By the 1930 centennial of the church’s organization, the pioneer culture of the nineteenth century had waned. Immigration to Latter-day Saint population centers had declined, and Latter-day Saints were better accepted in American society. In the records of the renamed Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association (YWMIA), honoring spiritual heritage and cultivating belief in the miraculous events of the faith’s founding emerged as key purposes of the organization alongside its robust slate of recreational and cultural activities. Given the declining focus on migration to Utah, this period also witnessed significant development of the MIA in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. In the United States, mobilization for World War II in the early 1940s heightened MIA leaders’ awareness of the world’s interconnectedness and raised new questions about how to address sexuality and track a young population in motion.

During the 1950s, the YWMIA was central to the church’s public image. Even as the organization enjoyed relative autonomy within the larger church, the YWMIA collaborated closely with the YMMIA to disseminate the church’s message and showcase the benefits of gospel living through the wholesome activities and achievements of its youth. Massive festivals, coordinated to occur during the MIA’s yearly June Conference, brought tens of thousands of youth, leaders, and spectators to watch the young people dance, sing, perform plays, and participate in other cultural events, some of which were televised to a still larger audience.

Within the Young Women organization, leaders created more subdivisions—adding the Mia Maids and Junior Gleaners—and adjusted age requirements within existing groups, in keeping with current thinking on stages of adolescent development and teenage life patterns. Reflecting the high marriage rates and relatively young marriage ages of the era as well as Latter-day Saint theology on family, preparation for marriage continued to be a major emphasis of instruction and activities for young women in their teens. Additionally, because the MIAs included members in their twenties and also sponsored groups for adults, the organizations served as the social hub for Latter-day Saints of all ages. To support both instruction and activities among these varied groups, the MIA organizations and their subdivisions printed thousands of pages of instructional materials each year to distribute to members and leaders.

In the 1960s, YWMIA leaders responded to rapid social change and church growth with an increasing emphasis on spiritual and leadership development. Even as time-honored traditions such as June Conference remained in place, concerns that church programs were too large and elaborate, combined with the international growth of the church and worries about the trajectory of the broader culture, caused leaders to drastically rethink the YWMIA. Though the church’s correlation committees had worked through the 1960s toward centralizing and streamlining all church organizations, including the YWMIA, the impact of those efforts began to be felt largely in the 1970s. Departing from the outward-facing, elaborate programs of the 1950s and 1960s, changes under the correlation movement generated a period of simplification and an even stronger emphasis on spirituality. The YWMIA was redefined and renamed to become the Young Women organization. Its recreation focus was curtailed, and its demographic scope narrowed to include only girls up to age eighteen. In the wake of correlation-related changes, leaders developed the church’s programs for young women and young men in different directions. The dramatic changes that came with closer integration into the shared structure of the church highlighted tensions regarding the place of women’s organizations within the priesthood hierarchy and the church’s expanding bureaucracy.