Scott Woodward:
Hi, Casey.

Casey Griffiths:
Hello, Scott.

Scott Woodward:
Man. We have another Voices of the Restoration bonus episode today.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, these episodes are so great. We got a chance to do a deep dive into a Church history topic, which is what we love to do. And today, we have one of the best possible people to talk about our subject, which is Emma Hale Smith.

Scott Woodward:
Yes. We don’t have Emma Hale Smith with us.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, I made it sound like the very person is here. But we have the next best thing, probably, which is Jenny Reeder, who is a good friend and who has written a little bit about Emma Hale Smith. So, Jenny, say hi to everybody.

Jenny Reeder:
Hi, everyone. I wish Emma was here, too. I would love to ask her a few questions.

Scott Woodward:
So, Jenny, what about Emma Smith should our listeners be excited about this week?

Jenny Reeder:
When we come to understand all the things that she went through, all the things that she did and succeeded in, and understand her legacy, it changes your life.

Scott Woodward:
Wonderful. Well, before we dig all into that, Casey, maybe we should introduce Jenny to our, our listeners here.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, let me give her bio, and then we’ll hear what she has to say. So Jenny Reeder is a 19th-century women’s history specialist in the Historic Sites division in the Church History Department. She has a PhD in American history from George Mason University, with an emphasis in women’s history, religious history, memory, and material culture. Her dissertation, Doing Something Extraordinary, Mormon Women and the Creation of the Usable Past, explores the material culture used to commemorate the first 50 years of Relief Society, and is pending publication. Jenny also has a master’s degree from New York University in History, Archival Management, and Documentary Editing. Jenny has written some great books. She was co-editor of At the Pulpit, 185 Years of Discourses of Latter-day Saint Women, The Witness of Women: First-hand Experiences and Testimonies of the Restoration. That was with Janiece Johnson. She is the lead historian on a collection of Eliza R. Snow’s discourses, almost 1,200 discourses, that the Church Historians Press website, she’s the lead editor, and a print volume of selected discourses, is coming out in March 2026. And then there’s the reason why we invited her here, which is, Jenny is the author of the book, First: The Life and Faith of Emma Smith, which is an excellent book.

Casey Griffiths:
In fact, Jenny, I think you have a copy of your book on Emma Smith. You want to hold it up so everybody can see?

Jenny Reeder:
We got so lucky that we got to have some gold foil on the cover, which I guess is usually only used for general authorities.

Scott Woodward:
Fancy. Wow. Very nice.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s how you know you’ve made it, the gold foil on your book. I remember when Witness of Women came out, you and me and Janiece were all sent to a Deseret Book to sign copies. It was around Education Week, and I don’t think anybody came to get my signature. It was a quiet night at the Deseret Book. But I want to give my personal endorsement to Witness of Women, which is awesome. It’s just so good. It’s organized kind of by topic, has some incredible historical sources, and to First, the Life and Faith of Emma Smith, which is the first book I usually recommend when people ask me about Emma Smith, which they do quite a bit. So, Jenny, tell us a little bit about how did you come to research and write about Emma Smith and women in general in the Church?

Jenny Reeder:
You know, that’s a really interesting question. And Emma has always been one of my favorites. As I worked for a couple of years before I went to graduate school at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of Latter-day Saint History at BYU, which unfortunately is no longer in existence. I worked with Jilder and Carol Madsen, and I learned some things that I didn’t know before about Emma, and that she did not like polygamy, and she had issues with a lot of the women and experiences in releases Relief Society…

Scott Woodward:
Wait, wait, wait. So she was the President of the Relief Society, and she wasn’t attending the meetings in 1843?

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Why is that?

Jenny Reeder:
She was also sick quite a bit.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Jenny Reeder:
I think she just, like, she was slowly discovering the wives of, of her husband that she didn’t know about were her friends in the Relief Society. So it was tricky, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

Jenny Reeder:
Anyway, fast forward after graduate school working at the Church History Department in Salt Lake, Kate Holbrook and I did First 50 years of Relief Society. And we would meet with the General Relief Society President at the time was Linda Burton. And I think we met with her, like, quarterly. And we were telling her about this book, At the Pulpit, and some of the things that were going to be in it. And we knew we had to include Emma. I was a little bit worried. In the Nauvoo Relief Society minutes, there’s not like a whole discourse or talk or sermon by Emma. The Nauvoo Relief Society was more of a discussion, so they talked amongst each other. I tried to put together some pieces of Emma’s words, and I remember talking to President Burton about this, and she looked at me and she said something I will never forget. She said, Emma was the elect lady. I don’t think we even talked about some of the difficulty surrounding Emma. I looked at her and I thought, And you are the elect lady right now, and I need to listen to you. And so I started to take a deep dive on Emma. And at one point, we talked about doing the papers of Emma Smith, kind of like the Joseph Smith Papers, with the Church History Department and the Church Historians Press, and they decided that we didn’t have enough to do.

Jenny Reeder:
A couple of years later, Deseret Book reached out to me and said, Would you be interested in writing a short book about Emma Smith, including as many of her words as you can? I was delighted, and I said yes. And I spent a lot of time tracking down everything. I went out to Independence, Missouri, to look at artifacts and documents in the Community of Christ archive. I had a lot of people helping me and reading through it and giving me different sources, and that’s how it came about.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. Yeah, it’s particularly tricky with Emma, right? Because she didn’t record a journal, correct? She doesn’t really have a lot of where she records her own thoughts. Is that right?

Jenny Reeder:
That is correct. In fact, when I send in my first draft to Deseret Book, the editor I was working with said, Well, can’t you put in, like, stuff from her journal? I said, I wish. We, I would give anything to have her journal, but it, it doesn’t exist. And sometimes I wonder, what if she did have a journal and then she destroyed it or burned it because she didn’t want that record? But I did. I mined through every single letter she wrote, everything she said in Relief Society. The Community of Christ Archive had a lot more letters that I hadn’t seen in the Church History Library, so it was cool. I also read as many books as I could find about her. Buddy Youngreen wrote a book years ago where he interviewed some of the grandchildren. And it’s fascinating to see so many different perspectives of Emma.

Casey Griffiths:
Besides your book, the most famous book on Emma is called Mormon Enigma. And that really does, in two words, kind of capture a lot about her, where she looms so large in the historical memory of the Church. I would venture that after Joseph Smith, her name is maybe the most well-known name, maybe Brigham Young and her are competing. We don’t have a lot of internal. What were her thoughts? How did she feel about this? What was going on with her? And yet it seems like people just attach themselves to her on an emotional level. Like, there’s so many people that identify with her and connect with her.

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah. And I have to say, Mormon Enigma. I think that came out. It came out in the 1980s, and it was groundbreaking for its time. No book had ever been done like that before. It really is an incredible book. And one of the great things now is that we have the Joseph Smith Papers. So we can access a lot more of Emma than we could before. There are so few words of hers that exist today.

Scott Woodward:
I think it would be fun, Jenny, if you just start at the beginning with us today and just, let’s just start talking about Emma. Could you drop us in with how Emma enters into the story of the Restoration?

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely. I think Emma is such a crucial part of the Restoration. The more I worked on this and the more research and editing and rewriting and revising and writing and rewriting. I realized that we wouldn’t have the Restoration today without her. I don’t think Joseph would have been as strong a prophet as he was without Emma. We know that she was more educated than Joseph. I think she grew up in a more comfortable family situation. She was more refined than Joseph. She had her own business. She owned a dairy, and that’s how she often made money with Joseph. Emma, she knew how to host. She was a daughter of a woman that hosted people often at their dinner table in Harmony, Pennsylvania. She just had a more refined way about her. She knew how to run business better than Joseph, bless his heart. She was the first person to be his scribe when he was first translating the Book of Mormon, she was amazed at how much, how Joseph, how attuned Joseph was to the record. Like, if they would take a little break, he knew exactly where to pick back up again without even looking or having her read back stuff.

Jenny Reeder:
But he also didn’t know certain things that she knew, like there was a wall surrounding Jerusalem, things like that. You know, I think that she and Joseph were incredible partners. I think they were helpmeets to each other in beautiful, incredible ways. I find that so exciting. Today, we kind of think that Joseph was very progressive in the sense that he considered his wife a viable partner with him. He shared ideas with her. She talked through things with him.

Casey Griffiths:
It sounds like she comes from a more well-off family. She’s better educated. She is a year older than him, too.

Jenny Reeder:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
She was quite a catch for him…

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
I guess you’d say. What do we know about the circumstances of how they met and a little bit about their marriage? I, I remember that, that quote where she says, Preferring him to any other man I knew, I decided, which doesn’t sound super romantic to us. But tell us a little bit about what we know about their meeting, their courtship, and their, their marriage.

Jenny Reeder:
Okay, I want to tell you a little bit about her childhood before I go there, if that’s okay.

Casey Griffiths:
Okay. Yeah, absolutely.

Jenny Reeder:
She grew up in a larger family and a wealthier family in Harmony, Pennsylvania, on the Susquehanna River. Her parents had come there from New England. All of her siblings lived in the area. And she was one of the youngest in the family. She went to school. She also had a beautiful voice. She sang. Her uncle became a Methodist preacher, her mother’s brother. And so they started going to the Methodist Church. And I love this story because her dad was not interested in church. He was a businessman and a hunter, and it was an incredible place to hunt animals and then ship them down the river to Philadelphia or wherever. At one point, at her Methodist Sunday School, she was instructed to go into the woods and pray for someone. So she decided to go into the woods near her home, which we know has many trees in that area. She went into the woods and she knelt down and prayed aloud for her father, that he would have a change of heart and that he would seek after God. He happened to be hunting at the time and was near her, which, first of all, I have to think is scary that this little girl is kneeling down in the forest praying and he’s out with his gun.

Jenny Reeder:
But nothing happened. Thank goodness. But he heard her praying, and he was so touched by her respect and her love and her fervent desire that he was, in fact, converted, and he did start to come to church. So I think it’s kind of interesting that both she and Joseph took to the woods to pray. She didn’t have the vision that Joseph had, but she had the understanding and the sense of purpose and testimony that he did. And she was able to capture that and write things down in ways that he couldn’t. So they complemented each other really well. One more thing about her childhood, she had older brothers who taught her how to ride horses. She became an excellent horsewoman, but also taught her how to row a boat. So she had those kinds of skills as well, which I think is cool because it kind of rounds her out.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
You know, I first began to understand the geography between Palmyra and Manchester, New York, and Harmony, Pennsylvania, when I went out there a couple of years ago for the first time. And it took us, like, four hours to drive on winding roads, two-lane roads, over rivers, over the rivers and through the woods. And it was so interesting because the Susquehanna Valley is so, so much more steep, and there’s not farming land as well as there is in Palmyra.

Jenny Reeder:
It was amazing to me that Joseph met Emma, that they ended up in Harmony in the same place. And we know that he was hired by Josiah Stowell. Josiah Stowell had a son who lived up in Palmyra, and he had heard about Joseph Smith, this kid who had incredible abilities to see things and to find things, as his reputation was at the time. And so he hired Joseph to come down to his area in Colesville, New York, and he wanted to find this silver mine that was purportedly lost. And so he hired Joseph to come do that. And Joseph, at the time, came and boarded at the, probably at an old log cabin on the Hale property. And that was where he met Emma. He soon realized that this was a lost cause, that they would never find the silver. And so he talked Josiah Stowell into farming, and he would help him with that. So that’s how he met Emma.

Scott Woodward:
So when they first met, was there any spark there? Or we don’t really have a record of their first meeting when he was boarding at their home, there was nothing at that point, or is that when it started? Is that when the spark struck?

Jenny Reeder:
I’m not sure when it started. We don’t have a record of that. I wish we did. I mean, I would love to have Emma saying, Oh, this guy is so dreamy, but we don’t have any record of that.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. We do have the Joseph Smith movie, you know, where he’s walking up with the shovel, and her father, Isaac, is polishing his gun. And that just makes for a great film.

Jenny Reeder:
I know. It is great. It’s a great romance. We don’t have any record of that, but we know that they were attracted to each other. They became friends, and he asked her to marry him, and she said, Well, I have to get my father’s permission. You’ll have to ask my father. And it was a huge tradition at the time to ask for the father’s permission and then to have the wedding in the father’s home, which was a lovely framed home on the Susquehanna. And her father, though, wasn’t so excited about Joseph. Not only did he not have an education, but he was doing crazy things like hunting for silver mines, and he probably wouldn’t stay in Harmony when all of his other children had married and stayed there in the area. So he said no. So Joseph had a few friends over not too far away, and they really encouraged Joseph to just go for it. At one point, Emma’s sister lived across the river in the same area as these people. And so she was going to go visit them. It was January, and she went over there, and Joseph said, We have to get married now.

Jenny Reeder:
And they did. And after the marriage, she went with Joseph back up to his family’s house in Manchester.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I’ve got this quote from her right here. She said, “I had no intention of marrying when I left home, but during my visit at Mr. Stowell’s, Joseph visited me there. My folks were bitterly opposed to him and being importuned by your father, meaning Joseph, aided by Mr. Stowell, who urged me to marry him, and preferring to marry him to any other man I knew, I consented. We went to Squire Tarbell’s, and were married. That’s interesting. So she had no intention of marrying when they left, but she says, why not?

Jenny Reeder:
He talked her into it, and then probably she was influenced by the Spirit. I like to think. You can go to there, to these houses and visit them. I think they’re owned and run by the Ensign Peak Foundation.

Casey Griffiths:
It’s the Joseph Knight Family Foundation that, that runs these places. I was leading a Church history tour out there, and we had a couple of descendants. And so we went off on a wild goose chase, and we went to the Knight’s home, and then just up the river is Josiah Stowell’s home. And yeah, they, this is where Joseph and Emma came after they were married. They even claimed that they have the mantelpiece there, that they were married in front of from Squire Tarbell’s place, which is pretty neat.

Jenny Reeder:
Well, plus there’s such a sweet spirit there, and also at the Knight home. It’s incredible.

Casey Griffiths:
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
And I wasn’t able to find the little pond or whatever where she was baptized a few years later, but it’s right around there somewhere.

Casey Griffiths:
So they get married. Her wording is her folks are bitterly opposed to the union. And then instead of going back and telling them, they, they go to Palmyra, they sort of elope. Is that correct to say?

Jenny Reeder:
Yes. Well, in a way, it is correct, but she was old enough to make her own decisions. So it wasn’t like she was breaking her father’s, the word that she would never marry him, you know. But yeah, it wasn’t with her father’s permission.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, there’s a, there’s a Q&A in the Elders’ Journal from 1838, where somebody asked something like, Did not Joe Smith steal his wife? Joseph’s answer is, She was of age. Why don’t you ask her?

Jenny Reeder:
Which I think says a lot about her and how she carried herself and lived her life. She was an individual with ideas and thoughts and knew what she wanted.

Casey Griffiths:
And it’s great that Joseph kind of responded that way by saying, you know, She’s not property, she’s a person. Just ask her if she felt like she was stolen or not. But that is a little controversial. Their, their marriage is a little, I guess you’d say, non-conventional. So she goes to Palmyra, and then my understanding is she’s there the night that Joseph goes to the hill to retrieve the plates. She’s with him, per the angel’s instructions.

Jenny Reeder:
Yes. In fact, I think it’s Joseph Knight that writes that down because he was there, too. In fact, he loaned them his wagon so they could drive up to the hill. And there’s a couple of different accounts. One account says that she stayed in the wagon while he went on up. Another account says that she went with him. I don’t know if you can confirm that. And then another account says she got out of the wagon and knelt down and prayed while he was up there, which I like that one, too. I think it’s nice. He gets the plates and hides them. They come back home, I think, as the sun is rising. And he does not have a secured lockable box or a lock to secure the plates. And so he decides he’s going to go find some day work up the river, or nearby. Meanwhile, Emma is home with the Smiths, the… Joseph senior and Lucy. Joseph Smith, Sr. Comes back in and says, You know, there’s a lot of rumors going on around here that Joseph has the plates, and they’re going to try to find the place and him, and Emma gets really worried. And so she, remember how I said she was an excellent horsewoman.

Jenny Reeder:
She goes and finds a horse in a field where the law at the time was, if you found a horse and it didn’t, it wasn’t tied up, you could use it. So she took the horse and rode bareback, I don’t know, to Macedon, to the town where he was working. And he came immediately back and was able to secure the plates. So I like how she’s so involved, even from that point.

Scott Woodward:
Jumping on the bare back of a horse to go and warn her husband, that’s pretty epic.

Jenny Reeder:
Isn’t that great?

Scott Woodward:
That’s very cool. Okay, so tell us a little bit about Section 25 of the Doctrine and Covenants. I mean, that section is such a rich revelation. And Casey and I covered this in our previous episode that goes along with this week’s curriculum. What would you like to point out? Like, what are some of your favorite lessons that we can learn from, from this section?

Jenny Reeder:
I think this section is really powerful. When you put it in context with the other sections at the time, a lot of people are receiving revelations from Joseph and being told specific things that the Lord would have them do. And also, we know that Emma was not at the official organization meeting of the Church in Fayette or in Manchester, for that matter.

Scott Woodward:
Why not, by the way? Why wasn’t she there?

Jenny Reeder:
That’s a really good question. I don’t know. She doesn’t appear on any of the lists of people that were there. We know that Lucy and Joseph senior were baptized, as were other people, and she wasn’t. She wasn’t baptized until the end of June in 1830. That was in April 1830. She wasn’t baptized till the end of June. Sometimes I think that today we make a way bigger deal of that first organizational meeting of the Church, and they didn’t really consider it as big a deal as we do today, because they did organize different branches of the Church in Manchester and in Fayette and back down in Colesville. So it may not have been a big deal. I mean, knowing her, too, she’s running this dairy, she’s supporting their family, and he’s off with Oliver Cowdery somewhere else, and she just had to keep the home going. There’s a lot of reasons it could be.

Scott Woodward:
That makes sense. Anyway, sorry, I digress. Continue. What were you saying about Section 25?

Jenny Reeder:
So Joseph and Emma go up to Colesville to meet with that new branch there in the Knight home. And she gets baptized. She was going to get confirmed the next day, but a mob came and tore down their, the dam that they had created and took Joseph off to jail. I think this was his first experience in jail. And she spent time with her sister, Elizabeth. She was scared to death of all of this and prayed for her husband, and they were able to get back together a day or two later, and they came back to Harmony. She’d been baptized but had not yet been confirmed. I don’t know state of her mind, I wish I did, when she received this, I don’t know if she asked Joseph, you know, You’ve given revelations to these other people. Can I have one? He received the revelation, gave it to her. And there’s a… I have some speculations about this.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Jenny Reeder:
She was, we know she was a scribe. I wonder if she wrote that down because we do not have the original copy of this revelation. It was in July of 1830. And I just… I mean, she moved around so much. What if she kept that, too? You know, a lot of times in the early Church, they would copy out revelations and either print them in newspapers or make copies by hand.

Jenny Reeder:
And I wonder if she just held on to it because she wanted her copy. So it’s beautiful. I was able to spend two weeks with the Maxwell Institute in New York City with a Latter-day Saint theology seminar studying Section 25, which was incredible.

Scott Woodward:
For two weeks, you studied Section 25?

Jenny Reeder:
Two weeks. We did, like, two verses every day.

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Jenny Reeder:
It was such a deep dive. I’d never done like that before. We were working at the Union Theological Seminary, and it was incredible, like going through each word and then maybe how the words changed a little bit with different publications and the Book of Commandments compared to the Doctrine and Covenants, compared to later editions of the Doctrine and Covenants. It’s an incredible study. Well, first of all, I have to say, I was with an incredible group of scholars. We had a textual scholar, we had a medieval scholar, we had a musicologist, we had a literature scholar. So it was interesting to hear all their different ideas. And there’s actually a book that the Maxwell Institute published with all of our final papers in that that you can order, I believe, from the Maxwell Institute.

Scott Woodward:
Oh, cool.

Jenny Reeder:
There were so many little parts of that that just really stood out to me. I love the fact that Heavenly Father calls her his daughter, and he says throughout this revelation that she can be where he is and that she will receive a crown of glory. He also gives her specific assignments.

Jenny Reeder:
And I think you can look at these in so many different ways. One of them was to be a comfort to her husband and to provide consoling words to him. And we have several letters showing these consoling words. They’re beautiful, and I, and I just love their relationship. She, of course, is told to not murmur because she hasn’t seen things that others have seen. And I would imagine this includes the plates. She never saw those plates when Joseph had Three Witnesses and Eight Witnesses who did. And she was also told to expound the scriptures and exhort the Church. And I think we use those words quite a bit, but I wanted to look them up in an 1830 dictionary to get a better idea of what they meant for them at the time. Expounding was to teach or to preach or to lay out an argument or to explain. And this is something that women did not do at the time. Even in the Methodist Church, they didn’t do that. And so I imagine that would have been a little bit scary for her. But then she was also told to exhort, which means to encourage and to embolden and give strength and courage to.

Jenny Reeder:
And she was really good at that. She did that for Joseph, and she did that for so many other people. The other interesting thing, I think, about this section is that you see assignments that are given to her that don’t happen for several years. She’s told to select hymns for the hymnal, and she does. She starts collecting hymns, and soon they’re moving to Fayette, and then they move to Kirtland. And she sends the hymns in the mail to William W. Phelps and Edward Partridge in Independence, Missouri, who are printing the Evening and the Morning Star newspaper and putting together the Book of Commandments. A mob attacks them in 1833, July of 1833, destroys the press, and she loses everything she worked on. This is three years after her revelation. She has to start all over again. So she starts again, and finally, right before the temple is dedicated in Kirtland, she publishes this book with the help of William W. Phelps. And I love it because when you look at those hymns and the way they’re used, not only in the temple dedication, but also later on, Amanda Barnes Smith has a great story of the words to one of those hymns, coming to her at a time of extreme trouble.

Jenny Reeder:
Emma is exhorting and expounding through these hymns. It’s such a beautiful thing, and it’s such a great tradition that we certainly have today in our Church from that legacy that she began.

Casey Griffiths:
And that’s an underappreciated legacy. That… A quick perusal through that hymn book, and you can find it on the Joseph Smith Papers. It’s there. It shows a lot of our most beloved hymns are there from the beginning. You know, Now, Let Us Rejoice, The Spirit of God. A couple of ones that we haven’t hung on to, like, Oh, Stop and Tell Me, Red Man, and things like that.

Jenny Reeder:
True.

Casey Griffiths:
Joy to the World.

Jenny Reeder:
Which they would sing all year long.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. That’s just a major part of our worship experience, and maybe Emma hasn’t gotten enough credit for her role in sort of starting that grand Latter-day Saint tradition of hymnody.

Jenny Reeder:
Well, and if you think about it, Rachel Cope talks a lot about this in an article she’s published, and also in a chapter in that Maxwell Institute Theology Seminar, Proceedings volume. She talks about how Emma was able to sort of understand and shape the direction that the theology went. And I don’t think we think that much of it, of just selecting hymns, but it’s actually, her first hymnal was selecting hymns that spoke of Zion and of Restoration. In 1842, she decided to write another, collect more hymns. The Church had grown exponentially. The Zion that they tried to in Missouri didn’t really work so well. So, the second hymnal, she’s collecting hymns, and they are revealing songs of Christ and of the Atonement and of his mercy and grace. So you can really trace the way that the Church and it’s theology has changed over time. It’s beautiful. Here’s another interesting story. At this time, Brigham Young is on a mission in England, and he decides that the Saints in England need a hymnal, and it’s very expensive to import those books from the United States. Plus, the communication is tricky. So he wrote a letter to Joseph and said, Should I make our hymnal here?

Jenny Reeder:
And Joseph wrote back and said, No, Emma’s in charge of that. That’s her assignment. Meanwhile, it takes a long time to get letters across the Atlantic. And Brigham goes ahead and starts, creates a new hymnal. And those hymns, it’s the British hymnal, it’s published in Liverpool. But the British Saints, there were so many of them, brought those hymns back Nauvoo. And it’s incredible to think about how the influence that those hymns had, which overshadowed the book, hymnbook that Emma did. And so that may have been some of the beginning of the tension between Emma and Brigham Young.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. I didn’t know that. Maybe that’s a good place to talk about Brigham and Emma. There seems to be a tension between them, and I didn’t realize it had traced back as early as maybe him stepping on her toes with the right to publish the hymns. And so kind of walk us through that. That’s Nauvoo era. Should we, should we start with the Brigham-Emma controversy? Would that, would that be a good

Jenny Reeder:
Sure.

Scott Woodward:
To start with?

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah, let’s do it.

Scott Woodward:
So, what, what else caused friction between these two?

Jenny Reeder:
I think that Brigham Young’s relationship with his second wife, Mary Ann Angell Young, was very different than Emma’s relationship with Joseph.

Scott Woodward:
How?

Jenny Reeder:
I think Joseph was in a more progressive frame of mind where he considered his wife his equal and his companion and his partner, and he talked with her a lot and shared a lot of ideas and developed a lot of ideas with her. I think Brigham Young and Mary Ann Angell Young were much more traditional and had a much more traditional relationship and marriage. And as a result, I think that Brigham Young felt a little threatened, maybe, by Emma, who was, in fact, sort of asserting her independence and her ideas and her thoughts and her talents and her assignments, and that made him feel a little bit threatened. And I think it really comes to a head after the death of Joseph Smith. Brigham Young is not in Nauvoo. At the time. He’s on a mission, I think promoting Joseph’s presidential campaign. Martyrdom was in June, and he comes home in July and doesn’t even come to visit Emma or pay his condolences to her. The first time he sees her, he says, Hey, we’re going to muster the Nauvoo Legion.

Jenny Reeder:
I need Joseph’s uniform and his horse. And Emma’s like, Oh, no, no, no, no, you cannot have his uniform. And she did allow, finally allow him to take the horse. And Joseph Smith III, her son, writes that Brigham Young’s aid or assistant, I don’t know who it was, his valet, maybe, came to get the horse, and then they mustered the Nauvoo Legion. And then he took the horse, and just, it was such a good horse and ran it into the ground, just had such a great time riding it, that the horse was never the same again. And Joseph III had some kind of bitter feelings about that as well.

Casey Griffiths:
Is this being written when Joseph III is leading the RLDS Church or is this from before, so?

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah.

Casey Griffiths:
There’s a lot of context…

Jenny Reeder:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
Behind these. And my understanding is that part of the conflict between Brigham and Emma was financial, too. It was over who owns what? Does this belong to the Church or does this belong to Joseph’s family and that there were conflicts there as well.

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely. And when Emma started finding about earlier in 1843, when she started hearing and understanding the influence of polygamy, plural marriage, she really worried about what’s going to happen when, when Joseph dies, and are all of his wives going to want property and money and all of that? And so she and Joseph had some really hard discussions, I can only imagine. And then he actually put some of the property in the names of his children and of her, which, again, at the time, is a very progressive thing. The United States of America is still living under the law of coverture, which means covered, which means husbands own the property, wives and women don’t. They’re covered by their husbands. So this is kind of a progressive part, too. But also one of the things, almost immediately after the death, the martyrdom, before Brigham Young was back, Emma knew that she needed to find someone who could manage the estate and be a trustee in trust. Emma had asked William Marks to help manage the estate, to be the trustee in trust. And when Brigham Young came back and understood what had happened, he was really upset because that sort of took away his role as the President of the Quorum of the Twelve.

Jenny Reeder:
So by 1845, we get Brigham Young asserting himself as the de facto leader and the President of the Quorum of the Twelve, and therefore the leader of the, of the Saints. And he shuts down the Relief Society. It’s so interesting to me that he says, If you find any women huddling together in the name of Relief Society, they’re not valid. He talks about this in two different meetings with the Seventies and with the high priests, I think. And they’re in, in for 50 years of Relief Society. So you can find those on your Gospel Library app on your phone.

Scott Woodward:
So he didn’t just have feelings against Emma, but the entire society, the Relief Society itself, was somehow a threat. How did he see the Relief Society as a threat?

Jenny Reeder:
That’s a tricky question, but it’s a really important question. And I think there’s a lot of things that we can consider, but we don’t know for sure. Part of it, I think, is Emma’s involvement with Joseph and the anointed quorum, which was in 1842, I believe, and how they were seen as the leaders of the anointed quorum and of the temple. And so she held that key as the queen, and Joseph was the king, and it was more of a family unit than an ecclesiastical unit with a church. And we see some of those changes even in the temple ceremony, where Adam and Eve then come under Brigham Young’s version, and he brings in Peter, James, and John, which is, again, an ecclesiastical thing. So I think that’s part of it. I think that he’s concerned because Emma is really mad about polygamy and his own wife, Mary Ann, takes it without any problem.

Casey Griffiths:
Let me point out two things just to provide important context, though. Number one, today, every woman is part of the Relief Society. That’s just standard procedure. That wasn’t the case in Nauvoo, correct? In fact…

Jenny Reeder:
No.

Casey Griffiths:
The Relief Society was… Most women in Nauvoo weren’t part of the Relief Society. It was a, it was a small group of people. The second thing, too, is, yes, even though Brigham Young closed down the Relief Society in Nauvoo, he is instrumental in restarting…

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely.

Casey Griffiths:
The Relief Society several decades later and chooses one of those women, Eliza R. Snow, who’s the secretary of the Nauvoo Relief Society, to start Relief Society again. So a little conflict there. But I would also say, I don’t think Brigham Young was anti the Relief Society. There was a lot going on, and I don’t think his conflicts with Emma over Church property helps smooth things over, too.

Jenny Reeder:
And I think part of that Church property is not only is it land, but it’s also the records.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
And Emma is most upset about that, I think. She wants those records to stay in Nauvoo and stay with the family. And I think they just view the family and the Church as very separate.

Casey Griffiths:
That is still impacting us today. Like it’s only been within a year that we got back the Joseph Smith—Translation manuscripts, which were one of those things that Brigham and Emma were quite understandably contending over. I can see Brigham’s perspective that that is very important ecclesiastical work. And I can see Emma’s perspective of saying, Well, that’s my husband’s work, therefore it belongs to me and not to the Church, and so.

Jenny Reeder:
And she was the first scribe, so she helped prepare all of that.

Casey Griffiths:
Understandable. I think we can still say they’re both good people.

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely.

Casey Griffiths:
But these are the conflicts that happen in the wake of someone’s sudden death, especially someone as young as Joseph, and nobody was expecting him to die at the time that he passes away.

Jenny Reeder:
And I think it’s interesting, too, that in some ways, Emma expected the Church to care for her and her children, and Brigham was like, no. And another thing that I think is so interesting, Brigham wanted to bring the bodies of Joseph and Hyrum to Utah. And Emma was not about that. She wanted to keep them there where she could be with them. They were her husband and her brother-in-law’s bodies. In fact, if you go back to Section 25, it says that she should go with Joseph at the time of his going, which she does. She goes to Missouri, she goes to Kirtland, she goes to Nauvoo, she goes to New York. And I kind of wonder if we twisted it, just, the worrying just a little bit to say that she stayed with him at the time of his staying, because that was such an important thing to her. So we know, for example, that they were worried because there was still a bounty on Joseph’s head after his death. They didn’t want the mobs to come and defame him further. So they buried coffins filled with sand at the, at the funeral. And then Emma and Mary Fielding Smith had talked about where they were going to put the bodies and how they were going to move them, and they were going to do them this certain night.

Jenny Reeder:
And then Emma came back to Mary and said, Oh, we’re not going to do it tonight. I’ll let you know. Well, Mary woke up in the middle of the night, and it was hot. She went outside to get some air, and she saw them moving the bodies without her. So I think we also start to see some tension between Emma and Mary Fielding Smith.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah. And I want to point out, we did not know the location of their burial until the 20th century, when they had to find Joseph and Hyrum because they were worried that… They built a dam down River Keokuk, and the Mississippi River level was going to rise, so they had to locate the bodies then or they might have been swept away. Emma was very protective of, of their final resting place to the point to where nobody knew where it was…

Jenny Reeder:
Right.

Casey Griffiths:
By the 20th century, and we had to do some tough work to find them and then get them to where they’re at right now.

Jenny Reeder:
I think it’s interesting, too. It’s a 19th century thing, and I think we need to understand that historical context. Sam Brown writes a little bit about this, about how Lucy, for example, Lucy Mack Smith, was going to come with the Saints west. And Brigham told her he would care for her and help her, but she could not leave her husband’s body in Nauvoo. And she also had Joseph and Hyrum and Don Carlos and Samuel that were all there, too. She couldn’t leave that area. She had to stay there, which also makes me think how hard it must have been for Emma to leave her baby in Harmony.

Casey Griffiths:
And right next to her baby, you know, her parents are, are both there. They pass away, you know, a couple of years after she, she leaves with Joseph.

Jenny Reeder:
And it’s interesting, too, because she never saw them again. After she left to go with Joseph to Fayette and then to Palmyra and Manchester, she never saw them again. She didn’t even have communication with them. And I think that reveals how much her father, Isaac Hale, how upset he was about her leaving and going with Joseph. After his death, she receives word of his death, and then she starts to communicate with her mother again.

Casey Griffiths:
Let me bring up another thing that I, I think was a documented point of contention between Emma and Brigham, and that is that she, she remarries, I think in 1846, to Lewis… Is it Bidamon? What’s the best-

Jenny Reeder:
I say Bidamon, and that’s how they said it at the Community of Christ Archive.

Casey Griffiths:
I think Bidamon, not being a Latter-day Saint, was a, was another kind of point of contention, too. It’s two years after Joseph’s death, but that’s a little sore point as well, I believe.

Jenny Reeder:
Well, and I think you’re absolutely right, and it gets worse because she marries him on Joseph’s birthday. But also Sarah Kimball, I don’t know if she was there or if she was across the river. Anyway, she’s the one that shares the news with everyone that Emma just got married to this guy, which felt like she was betraying the Church and her family and all this time and work and effort. I do think it’s interesting, though. So many people say she married a scoundrel. But if you go and you read the letters, the correspondence between Emma and Louis, when he went to California to dig for gold. They loved each other. She… Actually, there were still so many mobs in Nauvoo. She didn’t, she needed protection with her family. I mean she’s just a single mother with kids and a new baby that was born the November after the martyrdom. So she was feeling very threatened and insecure at the time. So I think that’s an important point. He also, we know, built up the Nauvoo house and it turned into the riverside mansion where she lived the last few years of her life. I think it’s also interesting. I mean, in a way, he was a scoundrel, right?

Jenny Reeder:
He had a girlfriend outside of the marriage, Nancy Abercrombie, and she got pregnant and had a baby, and she couldn’t take care of the baby. I sort of wonder if this is some like coming terms with polygamy, even. But she has such compassion over this little baby boy that she takes him in and brings him into her house. And then his mother, Nancy, couldn’t provide for him. She couldn’t work. And so she brings Nancy into the home. And pretty soon, Nancy Abercrombie becomes Emma’s nurse. And right before she dies, she calls for Louis and Nancy to come to her bedside and make them promise that they will get married after she dies so that this little boy can be raised in a, in a family, which I think is beautiful and sweet. She did that so often with orphan children. She would bring them in and take care of them. She came to terms with something.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s talk about polygamy. You’ve you mentioned it…

Jenny Reeder:
Okay.

Scott Woodward:
A little bit here and there. How did Joseph practicing plural marriage, how did that affect their relationship, and, and how did she wrestle with that?

Jenny Reeder:
How does it not affect a relationship, right?

Scott Woodward:
Right.

Jenny Reeder:
That’s the question. You know, documents and history tells us that he had this idea when working on the Bible translation and tried to understand how he was to play a part of the Restoration of the Church, and that he was so scared to tell Emma about that. I sometimes wonder if our understanding of plural marriage and polygamy is so jaded and so presentist today, where we think of marriage as this romantic Hollywood thing, and it wasn’t quite the same, especially in the way that Emma married Lewis that she really needed protection and help. But I think the fact that he didn’t tell her a lot about the women that he was marrying and what was going on because he knew she would be upset, and that those women turned out to be some of her dear friends, including Eliza R. Snow and Zina Young and other people associated with the household or just in town, were connected to him in that way.

Scott Woodward:
In her presidency, in the Relief Society presidency was-

Jenny Reeder:
Oh, my gosh. Okay, let’s go there. Emma was President of the Nauvoo Relief Society.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
Her first counselor was Sarah Cleveland, who, records show, also became a wife of Joseph Smith.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

Jenny Reeder:
Second counselor was Elizabeth Ann Whitney, who she had lived with in Kirtland, and then they brought the Whitney family into their home in Nauvoo. So they just, they had this incredible family relationship. Elizabeth Ann Whitney was not married to Joseph, but her daughter with Newel K. Whitney was at a younger age. So there’s also Eliza R. Snow, who’s married, the secretary, and the treasurer is also married to him. If you keep going a little bit further, as soon as Emma realizes Eliza is married to him, she gets a little understandably upset.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
Eliza writes in her Nauvoo journal that a woman with a dark visage or face came to her and that she had to change her place of habitation, her abode, and she had to leave Nauvoo and go live with her sister outside of the city. So that’s when Eliza stops recording the minutes of the Nauvoo Relief Society. Then you have an assistant secretary. Her name is Phebe Wheeler. She later marries a man named named Oliver Olney, and he’s a little bit of a kook, and so she doesn’t continue. So bly the next year, in March of 1844, they have another secretary. Her name is Hannah Els, and she and Eliza had been friends.

Jenny Reeder:
She was a very proper woman from England. She was a seamstress and had a millinery shop in Nauvoo. And Emma asked Hannah to keep the minutes of the Relief Society. She didn’t know that Hannah had also been married to Joseph. So all these women had been married to Joseph, and she had no idea.

Scott Woodward:
So it’s the secrecy that really was the thorn here, that she didn’t know about these marriages, that he had married these women unbeknownst to her, but they do reconcile.

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah, they do. I want to say one more thing about that is that we don’t know exactly what Joseph’s intent was with these plural wives, whether it was to raise children. He actually doesn’t have any children outside of his marriage with Emma. And Emma is pregnant when she, when he dies. So they have reconciled. One of my favorite things about their relationship is they had no privacy. They had so many people living in the mansion house with them at the same time, but they would often go horseback riding together. Again, here’s Emma, the horsewoman.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
They either go horseback riding out to their farm or they take a carriage out to their farm, and they somehow come to an understanding and understand each other. But the other thing that I think we need to remember is that Joseph, because he didn’t leave a record of his intent of everything, I wonder if his perception of plural marriage was more of an adoption, of bringing other women into his family. Many of these women did not have access to a priesthood-holding husband. And Joseph understood that patriarchal chain and the need to be a part of this larger patriarchy. Richard Bushman talks about how he was trying to expand his kin network.

Jenny Reeder:
Maybe one of the reasons he married the Whitney daughter was to connect their families together…

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
To have some family connection.

Casey Griffiths:
The same thing with the Kimballs. That’s one of the most controversial sealings where Helen Mar Kimball was sealed to Joseph Smith. But that may have been a kinship connection, too. And, Jenny, correct me if I’m wrong, but on at least one occasion, Emma proposed kind of an adoptive sealing to Jane Manning James. We’re hearing this from Jane. That’s the source. But Jane actually says, Emma came to and asked if I wanted to be adopted to them as their daughter, and Jane told them no. And she said that Emma backed off and said, you can have a little time to think about it, came back. Jane still said she didn’t know, because she didn’t understand what she was asking. But that’s an interesting thing, too, that these sealings are expanding family, that they’re creating kinships. And in that case, it’s really interesting because Jane is, Jane’s probably the most well-known early black female, Latter-day Saint in the Church.

Jenny Reeder:
You know what’s interesting about that, too. Emma had an aunt, her father’s sister, who married a black man, a free black man. So she grew up with that. Like, she, her cousin was a mixed race, a biracial family. So I think maybe to her, she sees things a little bit differently than Jane Manning James, or even Brigham Young, for that matter.

Casey Griffiths:
Jane actually talks about experiencing some racial tension, even among the Saints in Nauvoo, but Emma and Joseph are the ones that to welcome her in and make sure that she’s okay and take care of her. And then, according to Jane, even offer to have her adopted into their family, which that’s really progressive for the 1840s. That’s, that’s quite extraordinary. Now, one of the things that I want to point out that was kind of in your book, too, is another controversy with Emma is after Joseph’s death, there’s several statements where she denies the existence of plural marriage. In your book, you did a great job, including other statements, like giving us the whole picture because she’s in Nauvoo for the rest of her life, and she’s constantly visited by people from our church who are defending plural marriage, and people from the RLDS Church, now Community of Christ, that are condemning plural marriage. Can you give us a big picture of what did she say in her later life about plural marriage?

Jenny Reeder:
So most of this comes from an interview that her sons had with her right before she died in 1879. She told them that your father never practiced plural marriage, and she left it at that. So here’s the tricky thing. If you think about all of this, and if you think about how she really, really did not support plural marriage. She did for a little bit. She actually also invited some, two other sisters that lived in their home to be married to Joseph when they already had been, and she didn’t know. She’s also seeing what’s happening in Salt Lake City at the time. In Nauvoo, plural marriage was a very secret, sacred practice. Publically, Joseph would say one thing. Privately, he was practicing plural marriage, and he was very careful with his words and found ways to talk about it. And Emma picked up on this. She also knew that part of her responsibility with the Relief Society was to encourage moral purity. She was expected to require moral purity of all the women that joined the Relief Society or that were allowed to join the Relief Society. As Brigham Young and the Saints come West, in 1852, polygamy is then made public, so they’re talking about it.

Jenny Reeder:
This also becomes a point of contention with the federal government and with a lot of people on the east side of the United States who were very uncomfortable with it. It turns out there was a lot of anti-polygamy legislation proposed by the government, several bills that tried to stop the practice of polygamy, where the people in Utah claimed it as a religious freedom, and they claimed it as a part of their religious practice. Emma sees this, and she sees the newspapers and how they’re talking about the Latter-day Saints. But she also had been part of that original group in Nauvoo that promised to not speak about this and to keep it sacred and to keep it quiet. So part of me wonders if then at the end of her life, when she says this to her sons or even before when other people come and visit her and ask her about it, she’s sticking with that promise. She’s promised to not talk about it.

Scott Woodward:
So tell us about that. There was some sworn secrecy where they had promised not to talk about it? Give us more context on that.

Jenny Reeder:
Joseph didn’t want this to be public information. And as a result, they, the records they did keep, if they did keep records of people that were sealed to him or to Brigham Young or to other, other men at the time, it was kind of recorded in code. They didn’t talk about it.

Scott Woodward:
Do we have records of people, like, saying that they were sworn not talk about it?

Jenny Reeder:
Yes, they were sworn to secrecy, that they wouldn’t talk about this, that they wouldn’t share with other people. And I think that was really hard for Eliza R. Snow, for example, because there were rumors going on all over Nauvoo. And she would have to say she was not married to Joseph. When later, and they were able to talk about it publicly, she made several statements saying that she was, that Joseph was the crown of her heart and the love of her life. Women at that time, and men too, for the most part, didn’t talk about their intimate relationships. They didn’t record them. They didn’t talk about it. It was like the Victorian era where you keep that quiet and sacred and not public. I know there’s some polygamy deniers today who say that because they didn’t write about this in their journals at the time, it didn’t happen.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
But they just, that was not a topic of conversation.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, and I’ll say one of the most frustrating things about the introduction of plural marriage is the two people I want to talk to are Joseph and Emma, and they’re the two people we have the least information from. Like, almost everybody, including the people that say Emma wasn’t aware of the marriages, are, are people later who are speaking about it, and it’s not coming directly from Emma. And I understand where they’re coming from, where you don’t want to talk about your, your intimate life. But that is frustrating, is that we’re, we’re going off second and in some cases, third-hand sources about what was going on in their relationship. And we have so little information from, from both of them. Like, a little context from Section, for Section 132, for instance, from Joseph or Emma, would be so helpful, but we just don’t have it, and we’ve got to be honest that we don’t.

Jenny Reeder:
Right. Well, and it’s also interesting in Section 132. I honestly believe that section was intended as a private section for Joseph and Emma.

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah, it’s a conversation between a husband, a wife, and the Lord.

Jenny Reeder:
Right.

Casey Griffiths:
And there, there’s at least six years of discussions before, and we don’t know how many after, and we just sort of insert ourselves into the conversation, and that makes it difficult sometimes for people to navigate.

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of it, too, is that Joseph is sort of commanded to get Emma’s permission to marry other women, and he frankly doesn’t at the beginning. Later he does, and then later, I think in 1843, at some point, he promises he won’t do it anymore.

Scott Woodward:
Your theory is that Emma’s 1879 denial that Joseph ever practiced polygamy me, is that she was keeping secrecy, potentially, like, protecting his name as she had supposedly promised to do, though we don’t have any record of her promising to keep it secret. But that’s your theory?

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah, that. I think that she wanted to protect her sons. I mean, at this point, they’re a major part of this new church, right, the Reorganized Church. And I think she doesn’t want them to think poorly of their father, especially with all the attacks on Brigham Young and the Latter-day Saints in Utah.

Casey Griffiths:
Sometimes, Emma is spoken of as the founder of the RLDS Church. She’s not. The RLDS Church is founded primarily by a man named Jason Briggs. And at the time that Emma gave that interview, there was conflict between Joseph Smith III, Emma’s son, and Jason Briggs. Jason Briggs wanted the Church to acknowledge that Joseph practiced plural marriage, and Joseph III refused to. And Emma may have been in the middle of conflict, too, where Joseph III’s narrative is, My father never practiced plural marriage. That was his narrative to the end of his life. And Jason Briggs was saying, No, he did, and we should acknowledge that he did. And eventually, Jason Briggs leaves the Church over that particular issue. So that’s another thing that’s going in, kind of power politics among, among the RLDS church.

Jenny Reeder:
That’s so interesting. I never heard of that, but it make, I can totally see that. It makes so much sense. But it’s also interesting that people would come to Joseph III and Emma and them to join this new church, and for a long time, they said no. But then eventually they did. And I love that there was a branch of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ in Nauvoo that met in the upper rooms of the Red Brick store, and it was called the Olive Branch.

Scott Woodward:
The Olive Branch.

Casey Griffiths:
That’s pretty cool. That’s funny.

Jenny Reeder:
Right?

Jenny Reeder:
You know what’s interesting, though, because I think that through time, Emma came to to have a sense of grace or mercy for her husband. She always loved him. He was always the love of her life. And at the end of her life, when she was dying, she had a dream, and this is reported by another member of the Reorganized Church. She had a dream where Joseph came to her and took her into a, a large mansion to a nursery. And in the nursery was a baby, and it was her baby, Don Carlos, that had died in 1840, 41. But she knew immediately that’s who it was. She picks him up and holds him and loves him. And she says to Joseph, What about the others? Because she lost several children. And he says, You will have all of them. And then she turns around and there’s Jesus Christ, welcoming her and loving her. And I think, to me, this makes Emma’s story such a beautiful story of redemption, that she is given a crown of righteousness, that even if she did murmur a little bit as it was, as she counseled not to do in Section 25, that she worked through it and that she was with Joseph and with her children.

Jenny Reeder:
It’s interesting, too. I remember when I was doing research in Independence, I went out on the temple lot ground, right, and it’s owned by the Temple Lot Hedrickites. And if you look in all the different directions, there are so many different break-offs of the Church. There’s the RLDS Church, there’s the Restoration branch, there’s so many. I can’t name them all right now. But I just remember thinking, this is also part of the Restoration, is to bring these people together with Joseph and Emma as the leaders of this dispensation. I think it’s such a, it’s such a beautiful thing to come to be at one with these people that share this core belief in the Book of Mormon and in Joseph as a prophet and Emma as his wife.

Casey Griffiths:
When I have students ask me about Emma’s eternal fate, I usually quote that dream where she sees her baby and sees Joseph and sees the Savior and then just kind of ask, you know, Does that sound like a dream that somebody who is going to the telestial kingdom would have? I think she’s going to be okay in spite of some complexity. And let me use that as a segue. The next thing I’d like to talk about is Emma’s legacy within the Church, where I’ve had older members of the Church say, I remember going into the Relief Society room and they’d have a picture of every president of the Relief Society except Emma. We didn’t talk about her to where it seems like there was a cultural shift to where we, we sort of lionized Emma and made her sound like she was perfect. And now we’re kind of settling down into a narrative of she’s good, but she’s not perfect. She’s a human being. Let’s don’t put her on too much of a pedestal. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that change happened in, in our culture?

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely. I think a lot of that took so much time to swing back to where it is now because of Brigham Young, and because he did talk about Emma, and he was disappointed that she didn’t come. It was hard. And so a lot of the other women, when they saw this interview published in the Saints Herold with Emma and her sons, and where she denies polygamy, they become even more incensed and determined to testify of the fact that they were married to Joseph, to the point where they’re publishing it in the newspapers and doing all sorts of things. And it’s not until this time that Eliza R. Snow, for example, takes the name of Smith as her last name, and they start to call her Eliza R. Snow Smith. It’s after the death of Emma. I think it’s interesting if we fast forward to 1892, when the Relief Society under the leadership of Zina Young, is celebrating their jubilee, their 50-year anniversary. They are in a solid place in Utah. They are in the Salt Lake Tabernacle preparing this, on the pipes of the organ, they have a big portrait of Joseph and Brigham Young. And then they also have a portrait of Emma, and they have a floral key.

Jenny Reeder:
And that’s to represent when Joseph said to them that he was now turning the key to them to lead their organization as part of the priesthood, part of the Church. A lot of people were upset about the idea of Emma’s portrait being up there. And Emmeline Wells was the corresponding secretary for Zina Young, and she went and asked Wilford Woodruff as the prophet of the time, What should we do? And he’s like, There’s no reason why you should not have Emma up there. And so they did. They put Emma up there. But still, it took years and years and years, decades to sort of overcome that and to see her differently. In fact, there’s a woman named Vesta Crawford, who was an editor of the Relief Society magazine, and she wanted to write a book about Emma. She really liked Emma, and she was really impressed with her. And she wrote this draft of this book and was told, If you publish that, you will lose your job and you will lose your membership in the Church. So she didn’t ever publish it. And the draft of that is at the University of Utah Special Collections. You can go and read through that. In the 1980s, Val Avery, and Linda Newell published their book, Mormon Enigma.

Jenny Reeder:
But you also have people, descendants of Joseph and Emma, who start to want to know more about their ancestors, their, these people, some of them start to join the Church. That’s another thing that I think brings it all together. You get a lot of other people then who start publishing their accounts of Emma. Buddy Youngreen writes about meeting these cousins and getting records from the interviews of the grandchildren and the great grandchildren. You have Gratia Jones, who starts writing about her family and inserting them more into a mainline narrative. And you have the book Saints, the volumes of Saints, where historians for the Church write about this relationship. And I really think it’s such a beautiful, again, return to become at one for our church to understand the role of Emma Smith.

Scott Woodward:
A lot of people will ask, why did Emma not come West when Brigham Young and the Quorum of the Twelve and about 10,000 Saints from Nauvoo leave ,like? Was it just that her husband was buried in Nauvoo? She didn’t want to leave, or is there more to it than that?

Jenny Reeder:
I think it’s a very nuanced, complex situation, right. First of all, she lives in the same house in Nauvoo for more than a year. She has moved all over the place. They didn’t have their own home until they lived in Kirtland. And she has moved all of that time, and she felt more settled. Her kids were growing up, and she wanted to give them a foundation, a place where they could be. I think she was also worried about that relationship with Brigham Young, I think she was done. She just couldn’t do anymore. She couldn’t move again. She couldn’t live out of a wagon again. She couldn’t, you know… And we know it took several years for the Saints to actually create this whole new settlement and civilization in Utah, Utah Territory. So I think she just, she was done.

Scott Woodward:
And some people wonder not just was she done emotionally, like, doing those kinds of hard things, but was she done with the Church? Was she done with her faith in her husband as a prophet? They wonder about her testimony. What would you say about that?

Jenny Reeder:
In that same interview with her sons before she died, she also testified very firmly about how she knew Joseph was a prophet, that he received revelation that there’s no way he could have written the Book of Mormon by himself. She uses words like, It was a marvel and a wonder, which sounds like the marvelous work and wonder we are familiar with in the Doctrine and Covenants. She knows all of that, and she does not ever deny that. So she may have needed a little temporary break, a step away. And she was active later in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ in Nauvoo. She often funded missionaries and helped them in any way that she could. She worried about her sons going on missions to Utah because she knew they wouldn’t be treated well. It was hard. Also, her son that was born after Joseph died in November of 1844 had a mental breakdown and ended up in an institution. And if you look at pictures of her, photographs of her holding that baby or later, it looks like she has kind of a saggy eye.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
I don’t know that she had a stroke.

Scott Woodward:
It does look like it, doesn’t it?

Casey Griffiths:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
But I just wonder if her son suffered from post-traumatic stress, PTSD…

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Jenny Reeder:
And the fear of hiding in mobs and, you know, fires and walking across frozen rivers. I just wonder if it just got to her.

Scott Woodward:
That be very understandable, so.

Casey Griffiths:
And I want to point out, too, that, that not just funding missionaries from the RLDS Church, but she was very welcoming and friendly towards visitors from our church.

Jenny Reeder:
Yes.

Casey Griffiths:
There’s a lot of people. Joseph F. Smith, her nephew, goes to visit her, and it seems like she was never hostile towards them. And you’re right in that last testimony, it shows her complexity, right? Because we’re talking about, Well, why did she say this about plural marriage? But she’s bearing witness of the Book of Mormon. In fact, we quote that a lot when we talk about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, her final interview. So there’s a lot of complexity you can find in just one person, and maybe nobody captures that than, than Emma.

Jenny Reeder:
And I appreciate that about her. I appreciate that she is real and that she struggled, and she didn’t just blindly accept everything. She really worked through a lot of things. It makes me feel more okay when I have questions or concerns or when I’m tired.

Casey Griffiths:
I remember talking to you about this book once, and you talked about kind of working through your issues and talking it out with people. I remember, I think you mentioned, like, Rick Turley and you having long discussions. Would you tell us a little bit about your own journey with, with Emma and how you came to be where you were?

Jenny Reeder:
Absolutely. I think my journey with Emma started when I was visiting with Linda Burton, the General Relief Society President, and realizing this elect lady thing is legit and it’s real. And I started wanting to see Emma in a new light. Polygamy, I think for a lot of people is hard. It was really hard for me. I wanted to give credit to her for being a part of it in a way, whether it was acceptance or rejection or years of thinking about it and coming to terms with it. And I remember I wrote most of this during COVID. So I was home. I lived by myself. I was in my little office and just worried. Like I had access to so many different sources. I had all the Community of Christ archival information. I had the Joseph Smith Papers. I had all of that. And I just remember worrying about how I was going to talk about polygamy. Plural marriage. And I did talk to Rick a couple of times, long, detailed discussions. And he and I don’t see exactly eye to eye, but I have a new understanding of him and of his efforts to understand himself, and I appreciate that, I would talk to Emma a lot.

Jenny Reeder:
I would say, Emma, if you want me to get this right, I need you to help guide me. And I remember being scared that one day when I meet Emma Smith, that she’ll be like, Oh, my gosh, why did you do that? You didn’t get it right.

Scott Woodward:
Jenny, why did you represent me that way?

Jenny Reeder:
I know. Exactly. Exastly. And I just, I loved her, and I wanted to be a good representation of her or give a good representation of her.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, you’ve done a remarkable job. And like I said, we’re just grateful to have the opportunity to talk with you and kind of create a whole person here, someone that isn’t an angel, someone who’s not the worst enemy of the Church, someone who was a figure who dealt with some really, really challenging circumstances.

Scott Woodward:
Well, Jenny, this has been really fun to have you on with us. I’m curious, what would be your, your final thoughts in terms of what you would hope listeners would, would remember about Emma Smith?

Jenny Reeder:
I read about Emma to know that I’m not alone and that as she handled hard things, I can handle hard things. And as she started this amazing legacy with the hymns and with Relief Society and with the Church that I, too, can do hard things and that I can build on her and can be a partner with her in this great work to relieve the poor and save souls. And it’s so exciting for me to be a part of that.

Scott Woodward:
Love that.

Jenny Reeder:
It’s a marvel and a wonder.

Casey Griffiths:
Just as she said.

Scott Woodward:
Yes. Wonderful.

Casey Griffiths:
All right.

Scott Woodward:
Thank you, Jenny.

Casey Griffiths:
Well, thank you very much, and thanks for being with us.

Jenny Reeder:
Yeah. Thank you. I’m so grateful for this opportunity. Thank you..