In July 1885, members of the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association in the East Bountiful Ward in northern Utah Territory issued their own handwritten newspaper. An association member named M. A. Willie wrote that she felt self-conscious at first about writing for the project, but living in a culture that prized collective industry, she also felt a strong need to contribute to the shared work. “The Kingdom of God is a progresive Kingdom and it will wait for none of us,” she reflected. “I want to be one with my sisters.” Setting her insecurities aside, she cast her generation’s experience in heroic terms that echoed those used for their parents, the pioneers who had worked to build up their religious Zion in the Great Basin of the American West. “I think we as daughters of Zion have a great labor at home with ourselves,” she wrote. “There has never been a better time for woman to improve her talents than at the present time. We have oportunities that our mothers were deprived of for the improvement of our minds. Then let us as wives, as mothers and as daughters of parents that we have reasons to be proud of, improve every oportunity that is afforded us, that we may be honored instruments in the kingdom of God.”¹

Fifty years later, Jantje Copier, who lived in the Netherlands, expressed her excitement over the church’s Bee-Hive Girls program for young women. “Begun in Utah, it has now penetrated to the little village in Holland where I live and gather my honey of knowledge. How thankful I am for the great privilege of being a Bee-Hive Girl,” she wrote. “It has brought me that for which my soul seeks. It has brought me faith in life, in love, in joy, and in helpful work. . . . May our Father bless the Bee-Hive work that it may bring happiness to this and future generations.”²

In 2006, teenagers in Panama City participated in the Personal Progress program in their Young Women organization. “Personal Progress hasn’t taught me only about the Church,” said sixteen-year-old Andrea Navas. “It has helped me realize who I am, that we’re daughters of God.” It was equally meaningful to Mayka Moreno: “Personal Progress helped me to understand the doctrines of the gospel. It strengthened my testimony a lot about Christ’s Atonement and other things I didn’t understand. . . . I’m not the same person I was. I’m better. . . . The Lord wants us to be better, shine brighter. He wants us to develop our talents, to be a light on the hill. . . . That’s why we have this program.”³

Although separated by generations and nationalities, these young women are united through their participation in the Young Women organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For more than 150 years and through varied name and programming iterations, the organization has played a pivotal role in cultivating a sense of divine identity, purpose, and belonging for the rising generation of Latter-day Saint women in their respective eras. Preparing young women for a lifetime of discipleship in the gospel of Jesus Christ, encouraging them to make and keep covenants with God, and cultivating their engagement within the Latter-day Saint faith have been central to the purpose of the organization’s programs. The Young Women organization also nurtured young women who would become its future leaders. Understanding what individuals like M. A., Jantje, Andrea, and Mayka experienced in Young Women helps reveal what Latter-day Saints valued at different times in their efforts to keep faith alive and build up the kingdom of God on the earth.

Early histories of the Latter-day Saints seldom mentioned the Young Women organization, focusing instead on the prophets and apostles who serve as the faith’s central and most visible leaders. Over the past half century, however, scholars have been increasingly interested in the ways women have influenced religious practice and the transmission of faith traditions, a focus that has coincided with Latter-day Saint women’s interest in and subsequent efforts to recover the history of their foremothers. These efforts were first characterized by a strong emphasis on biography and life writings and on the Relief Society, the church’s first women’s organization.⁴ More recently, scholars have published important studies of the religious lives of Latter-day Saint women, and the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has established women’s history as one of its primary areas of focus.⁵ A growing body of scholarship and commentary has shed light on the roles of women in the church and on their relationship to men and to the priesthood as the church has grown and changed since it was established nearly two hundred years ago.

Still, little of this scholarship has examined perhaps the most potent intersection of all these historical inquiries: the history of the church’s Young Women organization. It is in this organization that adult Latter-day Saints have most consistently worked to define and model what it means to be a woman who follows Jesus Christ and lives the ideals of Latter-day Saint faith. Throughout its history, the organization’s female leaders have worked in concert with and under the direction of the church’s presiding male priesthood leaders to determine how to respond to cultural change and international growth. While the Young Women organization published its own official histories in 1911–1955, no full, scholarly history of this important organization has yet been written.⁶ Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 enters this virtually unplowed field to examine the aspirations and anxieties that have shaped the organization and its members.

The history of the Young Women organization, while unique, can serve as a case study of the ways religious groups wrestle with generation gaps, gender roles, and the tension between fidelity to tradition and adaptation to modernity. In addressing these issues, Carry On draws on scholarship about the history of childhood and youth and on scholarship probing Latter-day Saint communal boundaries and relations with the outside world. With this foundation, this history shows how successive generations of Latter-day Saints defined youth, femininity, and spirituality and how a succession of female leaders both studied social trends and sought divine guidance as they set a course for their organization and solidified its place in the larger church.

This volume is essentially an institutional history.⁷ While the Young Women organization has sought to adapt to the local circumstances of its members around the world, the organization is headquartered in Salt Lake City, and thus the cultural changes and contexts that have molded it most throughout its history overwhelmingly reflect those of the United States. Additionally, because adults have led the organization and shaped its records, this volume most often reflects the concerns of adults about girls. This narrative covers the full span of the organization’s history from 1870 to 2024, but it is not a comprehensive history of every change and program in the organization, which has been dynamic and fluid since its beginning. Carry On focuses on programs, initiatives, changes, and details that are particularly significant or illustrative of larger themes and trends in the history. The appendixes to the book, in print and online, supplement the narrative by providing a timeline and charts outlining the organization’s general presidencies, classes, and awards.

This book draws on a rich base of source material preserved in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ central archive, the Church History Library (CHL). These sources include board meeting minutes and other executive files, personal files of presidencies and board members, statistical reports, scrapbooks, handbooks and manuals, pamphlets and circulars, and church periodicals such as the Woman’s Exponent, the Young Woman’s Journal, the Improvement Era, the MIA Leader, the Church News, the Latter-day Saints’ Millennial Star, and MIA in the Missions. The CHL also holds an extensive collection of local records, including minute books and local publications. Because leadership changes regularly and participation in the organization is intentionally limited to certain ages, materials that might document individuals’ experiences are often considered ephemeral, and the CHL contains comparatively few records created by everyday young women and their leaders. To supplement the core institutional history with personal perspectives, researchers scrutinized correspondence collections, community and family histories, and oral histories, including those at other repositories such as the University of Utah and Brigham Young University. Church History Department staff also conducted oral history interviews and solicited personal materials for use in this book. These sources help ensure that, while this volume focuses primarily on the history of the central Young Women organization, the stories of individual young women and local organizations provide important illustration.

This volume traces the development of the Young Women organization in three parts.