Following the profound change and reorganization at all levels of the church in the previous decades, leaders in the 1980s worked to stabilize the Young Women organization within the new, correlated church structure. Seeking to foster a specifically Latter-day Saint identity, leaders redesigned the personal achievement program and introduced a theme and a set of values that would define the organization for more than three decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, leaders largely maintained the framework established by their predecessors and worked to help young women resist what leaders saw as increasing threats to traditional gender norms and family roles. And with rapid expansion of church membership throughout the world, they looked for new ways to make the Young Women programs accessible and relevant in settings with major economic, social, cultural, and demographic differences.

While marriage remained theologically important, the early 2000s saw marriage rates decline and average marriage ages increase substantially relative to the mid-twentieth century. By the 2010s, the Young Women organization increasingly worked to prepare young women for potential missionary service and emphasized service within the church and larger community. At the end of that decade and into the next, a series of dramatic changes within the organization and the larger church reoriented Young Women programs around integrating youth more fully into the work of the church, taking previous generations’ vision of youth leadership to a new level. Some of these changes consciously broke with the organization’s history, while others preserved and modified existing traditions. In general, the changes reduced the differentiation between the church’s organizations for young women and young men, bringing the two closer together than they had been since the mid-twentieth century. As they worked to make these adjustments, leaders turned consciously to the organization’s history, seeking not to replicate past practices but to find inspiration in them.

The organization’s recent reimagining demonstrates both the continuity and the dynamism that characterize the history of the Young Women organization. Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024 narrates that history, offers insights into the challenges of imparting religious faith and promoting human flourishing, and analyzes the processes that produce religious inspiration and motivate organizational change. Taken as a whole, this history is one of young believers who worked to shape their lives around their religious ideals and of leaders who carried on a long tradition of seeking out inspiration and introducing intentional change to further the organization’s consistent purpose—to raise up righteous women who would follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, blessing the church and the world.