Women’s leaders Eliza Snow and Emmeline Wells played pivotal roles in the faith, and now their diaries and discourses are available online.
, and, perhaps above all, a zealous advocate for suffrage and women’s rights.
Researchers set out to create “a female Journal of Discourses” as a kind of parallel to the official “Journal of Discourses,” which is filled with male voices, Latter-day Saint women in the Kanab Relief Society welcomed Snow and her counselors as “lady pioneers,” “mothers in Israel,” “as the elect lady and her counselors,” “president of all the feminine portion of the human race,” and as “leading priestesses.”
By the time she died in 1921, Wells was one of the last members who had met Smith and would “talk about her experience and testify of him,” said Lisa Olsen Tait, a historian manager and specialist in women’s history at the Church History Department. “So there was this great continuity between the pioneer generation of Eliza and the just younger generation. Emmeline would carry on these themes well into the 20th century.
Through it all, Wells advocated for women — and, the researcher said, it was her faith that prompted her to do so.