Emma Smith
The elect lady — first president of the Relief Society, scribe of the translation, faithful witness to the end
Called by Revelation
Emma Hale married Joseph Smith in January 1827, the same year he received the gold plates. From the beginning her life was inseparable from the Restoration. Before the Church was organized, before most of the revelations were received, Emma was already a participant — scribing portions of the Book of Mormon translation, providing the household that made the work possible.
In July 1830, less than four months after the Church was organized, Joseph received a revelation addressed specifically to Emma — the only revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants addressed to a named individual woman by name:
“Behold, thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady, whom I have called. … And thou shalt be ordained under his hand to expound scriptures, and to exhort the church, according as it shall be given thee by my Spirit.”
“Elect lady” was not a title of sentiment. It was a calling. She was ordained to expound scripture and exhort the church. She was also called to compile the first hymnal of the Restoration — “for my soul delighteth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me.”
Scribe of the Translation
Emma was one of several scribes during the translation of the Book of Mormon. She sat on the other side of a curtain, writing as Joseph dictated. She later described the process with precision: he would begin each session exactly where he had stopped, without reviewing what had been written. He could not have memorized or invented the consistency she observed.
Late in her life, when asked directly whether she believed the Book of Mormon was a divine record, she said: “I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God and that he had the gift of seership. I am satisfied that he translated the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of God, and that it was not written by him from any human knowledge.” She had been there. She knew.
The Costs
Emma buried six children. She moved more than a dozen times across twenty years of marriage, often under threat of mob violence. She was driven from Missouri with the rest of the Saints in winter. She watched her husband imprisoned in Liberty Jail for months. She nursed sick and dying converts in the swamps of Commerce, Illinois, before the city was even called Nauvoo.
She became the first president of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo in 1842, organized at Joseph’s direction. Under her leadership it grew to over a thousand members within months. Her charge to the women was direct: “We are going to do something extraordinary — when a boat is stuck on the rapids with a multitude of Mormons on board we shall consider that a loud call for relief.”
June 27, 1844
Joseph and Hyrum were killed at Carthage Jail on June 27, 1844. Emma was at Nauvoo, pregnant. She received her husband’s body and had to tell their children. She was thirty-nine years old and had been the prophet’s wife for seventeen years.
She did not go west with Brigham Young and the main body of Saints. The reasons were complicated — disputes over property, grief, exhaustion, and later her connection with the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which her son Joseph III would lead. Her relationship with the Utah church became painful and distanced. History has not always treated her gently for these choices.
What She Teaches
Emma Smith teaches what it costs to stand next to a prophet. She bore the weight of the Restoration in ways that are easy to overlook because they were domestic and personal: feeding and housing the men who came to receive revelations, scribing words that would become scripture, raising children through repeated uprooting and grief, burying half of them.
The revelation in D&C 25 ends with a line that was hers specifically and also universal: “This is my voice unto all.” What God asked of Emma — faithfulness, service, endurance, counsel to her husband, expounding of scripture — he asks in some measure of every disciple.
She was there. She saw the plates. She heard the translation. She organized women to serve. She buried her husband and did not leave the faith she had lived inside. Whatever the complications of her later years, her testimony of the Restoration — given by a woman who had more reason than anyone to know whether it was real — stands.