From Brigham’s daughters to today’s teens: New book celebrates 150 years of the LDS Young Women program

What started as an effort by Brigham Young’s female offspring to revolutionize fashions for young Latter-day Saint women has grown into a global organization that has guided millions of teenage girls during its 155-year history.

The church’s “Young Ladies’ Department of the Ladies Cooperative Retrenchment Association” was born May 27, 1870, with one main purpose: dress reform.

Young’s older daughters “committed to set an example for others by following scriptural counsel regarding dress and adornment,” historians Lisa Olsen Tait, Amber C. Taylor, James Goldberg and the late Kate Holbrook write in a newly published history of the group. “They would enhance real beauty through plain dress and reject waste, extravagance, and extreme in fashions.”

The polygamous 19th-century prophet and second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints envisioned that his daughters would “not only wear homemade items but … exercise a united influence in rendering them fashionable,” according to the book, “Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870-2024.”

Drawing on diaries, organizational minutes and personal narratives housed in the church’s archives, the volume is the first comprehensive chronicle of the worldwide Young Women group.

It is “a landmark publication,” said Tait, who directs women’s history for the church. “It’s a history of a women’s organization run by women and run for women that has been a fundamental part of the experience of young women and adult women in the church for many generations.”

It fills in an “underexamined aspect of Latter-day Saint history,” she said at a Tuesday news conference, “and that is the history of young people and their experiences.”

Priorities, principles and camping

“Carry On” tracks the highs and lows of 16 general presidents of the group, along with their counselors, boards and hosts of local leaders, as they worked to balance competing needs.

The Young Women organization created goal programs like “Bee-Hive Girls,” “Golden Gleaners” and “Personal Progress” as a way to address “differing priorities,” the book jacket explains, and added “a robust camping” experience for girls to participate in nature and “to seek deeper connection with God and his creation.”

Current Young Woman General President Emily Belle Freeman received a draft of the book four months before being announced as the new leader of the organization in 2023, she said. “I had the opportunity to just sit in a really quiet space and think about how overwhelming it was to oversee young women all over the entire world. The question I found myself asking a lot is: What would God have me do?”

This book is “not just a rich history of the heritage of those women and who they were,” Freeman said, “but how these women enter into [leadership] with boldness and with opinions and with … wanting to make a difference.”

The most important “underlying factor of every decision made by the organization, she said, was wanting their charges to know “that God lives and that he is your father.”

Goldberg, the only man on the writer team, echoed those sentiments.

The authors were studying “an institution that was shaped to carry on a sort of invisible flame [of spirituality],” he said, and “what cultural currents were they swimming in, drawing on, interacting with and … what it meant to follow Jesus Christ and become his disciples in a changing world.”

Taylor added that “through this lens, we begin asking and answering questions. Like how have leaders and women over time thought about what makes for a happy life, a life of discipleship and purpose? What are the most important things that young women need to know to be the mothers and leaders of future generations?”

Identity matters

Freeman was intrigued to read that, in 1890, the group’s president desired the perspective of younger women, so she chose four 20-something women “to be able to come up with ideas and a vision for the young women of the entire world.”

As worldwide Young Women leader, Freeman wondered if that would work today. After getting approval from an apostle, she invited five young adults to be on her council. “A lot of the things that you are seeing coming out of the organization during this presidency are coming because of the voices of those five young adults.”

Some Latter-day Saint women who came of age in the mid- to late-20th century say that the class names — “Beehives,” “MIA Maids” and “Laurels” — gave them a sense of identity. But those monikers were dropped in 2019. Any plans for new names?

“Finding identity is one of the greatest desires of young women of this generation, and that’s something that our presidency and council is very aware of,” Freeman said. “We see the importance of that.”

The names were “retired” because of “us becoming an international church and translation” issues, she explained. “The girls being able to identify with something that wasn’t just Utah centric … [provides] a feeling of belonging for the young women that will translate internationally across the church.

“... I won’t lie,” Freeman added. “It does come up in conversations everywhere we go. The girls are asking, ‘What is our identity?’ ‘Who are we, and what do we bring to the table in unique and different in positive ways?’”

Ardeth Kapp, the ninth Young Women general president who served from 1984 to 1992, suggested changing the class names to “Daughters of God,” according to Tait.

But the acronym (DOG) was, the historian quipped, “a little problematic.”