Under Utah territorial leadership in the later nineteenth century, the Relief Society expanded well beyond charitable relief into direct civic and professional roles unusual for a women's religious auxiliary of its era: it ran a grain storage program that supplied wheat during regional and, later, wartime shortages, published its own periodical, the Woman's Exponent and later the Relief Society Magazine, and helped sponsor women's medical education, sending several Latter-day Saint women to study medicine so they could serve Utah's rural communities directly. The society was also active in the national suffrage movement, and Utah women, Relief Society members prominent among them, gained the vote in the territory in 1870, decades ahead of the federal amendment.
Today the Relief Society operates as the church's organization for all women eighteen and older, paralleling the Young Women organization for teenage girls, with a chapter meeting in every ward and branch worldwide and a general presidency at the church's Salt Lake City headquarters that reports to the church's global leadership. Its contemporary work centers on weekly religious instruction, visiting and welfare ministry to individual women and families, and coordination with the church's broader humanitarian and welfare programs, making it, by the church's own account, among the largest women's organizations in the world by membership, though it functions as an integrated auxiliary of the church rather than an independent body.