The Sesquicentennial, So What? An Assessment a Quarter Century Afterward

Abstract

On Saturday morning, March 14, 1992, the Salt Lake Tabernacle filled with women in a spirit of anticipation. One hundred and fifty years after the founding of the Relief Society in the Red Brick Store, thousands prepared to commemorate the past and look to the future. Technicians connected satellite downlinks. Translators sat at their mikes. A well-trained chorus sang newly composed anthems. Outside, sesquicentennial banners waved from light posts. The St. Patrick's Day parade had been rerouted three blocks away. All focus was on women.The program from headquarters emphasized worldwide participation. The opening prayer was given in Mandarin Chinese, the closing prayer in British English. Women from five continents speaking in their native languages and translated into English, if needed, explored the objectives of Relief Society.1 President Elaine L. Jack in video onsite in Nauvoo walked through the founding under Emma Smith in 1842. President Thomas S. Monson heralded “The Spirit of Relief Society.”After the broadcast, responses returned from spotters in Europe. A sister in France exclaimed, “You came through loud and clear!” That response proved to be prophetic as well as descriptive because the Relief Society commemoration set trends still being fulfilled.While March 1992 offered landmark occurrences, it was just one of several significant moves the Elaine Jack administration made to include women globally and feature their voices. In happy ways, this was a bottom-up celebration rather than a top-down scheme. What exactly came through “loud and clear” as we look at long-term effects of the sesquicentennial? One was telling the story of Latter-day Saint women, past and present.In about 1982, Relief Society general president Barbara Smith initiated the writing of a solid, official history of Relief Society. Her counselor Janath Cannon started researching Women of Covenant2 and urged completing it in time for the celebration. Maureen Ursenbach Beecher contributed as a professional historian. Jill Mulvay Derr wrote a large section and finished the editing. Carol L. Clark added a chapter on the Jack administration.Before Women of Covenant was sent to press, editors at Deseret Book and members of the Quorum of the Twelve conducted an intensive review. Elder Dallin H. Oaks, by assignment and out of personal interest, read the manuscript with care. At issue were interpretations of Mormon women's experience as written in the new history. The Relief Society presidency with members of the Twelve sat together to resolve questions on women's blessings and healing and connections between this women's organization and the priesthood. Elaine Jack said they weighed matters of tone and perspective. “I was impressed,” she observed, “by Elder Oaks’ fairness in wanting to represent historical facts correctly by not making any changes in them, yet he desired to state the facts in such a way that they would not be misconstrued or misunderstood by a modern audience.” It is significant that Women of Covenant was published at all, “a gentle, quiet coup,”3 Elaine Jack called it. In another time the history might not have passed Correlation, and the presidency did not want to lose this very important piece of work.4The Relief Society presidency also devised a way to hear specifically from women in the field whom they would never have a chance to meet face to face. They received permission to announce activities in the “News of the Church” section of the Ensign and international magazines and invite submissions from local ward and stake Relief Societies.5 Responses came in throughout 1991 and 1992 and local histories continued to arrive for years afterward.6Since the Church Historical Department had stopped asking wards to send in their minutes and histories some seventeen years before, this call for writeups yielded information nowhere else available. The submissions varied from one-page aerograms to padded scrapbooks delivered in person to headquarters. Arriving histories were checked in, sections were translated if necessary, the manuscripts were read and catalogued, then stored in acid free boxes in the basement of the Relief Society building ready for transfer to the Church Archives after they had been used by the board. By February 1994, over sixteen hundred histories had been processed.“Women's Voices” was the title given to letters and short essays sent to headquarters responding to what it meant to be a woman in the church at the time.7 Writers represented thirty-two countries and thirty states in the United States. Their topics ranged from poignant sufferings to jubilant testimonials, from issues of abuse, addiction, and adversity, to self-discovery, service, and sisterhood.While a scholarly analysis of these documents is yet to take place, those of us who compiled them—myself and our committee of three—found women eager to talk about their lives, finding growth and purpose together. From Spain, “In no organization prior to coming to know the Church have I ever felt better than in the Relief Society.”8 From Samoa, “I am truly thankful for those mothers who formed this organization. . . . [It] enabled me to find important teachings in my life, for I was born of nonmember parents, who also did not have much education.”9 From Japan, “I began attending Relief Society meetings soon after I was baptized while still a student. . . . [A]s a young member, I was always welcomed and encouraged to attend. Since then, the things that I have learned in Relief Society classes have become a part of me, necessary parts of . . . my life.”10 From Mexico, “[After my mother died of heart disease when I was twelve,] one of my older sisters, who was 18, began to attend the Relief Society, by invitation of the adult sisters. She took me with her. . . . The sisters offered us their love and support. I was very fortunate because I found in each one the tender love that helped make up a little for that of my absent mother.”11 From Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, “Through these 20 years I have grown from an unsure young adult to a young wife and mother and then to a ‘sister of experience’ in my middle years. At the age of 19, I sat next to a sweet grandmother and learned to knit. She also was learning to knit. . . . I learned to teach, to hug, to lead and to follow. As I have walked through these last 20 years I have become a Relief Society sister, standing tall as a daughter of Heavenly Father.”12In addition, the presidency fostered an ongoing service project called “Gospel Literacy.” To counter the tragic illiteracy around the world, they worked with their priesthood advisors to develop a two-fold statement of purpose, “to teach basic gospel literacy skills to those who cannot read or write”; and “to encourage Church members to study the gospel and improve themselves and their families throughout their lives—lifelong learning.”13 They began with scholarships for women, disbursing $27,000 in the first year to 132 women in Mexico, the Philippines, and Central America. In expanding the literacy initiative, Relief Society used Church Educational System materials and relied on local women leaders “to take the water to the end of the row.”14Literacy had personal impact for the general board. Board members created teaching materials to send to Anne Pingree to test with women in her mission in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Carol Lee Hawkins and Carma Hales traveled to Guatemala and the Dominican Republic to assess progress on trial programs. Marjean Wilcox cajoled me into taking a community course with her in how to teach adults to read. President Jack and others tutored in local elementary schools over subsequent years. After release of the presidency in 1997, the literacy effort continued on through CES and Relief Society but never became the major church program they envisioned.In an allied area—welfare planning—women were invited to help more following the sesquicentennial. Relief Society already oversaw distribution of a few private funds. Carol Lee Hawkins represented Relief Society on the board as the NGO Latter-day Saints Charities was formed. She joined with Grant Beutler, former humanitarian aid director in Europe, at the Missionary Training Center, teaching cultural awareness to couples preparing to serve abroad on welfare missions.15 Those consulting positions expanded as the Welfare Department used Relief Society board member and healthcare specialist Delia Rochon to help develop an international welfare strategy in 1998–99. Women served on task forces concerned with health and sanitation, self-reliance, HIV-Aids, and emergency response.16 With all these invitations for partnership, the mid and late-1990s seemed like the Prague Spring in welfare services.Still another area benefiting from global outreach was curriculum. In 1995, Relief Society asked permission to rewrite its study guides. First came silence, then postponement, finally a different plan altogether. Chieko Okazaki, a counselor in the presidency, and I met with officials in the Curriculum Department month after month in 1995, proposing rewriting or at least updating Relief Society study guides. The problem was that present manuals were based on lessons written a decade earlier, had been repeated twice during this administration, and were marred by outdated quotations and need for current topics. The women were told to wait because Elder Dallin H. Oaks was conducting a study of Melchizedek Priesthood lessons. He called for improved teaching in both men's and women's organizations and proposed restructuring the Sunday meeting plan.By the time a formal proposal came to the general Relief Society, a writing committee for Melchizedek Priesthood had already spent several months researching and drafting a series of lessons to be called the Teachings of the Presidents of the Church, beginning with Brigham Young. A delegation of apostles came to the offices of the general Relief Society presidency to encourage their adopting the new study guides. “It was not imposed on us but we were strongly lobbied,” commented Elaine Jack. “And,” added Aileen H. Clyde, “three apostles waited down the hall while we deliberated.”17 Relief Society accepted the proposal but asked to be included in shaping the lessons since women were to study from the same guides as men. They were granted the chance to help edit the Brigham Young materials, if they would not delay meeting of spring deadlines18 nor expect to quote from women leaders.19 The new curriculum was announced in 1997.20We used Teachings of the Presidents for twenty years from 1998 through 2017. Relief Society was commissioned to write a set of guidelines—never published—helping to use the new series of Sunday lessons.21 Hoping for grassroot interchange of the sort evidenced in choosing ward sesquicentennial service projects, the Relief Society draft included twenty model discussion outlines for the first Sunday. Okazaki and Silver sent the guidelines to a sampling of ward Relief Society presidents from different cultural and demographic backgrounds to test. While early responses praised the local flexibility, later most ward presidencies thought they were just assigned to “give a lesson” rather than “lead a discussion.”22Two themes from the sesquicentennial continued to have impact. One area of focus concerns talking about and publishing the women's story in LDS church history. In 1992, board members had to read privately typed copies of the minutes of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo because publishing rights were not extended for those founding documents. Now the Nauvoo minutes are available and in print and online to everyone through the Church Historian's Press website.23 In October 2015, Gospel Topics published the carefully researched “Joseph Smith's Teachings about Priesthood, Temple, and Women.”24 Editors have tactfully covered issues like Joseph Smith's creating an independent women's organization, ordination of Relief Society leaders, turning of the keys to women, and female laying on of hands to give blessings. As with Women of Covenant, editors of The First Fifty Years of Relief Society have explained differences in meaning and practice from the early church to 2016. Their scholarship clarifies context while underscoring the influence of women in the history of the church across decades.25 Where once Relief Society lessons contained no quotations from women leaders, At the Pulpit, published in 2017,26 includes fifty-eight discourses, short and long, by Latter-day Saint women, confronting the issues of their times and speaking with authority. Additional books bring forth the testimonies of LDS women, notably Janiece Johnson and Jennifer Reeder's The Witness of Women.27Papers and conferences on Latter-day Saint women have been increasingly welcomed. Claudia Bushman conducted a summer seminar at Brigham Young University in 2003 with young scholars that yielded a proceedings book, Latter-day Saint Women in the Twentieth Century.28 The next year, Carol Cornwall Madsen and I chaired a symposium at BYU on “New Scholarship on Latter-day Saint Women in the Twentieth Century” with a volume following.29 Although we were not permitted to open this symposium to the public because BYU administrators felt that discussing contemporary LDS women might raise controversy, a trend was set. Eight years later in 2012, Kate Holbrook and Matthew Bowman organized a conference with Church History Department backing and published proceedings as Women and Mormonism: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.30 In 2014, the Mormon Women's History Initiative Team (MWHIT) hosted a symposium at Utah Valley University, “Origins and Destinations: Forty Years of Mormon Women's Histor(ies),” led by Andrea Radke-Moss and Taunalyn Rutherford. The next August, FAIR and the Church History Department partnered for a full day of speakers focused on women's stories—from church history, New Testament, and modern India. And so the pace quickens to acknowledge the lives and influence of women in the church.A second sesquicentennial theme of unity in diversity worldwide was illuminated in spring 2018 general conference when leaders announced three policy changes. The sesquicentennial emphasized local autonomy. That principle underlies turning from set visiting teaching lessons to flexible ministering. As with the service projects, local women prayerfully identify and meet the needs of their own people. The second policy change invites teenaged girls into ministering partnerships with older women. Leaders acknowledge the capabilities of young women and help build bridges for them as they leave the Young Women program to enter Relief Society. Finally comes the movement from Sunday lessons, in which quotations primarily come from male leaders, to discussions of ideas that apply to women's life experiences. Relief Society leaders are encouraged to teach members how to form discussion circles. While talking about lived religion, let differences in ideas and applications be acknowledged and welcomed. As Chieko Okazaki pointed out, “If we both think exactly alike, then one of us is not necessary.”31 These are the voices now coming through “loud and clear.”