In the library

Eliza R. Snow

She was secretary at the founding of the Relief Society, a plural wife of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the author of the hymn that put a Mother in Heaven into Latter-day Saint worship. Most of what is known about the Nauvoo Relief Society is known because she wrote it down.

Latter-day Saints called her Zion's Poetess and, less formally, Presidentess. She wrote ten of the hymns in the 1985 hymnbook, ran the Relief Society across the whole territory, and left a documentary record that historians of Latter-day Saint women still work from. This page follows what she actually wrote, and every quote links to its source.

March 1842: the minute book

When about twenty women met in the room above Joseph Smith's store on March 17, 1842 to organize the Relief Society, Eliza R. Snow was appointed secretary. That job is the reason we know what was said in that room — and in the meetings after it, including the April 28 discourse where Joseph Smith told the women he would turn the key to them. The handwriting on that page is hers.

The minute book she kept is now published in the Joseph Smith Papers and is the founding document of the largest women's organization in the world. The full story of those meetings is in The founding of the Relief Society.

A mother there

In 1845, the year after Joseph Smith was killed, Snow wrote a poem she called My Father in Heaven. It is now the hymn O My Father, and its third verse does something no other text in the Latter-day Saint hymnbook does — it asks a question about the nature of God and answers it:

In the heav'ns are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal Tells me I've a mother there.

Eliza R. Snow, O My Father, Hymns, no. 292 (written 1845)

The next verse addresses both parents directly:

When I leave this frail existence, When I lay this mortal by, Father, Mother, may I meet you In your royal courts on high?

Eliza R. Snow, O My Father, Hymns, no. 292

This is the main scriptural-adjacent source for the Latter-day Saint belief in a Heavenly Mother. The doctrine has never been developed in canonized scripture; it entered the tradition through a poem, written by a woman, and stayed because people kept singing it.

Married to two prophets

Snow was sealed to Joseph Smith as a plural wife in June 1842, when she was thirty-eight. After his death she was married to Brigham Young. She had no children. She lived in the Lion House in Salt Lake City with Young's other wives and their families, and from there ran an organization that reached every settlement in the territory.

She carried it west

The Nauvoo Relief Society was suspended in 1844 and did not meet again for more than twenty years. Snow carried the minute book across the plains. When Brigham Young asked her to reestablish the society in the 1860s and 1870s, she used it: she traveled ward to ward, read the 1842 minutes aloud, and organized each new branch as a continuation of the one Joseph Smith had founded rather than as something new.

She also helped found the Woman's Exponent — a newspaper written, edited and published by Latter-day Saint women from 1872 to 1914, and indexed here in full — and organized the Primary and the Young Ladies' organization. She died in Salt Lake City in December 1887.

What she left

The plainest measure of her influence is that a Latter-day Saint who has never heard her name has still sung her words, and has probably formed their idea of Heavenly Mother from a verse she wrote in 1845. Her poems, her minutes, and forty years of the newspaper she helped start are all in this library.