Emmeline B. Wells
Editor, suffragist, and the fifth General President of the Relief Society — a woman whose pen shaped both the national women’s movement and the spiritual literature of the Latter-day Saints.
A Life of Trials and Conviction
Emmeline Blanche Woodward was born in Massachusetts in 1828 and converted to the Church as a teenager. Her early life was marked by hardship: a first husband who abandoned her and left her with a young child, the death of multiple children, and the long journey west with the pioneers. She eventually settled in Salt Lake City and became a plural wife of Bishop Newel K. Whitney and later of Daniel H. Wells.
Despite grief and difficulty, Emmeline became one of the most prolific and influential voices in the Church. She began writing for the Woman’s Exponent and eventually edited it for nearly forty years, using the paper to advocate for women’s rights, suffrage, and the spiritual equality of women. She believed deeply that Latter-day Saint women were a vanguard in the broader women’s movement.
Voice for Women’s Suffrage
Utah Territory granted women the right to vote in 1870, and Emmeline was deeply involved in the national suffrage movement. She attended national conventions, worked alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and represented Latter-day Saint women before national audiences that were often skeptical of polygamy. She argued that no woman had more reason to understand the value of legal rights than one who had seen what happened when women had none.
She was a poet as well as a journalist, and her writing consistently linked her faith with her public work. She did not separate her testimony from her advocacy — to her, both were expressions of the same conviction that women were daughters of God whose voices and rights mattered.
Relief Society General President
In 1910, at the age of 82, Emmeline was called as General President of the Relief Society. She served until 1921, dying in office at 93 years old. Under her leadership, the Relief Society pursued grain storage, social welfare work, and expanded programs for women and families. She worked to the end of her life with the same urgency she had carried for seven decades.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Brigham Young University at age 91 — recognition of a lifetime of intellectual and literary achievement. Her journals, poetry, and editorials stand as a remarkable record of a woman who lived through the entire founding generation of the Church and refused to be silent about any of it.
Emmeline B. Wells
“I believe in women, especially thinking women.”
What Emmeline Teaches
Emmeline B. Wells demonstrates that covenant faith and public advocacy are not opposites. She lived at the intersection of pioneer hardship, theological conviction, and national political engagement — refusing to retreat from any of it. Her life is evidence that women in the early Church were not merely passive participants but active shapers of both their religious community and the broader culture around it.
She also models perseverance through personal loss. The grief in her journals is real and unvarnished. But grief did not stop the pen. She kept writing, kept advocating, kept believing — and her influence outlasted her by generations.
Key Facts
- 1828–1921 — Born Massachusetts; lived 93 years
- 1875–1914 — Editor of the Woman’s Exponent
- 1910–1921 — Fifth General President of the Relief Society
- Suffrage work — Close colleague of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton