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Relief Society Magazine

The Relief Society Magazine

Fifty-six years of the largest women's organisation in the church writing its own record — lessons, addresses, and the working detail of welfare, nursing and education that appears nowhere else.

Updated

What it is

The Relief Society Magazine was the official magazine of the Relief Society, published from 1914 to 1970, when it was discontinued along with the church's other auxiliary magazines in the consolidation that produced the Ensign.

It carried the Relief Society's monthly lesson material, addresses by its general presidency and board, conference reports, and the organisation's own account of what it was doing — which in this period was a great deal. Relief Society ran a wheat storage programme, a nursing and maternity effort, social service work, genealogical instruction, and a share of the church welfare programme after 1936.

Why it is worth reading now

Because it is the operational record, not the ceremonial one. General conference tells you what leaders said about women's work; the Magazine tells you what the work actually consisted of — how a ward society organised a maternity fund, what the visiting teaching message was in March 1938, what a lesson on the Book of Mormon looked like when it was written for adult women rather than for a general audience.

It is also a record of an organisation that had, in this period, a great deal of institutional independence, and of what happened as that independence narrowed. Reading the lesson material from 1920 next to the lesson material from 1960 is the most direct way to see correlation happening.

What we hold

41 volumes covering 1915 to 1961 — 477 indexed items.

Items indexed, by decade
1915–19 — 60 items1915–191920s — 90 items1920s1930s — 119 items1191930s1940s — 76 items1940s1950s — 108 items1950s1960–61 — 24 items1960–61
Items indexed, by decade
DecadeItems
1915–191960
1920s90
1930s119
1940s76
1950s108
1960–196124
Most common subjects
SubjectItems
Relief Society406
Book of Mormon232
Motherhood164
Jesus Christ155
Missionary work126
Word of Wisdom125
Visiting teaching116
Marriage97
Nauvoo95
Temple work92
Genealogy86
Child welfare80
Women's suffrage73

Subject tags are model-generated. Nauvoo ranks high because the Magazine returned constantly to the Relief Society's 1842 founding there — an organisation with a strong sense of its own origin.

Ask MormonGPT about the Relief Society Magazine

477 items indexed, 1915 to 1961.

What did the Relief Society Magazine publish about the wheat storage program? How did Relief Society lessons change between the 1920s and the 1950s? What did the Magazine say about visiting teaching? How did Relief Society describe its own founding in Nauvoo?

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  • Woman's Exponent Latter-day Saint women writing for themselves, 1872–1914 — on suffrage and on plural marriage at once.
  • The Improvement Era The church's own magazine, 1897–1970 — the largest and least-read body of material in this library.
  • The Library Every work indexed in MormonGPT, with what we hold of each.