The first Young Ladies’ Department of the Ladies’ Cooperative Retrenchment Association was founded in 1870. The word retrench meant to economize or simplify, though it was also used in military contexts to refer to fortifications. Both senses fit the times. Many of the earliest members of these young women’s groups had parents who experienced religious persecution in the eastern United States or marginalization in Europe and crossed the Great Plains to build up distinctively Latter-day Saint communities in Utah. By 1869, however, the arrival of the transcontinental railroad meant the end of an era of relative isolation for the Saints. They responded to the change with concerns over encroaching outside influences and perceived spiritual erosion, yet they were also interested in what could be gained from closer connection to the outside world. These opposing impulses—defense against assimilation and engagement with the larger culture—would recur throughout the organization’s history.

Initially, “junior retrenchment,” as the young ladies’ groups were sometimes known, spread as a grassroots movement, and in its beginnings, local organizations included married and single young women in their teens and twenties and existed only in congregations in Utah and the surrounding areas. Though unified in purpose, young women created and led their own organizations without any central governing body. By embracing retrenchment, Latter-day Saint women and girls intended to resist worldly influences, foster spirituality, and band together in economic and temporal solidarity. By the mid-1870s, however, these local associations had expanded their focus to intergenerational mentoring, practical work and service, and development of skills in reading, writing, and public speaking. After the mid-1870s, local retrenchment associations also began to develop closer ties with the recently organized Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association (YMMIA) and formally adopted a parallel name: Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA). In 1880, church president John Taylor established a YLMIA general presidency in Salt Lake City to offer centralized leadership to local associations. The shift in identity from retrenchment to mutual improvement echoed the recurring impulses toward defense and engagement. In the organization’s early years, its leaders also wrestled with ongoing questions as to whether the YLMIA’s focus should be on its role as a women’s organization alongside the church’s other female-led groups or a youth organization working in close collaboration with the church’s organization for young men.

At the close of the nineteenth century, YLMIA leaders worked to meet the needs of the church’s young women through greater centralization and unification, including the advent of standardized lessons and programs overseen by an expanding and ambitious general board. As centralization progressed, the YLMIA and YMMIA began cooperating extensively in their programs and activities, which led to a growing self-perception of the two as a single youth organization. The close association of the two groups at the turn of the century required female leaders to navigate overlapping responsibility and authority with men, a diplomatic dance with long-term implications.

By the 1910s, rapid urbanization was transforming life in Utah and the surrounding Latter-day Saint–majority areas. As the United States reached the height of the Progressive Era, the surge in popularity of clubs and social programs led the YLMIA to see itself as an alternative to secular community organizations, extending the Saints’ nineteenth-century goal of self-sufficiency into the cultural and social realms. Local YLMIAs were subdivided into Bee-Hive Girls and Gleaner Girls programs to offer a more structured approach to both achievement and adolescent development. Leaders of the YLMIA and YMMIA (known collectively as “the MIA”) developed a theory of “teaching the gospel through activities,” drawing on Latter-day Saints’ expansive theology of the interrelationship of the physical, spiritual, and social to argue that the MIA’s cultural and athletic programs fostered spiritual development. The MIA was assigned to oversee recreation for the church in 1922, though questions about the proper balance between activities and more overtly religious pursuits persisted.