Church of Jesus Christ celebrates Women’s History Month with book release on Young Women organization

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released its first-ever scholarly, book-length history of the Young Women organization on Tuesday.

The book, titled “Carry On: The Latter-day Saint Young Women Organization, 1870–2024,” recounts both the evolution of the Young Women program and the stories of many girls whom it has helped.

“It’s a history of a women’s organization — run by women, run for women — that has been a fundamental part of the experience of young women and adult women in the Church for many generations," said Lisa Olsen Tait, a church historian and one of the authors of the book. “We can’t claim that it’s a thorough account of young women’s experiences themselves, but it does contain many wonderful examples that illustrate girls' experience in the context of larger themes.”

The book release comes during Women’s History Month, which is annually celebrated in March.

“One of the hopes that we have for this project is that it’s establishing a baseline for understanding of the history in a way that will hopefully plant seeds and create openings for future scholarship for people to do more research and help us understand better,” Olsen Tait said.

It took nearly a decade to produce “Carry On.” Olsen Tait and other church historians spent that time going through documented histories of Young Women groups worldwide — some of which, Olsen Tait said, hadn’t been looked at since they were created. Those histories included autobiographies, oral histories, correspondence, local and general meeting minutes, church magazines, a variety of curriculum materials and other records.

President Emily Belle Freeman, who oversees the Young Women program globally, said the book answers a question that many people have: “What is the place of a woman in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?”

“What I’ve learned is that God does care about his daughters, and he is concerned about the direction that they are pursuing in their life,” President Freeman said.

Although a scholarly work, it is easy to read, said Elder Hugo E. Martinez, General Authority Seventy and assistant executive director of Church History Department, who conducted the event.

“It’s a historical narrative of key events that cycle back and forth and how they were handled throughout, mingled with personal stories, which is how the Lord would have us teach the history of the restored Church,” he said.

The book is available at Deseret Book and on Amazon for $34.99.