When she was called to serve as the fifth president for the Relief Society at the age of 82, she was the oldest woman to serve in that position. She had personally known all four of the previous Relief Society presidents, and was the last president with a personal knowledge of the Prophet Joseph Smith. From leading the women’s suffrage movement to editing the second women’s magazine in the nation, her life was devoted to women.
Born in Massachusetts on leap year day – February 29, 1828 – Emmeline later attributed her vigor to the fact that she only aged every fourth year. She was the seventh of nine children born to David and Diadama Hare Woodward, and began school at the precocious age of three. She knew early in her life that she wanted to be a writer, though her mother pushed her towards teaching, believing she would be unable to earn a living writing. Thus Emmeline was away at school in New Salem, Massachusetts, earning her teaching certificate, when her mother and three youngest sisters met the Mormon missionaries and were subsequently baptized. When Emmeline returned, she, too, was baptized at the age of fourteen, on March 1, 1842 – sixteen days before the first Relief Society meeting in Nauvoo.
Worried about the difficulties that membership in the church would bring, and wanting her daughter to stay strong, her mother urged her to marry the branch president’s son, James Harvey Harris, when the two were but fifteen. The couple moved with Emmeline’s in-laws to Nauvoo in 1844, where she met the Prophet Joseph Smith.
Only two months later, Joseph was killed in Carthage. Emmeline’s in-laws were discouraged by the mob persecution and dissension among the Saints, and pleaded with the couple to join them in returning to New England, but the two decided to stay in Nauvoo. Two months after the martyrdom, Emmeline gave birth to a son, who passed away within five weeks. Shortly after, James left to find work and never returned, leaving Emmeline brokenhearted. She received only two letters from him, although following the death of his mother in 1888 – fourty-four years after he left – she found many more stored in their attic, waiting to be forwarded to a lonely wife.
Emmeline began teaching in Nauvoo to support herself, and worked as a tutor for the children of Bishop Newel K. Whitney, who she later married as a plural wife. She developed a strong friendship with his first wife, Elizabeth Ann (who served as counselor in the Relief Society with Emma Smith), and greatly mourned her death in 1882. She gave birth to two daughters with Bishop Whitney, the second only a few weeks before his death.
In Salt Lake, Emmeline turned to teaching, and in 1852 became the seventh wife to Daniel H. Wells, a close friend of Bishop Whitneys. With him, she gave birth to three daughters.
As her daughters grew, Emmeline gave a new definition to the phrase “women’s work.” She was one of the ten women called to lead the Relief Society with its reorganization in 1866; she was a leader in the suffrage movement and cultivated a long-time friendship with Susan B. Anthony; and she first contributed and then edited the Women’s Exponent, the first women’s magazine in the West and the second in the nation. She served as secretary for the Deseret Hospital, established by the Relief Society in 1882, and helped organize the Primary Association.
In September 1876, President Brigham Young asked her to direct a project to gather and store wheat. Using the Women’s Exponent, she urged women to gather wheat scattered along fences and ditch banks after the harvest. The first year, 10,465 bushels of wheat were stored. The Relief Society donated the wheat to the poor and loaned several thousand bushels to farmers for spring planting. The most successful long-term Relief Society project, the wheat gathering enabled the Relief Society to help ease the effects of a Utah drought in 1898 and 1899, sent train cars full of wheat to the survivors of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and sold 100,000 bushels to the government during World War I.
In her work with women’s suffrage, Emmeline gained national and international prominence. Since Utah gave women the right to vote in 1870, she used the movement primarily to fight for plural marriage. To the surprise of the feminists back east, many women viewed it as a form of liberation, since when wives were able to share the housework and child care duties, they were better able to pursue their own interests. However, when polygamy was outlawed in 1887, Utah women also lost the right to vote. Emmeline then rallied for statehood, which would give Utah the right to decide whether or not women could vote.
Emmeline served as secretary of the Relief Society general board in 1888 under Zina D. H. Young, and as general secretary in the Relief Society in 1892 under Zina Young, and again in 1901 under Bathsheba W. Smith. On October 3, 1910, Emmeline was called to be the fifth general President of the Relief Society.
During Emmeline’s administration, the Relief Society motto “Charity Never Faileth” was chosen. A social services department was organized in January 1919, and courses were established in theology, genealogy, art, literature, home science, obstetrics, and nursing. Opposed to a centralized educational program, Emmeline urged each ward and stake to shape their own programs. She was the second person and the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Brigham Young University, and one of only a hundred women nationally to receive any form of honorary degree.
The first Relief Society president to be released from service, Emmeline was startled when President Heber J. Grant visited her home to do so on April 2, 1921. After he left, she suffered a stroke on her way upstairs and lay nearly comatose for three weeks, before passing away. Flags flew at half-mast in Utah to commemorate her death – the first time this had ever been done in honor of a woman. On the one-hundredth anniversary of her birth (only seven years after her death), a marble bust was placed in the rotunda of the State Capital, bearing the inscription “A Fine Soul Who Served Us.”
Related Articles:
Relief Society Presidents: An Introduction
Relief Society Presidents: Emma Hale Smith
Relief Society Presidents: Eliza Roxy Snow
Relief Society Presidents: Zina D. H. Young
Relief Society Presidents: Bathsheba W. Smith