Footnotes
All the organization’s early meetings (with the exception of one irregularly planned special meeting) were held on Thursdays, suggesting that the meeting took place on a Thursday. At the close of the society’s meeting held 24 March 1842, the society adjourned until the following Thursday, which was 31 March. This 31 March meeting date is confirmed in JS’s journal. (Relief Society Minute Book, 24 Mar. 1842, 21; 19 Apr. 1842, [30], in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 41, 49; JS, Journal, 31 Mar. 1842.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
Snow copied the letter from JS that was read during the meeting into the minute book following the minutes of 28 September 1842 and noted that she had not copied the letter into the minute book where it belonged chronologically because she had not been present “at the time of its reading.” (Relief Society Minute Book, [86]–[88], in Derr et al., First Fifty Years of Relief Society, 97–99; see also Letter to Emma Smith and the Relief Society, 31 Mar. 1842.)
Derr, Jill Mulvay, Carol Cornwall Madsen, Kate Holbrook, and Matthew J. Grow, eds. The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women’s History. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2016.
A later record keeper, believing that the word “ladies” was mistaken, canceled the word and replaced it with “Priesthood.”
In the first meeting of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, JS and the other men present also withdrew to allow the women to conduct the society’s business. (Minutes and Discourses, 17 Mar. 1842.)