About General Conference Sisters

Welcome! We’re glad you’re here! This website was originally created because I (Lauren) made an Activity Days website and wanted to include more quotes from and about women in our activities. Of course, I value the words of our male prophets and apostles, but I think it’s important that these young minds are also exposed to the voices of women in the LDS Church. These Mormon women are role models for all of us, showing us that wisdom, authority, and Gospel knowledge can and does transcend gender.

I quickly realized that this resource could be used to enhance lessons not only for Activity Day girls, but for Young Women, Sunday School, Young Men, Primary, Relief Society, and Priesthood quorums as well, since everyone can benefit from the spiritual wisdom of these amazing women. So, I paired up with Emily, who was serving as a ward Young Women president at the time and had also been working to include more women’s voices in her lessons, to create the website you’re visiting today.

Why create this page when all of these Conference talks can be found on LDS.org? Well, it can be difficult to find quotes specifically from women on the LDS site, because women have only been speaking in general sessions of General Conference since 1984*, and even now female speakers comprise only two out of approximately thirty speakers over the four general sessions! If you’re looking for a quote on a specific topic, you may have to search through several pages of talks from men before finding one by a woman. Hopefully this website will be a bit more efficient!

We’ve chosen to only provide quotes from General Conference because, while many of these women have written wonderfully inspirational books, it’s important during church lessons to stick to official Church doctrine from sources that members of the Church will recognize as authoritative. We want everyone to feel welcome and comfortable using this website as a resource, and confident that the quotes here are appropriate to use for lessons at Church. Every quote includes a link back to the talk in which it was originally given so you can also read the context of the quote for further reassurance.

You’ll notice that we have also included a few quotes from men when they quote women or tell women’s stories in their talks. Since 87% of the stories in the Primary Sharing Time plans reference boys**, we need all the supplemental references we can get that involve women and girls!

The quotes are arranged in reverse chronological order within each topic. Some of our favorites are bolded.

Since we have conference every six months, this is an ongoing project. If you’d like to help by reading new talks by women and extracting quotes, we would love your assistance! Please email us at lauren.rae.ard@gmail.com.

Thanks,

Lauren Ard
Emily Geddes

(If you’d like to read more about our experiences creating this site, please check out our guest posts cross-posted at Feminist Mormon Housewives and Young Mormon Feminists.)

*In 1930 each member of the Relief Society presidency gave a brief testimony in the spring session of Conference. Other than that instance, to the best of our knowledge, the main sessions of General Conference were without female speakers until 1984. However, we have included quotes from talks given by women in the General Welfare Sessions (beginning in 1975) and General Women’s Meetings (beginning in 1978) as well. See A Brief History of Women Speaking in General Conference for more information.

**This statistic can be found in Neylan McBaine’s excellent book, Women at Church, which has many suggestions for magnifying the impact of women in our church within our current doctrinal scope.