Articles

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 […]