Eliza R. Snow
Poet, Relief Society president, and the woman who put Heavenly Mother into words the whole Church could sing
A Voice Given to the Restoration
Eliza Roxcy Snow was born in 1804 in Beckett, Massachusetts, into a family that would eventually embrace the Restoration in full. Educated, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a poet’s gift, she joined the Church in 1835 and became one of its most formidable voices — a confidant of the Prophet Joseph Smith, a plural wife sealed to him in 1842, and ultimately the woman who gave the Latter-day Saint world one of its most theologically significant hymns.
She was known in her lifetime as “Zion’s Poetess,” and the title was not honorary. Her verse carried doctrine. Her words were not decoration around the gospel — they were the gospel in a form that could be remembered, sung, and felt long after a sermon fades.
O My Father — The Hymn That Changed Everything
In 1845 — one year after the martyrdom of Joseph Smith — Eliza published a poem that would become one of the defining theological statements of the entire Restoration. The hymn “O My Father” opened with a longing to remember a premortal home, then built to its most extraordinary verse:
O My Father — Verse 3
“In the heav’ns are parents single? / No, the thought makes reason stare! / Truth is reason; truth eternal / Tells me I’ve a mother there.”
That verse did not drift into the Church by accident. Eliza had heard the doctrine from the Prophet himself — that God our Father has an eternal companion, a Heavenly Mother, and that we are literally the spirit children of both. She put it into poetry because poetry is what the heart can hold when the mind is still adjusting to the enormity of a truth.
Brigham Young later confirmed the hymn as doctrine. The Church has since affirmed the reality of a Heavenly Mother. And the source of that affirmation — the woman through whom it reached the congregations — was Eliza. She found the words when no one else had them yet.
O My Father — Final Verse
“When I leave this frail existence, / When I lay this mortal by, / Father, Mother, may I meet you / In your royal courts on high.”
That is not sentiment. It is a covenantal expectation — the hope of exaltation spoken by a woman who understood precisely what exaltation meant.
Relief Society President
After Emma Smith — the first Relief Society president — separated from the main body of the Church following Joseph’s martyrdom, Eliza became the anchor of Latter-day Saint women’s leadership. She was sustained as second general president of the Relief Society in 1866 under Brigham Young, and she served until her death in 1887.
She organized Relief Societies across the Utah Territory — in every ward and settlement — at a time when women’s formal organization was not guaranteed in frontier Zion. She traveled tirelessly by wagon and on horseback to small settlements where women had never had such an institution. She trained leaders. She wrote curriculum. She insisted on the sacred and practical dignity of women’s service in the kingdom.
Brigham Young once called her “Presidentess Snow” — a title he gave no one else. He trusted her absolutely. And she used that trust to build something that outlasted them both by more than a century.
The Theology Underneath the Poetry
What makes Eliza remarkable is that she understood the difference between sentiment and doctrine — and she served the latter. Her hymn was not wishful thinking about a cosmic mother. It was the articulation of a revelatory framework: that eternal life is not solitary, that exaltation is familial, that the relationships which matter most here are not dissolved at death but perfected beyond it.
The Restoration’s understanding of exaltation — that God is a glorified, embodied being with an eternal companion and an eternal family — had no cleaner statement in the early Church than what Eliza wrote in verse. The principles are revealed in scripture; she made them singable and therefore memorable and therefore loved.
Key Scriptures
- D&C 25:7 — “Thou shalt be ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church” — the pattern of the elect lady that Eliza embodied
- D&C 132:19–20 — Eternal marriage and exaltation; the scriptural framework “O My Father” sings about
- Acts 2:17 — “Your daughters shall prophesy” — Eliza fulfilled this in word and in the leadership she built
Covenant Loyalty Under Personal Loss
Eliza Snow also teaches something about covenant loyalty in the face of profound personal loss. She had no children. She survived the martyrdom of a husband she could not publicly claim in the social world of her day. She crossed the plains with the pioneer company, burying behind her most of what she had built in Nauvoo. She built an organization in raw frontier conditions.
And through all of it, she wrote verse that sang of a mother in heaven. That is the comfort you offer when you know from the inside what it costs to endure — when you have survived enough loss to know that only something eternal can bear the weight of what mortality takes from you.
Faithful, educated women do something specific with the gospel: they carry it deeper. They find the implication others left unspoken, and they make it explicit — in hymn, in organization, in the quiet insistence that women’s work in the kingdom is not auxiliary to the real work, but constitutive of it. Eliza understood that. She gave it form. And the Church has been singing it ever since.