March was widely observed in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia as Women’s History Month, spotlighting the achievements of women, past and present.
This annual monthly commemoration is especially fitting for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because the Relief Society, its global women’s organization, was organized March 17, 1842, a birthday that has been honored and celebrated through most of the years since its founding.
This year’s observance found Latter-day Saint women gathering in chapels to listen to a broadcast featuring Relief Society General President Camille N. Johnson and her counselors, and Russell M. Nelson, the faith’s prophet-president. The prerecorded talks by those leaders were followed by local expressions of women’s faith in covenants, the power of God, and their perceived roles in the church, family and community.
Few specific women — other than Nelson’s two wives, one living and one deceased — were cited by name. Speakers praised the Relief Society’s efforts to support education, nutrition and health care in far-flung regions, without the specificity that I crave and in which I find inspiration. To augment the nonspecific, principles-based teaching of that evening, I offer here brief historical sketches of some Latter-day Saint women, whose convictions led them to actions beyond reverent statements of their faith. These women — most of them unknown to the world at large — embody the original Relief Society mandate “to relieve the poor” and “to save souls,” with the organization’s long-standing motto that “charity never faileth.” (This is not to suggest, of course, that Latter-day Saint women are or were the only ones to step forward to help in times of need, only that Latter-day Saint women have responded to the best ideals of their organization.)
If adhering to Relief Society principles includes heeding the counsel of church leaders, then today’s Relief Society women will be committed to Nelson’s advice given at General Conference a year ago: “In situations that are highly charged and filled with contention, I invite you to remember Jesus Christ. ... As we follow the Prince of Peace, we will become his peacemakers.”
Calming a gunman
(FamilySearch) Cordelia Perkins Green, a Latter-day Saint convert, calmed an intruding gunman at a worship service.
I know of no better or more dramatic illustration of peacemaking than that of Cordelia Perkins Green, a native of Kentucky who joined the faith as a 45-year-old widow in 1900. It was a volatile time for Latter-day Saints in the South, and it grew worse in the spring of 1902 as a Protestant minister issued repeated calls to drive them out of the county. On June 19 that year, Cordelia (known as “Cordie”) attended an outdoor baptism of four converts, then made her way that evening to a schoolhouse for a preaching service. The service commenced with singing and prayer, and a missionary proceeded with his sermon: “This is my commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
At that point, the meeting was interrupted when a man entered with a drawn gun. He ordered the missionaries to leave. Cordelia rose to her feet, noticing her bodily response: “I felt strong and felt so light. I felt like with a little effort I could soar up in the air. I was not scared or the least bit excited.” She stepped between the elders and the gunman, resting her hand on the gunman’s arm. The man tried to push Cordelia away, but she stood her ground, calmly speaking to him, then slowly backing him out of the schoolroom and onto the school grounds. Others followed Cordelia’s lead, speaking soothingly to the gunman and the dozens of other men they found waiting outside. In the face of Cordelia’s peaceful approach, the mob shamefacedly melted into the woods and left the elders and the Saints to continue their meeting.
Delivering the Dutch
(FamilySearch) Geertruida Lodder Zippro — with her husband, Willem, and their son, Johannes —helped feed and clothe Dutch Latter-day Saints during World War II.
War has been a natural setting for other acts of extraordinary bravery by Latter-day Saint women who were called to fulfill the ideals of the Relief Society despite the perils.
Geertruida Lodder Zippro, district president of the Netherlands Relief Society, was living in Amsterdam in May 1940 when Rotterdam was obliterated by two days of German bombing. While others were fleeing the chaos, Geertruida rode her bicycle 60 miles directly into the smoke and panic. She found the Latter-day Saint chapel in Rotterdam destroyed. The mission home was largely intact, however, so Geertruida made that her base of operations, helping displaced Saints find shelter, and distributing bedding, food and clothing donated by other Dutch members. She continued her bike rides throughout the war — even after her tires wore out and her husband, Willem, had to wire lengths of garden hose to the rims — arranging for food distribution and keeping isolated Saints in contact with one another.
After the war, Geertruida and her family emigrated to Salt Lake City; she and her husband now lie in the city’s historic cemetery.
Saving airmen
(FamilySearch) Lucile Fabres, with Latter-day Saint missionary Rudger Jones, at her baptism in 1937.
Lucile Fabres, a nurse in her 50s when she joined the faith in 1937, was an active Relief Society participant in a Paris branch until the beginning of World War II.
Possibly to protect the other Latter-day Saint women in Paris, Lucile’s name was omitted from the records kept by her good friend Eveline Kleinert, who held that branch together during the war years. Lucile had a radio that allowed her to receive broadcasts from England, and she transmitted news and messages to the French Resistance. At least four times, she rescued Allied airmen who had parachuted from their destroyed planes and hid them in her apartment until they could be passed along on the road toward England.
She participated in the liberation of Paris. Although details are scarce, historian Grant Emery has discovered the broad outlines of her service, including the fact that the governments of France, Canada and the United States awarded medals to Lucile for her work in saving the lives of their airmen.
Fleeing genocide
(Church History Library) Yeranik Gedikian fled the the genocide of Armenians in Turkey.
Other wartime women embodied Relief Society ideals by enduring and emerging with spirits intact.
Yeranik Gedikian grew up as a Latter-day Saint in the Armenian community at Aintab, Turkey. When she was 16, the genocide of Armenians by the Turks washed over her people, and Yeranik was driven south into the Syrian desert, following the same route used by the Israelites who had been driven into captivity in Babylon.
Yeranik’s young husband was shot, and she endured the next three years in an open-air concentration camp before escaping and making her way back to Aintab. In 1922, Yeranik fled from Aintab to Aleppo, Syria, as shifting borders and political conditions made one place less dangerous than another. In Aleppo, Yeranik was reunited with a brother. She was also called into Relief Society service. Having endured the worst of what humankind could do, she was well suited to reach out with compassion to others in great need.
Enduring internment
(Ardis E. Parshall) Chiyo Koji Shiogi, the first Japanese Latter-day Saint convert to emigrate to the United States, holding her eldest son, Woodrow, with her husband and a brother-in-law on their Oregon berry farm.
Chiyo Koji Shiogi, the first Japanese convert to the faith to emigrate to the United States, arrived in Portland in 1912. She carried with her the recommendation of her mission president, Elbert D. Thomas, stating that Chiyo, a college-educated woman, had taught Sunday school classes. Knowing of the prejudices at home, Thomas urged the American Saints to “treat her as a saint should be treated” and “do your best to see that she is guarded from unfair treatment.”
Chiyo had come to the U.S. to marry a Japanese farmer, whose home and work were far from any Latter-day Saint branch. Her formal church activity necessarily ceased. But she retained some awareness of those she had once known. Chiyo’s husband was arrested by the FBI on the evening of the Pearl Harbor bombing, and Chiyo and her youngest child — a U.S. citizen — were soon interned in the camp at Minidoka, Idaho, where they spent years behind barbed wire.
Chiyo somehow was able to contact Thomas, who had become a U.S. senator. He labored tirelessly to locate Chiyo’s husband, Sadaji Shiogi. While Thomas was not able to free the family, he did succeed in reuniting the family at Minidoka.
Nursing the sick
(FamilySearch) Elsie Thackery, a Utah Latter-day Saint nurse, helped treat flu patients in 1918 before dying of the disease at age 19.
The Relief Society’s mandate to relieve suffering found early expression in nursing the sick, a practice that extended from tending patients in homes, providing medical training in frontier Utah and establishing hospitals. Some Relief Society women gave their lives in service to their ideals.
Elsie Thackery of Croydon, Utah, began her formal nursing education at Salt Lake City’s LDS Hospital at age 18. When a flu pandemic reached Utah late in the fall of 1918, she remained at her post, until she was infected herself, becoming one of Utah’s earliest flu victims, dying at age 19 on Nov. 3. Leonie Reeder, 27, of Brigham City, was also a nurse, so well respected that she was hired to tend to a dying church President Joseph F. Smith (he did not have influenza, although he did die during the first surge of the pandemic). Leonie caught influenza while tending to another patient and died Dec. 2. Other nurses died after contracting flu from their patients; some wives and mothers died after nursing their own families. But the need for nursing patients was so great that many women volunteered to care for neighbors and others for whom they were not responsible, save for purely altruistic reasons. One such volunteer Utah caregiver, Alice Louise Nay of Monroe, was 17 when she died of the illness she contracted while nursing a neighbor.
(FamilySearch) Utah Latter-day Saint Alice Louise Nay died at age 17 by nursing a neighbor during a flu epidemic in the early 20th century.
Breaking a language barrier
Other women, as young as nurses Elsie and Alice, extended themselves beyond their home circles in the spirit of Relief Society service. Herta Klara Kullick, for instance, was 16 in 1925, when three church leaders arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to open the first formal mission in South America. The elders had come at the invitation of several German families, immigrants to Argentina, who asked to be baptized.
Herta was the youngest of five new converts. But missionary work stalled at that point. The German adults spoke no Spanish and could not introduce the missionaries to anyone outside their circle. Two of the three missionaries spoke no Spanish. Newspapers were not interested in printing Mormon announcements. The missionaries, one of them an apostle, could find no better way to try to contact the vast majority of Buenos Aires residents than to pass out flyers on the street corner. That is, until Herta, who had picked up Spanish, decided to invite some of her friends to watch a missionary slideshow. She brought more than 100 of her friends to that meeting.
(FamilySearch) Herta Klara Kullick, the only teenager in this group photo, helped boost the success Latter-day Saint missionary work in Argentina by learning how to speak Spanish. The man on left, with white mustache, is Rulon S. Wells of the then-First Council of Seventy; the man on the right with the paper in his jacket pocket is apostle Melvin J. Ballard. The balding man standing next to Herta is her father, Jacob Kullick; her mother, Anna Biebersdorf Kullick, is seated at the left in the row of women (her hair is parted in the middle).
Spanish-speaking parents soon began attending meetings to ask why their children expected to pray before meals and to learn the new songs their children were singing. Spanish names began showing up in the baptismal records of the new mission after Herta’s simple invitation to her friends broke the language barrier.
Baking the bread of life
When an earthquake struck San Francisco on the morning of April 18, 1906, Salt Lake City, as one of the nearest large cities that could furnish assistance, filled trains with relief supplies.
It was an emergency tailor-made for women who lived by ideals of feeding the hungry and caring for the destitute. While the city could furnish untold amounts of raw wheat, the California sufferers could not make immediate use of that wheat, nor could they readily use flour in the first days of the crisis. They needed bread, and lots of it, ready to eat. The women of Salt Lake City baked bread in their kitchens all day, and carried it to train stations to be shipped to California that night.
Perhaps one of the youngest women to make such a contribution was 14-year-old Nabbie Clawson, who was experienced in caring for her father’s family after her mother died. Nabbie’s name was not recorded in the city’s newspapers that day, but because she slipped notes of encouragement under the wrappers of her bread, some of the responses she received were printed over the following weeks, noting the gratitude of recipients and sending greetings to the women who had helped them.
Facing bigotry
Some Latter-day Saint women who most deserve remembrance, perhaps, are those who joined the faith and embraced Relief Society principles under a double handicap: Not only did they choose to believe at times and in places where the faith was held in particular contempt, but they also did so despite the refusal of their religious sisters and brothers to fully accept them in the faith.
The stories of many such women — Black Latter-day Saints — are becoming better known due to research projects like historian W. Paul Reeve’s “Century of Black Mormons” and Amy Tanner Thiriot’s award-winning publication, “Slavery in Zion.”
(Ancestry) Samantha Norman Cummings, a Black Latter-day Saint who endured racism within the faith, is pictured with daughter Susan Cummings.
Samantha Norman Cummings of Mecosta County, Mich., was baptized as a Latter-day Saint in 1876, incredibly early for such Black conversions at a distance from Utah. Although she wrote to church President John Taylor asking about the possibilities of emigrating to Utah, Samantha remained in Michigan the rest of her long life, the heart of an extended mixed-race family of Latter-day Saints, with Black, white and Native ancestry. Her life, traced by Brigham Young University student genealogist Sarah Day, shows Samantha remained connected to the faith, despite only occasional contacts from missionaries, to the point that 40 years after her baptism, perhaps presenting herself as mixed white and Native without mentioning her Black heritage, she traveled to Salt Lake City and went to the temple there, receiving ordinances that were formally withheld at the time from Black members.
Identifying 19th- or early 20th-century Black members of the faith often reveals expressions of racism in Latter-day Saint records. One leader touring Brazil in 1959, for instance described the “surprising experience” of “find[ing] our Relief Society president there a Negro woman,” with another “young girl in her early 20s with Negro blood in charge of the Primary.” While he did acknowledge that these two were “recognized as the strongest women in the community,” his “surprising” discovery also provoked a discussion of limitations placed on Black members and the need to better train missionaries to deal with “this problem.”
The prejudice was apparently so great that when Relief Society President Geni Diniz Junqueira Pereira emigrated to Utah and Idaho, she concealed her racial background from even her grandchildren, who discovered it in recent years through DNA testing. Geni may be the earliest Black Latter-day Saint woman to preside over white women as Relief Society president, and I am glad to know that the grandson with whom I have been in touch is deservedly proud of his grandmother.
(FamilySearch) Geni Diniz Junqueira Pereira, a Black Latter-day Saint who led a local women's Relief Society.
While Samantha and Geni were able to “pass” as white for the purpose of temple attendance, no such opportunity for full acceptance within her faith came to my most beloved early Black member of Relief Society. Marie Benjamin Graves of Oakland, Calif., was obviously Black. She and her husband, William, had no known problems fitting into their primarily white Oakland branch after their 1911 baptism. Both appear frequently in branch minutes praying and bearing testimony.
In 1920, however, when the couple traveled to Atlanta, and Marie wanted to take two friends to worship with her, she recorded that “we found the right church, all right, but found the wrong people.”
Marie tried to claim her membership, but “it seems like I had gone into a den of evil spirits, so bad was the feelings against us, because we was colored.”
Shocked by such treatment, Marie wrote to church President Heber J. Grant, believing he would correct the problem. She vowed that while “I never had nothing to hurt me like that in all of my life,” her faith would remain intact.
It did — despite the letter Grant sent to the president of the California Mission asking him to tell Marie that “should Oakland suddenly become populated thickly by Negroes, evidently the same color line would have to be drawn there as now exists in the Southern states.”
(Oakland Stake) Marie Benjamin Graves, a Black Latter-day Saint who encountered racism in the church but remained faithful.
Marie continued to attend services, teaching classes, folding paper cups for the sacrament (Communion), donating to Relief Society charitable funds and in all other ways refusing to be driven away from the faith she loved.
Most Latter-day Saint women will not face wartime risks, or blatant bigotry from fellow members. Our service may be as homely as that recorded by mission president and future apostle Charles A. Callis on the recommendation he wrote in 1912 for Eliza Ann Jane Durrance of San Mateo, Fla.: “In addition to her many other good qualities ‘Aunt Sis’ is not excelled as a maker of good bread. Many and many a time she had favored the missionaries in Jacksonville with a good loaf.”
Or we might contribute labor to welfare work, or visit the lonely, or tend children so others can attend the temple, or in any number of other ways relieve small burdens. It’s all worthy work — worthy of doing, worthy of remembering, worthy of recording about the women of our past. Charity never faileth.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Ardis E. Parshall, Latter-day Saint research historian in Salt Lake City, surrounded by her beloved books.
Ardis E. Parshall is an independent research historian who can be found on social media as @Keepapitchinin and at Keepapitchinin.org. She occasionally takes breaks from transcribing historical documents to promote the aims of the Mormon History Association’s Ardis E. Parshall Public History Award.