PROVO — Brigham Young University student leaders in 1976 had no idea a two-day women's conference they were organizing would endure three decades, become a major event and draw some 20,000 participants.

However, Belle S. Spafford, former general Relief Society president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, hinted as such in her inaugural conference keynote address in the Wilkinson Center ballroom. She predicted the event would become an annual affair eventually filling the recently constructed, 22,000-seat Marriott Center with conferencegoers.

Now in its 34th year after considerable transformations and enhancements, the BYU Women's Conference begins Thursday morning with the first of four general sessions in the same Marriott Center.

And by the time Elder L. Tom Perry of the LDS Church's Quorum of the Twelve gives his concluding keynote address late Friday afternoon, attendees will have their choice of 95 hourlong presentations, an evening service project, sharing stations, instant choirs and housing and meal plans for those out-of-towners.

In 1976, the conference — titled "The LDS Woman: Potentialities and Promises," held in mid-February and geared toward students and faculty — was a creation of ASBYU's Women's Office and its student leaders as an on-campus offering against the mid-1970s national backdrop of women's movements and equal rights amendment efforts.

Topics centered on home, church, community and career — "many of the topics are the same today that they were talking about in the late 1970s," said Debbie Hutchings Forrest, the ASBYU women's vice president in 1976 who joined Carla Gibson Smith, another Women's Office leader, in creating and directing the original conference.

Also key contributors and directors in the conference's initial years were Maren M. Mouritsen, then BYU associate dean of student life, and Ardeth G. Kapp, then working in the student leadership development program and later the LDS Church's Young Women general president.

"It's a focus on values for women within the framework of the church and in a forum in harmony with its values and principles," said Kapp, who has not only been a speaker and presenter many times over the past 30-plus years but a conference committee member for several years a half-decade ago.

Some 900 people attended the '76 conference to listen to the likes of Spafford, Gretae Peterson, Marilyn Arnold and Virginia Cutler. Enthusiasm about the conference spread into surrounding communities, and attendance quickly ballooned beyond a campus crowd.

In June 1990, the LDS Church's Relief Society became a conference co-sponsor; in 1999, the first en masse service project as part of the conference schedule was introduced; in 2003, a track of sessions were presented for the first time in Spanish.

The conference now falls under the organizational efforts of BYU's Conferences and Workshops and is rebroadcast over BYUTV in more than a half-dozen languages.

But for those attending the two-day conference in person, it's a chance to assemble for instruction and encouragement; for others, it's become an annual tradition — to reconnect with family members and friends in retreat or reunion fashion.

Or, as Kapp says, the BYU Women's Conference after a third of a century "has become kind of a gathering place."

E-MAIL: taylor@desnews.com