Articles

August 2025 We’re pleased to announce a new toolkit and free resources available now about Utah women’s many roles in World War Two! As Utahns commemorate the 80th anniversary of the war’s end, this toolkit provides free resources for K-12 educators and lifelong learners. Utah women took on many new roles during WWII in the […]

BY ELIZA DURHAM, BETTER DAYS INTERN “Women are the last remaining important reservoir of labor.”[1] When the United States joined World War Two, Utah women’s roles increased in almost every area of the workforce as women stepped up to help their country. Like the national symbol of Rosie the Riveter, the women of Utah who […]

BY DARCI GARDNER, BETTER DAYS INTERN “I told them I will go AWOL before I would be a secretary,” said Kathryn Klaveano, one of the many Utah women who served in the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) during World War II. She went on to become a flight orderly for domestic military flights. […]

November 26, 2024 A true pioneer, Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon blazed trails as a doctor, suffragist, public health reformer, and the nation’s first female state senator. Her statue’s been selected to represent Utah in the National Statuary Hall Collection and her installation date has (finally) been set for December 11, 2024. We’re hosting an open […]

October 2024 We’re thrilled to co-host an official quarter release celebration for Yankton Sioux author, musician, and political activist Zitkála-Šá on October 24! Join us at the Salt Lake City Main Library for an inspiring program with speakers, a short film, and a performance from the Sun Dance Opera she co-composed while living in Utah. Find […]

September 10, 2024 We’re pleased to announce the return of our annual “She Started It” art contest for students in grades 4 – 12! Utah women make history, but they’re often missing from our textbooks. Students can research a woman in Utah history and submit original artwork about her for the opportunity to win cash […]

March 2024 We’re pleased to announce a new toolkit and resources about Utah women in World War One! The Great War shaped and was shaped by millions of women across the globe, and Utah women were no exception. World War One involved Utah women in new capacities. Some witnessed the violence of the war firsthand […]

By Lauren Webb Because so many men left jobs to fight in World War I, women were given new opportunities for work. Many Utah women went to work in positions that had never been open to them before. On September 24, 1919, seventeen-year-old Alta Hester clocked-in to her job as an elevator operator at the […]

by Lauren Webb In 1918, a group of women living on the Goshute Reservation in Western Utah took action to protest the arrest of a group of their men. The men had been arrested for resisting the draft during World War I. By the beginning of the First World War, most Native and Indigenous peoples […]

By Emily Peterson, Better Days Research Assistant Beginning in 1876, members of the Relief Society, the women’s organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, began a mass effort to grow and store grain. Emmeline B. Wells, editor of the Relief Society magazine The Exponent, wrote an article encouraging women to grow wheat […]

by Amber Taylor, LDS Church History Library Most nineteenth-century women in the United States couldn’t yet vote at the national level, but they participated in benevolent societies and later clubs as a way to assert their influence locally and nationally. In the 1890s, many suffragists in the US and abroad began turning their club work […]

September 6, 2023 We’re pleased to announce the return of our annual “She Started It” art contest for students in grades 4 – 12! Utah women make history, and we need your help to show it. Download the contest flier here, or read on for full details. Submit to the contest here The task: Create […]