The Christine Dutson papers date from 1954 to 2000 and measure 12.2 linear inches. The papers are arranged in four series: Memoirs, Poetry, Nauvoo Temple, and In Balance.

The Memoirs series begins with an unpublished work, "Enlightened by Enrichment: Teaching Gifted Education in a Rural Iowa School District." Dutson uses a combination of journal entries and topical essays to describe and critique the programs she implemented in various elementary schools in southeast Iowa between 1990-1995. This book-length essay offers a wealth of practical details about classroom activity units as well as many sobering insights into the structural and intellectual challenges facing the special-needs educator in the 1990s.

The series continues with an unpublished collection of short essays on assorted topics. Subjects include Dutson's experiences learning to drive, learning Spanish, doing laundry, and grocery shopping with her mother. She also shares with readers her attitudes on luck and her most joyful and sorrowful experiences.

Dutson's major unpublished memoir, "Time's Chameleon," offers a rare research opportunity; it is an unusually lengthy and detailed spiritual autobiography written by a woman of working-class origins. This intimate and moving multi-volume work begins with an unblinking memoir of childhood poverty and familial disorder. Later volumes examine changes in Dutson's marriage, her work experiences, the family's struggles with debt and depression, and a wealth of personal details about her relationships with her children, her parents, and her husband. Volumes after 1982 are in journal form, capturing Dutson's immediate reactions to the events of her life. Richly evocative passages chronicle her emotions as she experiences the uncertainty of widowhood and the joys of new love. Dutson's spiritual devotions, woven into the fabric of everyday domestic activities or undertaken during service to her church callings, grant historians a rare chance to observe the way in which religious faith empowered and shaped one woman's life. Her journals also provide abundant evidence describing the roles and activities of LDS women in the church's day-to-day operations. Researchers seeking information on the treatment of the mentally ill, the challenges of and changes in family life in the latter half of the twentieth century, the entrepreneurial activities of women, or classroom practice in the Iowa public school system also will be richly rewarded. Each volume contains photocopies of photographs and memorabilia germane to the writings therein.

Works in the Poetry series are arranged chronologically within topical groupings. Dutson has annotated these works, adding descriptive matter concerning their subjects or the circumstances of their composition.