Footnotes
All the organization’s early meetings (with the exception of one irregularly planned special meeting) were held on Thursdays, suggesting that the meeting took place on a Thursday. At the close of the society’s meeting held 24 March 1842, the society adjourned until the following Thursday, which was 31 March. This 31 March meeting date is confirmed in JS’s journal. (Relief Society Minute Book, 24 Mar. 1842, 21; 19 Apr. 1842, [30], in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 41, 49; JS, Journal, 31 Mar. 1842.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
Snow copied the letter from JS that was read during the meeting into the minute book following the minutes of 28 September 1842 and noted that she had not copied the letter into the minute book where it belonged chronologically because she had not been present “at the time of its reading.” (Relief Society Minute Book, [86]–[88], in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 97–99; see also Letter to Emma Smith and the Relief Society, 31 Mar. 1842.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
Twenty women were present at the society’s first meeting on 17 March 1842. Another eight were admitted that same day and forty-eight more the following week. Despite JS’s instruction to add members to the society slowly, within two months of this sermon the organization was too large to meet in the store and began meeting outdoors in the grove west of the temple construction site. By the end of 1844, over thirteen hundred women had joined the society. (Minutes and Discourses, 17 Mar. 1842; Relief Society Minute Book, 24 Mar. 1842, 15–16, in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 37–38; Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 25.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
See Romans 10:2.
See Hebrews 12:12.
At the organization’s first meeting, JS stated that the society’s presidency would serve as their “constitution” and explained to the members, “The minutes of your meetings will be precedents for you to act upon— your Constitutio[n] and law.” (Minutes and Discourses, 17 Mar. 1842.)
See Exodus 19:6; and Revelation 1:6. Based on this instruction and similar comments JS made to the society at other meetings of the organization, in coming years members of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo and church leaders identified a relationship between the society and the temple and its associated ordinances. Bathsheba Bigler Smith, a founding member of the society, recalled in 1905 that JS “wanted to make us, as the women were in Paul’s day, ‘A kingdom of priestesses.’” (See Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 43n126; Discourse, 28 Apr. 1842; and “Pioneer Stake,” Woman’s Exponent, July and Aug. 1905, 34:14.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
Woman’s Exponent. Salt Lake City. 1872–1914.