Emma Hale Smith

Emma Hale was born in Harmony, Pennsylvania, in 1804, and married Joseph Smith in January 1827 against the wishes of her father, who thought little of him. She was present at the beginning of everything that followed. She acted as scribe for part of the translation of the Book of Mormon, and the manuscript pages she wrote survive. A revelation dictated to her husband in July 1830, now Doctrine and Covenants section 25, addresses her directly, calls her an elect lady, tells her to be a comfort to her husband and to expound scripture and exhort the church, and assigns her the task of making a selection of sacred hymns.

That hymnbook, published at Kirtland in 1836, founded the Latter-day Saint hymn tradition, and several of the texts she selected are still sung. On 17 March 1842 she was organised as the first president of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, an office whose charter the surviving minute book records in unusually expansive terms.

Her losses were extraordinary even by the standards of the period. She bore eleven children including two sets of twins and adopted two more; six died in infancy or early childhood. She was driven from Missouri in winter, crossed the frozen Mississippi with four children while her husband was imprisoned at Liberty, and was widowed at forty with four surviving children and pregnant with a fifth.

Emma Smith did not join the exodus. She remained in Nauvoo, married Lewis Bidamon in 1847, and lived out her life in Illinois. In 1860 she stood with her eldest son, Joseph Smith III, when he accepted the leadership of what became the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, now the Community of Christ, a body that rejected both plural marriage and the authority of Brigham Young. That decision made her, for more than a century, a difficult figure in the Utah-based church, and nineteenth century accounts written there were often unkind about her.

The hardest problem is her testimony about plural marriage. She denied to the end of her life that her husband had practised it, and repeated the denial to her son in 1879, weeks before her death. The surviving documentary record does not support the denial, and the church's own 2014 Gospel Topics essay states that Joseph Smith had between thirty and forty plural wives. What is equally well attested is that Emma knew of at least some of the marriages, consented to a few and then withdrew consent, and opposed the practice in Nauvoo with considerable force. Historians read the later denials variously as protection of her sons' position, as a refusal to concede the ground to Utah, or as something closer to a settled account of her own life. None of these readings is established, and the atlas does not choose between them.

Her standing in the Utah church has recovered steadily since the 1970s, and in 2016 that church published in full the Relief Society minute book she presided over.