A historical look at brave Latter-day Saint women throughout the faith's history.
The women's Relief Society logo displays the organization's motto, Charity Never Faileth.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.
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.
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. 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.
Utah Latter-day Saint Alice Louise Nay died at age 17 by nursing a neighbor during a flu epidemic in the early 20th century.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.
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.
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.
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.”
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