Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Three Books on Mormon Polygamy

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1 Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Three Books on Mormon Polygamy Sarah M. S. Pearsall Reviews in American History, Volume 44, Number 1, March 2016, pp (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article Accessed 2 Jan :06 GMT

2 RESPECTING MARRIAGE (EARLY AND OFTEN): THREE BOOKS ON MORMON POLYGAMY Sarah M. S. Pearsall Merina Smith. Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, Logan: Utah State University Press, viii pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $ Christine Talbot. A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, viii pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $85.00 (cloth); $30.00 (paper). Paula Kelly Harline. The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, xii Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $ Scandal, betrayal, sex, murder, scoundrels, revelations, and chicken pie: the history of Mormon polygamy has it all. It could not be a more dramatic and fascinating history, though also one filled with compellingly homely details. Three new books offer insights and useful narratives framing this rich history. They don t entirely capture the drama and breathlessness of that unexpected tale, nor do they offer startling new insights about marriage, gender, and politics in the nineteenth-century United States. Still, they make clear the high stakes and the many lives touched by this extraordinary history. The history of American marriage has captured a great deal of attention, scholarly and otherwise, of late. Who should be allowed to marry whom and in what configuration? In particular, the many years of agitation for same-sex marriage, culminating in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that makes it legal across all states, have prompted greater consideration of marriage and its history. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves : so declared Justice Anthony Kennedy in the Obergefell decision. Kennedy s words could easily have described nineteenth-century polygamists of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, who also saw love Reviews in American History 44 (2016) by Johns Hopkins University Press

3 PEARSALL / Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Mormon Polygamy 91 as enduring past death and who respected marriage so deeply that they placed it at the center of their vision of salvation. Has marriage always been one man plus one woman? Of course not. The most common alternative for much of human history, over most of the globe, has been the configuration of one man plus two or more women. Plural marriages, just as same-sex ones, offer fascinating access to the workings of the institution and gender more generally, as well as the controversies linking public and private that have surrounded it. Naturally, members of the mainstream LDS Church have long been interested in, if a bit wary about, polygamy, given its centrality to their early history. Their own volte-face in terms of marriage from defenders of a decidedly illicit version to active promoters of the most conservative heterosexual monogamy has also contributed to this disquiet. Also provoking unease is the complicated issue of women in Mormon polygyny (that is, one husband/multiple wives). Polygyny has seemed to embody the oppression of women by men. Even where individual Mormon women declared their willingness to live the principle of polygyny, it was a system that favored men, giving them access to the productive and reproductive labor of women and children. However, one might say the same of monogamy in the nineteenth century (and earlier). Indeed, Susan B. Anthony at the time saw them in similar terms: woman s work in monogamy and polygamy is one and the same that of planting her feet on the ground of self-support (Anthony as quoted in Talbot, p. 67). It seems strange that Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke in Utah, communicating with Mormon women, who were among the first women in the nation to win the vote (enfranchised in 1870). For some women, polygamy apparently offered a system of household organization that allowed at least a few of them to pursue interests beyond the household (such as medical training). Polygamy could afford some women space and relations with other women; it could also make some women desperately unhappy and, indeed, crushed with a sense of oppression. This seeming paradox of female constraint and liberty has preoccupied many scholars. In various articles from the 1980s on, Joan Iversen notably argued that Mormon polygamy was not as oppressive as had been supposed. Such debates have long animated work in this field, the best of which have also compellingly shown the importance of Mormon polygamy to American history, law, and culture. The strongest social historical treatment appears in Kathryn M. Daynes More Wives Than One : Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, (2001). Nancy F. Cott places such conflicts in broader context in her groundbreaking account of modern American marriage, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (2002). Sarah Barringer Gordon s The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (2002) presented a brilliant interpretation of the legal, constitutional, and cultural controversies. The connection of law, religion, and polygamy also

4 92 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2016 received useful attention in Kathleen Flake s The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004). After the flurry of work appearing in the early 2000s, there has been something of a hiatus, despite increased general fascination with Mormon polygamy. Same-sex marriage debates have partly generated this concern. Other events, such as the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, a polygamy compound, and the arrest of polygamist Warren Jeffs as well as popular representations, including HBO s Big Love and TLC s Sister Wives have raised interest, too. The LDS Church strongly disavows such practices of fundamentalist Mormons, but they continue to intrigue Americans. LDS history has also come under greater scrutiny, thanks in part to Mitt Romney s presidential bid in 2012 and the continued success of the popular musical The Book of Mormon. The books here are largely the fruits of earlier scholarly debates, although they may also tap into current popular interest. They do not quite provide such novel interpretations as earlier works did in terms of understanding the paradox of women and polygamy, or indeed the institution itself. Christine Talbot appears to argue for the notion that polygamy gave women opportunities as well as limitations, though Donna Harline seems to reject that idea. However, all of these books offer helpful and interesting consideration of the complexities and ambiguities of polygamy for women, if sometimes in slightly anecdotal ways. More structural and contextual analysis would have enriched Merina Smith s Revelation, Resistance, & Mormon Polygamy, a book based on her UC San Diego dissertation. Nevertheless, she centers on a terrific question: given how outlandish polygamy seemed to nineteenth-century Americans, how did Joseph Smith convince anyone to accept it in the first place? Smith does not entirely answer this question satisfactorily, but perhaps no one could. What follows is a solid, albeit fairly internalist, narrative history of early Mormon polygamy, organized chronologically. Although she does not end her narrative until after Joseph Smith s death, the focus is on how polygamy became instituted among Mormons in the 1830s and, especially, the 1840s. Of course non-mormons might wonder how Joseph Smith got people to believe in a whole lot of other ideas within the religion besides polygamy. Merina Smith does not consider this issue, but surely some part of the explanation lies in Joseph Smith s extraordinary charisma and persuasiveness. Richard Bushman s fine biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), suggests some answers to the larger puzzles, however, and it would be worth probing these issues more. Merina Smith s answer to the polygamy question lies largely in millenarian theology. One substantial insight here is that Joseph Smith s teaching had, to some degree, recast marriage and family in other ways, and polygamy fit into a broader re-interpretation of both. Smith concentrates on what she called the

5 PEARSALL / Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Mormon Polygamy 93 resacralization of marriage. She tracks the ways early Mormon theology transformed marriage, linking it closely to salvation. She also points out that Mormons began conducting their own marriage ceremonies early on, so that by around 1840, the church was in a position to institute radical changes in forms of marriage (p. 37). Yet these teachings were revealed only slowly, in piecemeal fashion, perhaps as Joseph Smith s own thinking also evolved. Naturally, many contemporary Mormons have been eager to dissociate polygamy from Mormon ideal marriage, since the Church disavowed the doctrine of plural celestial marriage in the 1890 Woodruff Manifesto. So some Mormons have argued that it was marginal to LDS theology, merely added at a later stage. Between them, Smith and Talbot refute this idea, making it clear that polygamy was central to early Mormon theology, belief, and structure. It was indeed part of a broader reframing of marriage and family in terms of salvation, with telestial and terrestrial and celestial marriages all at different stages of salvation (p 88). The complex interplay between secrecy and public acknowledgment was part of this history of polygamy, as in many other aspects of Mormonism, Smith rightly notes throughout her discussion. This dynamic continues in modern Mormonism. Smith implies that it caused Mormons problems early on. After all, the practice of polygamy began secretly, and the mystery that surrounded it nourished a great deal of rumor, intrigue, and misunderstandings. Merina Smith contends that such secrecy was central to its implementation, and early Temple sealings (for marriage), borrowing from Freemasonry, were especially important in terms of secret rites and privileged insider information. By 1842, the doctrine of polygamy started to become a major issue for the Mormons in Nauvoo, Illinois, where they had moved after threats and disasters in Missouri. Joseph Smith continued to try to convince others of this doctrine while keeping it secret, but increasing controversy surrounded its practice. Much of the dispute centered on the Relief Society, led by Joseph s first wife, Emma Smith. The Relief Society, a women s organization, became a place where the battle over polygamy was fought publicly, though obliquely (p. 106). Matters worsened when John C. Bennett, painted by LDS historians as a first-degree scoundrel, published an exposé after a falling out with Smith. Bennett had evidently been seducing women by suggesting they become spiritual wives, a development that did not help the cause of celestial marriage. Of course, to an outsider, the line between seduction based on spiritual wifery and officially sanctioned celestial marriage might seem indistinct, especially when many early plural marriages seem not to have involved the couple moving in together (and others involved people who were already married, including married women who were then also sealed to Joseph Smith). Altogether, it is just about impossible to know precisely what was going on in terms of marriage and domestic lives among Mormons in Nauvoo. Sources

6 94 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2016 are limited, and, for much of the time, it was not meant to be public. However, we do know that polygamy helped to precipitate a more general crisis for the Mormons. Evidently, Joseph Smith tested the waters by publishing a propolygamy tract. When it provoked a scandal, he denied any knowledge or involvement. Although there was a period, especially in 1843, during which Emma Smith apparently was not agitating against plural unions, overall, she seems largely to have rejected the practice. Her opposition to it took on new urgency in 1844, as further exposés were published. Smith s failed presidential bid and continued repercussions from Missouri brought greater, unwelcome attention to the Mormons. All of these factors created what Merina Smith terms a perfect storm in 1844, culminating in the assassination of Joseph Smith and the emergence of leaders, most notably Brigham Young, who saw polygamy as a way to connect themselves powerfully to his legacy (and who had already committed their own families to it). It also became clear that, despite a new elaborate Temple in Nauvoo, Mormons would not be able to practice their religion and their marriages without a westward trek. So in late 1845, even as the Temple was finished, Young began to organize the move. By 1846, as the Saints began their arduous journey west, polygamy had become an open secret as more and more families adopted it (p. 211). Prior to their departure, over 200 men and 700 women were living in plural unions: some 7.5 percent of the population (p. 206). Merina Smith follows polygamy west briefly, tracking two experiences as recorded in diaries (that of Brigham Young s adopted second son, John Doyle Lee, and midwife Patty Sessions). Lee s experience of plural unions was mixed. Of his fourteen wives, two died and seven left him, so all was not well. On the other hand, five remained. Patty had a complicated married life over the course of a long and well-documented life, sealed to Smith despite her marriage to David, and later as a first wife in polygamy. The polygamous experiences of John Doyle Lee and Patty Sessions suggest some of the benefits, as well as some of the many tensions and resentments generated by such a system. They gained family and community, but also competition over resources, actual and emotional, and a lot of frustration. These stories are intriguing, but the wider context might have received more reflection. Christine Talbot also considers the ambiguities of polygamy, in a lucid and contextual account of Mormon polygamy controversies up to the Woodruff Manifesto of Her treatment is fine-grained, building on a dissertation at the University of Michigan. Of the three books here, it is the most scholarly, connecting with previous work in productive ways. Talbot offers both an examination of Mormon thought and theology and an investigation of the outraged responses they provoked. Talbot s analysis turns on the public-private

7 PEARSALL / Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Mormon Polygamy 95 divide and on how Mormons subverted the usual understandings of these divisions a plausible enough argument. Talbot demonstrates her awareness of key works in this particular history (including work by the afore-mentioned Cott, Daynes, and Gordon) as well as some familiar theoretical approaches (Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere, Edward Said on Orientalism). The radicalism of the Mormon project rightly centers Talbot s discussion of Mormon thought on polygamy (p 15). Marriage and family underpinned Mormon ideas of salvation and the afterlife, and plural marriage was a vital part of this understanding. Talbot contends, again quite correctly, that polygamy deeply disturbed the nation (p 34). She argues that Mormons undermined the public/private divide in three ways. First, they collapsed religion, family, and government into a single theology and ideal. Second, in terming themselves the family of God, Mormons extended the private into the public. Finally, Talbot contends, they privatized the Kingdom of God, so that the public was also private (p. 41). In this way, Mormons felt they could coexist with American laws and cultures even while pursuing various practices at odds with them (including polygamy). Talbot posits that women s suffrage emerged naturally out of Mormon patriarchy (p. 63). Mormon women evidently saw many advantages to polygamy, even as some found it immensely challenging in their personal lives. They pointed out that it allowed them to enjoy the pleasures and privileges of wifehood and motherhood. They averred that it let them be choosier in terms of spouses. Although Talbot does not dwell on it, early Mormons also allowed divorce more easily than most other Americans did, so that a woman unhappy in a marriage need not stay in it. Many plural wives argued that polygamy emancipated them, although we may not always believe such claims. Talbot s most original contribution is to point out that, although Mormon women had connected polygamy with suffrage, this situation changed in 1879 with the decision of Reynolds v. the United States, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that religious freedom did not include the right to polygamy. At this point, polygamy came to be seen by Mormon women as more problematic. The outraged responses to Mormon polygamy occupy the rest of the book. Following work by Gordon and others, chapter four focuses on four key anti- Mormon novels: Maria Ward s Female Life among the Mormons (1855); Metta Victoria Fuller s Mormon Wives (1856); Orvilla Belisle s Mormonism Unveiled (1855); and Alfreda Eva Bell, Boadicea (1855), to show the ubiquity of negative representations. Such novels, as well as travel narratives from Utah, combined to suggest that despotism, violence, and trouble attended the domestic practices of Mormons, including polygamy. Talbot also considers consent and contract, particular points of concern in the later nineteenth-century United States. Building on earlier work, Talbot points to the ways in which Mormons were considered to subvert consent: through polygamy but also through secrecy

8 96 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2016 and seduction. Using the analogy of slaves and prostitutes, anti-mormons argued that domestic life in Utah was a perversion, where wives were both enslaved and prostituted into polygamy. Opponents of Mormon polygamy also mobilized stereotypes surrounding race and class. Anti-Mormons relied on stock associations of polygamy with Eastern harems, and one former Mormon who published an 1842 exposé denounced the Mormon seraglio. Critics also decried Mormons as poor immigrant foreigners overrunning the United States. Satirists portrayed Mormonism as a contagion and an octopus with long tentacles, dangerous to those in the vicinity and requiring containment. Talbot tracks the end of orthodox Mormon endorsement of polygamy, which resulted from the campaign by the U.S. government, via the Edmunds Act of 1882 and the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887, to prosecute polygamist husbands or cohabs (since polygamy was prosecuted as illegal cohabitation). Talbot concludes by noting that: In 1890, the Mormon Church sacrificed the majority of their nontraditional marital practices upon the altar of Americanness (p. 158). Mainstream Mormons have mostly stayed there since. The complications wrought by federal prosecution of polygamists in the 1880s form one of the three key themes of Paula Kelly Harline s The Polygamous Wives Writing Club. Geared for a popular audience, this book uses the unusual conceit of a writing club to bring together consideration of twentynine ordinary polygamous wives (of non-leaders) who recorded their own experiences of it (but who mostly did not know each other). So a typical chapter opening begins: If first wives Rachel Simmons and Mary Jane Tanner had known each other, they probably would have enjoyed spending an afternoon together (p 11). Harline focuses on two other themes: first, that wives never found polygamy particularly easy or pleasant; and second, that wives in unions often had conflict but tried very hard to get along. The structure of the book follows the three key themes. Each of the three sections has three chapters, tracking particular women s stories. A brief interlude provides general context for each period. The writings and perspectives of wives center Harline s book in laudable ways. The account opens with one polygamous wife in Provo, Utah, in the 1860s, who took time away from chicken pie and children to write her thoughts on her life and her marriage (p. 3). Harline makes great use of these life writings, and she has commendably brought together a fascinating range of material. She uses diaries and memoirs, though only occasionally does she distinguish between the two genres. More consideration of the differences between these two kinds of texts in the introduction would have helped to set up some of the discussion that follows.

9 PEARSALL / Respecting Marriage (Early and Often): Mormon Polygamy 97 Harline notes that, as a graduate student, she had thought polygamy gave women a space for feminism, female community, and independence. After her careful reading of the writings of twenty-nine plural wives, she came to realize, however, that there was another side to the story : the many challenges of living polygamy as a wife (pp ). Harline also observes that there is relatively little evidence of wives in the same family becoming friends: there was minimal female friendship in the same family (p. 79). There are some occasional exceptions (such as Martha Cox, whose story appears in chapter eight). Harline s writings offer a contribution to what will surely be ongoing debates about the ways in which polygamy affected women s lives. The life writings at the core of the book are compelling, though the approach is rather limited. Harline s decision to interweave different women s stories together in the same chapter means that it is also hard sometimes to keep the narrative line straight. After all, following each marriage (with several wives all those busy Marthas and patient Mary Anns of nineteenth-century America!) can be challenging enough. Harline ends her main account with a brief discussion of plural marriage controversies. (An epilogue recounts her own family history.) She notes that in America today there s a growing sense that consenting adults should have the liberty to decide what their primary relationships should look like (p. 200) and concludes with a series of questions about polygamy, including Should an enlightened society allow polygamy? She answers that obscure nineteenth-century polygamous wives at least offer some detailed scenarios for our consideration (p 201). More of this consideration would have bolstered this account, but the questions are intriguing ones. In illuminating Mormon polygamy, Harline, Talbot, and Smith offer captivating evidence about the nature of American plural marriages and especially women s perspectives on them. However, this extraordinary history deserves further, and ideally bolder, treatments. There might be more scholarship on how Mormons went from being nineteenth-century radical outlaws to the ardent U.S. regime-supporters they became by the twentieth century; marriage controversies, from polygamy to Proposition 8, have been central to that transformation. There might be more attention to polygamy issues in the post Woodruff Manifesto era, especially from 1890 to 1904 (when stricter prohibitions against polygamy were put in place). New books might also tackle issues of gender and Mormon polygyny further. Forthcoming work by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Kathleen Flake should offer lively re-appraisals. Linking the imposition of monogamy with the state-building process more generally, as Sarah Carter does in her excellent The Importance of Being Monogamous: Marriage and Nation Building in Western Canada to 1915 (2008), also generates significant insights, especially about the relationship of Native

10 98 REVIEWS IN AMERICAN HISTORY / MARCH 2016 Americans and others to Mormon polygamy conflicts. A global perspective on marriage controversies might similarly suggest fresh questions for Americanists. Another way forward lies in the longer history of controversies over plural unions, as in, for instance, John Witte s The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (2015). A fuller understanding would help to illuminate the particular dynamics of Mormon plural unions, as well as fights over them. Despite the many achievements of these books, then, there is much still to be written respecting American marriage. Sarah M. S. Pearsall is University Senior Lecturer in the History of Early America and the Atlantic World, Faculty of History, and Fellow, Robinson College, Cambridge University. She is the author of the prize-winning Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2008) and is currently writing a book on the history of plural unions in what is now the continental United States.