Matriarchal Priestesshood

The Restoration did not reveal exaltation as a solitary male office. Joseph Smith restored a Family Order: Fathers and Mothers, Kings and Queens, Priests and Priestesses, sealed together in the New and Everlasting Covenant.

The Collier’s Publishing issue The Matriarchal Priestesshood gathers the evidence that women were not merely near the Nauvoo Holy Order. They were to enter it, receive its blessings, and administer in its sacred work according to the order appointed to women.1

Sacred ordinance texts, ritual instructions, and ceremony mechanics are not published here; the focus is doctrine and historical evidence.

Queens and Priestesses in the Family Kingdom

The issue begins with the doctrine of exalted parents. In the Celestial order, the faithful become “Kings and Priests, Queens and Priestesses” who preside over eternal posterity.2 That is the frame: Matriarchal Priestesshood is not a modern political slogan. It belongs to the same Family Kingdom as Celestial Marriage, Adoption, the Holy Order, and the Church of the Firstborn.

In that order, Priesthood is inseparable from eternal family. The publication states the point plainly: “It was in this order that a man and woman received the ordinances of the Priesthood which prepared them for Godhood.”3

Joseph Smith and the Relief Society

Joseph Smith’s Relief Society teachings are central to this subject. On April 28, 1842, he taught the sisters how they would “come in possession of the privileges, blessings and gifts of the Priesthood.”4 In the same setting, he spoke of delivering keys to the Society and to the Church. Because this discourse came before the first Nauvoo Endowment on May 4, it is an important witness that women were already being treated as participants in Priesthood blessing and authority, not merely as later recipients of auxiliary permission.

This is not auxiliary language. It is temple language, covenant language, Family Kingdom language. Joseph was preparing women to receive more than institutional permission to serve; he was preparing them for the order of exaltation. See also the Melchizedek Priesthood page.

Women in the Nauvoo Holy Order

The publication’s central claim is direct:

“It was the Prophet’s doctrine that the women who were brought into the Holy Order received the Priesthood along with the men.”5

The issue connects this claim with Nauvoo temple ordinances, Relief Society teachings, and later patriarchal blessings. It also cites Women of Mormondom, a work prepared in the circle of Eliza R. Snow and the early Relief Society women, which preserves the early Restoration witness that women were to be “high priestess and prophetess” and administered in holy places.6

Patriarchal Blessing Evidence

Some of the strongest public evidence comes from nineteenth-century blessings given to women. These are not abstract summaries; they are concrete records using Priesthood language.

John Smith’s November 7, 1845 blessing to Maria Louisa Turnbow promised that she would be endowed in the Lord’s house and “be clothed with the Power of the Holy Priesthood” to redeem her father’s house.7

Elisha H. Graves’s November 4, 1856 blessing to Lucy Hannah White Flake called her “a royal heir” to the blessings, privileges, and powers of the Holy Priesthood “according to thy sex,” and promised that she would be anointed “a queen and priestess unto the most high God.”8

John Smith’s January 26, 1846 blessing to Emily Jacob is even more explicit:

“I place my hands upon thy head in the name of Jesus of Nazareth and seal upon thee the Priesthood with all the blessings of the new and everlasting covenant.”9

The same blessing adds that a woman has little power in the Priesthood without a man. The publication immediately balances that sentence: “It should also be stated that a man has but little power in the Priesthood without a woman.”10

The Order of Priesthood Is Marriage

D&C 131 gives the doctrinal key: to obtain the highest degree of celestial glory, a person must enter “this order of the priesthood,” meaning the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage.11 Exaltation is not bachelor Godhood. It is Fatherhood and Motherhood together.

That is why the Matriarchal Priestesshood is not a detachable women’s-rights appendix to Restoration doctrine. It is built into the structure of eternal increase. A King without a Queen cannot become what God is. A Priest without a Priestess cannot receive the fullness of the Family Kingdom.

Why the Doctrine Receded

Fred’s publication locates the later obscuring of the women’s side of the order in the succession crisis itself. Joseph’s Family Kingdom vested its powers in King and Queen, the anointed husband and wife. Emma stood as the elect Queen and Eve figure beside Joseph, but she began struggling with and resisting key Nauvoo doctrines before Joseph’s death. After the martyrdom, her opposition became open and intransigent as she aligned herself with Sidney Rigdon and William Marks; because she stood as Joseph’s elect Queen in the Holy Order, that opposition carried consequences for the women’s side of the Kingdom. The result was not that every ordinance vanished at once, but that the original Patriarchal/Matriarchal Order entered a state of disorder and de-emphasis while President Young and his associates preserved what could be preserved.12

The publication closes the argument this way: when the Patriarchal Order was lost to the Saints, “with it went the doctrines and ordinances which would have brought women into the Priesthood.”13

Matriarchal Priestesshood therefore belongs to the larger Nauvoo restoration, not to an isolated modern debate. It belongs with the Holy Order, Temple & Ordinances, Adoption, Celestial Marriage, and Heavenly Mother.

Further Study

Notes

  1. William S. Harwell, The Matriarchal Priestesshood as Established by the Prophet Joseph Smith in the Holy Order at Nauvoo, Doctrine of the Priesthood, Vol. 8 No. 3 (March 1991), title page and 1. The issue was published by Collier’s Publishing Co. and identifies the paper as presented at the 1989 Sunstone Symposium. ↩
  2. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 1. ↩
  3. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 3. ↩
  4. Joseph Smith, remarks to the Female Relief Society, April 28, 1842, in Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., The Words of Joseph Smith, 114–19; History of the Church 4:602; Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 7–8. ↩
  5. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 6–7. ↩
  6. Edward W. Tullidge, Women of Mormondom (New York: Tullidge & Crandall, 1877), 22–23; quoted in Harwell, The Matriarchal Priestesshood, 4. ↩
  7. John Smith blessing to Maria Louisa Turnbow, November 7, 1845, quoted in Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 8. ↩
  8. Elisha H. Graves blessing to Lucy Hannah White Flake, November 4, 1856, quoted in Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 8. ↩
  9. John Smith blessing to Emily Jacob, January 26, 1846, quoted in Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 8–9. ↩
  10. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 9. ↩
  11. D&C 131:1–4; Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 9. ↩
  12. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 12–15. ↩
  13. Harwell, Matriarchal Priestesshood, 18–19. ↩