Links to:

Eliza R. Snow Papers
Emmeline B. Wells Papers

On Thursday, October 27, 2022, the Church History Library of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints launched the websites for the Eliza R. Snow and Emmeline B. Wells Papers. Either of these projects would be newsworthy; the two of them together promise to launch many new projects in Latter-day Saint women’s history.

Some context for the project: beginning decades ago, historians like Cherry B. Silver, Sheree Bench, Jill Mulvey Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, and others transcribed and annotated documents. Then, roughly a decade ago, the historian Jill Derr suggested the creation of “a female Journal of Discourses” for Latter-day Saints to access women’s words and witness. These Papers Projects join Relief Society: The First Fifty Years and At the Pulpit: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History as collections in these “journals of discourse.”

Jennifer Reeder spoke on Snow, sharing several documents (which I share below) that reveal “the Lioness of the Lord’s” personality and administration. Of particular note was her reflection on Brigham Young asking her to “instruct the sisters.”[1] She remembered, years later, “Altho’ my heart was ‘pit a pat’ for the time being, I did not, and could not then form an adequate estimate of the magnitude of the work before me.” Her career took her to many groups close to her home in Salt Lake and throughout the Intermountain West.

Reeder shared several fascinating items from Snow’s life. First, she emphasized that Snow was not “the queen of everything.” She did not see herself as the center of attention. Like the postal service, she traveled through rain and Snow and the dark of night to meet with women in far-flung locations to preach and meet with Latter-day Saint women. She sought to meet with women in community and truly enjoyed the face-to-face meetings, asking women not to wear bonnets to Relief Society meetings so that she could see their faces without obstruction. She asked women to work together, metaphorically combining their shares of coal to build burning fires of faith and women’s networks. As she said in one 1874 address, “In this Church and Kingdom there was no such thing as dividing the interests of Man & Woman that they were identical that they are coworkers in this Church for the building up of the same and strengthening of each other.”

Reeder mentioned that Snow often quoted from the Nauvoo Relief Society Book, referring to it as the Relief Society’s “Constitution.” Far less critical to Snow’s life, but she also noted that someone pressed purple flowers into the Minute Book, which illuminates how readily accessible the book is as if one could pop some flowers in. Reeder further shared that Zina D.H. Young often read Doctrine and Covenants 25 with Latter-day Saint women.

Lisa Olsen Tait spoke on Emmeline B. Wells’ papers and life. One fascinating insight was that Wells used “Woman” rather than “Women” in her writing, representing women’s collective interest rather than individual groups of women. She came to leadership at a time when the walls between the public and the private broke down, giving women like her opportunities to lead and teach in public. Wells used those opportunities to empower female networks and build a strong sense of community.

I thought that Wells’ 1892 Relief Society Jubilee address reveals a woman who saw women’s liberation connected to Joseph Smith’s Restoration project. “Woman,” she said, “is being emancipated from error, superstition, and darkness” alongside, and because of, Joseph Smith’s restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ.

I was also, and I’m not sure how to say this more clearly, heartened to hear that Wells’s feelings were intense and often melancholy. She felt neglect and marked grief, noting death dates and their anniversaries, sadnesses, and frustrations. She wanted to make a difference through her poetry and spend more time writing. It seems that a prophecy that Orson F. Whitney pronounced, in her remembering, “[Wells] should have nothing to do but to devote my whole time to writing and to literary pursuits, and that I should sit and eat and drink and converse with the nobles of the earth and tell them of the Gospel.”

She also noted her positive feelings when teaching her grandchildren to pray or meeting with other LDS women and speaking in tongues or blessing each other. LDS leaders were intimately connected to their audiences, a responsibility and luxury of Church membership living in relative physical proximity.

Church History Department Director Matthew J. Grow spent time honoring the historians and note-takers, those who wrote the primary sources, and those who deeply researched them, calling attention to the great work done over decades to see these projects accomplished. As Grow noted, women’s voices are increasingly integrated better into the Church History Department’s products, not limited only to primary source projects, but to the SAINTS series, museum exhibits, and public sites.

Like Reeder and Tait, Grow emphasized that Snow and Wells advocated for unity and valued their time spent building community wherever they could.

Emptying the Notebook (and other stray thoughts)

Following up on Derr’s vision of a “women’s Journal of Discourses,” I’m hoping for at least 26 volumes of discourses to match the JD series!

Speaking with historian Cherry Silver at the launch event, she mentioned that originally they hoped to print the Wells diaries in three volumes (at about 600 pages apiece), but that the digitization process has made it much simpler to put the sources online where anyone can use them.

I would love a video series where historians shared their favorite documents and how those sources became “alive to them.” 10/10, would watch it.

It was readily apparent to me that volumes like Snow’s and Wells’ papers are aimed at Latter-day Saints but are also intended to be helpful to academics. Serving both audiences can be tricky to walk, and I appreciate how much time goes into making sources accessible and readily useable in myriad contexts. Historians of the US West, women’s history, political history, and American religion should plan to incorporate the primary sources and follow up on the annotations in their work.

Truly, no one does as great a job as the Church History Library in making primary sources available to the public. A significant part of the credit goes to the digitization and web teams, who toil behind the scenes, negotiate legal requirements, and create miles of code to allow historians to do their work. I’m not sure if they’d want to be named, but Audrey D. and Naomi W. both received special mentions in conversations with Snow and Wells researchers. Once more, it’s women at the forefront of Latter-day Saint history, and they deserve more credit and recognition.

Speaking of sources, Reeder noted that the Snow team read approximately 480,000 pages found in 1600 Minutebooks, 384 issues of The Woman’s Exponent, and hundreds of newspapers, journals, and books. Who paid for senior historians to organize the project? Who set aside funds for interns, research assistants, tech crews, digitization, and the thousand other resources needed for a project of this size? The LDS Church History Library (and BYU’s Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History). All this is to say that no one invests as much in LDS women researchers and research on LDS women’s history as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

[1] Underlined in original.