Locating discourses delivered in such varied venues and formats over 185 years requires a historian’s proclivity to excavate old sources. While women’s discourses can be found throughout the Latter-day Saint historical record, these sources are often difficult to access. Some of the earliest talks by Latter-day Saint women were preserved in personal reminiscences, like those of Lucy Mack Smith. Minute books of women’s organizations are a particularly valuable source for women’s discourses. Female secretaries typically kept minutes of meetings, but the accuracy of these minutes depended on the individual secretaries. Some took meticulous notes, while others provided only summaries, and many female secretaries recorded the discourses of men in more detail than they did the speeches of women. Around 1915, church organizations replaced handwritten minute books with standardized forms, which recorded the names of speakers but little else.² As a result, the historical record lost many spontaneous utterances of everyday members in their regular meetings.

Newspapers and magazines often distributed speeches to a wider readership, though women’s words were typically summarized rather than reproduced in full, especially in the nineteenth century. The Woman’s Exponent (1872–1914) was written, edited, printed, and distributed by women and included reports of women’s meetings, often submitted by local organizations’ secretaries. Women’s speeches also appeared in the Millennial Star (1840–1970) and the Young Woman’s Journal (1889–1929). In the twentieth century, the Relief Society Magazine (1915–1970) published women’s discourses, as did Relief Society, Mutual Improvement Association, and Young Women conference reports. General conference reports and transcripts of Brigham Young University (BYU) devotionals—especially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—provide a rich collection of discourses given by women. Talks from the BYU Women’s Conference are available in published collections, the first of which was released in 1980.³ By the close of the twentieth century, Mormon women’s discourses were available in the Ensign and Liahona, in printed books, on television broadcasts, and on the Internet.

The advent of recording technology vastly increased the number of women’s discourses that were preserved, and as a result, the editors of this volume had far more speeches to choose from in the later decades of church history than they did in the early years. Later talks were captured with more detail and precision, and the average length of recorded discourses increased over time. Most of the later talks come from published sources, while most of the early talks were found in newspapers or minute books.

The available sources are heavily weighted toward discourses given in Utah, and the selection in this book does not adequately represent non-American voices. Nevertheless, the voices of international women do appear in this book. They include a nineteenth-century address given in England by Elicia A. Grist and several discourses by English and Scottish immigrants who converted to the church and joined the Latter-day Saints in Utah. Church growth in international areas accelerated rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, and discourses by women from Germany, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, and Kenya represent in some small degree the international composition of the modern church. Non-American voices are found in 1970s Area Conference Reports, including the speech of Lucrecia Suárez de Juárez, a Mexican Latter-day Saint. When Carol Lee Hawkins coordinated the BYU Women’s Conference during the early 1990s, she made a point of inviting speakers who lived their formative years outside of the United States, and her efforts yielded a number of talks, including that of Jutta B. Busche in this volume.⁴ More work remains to be done by both scholars and church members in preserving the spoken insights of Latter-day Saint women outside the United States.

After collecting and reviewing hundreds of discourses, the editors chose engaging talks that focused on doctrinal themes, rather than talks that recounted or represented historically significant moments. The editors prioritized speeches that were well written, that contained theological analysis, and that illustrated women’s faith throughout the years since the church’s founding in 1830. Some women featured in this volume were well known in their day, and some of them are known to today’s readers. Others were, until now, obscure and largely forgotten. The discourses are arranged in chronological order by creation date, with two exceptions: Lucy Mack Smith’s discourse in chapter 1 and Elizabeth Ann Whitney’s song in chapter 2 are placed at the time those discourses were originally delivered, though they were recorded or printed years after the fact.

The editors have usually selected the earliest known extant version of a given discourse for inclusion in this volume. Generally the entire speech is reproduced, but on occasion material not relevant to the main topic of the address has been omitted. Where this occurs at the beginning of a speech, the material has been omitted silently; where the omission is made within the text of the talk, the deletion is marked with ellipses. A source note at the end of each transcript provides information on the source used and the repository where the source material is held.