Snow, Eliza R.
See this page in the original 1992 publication.
Author: Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach
Dubbed "Zion's poetess" by Joseph Smith, Eliza Roxcy Snow (1804-1887) is still noted widely for her hymn-texts, ten of which are included in the 1985 LDS Hymnal (see Hymns and Hymnody). Of those, "O My Father," written in Nauvoo in 1845 and sung to various tunes since its first publication, is one of Mormondom's favorites. Her poems "How Great the Wisdom and the Love" and "Though Deepening Trials" are also sung frequently. Her most significant legacy, however, was not her poetry but her 1867 assignment to organize relief societies throughout the Church, and her involvement in the organization of the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association (later young women), the primary Association, and other economic and ecclesiastical movements. She was unchallenged in her position as "captain of Utah's woman-host."
She is described by her contemporaries as being of average height, and delicate in appearance. In her sixties she seemed to observers to be as young as forty, despite the fact that her dark brown hair was silvered with gray. She had dark eyes and a high forehead, and she habitually wore a cap over her center-parted hair and dangling earrings. Her manner was quiet and dignified. She was simple in her attire, calm, ladylike, and rather cold, observed several of her contemporaries. At age seventy, her now wrinkled face appeared to many to be stern. Most remarkable are the descriptions of her in her eighties, however, revealing a woman with mental faculty in full vigor, industrious beyond her physical strength, and tireless as a woman half her age. Throughout her life she was perceived as neat and orderly, with "old school" manners. Where her detractors saw her as outrageously bigoted, her friends admired her precision and enthusiasm in defense of her faith.
Born in Becket, Berkshire County, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1804, Eliza Roxcy (most often Eliza R. or misspelled Roxey) Snow was raised from her second year in Mantua, Portage County, Ohio. Her father, Oliver Snow, of Becket, and mother, Rosetta Pettibone, of Simsbury, Connecticut, along with daughters Leonora and Eliza, and family members on both sides, were 1806 pioneers to Connecticut's "Western Reserve" in northeastern Ohio. They cleared a good farm and in 1814 built one of Mantua's first permanent homes. Oliver was a town and county official, and Eliza, as she matured, served often as his secretary.
A precocious child, Eliza was gifted in language, reading, and writing beyond her years. Her earliest publications, odes in the neoclassical style of the century past, indicate wide knowledge of the literary masters, Shakespeare, Milton, and the ancients. "Trained to the kitchen," as she later wrote in her autobiography, she was skilled in domestic arts as well. She completed an education in the local grammar school; unlike her younger brother Lorenzo Snow, however, she did not attend secondary schools.
Eliza claimed to have had suitors as a young woman, yet did not marry in Ohio. A member of the Reformed Baptist congregation of Sidney Rigdon, she was, with her family, introduced to Joseph Smith within a year of his arrival in Ohio. Not until 1835 did she follow her mother and older sister into the new faith, she having had first to "prove all things." Shortly after her baptism she moved to Kirtland, where she lived in the household of Joseph and Emma Smith. There she taught a school for their children and others. She witnessed and recorded the dedication of the Kirtland Temple, purchased land, and brought her family to Kirtland, but was, with them, compelled to move with the Saints to Missouri.
Settling in Adam-ondi-Ahman, north of Far West, the Snows stayed only nine months before they were forced to leave with the migration to Illinois. There the family was split three ways: Lorenzo had gone on a mission through the southern states; the parents and younger boys moved to LaHarpe; and Eliza with Leonora and her two daughters stayed in Quincy. The local newspaper, the Quincy Whig, published several of Eliza's verses in defense of the Saints.
On invitation from Sidney Rigdon, Eliza moved to what would become Nauvoo, again to teach a school. Though Father Snow eventually came to Nauvoo, he soon became disaffected from the Church and took his remaining family to settle in Walnut Grove, Illinois, where he and Rosetta died.
Left alone in Nauvoo, Eliza continued to publish verses in the several Latter-day Saint newspapers. When in March 1842 the women's Relief Society was organized, she was invited first to draft its bylaws, and then to be its secretary. At the discontinuance of that organization in 1844, she was custodian of the minute book. That record would prove invaluable as a guide to the reorganization of the Relief Society in Utah in the 1860s, containing as it did reports of the Prophet Joseph Smith's instructions to the women.
Less than ten weeks after the founding of the Nauvoo Relief Society, on June 29, 1842, Eliza Snow was sealed as a plural wife to Joseph Smith, and lived for six months in the Smith home (see Plural Marriage). Again she taught a school, which included the Smith children. Following the death of Joseph, by which time she was living in the attic room of the Stephen Markham home, she was married "for time" to President Brigham Young. She never took President Young's name, however, and at his death claimed the name-and was buried as-Eliza Roxcy Snow Smith.
With the Markhams, and later with the Robert Peirce family, she made her way across the plains in the pioneer migration to the Great Basin. The winter that divided the two seasons of travel she spent at winter quarters, Nebraska, much of it in ill health. Recovering, she found a place in the network of "leading sisters," those wives and daughters of the leaders of the Church who would, in years to come, direct the activities of LDS women in the Utah settlements. Traveling with the "big company," she arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on October 9, 1847.
Little is known of her activities in her first decade in Utah. Susa Young gates, who knew her later, wrote that she was ill with tuberculosis, from which she recovered in the late 1850s; other indications suggest something less severe. During the first two decades in Utah she wrote and compiled poetry until she had enough for two volumes. The first, Poems: Religious, Historical, and Political, was published in Liverpool in 1856. Eliza Snow's reputation as poet and thinker made her the center of a female intelligentsia in Utah society. In 1854, she and her brother Lorenzo founded a Polysophical Society, where a select group of friends met regularly to perform for and address one another. Some of her most thoughtful writings were composed for those occasions. The assembly displeased some Church authorities, and so was discontinued in 1856.
The same year as the founding of the Polysophical Society, Relief Societies sprang up in various Salt Lake City wards, later to be encouraged by Brigham Young. Eliza Snow was herself only peripherally involved in the movement, and only in her own Eighteenth Ward. The reborn societies were interrupted by the Utah War (see Utah Expedition), however, and few survived.
In December 1866, following the Civil War, President Young once more saw need for the women to be organized, and called Eliza R. Snow to "head up" the movement, this time on an all-Church basis. Thus began the Relief Society as it has continued to the present: a central board setting directions to be followed by stake and ward officers wherever the Church has members. Loosely organized at first, the movement took advantage of existing networks of women until lines of responsibility were firmly established. Always at the center was "Sister Snow," or "Aunt Eliza," visiting or sending envoys to the various settlements to instruct, aid, and encourage. The Cooperative Junior and Senior Retrenchment Association, established in 1869 to promote frugality and home industry, served as an early central meeting place for the sisters, meeting semimonthly in the Fourteenth Ward meetinghouse. It was replaced gradually by more directed organizations.
Included under her direction as "presidentess" of the women's organizations were, by 1884, the Relief Society, Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association, and Primary Association, all of which she helped found. She also held responsibility for the women's work of the Endowment house, and sat on an advisory board of the woman's exponent, the semimonthly newspaper edited for Mormon women by Lula Greene [Richards] and Emmeline B. Wells.
Various ad hoc projects came under Eliza Snow's direction: the encouragement of women to attend medical schools and then to offer classes in practical nursing and midwifery (see Maternity and Child Health Care); the celebration of the United States Centennial by the preparation of handicrafts, later sold in the Ladies' Commission Store; the preparation, with Edward Tullidge, of a manuscript later published in New York as Women of Mormondom; and the establishment of the Deseret hospital, the first to be founded by the Latter-day Saints.
In addition to all of her public efforts, Eliza Snow carried on her private projects. She wrote, or edited, and published nine books, including her two poetry volumes, a biography of her brother Lorenzo, a collection of letters from her 1872-1873 tour of Europe and the Holy Land, and five instructional books for children.
Revered in her own time, she was honored during her many visits to the settlements of the Saints by feasts, celebrations of her birthday, odes in her praise, and invitations to address meetings of both men and women. Accounts of her healings, blessings, and prophesies are extant; her instructions to the women were accepted as binding. There was no intended exaggeration in the Kanab Relief Society's 1881 acknowledgment of her position as president "of all the feminine portion of the human race" and as "leading Priestess of this dispensation" (Woman's Exponent 9 [Apr. 1, 1881]:165), and Primary children two decades after her death in 1887 were encouraged in reverence for "the prophet, the priesthood, and Eliza R. Snow."
Bibliography
Autobiographical writings:
Three holographic diaries and a brief autobiography are extant, two diaries at the Huntington Libraries, San Marino, Calif., one at the LDS Church Archives, and the autobiography at the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, Calif.; they have been published, in greater or lesser completeness, in the following places: Trail journals, 1846-1849, serially in the Improvement Era, in 1943-1944; "Sketch of My Life" in Relief Society Magazine, March to October 1944; also in part in Edward Tullidge, Women of Mormondom (New York, 1877). Parts of the trail journals are found, with other writings, in Eliza R. Snow: An Immortal (Salt Lake City, 1957). The Nauvoo diary and notebook, 1842-1844, are published as Eliza R. Snow's Nauvoo Journal" in BYU Studies 15 (Summer 1975):391-416.
Publications by Eliza R. Snow:
Poems, Religious, Historical, and Political, 2 vols. Liverpool, 1856, and Salt Lake City, 1877.
Correspondence of Palestine Tourists. . ., edited. Salt Lake City, 1875.
Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow. . . .Salt Lake City, 1884.
Publications about Eliza R. Snow:
Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. "The Eliza Enigma." Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 11 (Spring 1978):30-43.
Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. "'The Leading Sisters': A Female Hierarchy in Nineteenth Century Mormon Society." Journal of Mormon History 9 (1982):26-39.
Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. "Leonora, Eliza, and Lorenzo: An Affectionate Portrait of the Snow Family." Ensign 10 (June 1980):64-69.
Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach; Linda King Newell; and Valeen Tippetts Avery. "Emma and Eliza and the Stairs." BYU Studies 22 (Winter 1982):87-96.
Hicks, Michael. "'O My Father': The Musical Settings." BYU Studies 36:1 (1996-97):33-58.
Madsen, Carol Cornwall, and Susan Staker Oman. Sisters and Little Saints: One Hundred Years of Primary. Salt Lake City, 1979.
Mulvay-Derr, Jill, and Susan Staker Oman. "The Nauvoo Generation: Our First Five Relief Society Presidents." Ensign 7 (Dec. 1977):36-43.
Terry, Keith, and Ann Terry. Eliza. Santa Barbara, Calif., 1981.
MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER
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