Across the library

The founding of the Relief Society

On March 17, 1842, about twenty women met in the room above Joseph Smith's store in Nauvoo, chose a name, and elected Emma Smith president. The minutes survive word for word, and the organization they founded is now one of the largest women's organizations in the world. Every quote links to its source.

The Relief Society was founded in the upstairs room of Joseph Smith's red brick store in Nauvoo, Illinois, on March 17, 1842. Eliza R. Snow was appointed secretary, and the minute book she and others kept survives complete. It is published in the Joseph Smith Papers and indexed in this library, so what follows comes from the room itself, not from later memory.

March 17, 1842

About twenty women attended. They debated the name and settled on the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, and they elected Emma Smith president, with Sarah Cleveland and Elizabeth Ann Whitney as counselors. Joseph Smith attended and, per the minutes, stated the object of the society:

…that the Society of Sisters might provoke the brethren to good works in looking to the wants of the poor— searching after objects of charity, and in administering to their wants…

Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book, March 17, 1842

The line worth remembering from that first meeting belongs to Emma. She was arguing that this should not be an ordinary charitable society:

…we are going to do something extraordinary— when a boat is stuck on the rapids with a multitude of Mormons on board we shall consider that a loud call for relief…

Emma Smith, Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book, March 17, 1842

"I now turn the key to you"

Joseph Smith spoke to the society several times that spring. The sentence Latter-day Saint women have quoted for 180 years comes from the meeting of April 28, 1842, recorded in Eliza R. Snow's handwriting:

This Society is to get instruction thro' the order which God has established— thro' the medium of those appointed to lead— and I now turn the key to you in the name of God and this Society shall rejoice and knowledge and intelligence shall flow down from this time—

Joseph Smith, Discourse of April 28, 1842, as recorded by Eliza R. Snow in the Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book

The next line in the minutes reads this is the beginning of better days, to this Society.

What it became

The Nauvoo society was suspended in 1844 and did not meet again for more than twenty years. When it was reestablished in Utah, Eliza R. Snow — who had carried the minute book west across the plains — used it to reorganize the society ward by ward, reading the founding minutes aloud so each new branch knew what it was continuing. The record of what those women built runs through this library: the Woman's Exponent, a paper published by Latter-day Saint women from 1872 to 1913, and the Relief Society Magazine, which ran from 1915 to 1970. Today the Relief Society counts its membership in the millions, and it still dates itself to the meeting above the store.