The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women's History

The First Fifty Years of Relief Society, edited by Jill Mulvay Derr, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook and Matthew J. Grow and published by the Church Historian's Press in 2016, is a documentary edition publishing the Nauvoo Relief Society Minute Book in full alongside the principal records of the organisation's first half century, edited to scholarly documentary standards. Its strength is unusual for an institutionally published source: it is both the church's own historical press and a peer reviewed documentary edition prepared by professional historians, so the primary text is presented with full editorial apparatus rather than paraphrase. Its limit is that it is published by the institution whose own history it documents, so a claim about how the volume characterises Relief Society's founding or its leaders' intentions should be checked against independent Mormon studies scholarship as well, even though the documents themselves are reproduced faithfully.