesthood because males are the heads of women. But now it's.
- [67:39]
Lisa
Now it's men are the head because they have priesthood.
- [67:43]
Casey
Men are the head because they have priesthood. Whereas it used to be men have priesthood because they are head.
- [67:49]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [67:51]
Casey
Okay, interesting.
- [67:52]
Scott
And I'm gonna chime in here for a second. I remember attending a presentation at the Mormon History association where Jana Reese presented. And some of her research was that at the same time this is happening, the church is seeing less involvement from men in the church. And Jana's thesis was that basically part of the shift was we were losing a lot of young men, and we felt like if we gave them greater authority, greater emphasis, we emphasized how important they are, that that might be a way to lure them back in. And what Janice said essentially was that it worked, but it might have worked too well for a minute. And now we need to may rebalance the equilibrium, because what we're seeing, it feels like now, is we're losing more young women, and we've got to look at that. So it's a shifting dynamic, and that might be a factor too.
- [68:48]
Lisa
Well, and as we talked about with the priesthood reform movement, that was also one of the concerns in the early 20th century is concerns over men and masculinity and male participation in the church and so forth. So I'm just going to stop there. But it's a really interesting dynamic that we could talk more about.
- [69:10]
Casey
And I think the narrative about correlation is often sort of framed as a declension narrative. Right. In other words, we're focusing on what was lost, and those losses were real, and they were painful at the time. And before we talk about any sort of the positives that come from this, can we just dwell on the negative for a second? Just to name a couple things, a couple losses that were felt. All auxiliaries, for instance, had to turn over their funds to a central budget and were then allocated funding through a centralized process. This is especially painful for the Relief Society because they had a tradition of over a hundred years of raising, investing, and managing their own money, something women were proud of, since it actually went against some older notions of what women were capable of another thing is that curriculum came to be overseen by a curriculum department rather than being produced by the general boards of each of the auxiliaries. And it's now subject to increased scrutiny and levels of different gatekeepers. And women did not have control or even initiative at times over their own lessons and materials. Church magazines were completely re envisioned. It's another thing here with three magazines appearing in 1971. These are magazines we're probably all familiar with. The Ensign magazine starts at this time, the New Era, and the Children's Friend. Actually, that one wasn't new, but the Children's Friend is part of this triad. So what went away? So the Relief Society magazine goes away. The Relief Society ceased publication after 57 years. There's now at that point no longer a public female space in the church that's solely female. Right. The New era replaces the Improvement era, which maybe doesn't seem like a big shift, but the Improvement Era had been published since 1897, jointly with the young women since 1929. And it's now a correlated youth focused magazine instead of what it used to be, which was more or less the official magazine of the church published by the MIA rather than a correlated group. Right. So it's kind of who is in charge of what goes into it now. Another thing is. I'm just going to keep riffing here. The women's organization becomes, as you mentioned, Lisa, it's now layered more in that male headship hierarchy, right under what some have called bureaucratic and priesthood lines. Maybe that's a more negative way of saying it, but this went through some permutations. But essentially what it meant is that women leaders no longer had direct access to the final decision makers in the priesthood leadership. In many cases, this is especially difficult for the young women's organization. And you spend a lot of time on this in your book Carry On. In chapter seven, we would highlight and recommend people check out chapter seven in the mia. In the Mutual Improvement association, the recreation cultural focus was disregarded in favor of a simplified emphasis on spirituality, on service, on youth leadership. All good things, right? But there's an exchange happening here. June conferences were ended in 1975, again without consulting the young women leaders. It was just ended. Most of the traditional elements of the MIA were explicitly discontinued or faded after this point from lack of support. So by the 1980s, there are several leaders who are looking back and they're expressing regret or worry about what had been lost for the youth. That's the end of my list of negatives here or perceived negatives but was it all negative, Lisa, any other lenses that we can look at it through?
- [73:11]
Lisa
Yeah, yeah, I'll just. I'll just say really quickly. I went into young women in 1979, and so I was in the transitional period between the bulldozer that's taken to the MIA in 1972 and then Ardif Capp, who comes in in 1984 and kind of gets it back on its feet. And of course, I'm a kid. I don't recognize all of. All of the things that are going on. But looking back now, I can see why I had such a kind of spotty experience in young women because it was very much in flux and they didn't really. Hadn't really figured out what it was now that it wasn't the MIA anymore. And so it was interesting to see that even people who had been involved in making some of those decisions were looking back going, oh, gosh, we maybe didn't intend for some of those things to get as lost as they did. A lot of things can be true at the same time, right. And as we talked about with the explosive growth in the church at the time and how that's just overtaking all considerations. And you can see it go back and read General Conference talks from. From this era, right? They're. They're just trying to. They're not really even catching up. They're just. They're just trying to figure out how to. How to work with this. So it's probably a necessary step, even if painful, in making the church translatable to any cultural setting. The problem is that they gave women responsibility but no authority. And so it could have gone.
- [74:44]
Casey
Say more about that. What does that mean, responsibility but no authority?
- [74:48]
Lisa
Well, so we saw this with the young women leaders is where we really examined this. It was true across the board, but as you talked about, they're layered into these layers of bureaucracy and leadership. And so they have responsibility for these big organizations, but they don't have any authority to make final decisions, and they don't have access to the people who do. And then there's a big. There's a lot of flux in church communications. They're not even allowed to reach out to the. The stakes and the local units for a few years. I mean, there's just a really painful transitional period that happens from all of this. But at the end of the process, you had a smaller, more scalable organization, and there's no way you were going to get to that without it being painful, given what we were dismantling the, the Titanic that we were turning around, you know, a hundred years of precedent of mia, for example, Relief Society, like, it's just not going to be an easy transition, no matter the fact that everyone's acting in good faith and with good intentions and trying to do what's right for the church and the kingdom. The big thing is that the big change, the big shift that is a net plus I think, is that it takes these organizations and makes them more flexible for local leadership, local administration to be adapted to local needs. So previously, remember, we talked about those thousand pages of material that a young woman president might be responsible for. The wards and stakes were responsible to carry out these extensive programs exactly as they were outlined. Like there was a calendar that said every week of the year what your lesson was and what you were activities you were going to be doing, so forth and doing the program became kind of an end in itself. Whereas in the correlation era and the women leaders, I can speak especially to the young women leaders, like they were totally on board with this. They could see the need to scale this back and make it more adaptable for local wards and stakes. And that is one thing that came out of it and to the point that we just take that for granted today that there's some structure, but there's a lot of room for flexibility and adaptability as well. Of course, the other thing it does is to establish a clear and integrated authority structure for the church. And so all training and communication is now coming through the priesthood lines. And as I've alluded to, this is a mess for a while, especially in regard to the young women. And partly because, frankly, the men didn't know the women's organizations and programs they didn't have to. That was, you know, women ran that. And so all of a sudden now it's like all these 70s are supposed to go out and do the training for the auxiliaries, but they don't necessarily have the background on that. And it's at a time when women's ability to be heard and to influence those discussions is being curtailed. So it's just a really difficult transitional period in the 1970s from that. But it did lay the ground for further partnership between men and women, between the priesthood and the women's organizations in the church. And by the 1990s, the women leaders are meeting with the top priesthood leaders regularly. And of course, we know by the 2010s then the women leaders are added to these governing councils of the church. And so it would be a lot harder now for a Big program to be developed that women leaders didn't have any input on because they're part of the councils that do all of this now. So. And I've had in my work just a little bit of a glimpse into that. And I can, I can attest that these, these sisters are thoroughly immersed and very busy and valued in, in those roles on the, on the governing councils. So there's some trade offs. Right. Let's look at one example, which would be Relief Society bazaars. And this is something that, and that's like B, A, Z, A, A, R, not bizarre, with a B, I, Z. But this was a tradition, a long standing tradition in the Relief Society for fundraising, where everybody would make stuff. You know, you'd sew, you'd quilt, you'd crochet, you'd knit, you do food, maybe canned food or something like that. And then they would come together as a ward or a stake, and those items would all be displayed and people could buy them, and then that would help the Relief Society with fundraising. And that was a tradition. It was really cherished. It was very vibrant for a long time at the same time. And this is one of the things that's discontinued in the correlation era when this budget change happens, they no longer have to raise their own funds. So first of all, they no longer have to raise their own funds. They're not having to spend a lot of time and, and energy on raising money in Relief Society anymore. And I mean, like, how many of Sister Baker's doilies can you sell year after year? You know, like, I, I'm a prolific crocheter and there's no way I could ever, you know, sell all of the items that I make. And so, in a way, the trade off was greater bandwidth for the Relief Society to refocus on what were felt to be the core object and priorities of the organization. Kind of the same thing with the Relief Society magazine. Like, I'm in the camp that thinks it was a net loss to lose that public female space and a place for women's voices in the church, period, full stop. But the Relief Society magazine was very difficult to translate literally and figuratively cross culturally. They had lessons on the constitution, they had lessons on how to pick out cuts of meat at the supermarket, which just probably didn't apply very well to the sisters in Guatemala and other places in the world. Right. And so you can see how. And then also there were a lot of resources that went into publishing these magazines for all of the organizations, and by streamlining the church's publications Those resources are freed up for other things. So definitely trade offs in the Young women organization and the young men. One of the things that we really see take hold is this idea of youth leadership. And we kind of had to laugh when the Children and Youth Initiative Program was, whatever you want to call it, was announced in the fall of 2019. It was right when we were writing this chapter of the Young Women book. And we were kind of like, does anybody know that they tried this before? Because the. What was implemented in the, you know, around 2020 was very similar to what they tried in the early 1970s, and it didn't work very well. But they did establish this initial ideal of youth leadership, and it took a long time for that to really take hold and for us to figure out what that looks like. I think we're still struggling with it, but I think it is more firmly established now than it ever has been before. And the roots of that would go back to this era.
- [83:05]
Casey
So it sounds like the tree needed to be pruned so that we could get better fruit. Is that fair? International fruit throughout the whole world.
- [83:18]
Scott
It's really interesting to hear this history from a different angle because like I mentioned before, my background is in international education. And during this era, we saw the same thing where the church had a school system in Mexico and in Chile and one that was starting up in Bolivia and Peru. And the leaders of the church kind of had to sit down and say, is this going to be something that we do everywhere? And can we do that? And they had to make some really difficult choices where basically, when Neal A. Maxwell became the church Commissioner of Education, he said, we need to do what only we can do, and that's religious education. And that was incredibly painful because they had to shut down the school systems that were everywhere, which were admittedly a great blessing because the people of those countries. But I saw letters where they were having, like, a stake president in Guatemala say, we don't have anything. How come Mexico has a school system? And they made the decision to close, consolidate, and then send out religious education programs because that was something that they couldn't get anywhere else, essentially. So I kind of see the same thing here where, man, it's painful, like Scott said, that's a good analogy, to have to prune the tree. But it may have been necessary for the church to fully become a global religion. Again, tough stuff, but maybe necessary.
- [84:44]
Lisa
Well, it's what makes us a living church, right?
- [84:47]
Scott
Yeah, we get revelation and we make changes from time to time, too. So this is getting us Close to our type. And this is. Lisa, you've already said I remember this stuff as a kid. One of the things that reflects this too is the block schedule, which I don't remember anything other than the block schedule. I was totally surprised in my twenties when I found out that we used to come to church for priesthood and then come back for sacrament meeting and then for Sunday school and maybe have primary during the week. But this is implemented in 1980 and it basically consolidates all these meetings into a three hour block on Sunday. And at this point the women's organizations become a class that a person attends on Sunday. So there's still weekday activities, they still have a mutual night, but the center of gravity in the church shifts towards Sundays and figures during this time. Like Elaine Cannon advocated for Sunday school instruction for young women, seeing that it was a place of imbalance between young men who had priesthood meetings on Sunday and young women who had nothing other than Sunday school. So that's where we get young women's. But the organization this may have had the most far reaching implications for is the primary. The primary was a week weekday afternoon class. Instead it becomes a Sunday class which allows them to get more men to work in primary. And primary is still the only organization where women preside over a mixed gender staff. Which is kind of interesting. And this might bring us to something that happened a couple weeks ago. We record these a few weeks in advance, but I was delighted to see a notification on my phone telling me that the church had just announced handbook changes and one of them was that we were going to have ward Sunday school presidencies that could be male or female. In fact, do either of you want to comment on that recent organizational change that happened and we're recording this in 2026 just for future posterity.
- [86:53]
Casey
I mean, as soon as I saw it, my wife texted to me, she's in a Stake Relief Society presidency. Her Stake Relief president had texted it to her. She texted it to me, I texted my bishop, I'm a first counselor in a young adult student ward. And we were just talking last week about who's going to be our next Sunday School president for next semester. And I said, did you see this exclamation point? I said, any sisters come to mind? And our heads started going in that direction right away. So I think it's tremendously exciting. Prior to this moment, there's never been an organization where women presided over men besides the primary. Now it's primary and Sunday school.
- [87:44]
Lisa
Well, except that it's not because by stipulating that Sunday school presidencies have to be all male or all female.
- [87:53]
Casey
Yeah.
- [87:54]
Lisa
Then I think that's putting us in a position where women cannot preside over men, at least in the presidency.
- [88:01]
Casey
Well, but if. Yeah, but if I'm a Sunday school teacher and I'm a man and I have a female Sunday school president, then is that not a situation where a female is presiding over a man?
- [88:12]
Lisa
Sure. Yeah.
- [88:14]
Casey
That's all I said.
- [88:15]
Lisa
Yeah.
- [88:16]
Casey
Like, prior to that, it's only in the primary. Right. Primary president. And then you'd have like a. Maybe a male's primary teacher. But now. Now there's two auxiliaries in the church that have that dynamic at play.
- [88:28]
Lisa
Well, and historically speaking, we. We've done a little bit of work on this, and I think we're gonna eventually maybe publish something. But historically speaking, we had mixed Sunday school presidencies in the past quite a bit.
- [88:42]
Scott
Back when we had a Sunday school superintendent. Right. We had female Sunday school superintendents.
- [88:48]
Lisa
And we have not talked about the title superintendent, but that is. And it's something that. Another thing, if we have enterprising graduate students out there, if we could do a granular history of the use of the term superintendent. There were times when the president of the ymmia, the young men's organization, was referred to as superintendent. And I think, think what my sense is that that term was a way of distinguishing that this is not a priesthood office, that superintendent is the leader, but it's not a priesthood office. And so we had female superintendents sometimes and male superintendents as well in certain organizations. It will be really interesting. Yeah. To see how this plays out.
- [89:39]
Scott
That is an interesting dynamic. I remember a couple years ago, I saw someone write, there's no place in the church where women preside over men. And at the time, I had just been released from being the bishop in my ward, and I was made a primary teacher. And I remember thinking, well, my boss is a woman. The primary president is Sister Young, and she tells me what to do. This shifts that dynamic a little bit, too. I went to Sister Young and said, well, what. What are your instructions like? Like what. What orders do you have me to carry out? And she was very kind and gracious. But this. This does represent that too. I. I don't know what the ripple effects will be as things going forward, but it is interesting to think because I am a Sunday school president, my word, right now, I'd be okay if they let us go and put in
- [90:32]
Casey
a Females are coming for your job.
- [90:34]
Scott
Well, at first, everyone at First I thought it was that they were going to be mixed gender. So I was going to go and say, hey, Brother Selk, you're great, but I want a female perspective and fire him and bring it up. But it's either all male or all female is what the announcements specify, too. So it's another one of those just signs that the church is constantly dynamic and changing. And I think we've talked about this a couple times, but it appears that we're in an era of dynamic change within the church. If you can say that there ever wasn't an era where there wasn't dynamic change going on. Like, we're always doing things.
- [91:09]
Casey
So as we kind of think about this correlation era, there are questions that come up about, like, what were the gains and what were the losses for women? Right. We could probably spend a lot of time discussing the relative merits of keeping these women's organizations kind of separate, doing their own thing and doing it well versus integrated, as has happened. Questions? Here's just a couple questions if you want to respond, or maybe these can be rhetorical, I don't know. But what do women gain and what do they lose when they have their own space and their own structures? Then what do they gain and what do they lose when they are integrated with men? We think about that integration as a partnership. But another question is, is it truly a partnership if one party is subordinate to the other? These are big questions, and there are perennial debates that have gone on about these, and they continue to go on even now. But any final thoughts as we wrap today's episode up on any of those?
- [92:23]
Lisa
You know, Scott, I think those are the questions. And I don't know that we, of all people or anybody can offer, like, a totally definitive response. But sometimes asking the right questions helps us to think through things more carefully and more clearly. And I think in this case, gender is just one of those things in the human condition that we're always navigating and trying to figure out. And it may not be the primary thing that. That people are thinking about, but as we've talked about, because of the. The priesthood dynamic in the church, there is necessarily a gender dynamic to that as well. And I think over the last couple of decades, we've seen a lot of people, like, we've seen a whole spectrum of response, right? We've seen, you know, very outspoken agitation for women to be ordained and to have, you know, the same offices and the same authority and everything as men have. And you can make a good case for that. That's a Perfectly reasonable case to make. But we've also seen people who have tried to say, well, okay, the priesthood structure is what it is and we accept that this is the order of the church and that our leaders have taught us that this is the way it is. But even within that structure, what could we do that would help to balance things out a little bit better? And this announcement we were just talking about with Sunday school is a good example. That's one that's been floated for a long time that, you know, we could re examine like what needs to be priesthood and what doesn't. And you know, in a way like the, in the correlation era, that was what they were doing. They were saying, well, what needs to be priesthood? And the answer was kind of everything. And now we're kind of looking at it again going, well, but does it? And what do we mean by that? And now we've had some shifting definitions and discussions about priesthood and women's relationship to priesthood. And so are there ways that we could think about this differently now and changes that we can make that are not necessarily, you know, going full bore on the exact sameness for men and women? And it raises that question that we've talked about before. You know, what is separate? What is equal? And is equal even the right word to use when we talk about priesthood and women and men in the church? And is there a different definition of power and equality and so forth in the Lord's system than there is in the world system? I think the answer to that is definitely yes, because we have section 121 that lays out what the Lord's definition of power is. But I think we should expect that, you know, as long as we're human beings in the human condition trying to navigate these things, we're going to just keep having discussions and the need to revisit and re examine and make things work for where we're at at any given time.
- [95:28]
Scott
Yeah, and these discussions are worth the wrestle. You know, there's something, one theme that emerged as we were talking about everything is how much every generation has wrestled with this as they've turned over and tried to work forward and find their own solution. So it's okay that we don't have all the answers because we have to keep kind of redefining how it's going to work in our time. And the other element we haven't even really had time to talk about is how do we go from becoming an American faith to a global faith where gender dynamics are all over the place and in some Countries the church is very conservative and in some countries the church is very liberal when it comes to our gender attitudes too. We're all three of us Americans looking at it from the culture we grew up in. But in different cultures it's going to be a different conversation too. And that's another element to this.
- [96:19]
Lisa
That is a really good point, Casey. And there's been some great scholarship done in recent years. Caroline Klein wrote a great book and, and some others that have looked at how what in white middle class American culture we think of as the patriarchy and you know, with kind of pejorative meaning sometimes. But how in some cultures that actually represents progress by conveying to men that no, you don't just go out and sleep around and drink and spend all the money that your wife earns and have affairs and you know, whatever. Like I don't, and I don't mean that to be denigrating to any given culture, but this is what I have heard women in those cultures say that it, for them it feels like progress. This model of a man who presides and nurtures and takes care of, of his wife and children represents real progress for them in a way that for a lot of white middle class Americans we have kind of a gut level reaction of oh well, can't we do better than that? And so again, it's just part of the human condition.
- [97:29]
Scott
Yeah. Trying to create a global culture is really a challenge.
- [97:34]
Casey
And one of the golden threads that for me, as we've been talking through all this history has started to shine is I think every generation was doing the best that they could given the context that they were in. They were wrestling with important questions on how do we do better? How do we push back against worldly influences that are encroaching? How do we adapt to the changing context and culture that we're in? How can we best build the kingdom of God together, not just locally, but now internationally? The questions are always, they're good and the motives are good. There's been some stepping on toes. This is, this is a human and divine institution that we call the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints. And we've talked about some of the human elements as well. But I think that there is, it's kind of like the stock market in my head where it's like up and down, up and down. But when you like zoom out, it's like the trajectory is good, the trajectory is good. And there's been a couple crashes, there's been a couple down moments, but it seems like you know, I think we're getting better every generation, and it's exciting to see where this is headed.
- [98:45]
Lisa
Well said.
- [98:46]
Scott
Well, this has been very enjoyable. Thanks to both of you for guiding us through these sources. Next week, we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the temple, which should be interesting. So until next time, Scott, Lisa, thanks very much. We'll see you then.
- [98:59]
Casey
All right.
- [99:00]
Lisa
See you later.
- [99:00]
Casey
See you guys. Sa.