Sabbath Devotional :: Unity and Difference

L to R: Amy Brown Lyman and Susa Young Gates

Last week, we celebrated the Relief Society’s birthday or, as I like to call it, “The One Day a Year When Being a Mormon History Nerd Makes You Interesting and Popular.” One of my favorite episodes in Relief Society history is an argument between two Relief Society leaders with intractable opinions and healthy self-confidence. What is unusual about this particular argument is that it took place in the office of President Heber J. Grant.

The women were Amy Brown Lyman and Susa Young Gates, both members of the Relief Society General Board. Amy Lyman had been asked by Joseph F. Smith to establish a Social Services Department within the Church to direct charitable activities throughout the church. She was a talented administrator and formidable personality. It was said of her that she moved with such obvious purpose and determination that she could scatter a crowd in her path just by walking toward them, even in her eighties. Susa Gates was no less commanding a presence — a daughter of Brigham Young, the first General President of the Young Women’s organization, editor of the Young Women’s Journal and founder of the Relief Society magazine, a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Utah–she was a force in almost every aspect of Utah public life for decades.

The two women disagreed about methods for helping the needy. Lyman, educated at the University of Utah and the University of Chicago, had been trained in modern social work and favored central organization and professionalized delivery of services. She had established programs to train Relief Society sisters to distribute nutritious food, help educate mothers, and conduct home visits to assess need. In her role at the Social Services Department, Lyman partnered with community organizations like the Red Cross and the YWCA, as well as with hospitals, courts, and jails.

Young, part of an earlier generation that had organized the Relief Society’s efforts to assist the needy in Utah territory, felt that it was important to preserve the personal connections and localized control of having individual Relief Societies administer social projects in their own wards. According to historian David Hall, she “feared that adoption of ‘commercialized Charity’ and creation of a professional, salaried bureaucracy would eat up in overhead those funds which had been intended to help the poor. She also warned of the demoralizing effects that the professionalization of the church’s charity efforts would have not only on those receiving aid but on those dispensing it as well.” (David Hall, Anxiously Engaged: Amy Brown Lyman and Relief Society Charity Work, 1917-45, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Summer 1994, 81).

These disagreements apparently came to a head in President Grant’s office. Each woman presented her case to Grant, and each remained entirely unmoved by the other’s position. President Grant, unable to persuade either of them, sent them back to the Relief Society Board to work through the issues. While the Board found ways to continue the Relief Society’s work, Gates and Lyman seem not to have come to any agreement, and Young continued her opposition to Lyman’s methods even after being released from her service on the Board. Importantly, though, “both suppressed their disagreement out of loyalty to the organization, and co-workers not aware of the matter did not sense any animosity between them.” (Hall, 81)

The elderly Susa Gates resigned from the Board about a year after the meeting in President Grant’s office, and, at least for a while, Amy Lyman’s approach seemed to “win.” While no one could have predicted it in 1921, the methodical and systematic progress of Relief Society work under Lyman’s direction was critical to helping Utah survive the Great Depression, and also to the founding of the Welfare Program as we now know it. At the general level of the Church, in the Welfare Department and Humanitarian Assistance programs and many of the other efforts organized under the Presiding Bishopric’s mandate, Amy Brown’s legacy is immense.

But Susa Gates and the women of her generation left a legacy as well. Their local approach, which took willingness and tenderness to be as important as training and efficiency, continued in Relief Societies all over the world. Amy Lyman’s methods probably could not have been scaled to match the worldwide growth of the church in the 1970s, and the spirit of charity which had always been the guiding force of the Relief Society found expression in modes of service at the mission, ward, and branch level, in ways that Susa Young Gates would have approved of.

The clear lesson to me is that both large efforts towards political reform like MWEG and small efforts at simple kindness in our wards and neighborhoods are part of the same work. As Latter-day Saint women, we honor our foremothers both by large-scale organizing efforts and by small acts of charity. I don’t think either Amy Lyman or Susa Gates had any inkling that we would someday find ourselves in a country where bringing a casserole to someone who votes differently than we do would seem unusual, even radical. But here we are in that world, where simply remaining friends with our sisters on the other side of the political aisle begins to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy that “thou shalt be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of paths to dwell in.”

I am convinced not only that, as the scriptures tell us, “out of small things proceedeth that which is great,” but also that we are rarely in a position to realize the relative greatness or smallness of our efforts or the eventual fruits of our labors.

I love the story of Susa and Amy fighting in President Grant’s office because it shows so clearly that there is more than one way to show love and devotion, and that when we are earnest in our desire to do good, we can move forward in love without abandoning our convictions or resolving every disagreement.

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Read more about Amy Brown Lyman, including a beautiful sermon on faith, here: Church History Press

Image 1: Amy Brown Lyman (Source: Collections.lib.utah.edu)
Image 2: Susa Young Gates (Source: Collections.lib.utah.edu/ark)