The example of the Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book helped create a record-keeping sensibility among Latter-day Saint women, who conscientiously created thousands of official and private records during the nineteenth century. The seventy-eight key documents in this collection include minutes of meetings, sermons by both women and men, annual reports from local Relief Societies, newspaper articles and editorials, political petitions and speeches, poetry, letters, journal entries, and reminiscences. They were produced not only near church headquarters but in far-flung settlements in the Mountain West and in areas as remote as Hawaii and England.

These records from the first fifty years of Relief Society give insight not only into the spiritual and ecclesiastical dimensions of Latter-day Saint women's lives but also into their political, temporal, and social pursuits. Relief Society women cared for their families and the poor.

They manufactured and sold goods, worked as midwives and doctors, gave healing blessings, appointed and set apart Relief Society officers, stored grain, built assembly halls, fought for woman suffrage, founded a hospital, defended the practice of plural marriage, and started the church organizations for children and young women.
Hard Cover.