Education Quote by Brigham Young

In Brigham Young's mouth, this line lands less like a soft egalitarian flourish and more like frontier triage with a theology behind it. He’s not arguing that daughters are inherently more deserving; he’s arguing that, under scarcity, educating girls is the highest-leverage investment a community can make. That’s the rhetorical move: taking a moral stance that sounds progressive, then anchoring it in the practical mechanics of building a durable society.

The subtext is about power and transmission. In Young’s world, women were central to the domestic and spiritual infrastructure that kept a dispersed, besieged religious community coherent. Educated daughters become literate mothers, organizers, teachers, and cultural carriers; they shape the next generation’s habits, piety, and ambition long after a sermon ends. The line quietly reframes "women’s education" from personal uplift to collective survival. It’s also a way of policing the future: educating girls doesn’t just broaden their horizons; it standardizes what the household will value.

Context matters. Mid-19th-century America treated women’s schooling as optional and ornamental, especially on the frontier where labor and logistics swallowed any spare time. Young’s statement pushes against that default, but it doesn’t necessarily dismantle hierarchy; it reallocates resources within it. The brilliance, and the tension, is that it uses a seemingly feminist priority to reinforce a communal project: stabilize families, preserve faith, and outlast competitors. Under constraint, he implies, the smartest long game runs through women.