Grain, Suffrage, Hospitals, and Correlation

Between 1867 and the early twentieth century the Relief Society operated as something close to an autonomous institution inside the church. It ran a grain storage programme, buying and holding wheat against famine, and in 1918 sold about two hundred thousand bushels of it to the United States government for the war effort. It published the Woman's Exponent from 1872 and later the Relief Society Magazine. It financed and operated the Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City, sent women east to train as physicians and brought them back, and ran midwife and nursing training for a territory that had almost no other provision.

Its leaders were public figures. Utah women voted from 1870, the second jurisdiction in the United States to enfranchise them, and Relief Society leaders were central to that campaign and to its restoration after the federal Edmunds-Tucker Act stripped the vote away in 1887. Emmeline B. Wells, later the general president, edited the Exponent and corresponded with Susan B. Anthony.

The correlation programme of the 1960s and 1970s ended most of it. The society's finances, its magazine, its curriculum and its independent projects were absorbed into central church departments under priesthood direction. The church presents this as an alignment of effort in a global organisation, and that is a real argument. Historians of the movement, including Latter-day Saint historians publishing with the church's own press, also describe it as a substantial loss of institutional independence, and both descriptions are accurate.