Contrary to popular nineteenth-century notions about polygamy, the Mormon harem, dominated by lascivious males with hyperactive libidos, did not exist. The image of unlimited lust was largely the creation of Gentile travelers to Salt Lake City more interested in titillating audiences back home than in accurately portraying plural marriage. Newspaper representatives and public figures visited the city in droves seeking headlines for their eastern audiences. Mormon plural marriage, dedicated to propagating the species righteously and dispassionately, proved to be a rather drab lifestyle compared to the imaginative tales of polygamy, dripping with sensationalism, demanded by a scandal-hungry eastern media market.
The stark reality behind the headlines and head shaking was an essentially puritanical Mormon marriage system. Brigham Young explained the purposes of plural marriage to a 14 July 1855 Mormon audience: “God never introduced the Patriarchal order of marriage with a view to please man in his carnal desires, nor to punish females for anything which they had done; but He introduced it for the express purpose of raising up to His name a royal Priesthood, a peculiar people” (JD 3 [14 July 1855]: 266).
Young insisted that polygamy was not something he would have sought of his own volition and testified that the time Joseph Smith advised him to take a plural wife “was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave” (ibid.). John Taylor, one of the earliest apostles to accept polygamy, agreed that taking a second wife had not been an easy matter. “I had always entertained strict ideas of virtue,” he commented, “and I felt as a married man that this was to me … an appalling thing to do.… Nothing but a knowledge of God, and the revelations of God … could have induced me to embrace such a principle as this.… We [the Twelve] seemed to put off, as far as we could, what might be termed the evil day” (Roberts 1965, 100).
Another prevalent nineteenth-century misconception about Mormon polygamy was that women were dehumanized by the practice. In reality, polygamous wives lived lives similar to those of other frontier women. Despite several notable exceptions who attained success in business, mercantile, literary, and medical careers, most Mormon women remained in the domestic sphere; they were not exploited for their income-earning capacity as tradespeople or factory workers. In interviews with the children of 155 plural wives, the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University has discovered that only twelve percent of their mothers ever worked outside the home after marriage. Most of those who did were teachers, nurses, midwives, housekeepers, and seamstresses. Thirty-six percent of the women supplemented their family’s income by selling farm produce, taking in boarders, washing clothes, or selling breadstuffs, quilts, or rag rugs (Embry, “Economic Role,” 6-7).
Mormon polygamy, unlike plural marriage in other cultures, developed rapidly and without long-term cultural shaping. Since the number of wives permitted was never defined some men married beyond their means. Though the first wife’s consent was supposedly required by scripture, it was not always sought or willingly given. Courtship manners were not well established, and accounts of older men “making fools of themselves” over young girls are seen occasionally. The rules of wooing depended on the individuals involved: interest could be initiated by the man, the prospective wife, or even the first wife who felt it was her religious duty to do so.
As no set patterns of living arrangements evolved in Mormon polygamy, personality conflicts often influenced such matters. In some households—Brigham Young’s being probably the most obvious example—all wives lived under the same roof. But this could be a source of jealousy and frustration. Consequently husbands usually tried to provide separate dwellings for each woman. If wives lived in the same community husbands usually alternated days or nights with each family. Some men were fair to the minute; others favored their more agreeable or younger wives and spent more time with them. When wives lived far apart husbands sometimes visited branches of their family only a few times each year.
Plural wives, like their husbands, viewed polygamy as a practical and honorable means for providing marriage and motherhood to thousands of women who may have otherwise remained unmarried in a monogamous world. Church leaders pronounced over and over that plural marriage countered various social evils. Above all they stressed that the principle was commanded by God to raise a righteous generation. Mormons nearly always entered polygamy because they believed it was essential to their salvation, that God required it of them. “Maney may think it verry strainge that I would consent for my dear husband[,] whome I loved as I did my own life and lived with him for years[,] to take more wives,” wrote Sarah D. Rich, wife of Apostle Charles C. Rich. “This I could not have done if I had not believed it to be right in the Sight of god, and believed it to be one principal of his gospel once again restored to earth, that those holding the preasthood of heaven might by obeying this order attain to a higher glory in the eternal world” (Arrington 1974, 288). Annie Clark Tanner was similarly certain that “women would never have accepted polygamy had it not been for their religion. The principle of Celestial Marriage was considered the capstone of the Mormon religion. Only by practicing it would the highest exaltation in the Celestial Kingdom of God be obtained” (Tanner 1976, 1-2).
Despite constant exhortation from the pulpit to live the principle of polygamy and the resulting group pressure to conform, most men remained monogamous. The percentage of polygamous households varied considerably from community to community—depending on the enthusiasm of the local church leaders in promoting the practice. The most comprehensive study to date, detailing forty 1880 Mormon towns, found that almost 40 percent of St. George households were polygamous compared to 11 percent in nearby Harrisburg/Leeds. In Rockville only 10 percent was polygamous, while 67 percent of Orderville was. In South Weber, north of Salt Lake City, 5 percent practiced polygamy, compared to nearly 30 percent in Bountiful. Other studies found a 15 percent incidence in Springville, while 63 percent of Mormon men in the Mexican colonies had more than one wife (Bennion 1984, 30-31; Logue 1984, 10; Nelson 1983, 57).1
In addition, polygamous men often married only one additional wife, evidently just enough to satisfy the letter of the law. Stanley Ivins’s 1956 demographic study (using a sample of 6,000 families), pointed out that of the 1,784 polygamous men in the group, 66.3 percent married only two wives, 21.2 percent married three, 6.7 percent married four, and a scant 5.8 percent married five or more women.
Although defenders of Mormon polygamy stress that the principle was intended for religious rather than sexual purposes, plural wives tended to be much younger than their husbands. A 1987 study completed by the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University found that 60 percent of the 224 plural wives in their sample were under the age of twenty. The man was usually in his early twenties when he married his first wife, who was in her late teens. When he took a second wife he was generally in his thirties and his new wife between seventeen and nineteen years of age. Men who married a third wife were commonly in their late thirties. The average age of third wives was nineteen as were fourth wives whose husbands by then were between thirty-six and forty-five (Embry 1987, 34-35).
Though polygamous families were always a minority, most Mormons viewed the practice as the model lifestyle. Church leaders deftly twisted the guilt in the hearts of Saints who were less than enthusiastic about engaging in the practice. “If any of you will deny the plurality of wives,” Brigham Young was quoted in the 14 November 1855 Deseret News, “and continue to do so, I promise that you will be damned.” His colorful counselor, Heber C. Kimball, the husband of forty-three wives and father of sixty-five children, went so far as to promise aging Mormon men that polygamy would bring them a renewal of youth. “I have noticed,” he commented, “that a man who has but one wife, and is inclined to that doctrine, soon begins to wither and dry up, while a man who goes into plurality looks fresh, young, and sprightly” (JD 5 [6 April 1857]: 22). Portly apostle George A. Smith poked fun at non-polygamists by calling them a “poor narrow-minded, pinch-backed race of men, who chain themselves down to the law of monogamy, and live all their days under the domination of one wife” (JD 3 [6 April 1856]: 291).
No period of Mormon history demonstrated a devotion to polygamous duty more than the two-year-period from 1856 to 1857, known as the Mormon Reformation. This movement, led by Brigham Young’s fiery counselor Jedediah M. Grant, stressed cleanliness, confession, repentance, self-sufficiency—and plural marriage. Stanley S. Ivins, a prominent student of polygamy, noted that during this two-year period, sixty-five percent more polygamous marriages were contracted than at any other two-year period in Mormon history (Ivins 1956, 231). “All are trying to get wives,” Wilford Woodruff wrote fellow apostle George A. Smith, “until there is hardly a girl 14 years old in Utah, but what is married, or just going to be” (JH, 1 April 1857). A Salt Lake City woman writing to her friend wondered “if the reformation has taken as much effect where you are, as it has here in regard to getting more wives. If it has, and your husband is a true Saint, I might possibly be obliged to send the comforting words of ‘grin and bear it’ to you.… Indeed this is the greatest time for marrying I ever knew” (Ellsworth 1974, 38).
The belief that polygamy was divinely sanctioned was no guarantee against marital problems. Mormon sociologist Kimball Young, in a study of 175 polygamous marriages, rated 53 percent as “highly successful” or “reasonably successful,” 25 percent as “moderately successful,” and 23 percent as troubled by “considerable” or “severe conflict” (1954, 56-57). More recent studies have revealed that at least 1,645 divorces were granted by Brigham Young during the period of his presidency (Campbell and Campbell 1978, 5). It is not known, however, the extent to which polygamy was a factor in these cases. D. Michael Quinn’s study of the Mormon hierarchy indicates that of the seventy-two General Authorities who entered plural marriage, thirty-nine were involved in marital breakups, including fifty-four divorces, twenty-six separations, and one annulment. Many of these church leaders, however, were married to numerous wives, thereby substantially increasing the possibility for broken marriages.2
The extent of Mormon divorce was a concern to Brigham Young. During the millennial fervency of the Reformation many Saints had entered into unsatisfactory marriages. In an 1858 address Young argued, “It is not right for the brethren to divorce their wives the way they do. I am determined that if men don’t stop divorcing their wives, I shall stop sealing” (JH, 15 Dec. 1858). Though upset about the frequency of divorce, Young did not require unhappy women to stay with their husbands. His advice to a woman seeking counsel was to “stay with her husband as long as she could bear with him, but if life became too burdensome, then leave and get a divorce” (President’s Office Journal, 5 Oct. 1861). He suggested in an 1861 address that “when a woman becomes alienated in her feelings and affections from her husband, it is his duty to give her a bill and set her free.” In an unusual moral definition, he declared it “would be fornication for a man to cohabit with his wife after she had thus become alienated from him.” There was another church-approved way in which a woman could leave a man—if the woman preferred a man higher in authority,” Young explained, “and he is willing to take her and her husband gives her up. There is no bill of divorce required, in [this] case it is right in the sight of God” (Beck Notebooks).
Mormon men were under a lifetime moral obligation to care for their ex-wives. “For a man to seek a divorce is almost unheard of,” Apostle George Q. Cannon noted when explaining the legal and religious safeguards for divorced women. “The liberty upon this point rests with the woman, and as regards a Separation, if her position should become irksome, or distasteful to her, even, and she should desire a Separation, not only is the man bound to respect the expressal of her wish to that effect, but he is bound also to give her and her offspring a proportionate share of his whole property.” Divorced families had an economic claim upon a man, according to Cannon, “from which he is never completely absolved” (Cannon 1879, 36).
Some have argued that marital discord in Mormon polygamous marriages was no greater than in the monogamous American populace. Others, however, have disagreed. George S. Tanner, prominent Utah educator and polygamous son, reasoned: “I doubt there was a woman in the church who was in any way connected with Polygamy who was not heartsick.… They would not admit it in public because of their loyalty to the church and their brothers and sisters.” Tanner was persuaded that “the women try to be brave, but no woman is able to share a husband whom she loves with one or more other women.… Only a few of the women involved in polygamy asked for a divorce simply because it was not a popular thing to do” (Campbell and Campbell 1978, 14-15). Mrs. Hubert Howe Bancroft, a prominent visitor to Salt Lake City in 1880, commented on the ability of polygamous women to maintain appearances. She observed that Mormon women viewed polygamy as “a religious duty and schooled themselves to bear its discomforts as a sort of religious penance, and that it was a matter of pride to make everybody believe they lived happily and to persuade themselves and others that it was not a trial; and that long life of such discipline makes the trial lighter” (“Inner Facts,” 18).
Predictably, observations from women living polygamy varied as widely. “If anyone in this world thinks plural marriage is not a trial,” Sadie Jacobson said, “they are wrong. The Lord said he would have a tried people” (1972, 292). “I want to testify,” said her sister-wife Becky Jacobson, “that I have been happy and blessed as a polygamist wife.… Any sacrifice we made for each other was rewarded ten-fold.… We learned to worship together, sorrow together, play and rejoice together, to unselfishly pool all our resources for the good of the family” (ibid.).
Ada and Vady Hart, though experiencing jealous bouts over their shared husband, felt that these feelings “were the work of the devil who was trying to destroy the Lord’s work.” When they would find themselves “out of harmony” the two wives would “fast and pray” in order to “get the right spirit again” (Embry, “Effects,” 58). At the other end of the patience spectrum was the tongue-in-cheek quip attributed to a daughter of Jedediah M. Grant: “Polygamy is alright when properly carried out—on a shovel” (Shook 1914, 208). Contemporary diary and letter accounts of polygamous relationships generally present a less-than-glowing picture of polygamy. Positive testimonials are most often seen in public or retrospective accounts. Church members, recognizing that the eyes of the world were upon them, may have been inclined to put forth a sanitized “storybook polygamy” publicly rather than portraying the real hardships involved in trying to live the practice.
The paradox of women publicly supporting plural marriage while privately suffering from it is demonstrated in the lives of such prominent Mormon women as Emmeline B. Wells and Martha H. Cannon. Wells, wife of Daniel H. Wells of the First Presidency, editorialized in the Women’s Exponent that plural marriage “gives women the highest opportunities for self-development, exercise of judgment, and arouses latent faculties, making them more truly cultivated in the actual realities of life, more independent in thought and mind, noble and unselfish” (Godfrey et al. 1982, 16). Yet Emmeline’s marriage to Daniel was unhappy. “O, if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem to be perfectly indifferent to any sensation of that kind,” she wrote in her 30 September 1874 diary. “He cannot know the craving of my nature; he is surrounded with love on every side, and I am cast out.… O my poor aching heart when shall it rest its burden only on the Lord.… Every other avenue seems closed against me.”3 On their twenty second wedding anniversary she wrote in her diary, “Anniversary of my marriage with Pres. Wells. O how happy I was then how much pleasure I anticipated and how changed alas are things since that time, how few thoughts I had then have ever been realized, and how much sorrow I have known in place of the joy I looked forward to” (10 Oct. 1874). The autumn years of Emmeline’s life brought a bittersweet unexpected reunion with her erstwhile husband. Wells, now seventy-six, became attentive to the sixty-two-year-old wife he had essentially ignored for nearly four decades. After his death in 1891, she wrote, “Only memories, only the coming and going and parting at the door. The joy when he came the sorrow when he went as though all the light died out of my life. Such intense love he has manifested towards me of late years. Such a remarkable change from the long ago—when I needed him so much more” (24 March 1891).
Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, twenty-seven-year-old resident physician at Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City and later the first female state senator in the United States, became the third plural wife of fifty-year-old Angus Cannon, Salt Lake City stake president and one of Deseret Hospital’s directors. Government pressure to stamp out polygamy and a too-often-absent husband made Martha’s marriage less than enviable. Forced to leave Salt Lake frequently to prevent her husband’s arrest for practicing polygamy, she described her marriage as “a few stolen interviews thoroughly tinctured with the dread of discovery.” In a 3 February 1888 letter to her husband while she was in Europe, she wrote that the trials of polygamy would be unendurable without “a thorough knowledge from God, that the principle for which we are battling and striving to maintain in purity upon the earth is ordained by Him, and that we are chosen instruments in His hands to engage in so great a calling.” She added that “even with this assurance grounded in one’s heart, we do not escape trials and temptations, grievious at times in their nature.”
Martha was acquainted with several monogamous families and yearned for an exclusive relationship. She described such a marriage as “a joy and comfort to witness, where the wife and Mother is proud and happy in the devotion of a noble husband, while he in turn is equally contented and happy in the possession of the partner he has chosen for life; while at home in each other’s association is where their greatest joys are centered.”4 “Oh for a home!” she lamented in a 30 December 1891 letter to Angus: “A husband of my own because he is my own. A father for my children whom they know by association. And all the little auxiliaries that make life worth living. Will they ever be enjoyed by this storm-tossed exile. Or must life thus drift on and one more victim swell the ranks of the great unsatisfied!”
Marital satisfaction proved an elusive dream for Martha. Though she noted in a letter to her husband that she “would rather spend one hour in your society, than a whole lifetime with any other man,” near-constant lack of money and a husband occupied with other family, church, and civic responsibilities resulted in the collapse of their marriage. “How do you think I feel,” she angrily wrote to her husband, “when I meet you driving another plural wife about in a glittering carriage in broad day light? [I] am entirely out of money—borrowing to pay some old standing debts. I want our affairs speedily and absolutely adjusted—after all my sacrifice and loss you treat me like a dog—and parade others before my eyes—I will not stand it.”
She wrote on another occasion, “Will you send remitance—coal—flour etc etc … to say nothing of winter clothing essential to growing children. I find myself inadequate to entirely support them while they have a so-called ‘handsome magn[i]fic’ father living.” Eventually Martha found her husband’s inattention insufferable: “I should have appreciated the interest you should have felt more than the money—Tis the little things you could have done and not the larger things you could not, that has estranged us.… I will never feel as I once did. And you are to blame—so little[,] had you helped[,] would have alleviated this.”
In a 3 February 1888 letter to her husband, Martha Cannon explained that had she not believed living in plural marriage would have enabled her to “associate with the elect in eternity,” she would “undoubtedly have given plural marriage a wide berth except perhaps as first wife.” But the adjustment required of the first wife in switching from monogamy to polygamy was perhaps the most difficult of all. After years of an exclusive relationship with a husband, having to share him with other women was a trial for any Mormon woman. Some, like Emma Smith, opposed their husbands’ taking additional wives. In such instances the man had two options. Either he could respect his wife’s wishes and remain monogamous, or he could, as Joseph Smith did, ignore her objections and take plural wives without her consent.5
Kimball Young reported an account of a Mormon elder in St. George who was asked why he never entered polygamy when so many of his peers had. “She wouldn’t let me,” he nodded towards his wife. “I told him,” she reported, “that if he ever took another wife, when he brought her in the front door I would go out the back. And when I told his mother what I said she told me, ‘If I had only a quilt, you would be welcome to half of it when you left him’” (1954, 123). A novel though unsuccessful attempt to get a second wife was initiated by an elder from southern Utah. Young reported that the fearful man hesitated to ask permission of his feisty wife. “Finally, he told her he had had a revelation to marry a certain girl and that in the face of such divine instructions, she must give her consent.” He had obviously underestimated the ingenuity of his wife, who announced the next morning that she had received a revelation to “shoot any woman who became his plural wife” (ibid.). He remained monogamous.
Prominent Lehi settler Isaac Goodwin also lived monogamously and would have it no other way. “I have a kingdom of my own,” he told adventurer John Codman in 1878, “without polygamy: this old lady, seven children, and thirty-three grandchildren.” He then explained his philosophy in detail: “I believe in the doctrine for those who like it, but God never required it of me. Matrimony is a “straight and narrrow path.” I like to go it alone. Now you hang a plummet down from the wall and let it drop between two women. Each of them will say it swings nearer the other one than toward her. I might be straight up and down like that plummet, and though the women mighn’t say anything, both of them would think I was leaning the wrong way from her. So much for two women. Now hang yourself like a plummet in a circle of half a dozen, and then you can make some calculation what kind of a time you would have through life” (p. 200).
Pressures to live polygamously, however, were compelling to Mormon males desirous of advancement in church position. Apostle John Taylor was told by Joseph Smith to take a second wife, and when Taylor hesitated, Smith spelled out the consequences of failure to enter polygamy: ‘“Elder Taylor, have you concluded to enter into that principle and observe the counsel that you have received?’ I told him I was thinking about it very seriously, when he replied, ‘Unless that principle is observed and acted upon, you can proceed no further with the full fellowship of God’” (Cannon, “Statement,” 24). Hints to take additional wives were not always subtle. In 1875 Apostle Wilford Woodruff announced, “We have many bishops and elders who have but one wife. They are abundantly qualified to enter the higher law and take more, but their wives will not let them. Any man who permits a woman to lead him and bind him down is but little account in the church and Kingdom of God” (Cowley 1909, 490).
When government anti-polygamy pressure intensified in the 1880s, President John Taylor received several revelations which further pressured monogamists. In calling monogamist Seymour B. Young to the Council of Seventies in a 13 October 1882 revelation, he stipulated that Young would first have to “conform to my law … it is not meet that men who will not abide in my law shall preside over my Priesthood.” The next day, in a meeting of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve, Taylor related that Joseph Smith had once said to him: “If we do not keep the same law that Our Heavenly Father has we cannot go with him.… A man obeying a lower law is not qualified to preside over those who keep a higher law” (Kenney 8 [14 Oct. 1882]: 126). In 1884 Taylor reported another revelation which urged monogamists to resign ecclesiastical offices in the church (Abraham H. Cannon Journal, 6 April 1884).6
Church leaders went so far as to threaten monogamist men with excommunication and loss of their one wife in the afterlife to more obedient polygamists. During an 1873 meeting at Paris, Idaho, Brigham Young said that a “man who did not have but one wife in the Resurrection that woman will not be his but [be] taken from him & given to another” (Kenney 7 [31 Aug. 1873]: 152.)7 Francis M. Lyman, eventual president of the Quorum of the Twelve, remarked in 1883 that “Celestial marriage is for the fulness of the glory of god. it is the crowning glory. a man has no right to one wife unless he is worthy of two … [T]here is no provision made for those who have had the chance & opperternity and have disregarded that law. Men who disregard that law are in the same situation as if they broke any other law. they are transgressors” (“Remarks”).
An 1883 letter to church president John Taylor asked if a man “having a wife sealed to him over the alter, and lives faithful, and is not successful in getting another. Will the one he has be taken from him?” Taylor’s secretary responded, “A person cannot reject that principle without eternal loss to himself.… Those who reject and fight against this law of heaven would do well to have a care lest the anger of god fall upon them” (William Marsden to George Reynolds, 19 Nov. 1883; Reynolds to Marsden, 26 Nov. 1883).8 Marriner W. Merrill, in the early 1880s, called Andrew L. Hyer to preside over the seventies quorum in Richmond, Utah. “But first you’ve got to take another wife,” Merrill warned. Though Hyer did not want to, he changed his mind after Merrill threatened to cut him off from the church (Embry, “Richardson,” 4).
David John, a member of the Utah Stake presidency for thirty years, recorded in his 1884 journal that the First Presidency (consisting of John Taylor, George Q. Cannon, and Joseph F. Smith) said that “Celestial Marriage” was “binding on all the Latter-day Saints and no man was entitled to the right of Presiding without abiding this law.” According to John, the officials added that “If Bro. Wm. W. Cluff and Abraham [sic] Hatch and other leading men had gone into this order 18 months or more ago Zion would today have been upon a higher place than now” (p. 421). Neither Summit Stake president Cluff nor Heber Stake president Hatch entered polygamy. William Forman, a bishop in Hatch’s stake, noted in his 11 March 1884 diary that during a local priesthood meeting Hatch said it took Wilford Woodruff forty years to obey the Word of Wisdom, the church’s health code, and it would probably take him (Hatch) that long to live polygamy. Forman added that Hatch “feels quite important and says he is not going to resign.”
Women who opposed the “patriarchal marriage system” were publicly condemned for failure to “follow counsel.” Ellen Clawson wrote to a friend during the Mormon Reformation, “Some of the brethren here have to take more wives, whether they want to very bad or not, and Bro. [Heber C.] Kimball says those that havn’t but one, she rules, and he makes so much fun of them, that they are ashamed, and get another as quick as they can” (Ellsworth 1974, 38). Brigham Young browbeat recalcitrant females in an 1856 address: “Let the father be the head of the family … and let the wives and the children say amen to what he says, and be subject to his dictates, instead of their dictating the man, instead of trying to govern him” (JD 4 [21 Sept. 1856]: 55).
Some women, however, would not bend to such patriarchal directive. Such a woman was Sarah M. Pratt. Her husband, Orson Pratt, following his own 1842 difficulties over plural marriage, came, like many Mormons, to hold a larger-than-life image of polygamy. “Instead of a plurality of wives being a cause of sorrow to females,” he wrote, “it is one of the greatest blessings of the last dispensation: it gives them the great privilege of being united to a righteous man, and of rearing a family according to the order of heaven.” Instead of remaining single or marrying a “wicked man who will ruin her and her offspring,” a woman in plural marriage “can enter a family where peace and salvation reign … where the head of the family stands forth as a patriarch, a prince, and a savior to his whole household; where blessings unspeakable and eternal are sealed upon them and their generations after them; where glory is eternal and her joy is full” (Pratt 1853-54, 155-56).
But Pratt’s first wife, Sarah, did not view polygamy so idealistically. She insisted that the first wife “should be it, and resented her husband’s affections toward his other wives” (“Elizabeth Ivins”). Being away from home on church assignment was a hallmark of dedication for Mormon males, and during the years 1839-68, Orson Pratt was absent from his home for a total of nearly eleven years. Thirteen children were born during this period. Death took many, and other hands than Orson’s usually buried them. Most of the happy times found him absent as well. Sarah learned to get by, rearing the children with little help from their father.
Ultimately Pratt’s preoccupation with church work and his habit of marrying much younger women dealt a fatal blow to his relationship with Sarah. After returning from England in early 1868, the fifty-seven-year-old man began courting a sixteen-year-old girl who would become his tenth wife on 28 December 1868. At fifty-one, Sarah could no longer bear children, and she had come to resent bitterly Pratt’s relationships with women younger than their oldest daughter. In an 1877 interview she lashed out at him. “Here was my husband,” she said, “gray headed, taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage. Of course there could be no joy for him in such an intercourse except the indulgence of his fanaticism and of something else, perhaps, which I hesitate to mention” (“Orson Pratt’s Harem”).
Sarah could not have been fully aware of the workings of polygamy when she first let Orson take additional wives in Nauvoo. Few women—or men—were. Sarah half-heartedly went along with the system for nearly a quarter of a century, as her son Arthur put it, “from an earnest, conscientious desire to do what was right as a Mormon, and to please a husband whom she loved with all the strength of her nature” (Anti-Polygamy Standard, Feb. 1882, 81). But because of her earlier difficulties with Joseph Smith in Nauvoo, she was never converted to polygamy.
Sarah explained, ten years after the fact, that her marriage to Pratt finally came to an abrupt end on 12 March 1868, when he announced his intent to equalize his time spent with each wife. “I believed,” Sarah said, “when he decided to enter upon the practice of polygamy, that he did so not from any violence of individual passion, but from sheer fanaticism.” Orson told her that he considered it “his duty to take other women besides myself to wife,” but that “this would make no difference in his affection for me, which would continue pure and single as it had ever been.” This did not prove to be the case, according to Sarah, as indicated by Orson’s eventual desire to spend equal time with his other wives. “By and by he told me that he intended to put these five women on an exact equality with me,” Sarah later remembered, by spending “a week with one, a week with another, and so on, and that I should have the sixth week! Then patience forsook me,” Sarah claimed; “I told him plainly that I wouldn’t endure it. I said, ‘If you take five weeks with your other women you can take the sixth with them also.’”9
She meant what she said. When Orson refused to reconsider his equal-time plan, she turned a cold shoulder to both him and the church. Because of her high profile as an outspoken anti-polygamous wife of a church leader, numerous individuals interviewed her, and in one interview in the mid-1870s she castigated polygamy as the “direst curse with which a people or a nation could be afflicted.… It completely demoralizes good men, and makes bad men correspondingly worse. As for the women—well, God help them! First wives it renders desperate, or else heart-broken, mean-spirited creatures; and it almost unsexes some of the other women, but not all of them, for plural wives have their sorrows too” (Froiseth 1884, 38-40).
Even those first wives who seemed to adjust well to polygamy often suffered quietly. Artemesia Snow, wife of Apostle Erastus Snow, complained frequently to him of the difficulties of raising her children in a house filled with other wives and their children while he was away on church activity. “You often ask how we enjoy ourselves,” she wrote to her absent husband; “we enjoy ourselves as well as we can under existing circumstances[;] we have a large family of little children and many different kinds[;] it is not very pleasant having so many kinds of children and so many different mistresses.” She lamented that they did not have a father with them: “I become more and more satisfied every day of my life that it is no way to bring up children, and I think that you would be convinced of that fact if you were at home a few evenings from sunset till dark and hear the music of the four babies[,] saying nothing of the others[,] to join in and help them a little. [W]e often wish you were hear to hear them but we will try and stand it till you come home and then we will poke you up with hot blocks” (A. Larson 1971, 270).
Mary Ann Angell Young, Brigham Young’s second wife, was a patient, uncomplaining woman.10 But even she reportedly remarked to a friend, “God will be very cruel if he does not give us poor women adequate compensation for the trials we have endured in polygamy” (Anti-Polygamy Standard, Aug. 1882, 36). The highly favored Emmeline Free Young experienced, as Mary Ann put it, “the torments of the damned” over being displaced by Brigham’s younger wife, Amelia Folsom. When a friend asked one of Mary Ann’s daughters if it did not grieve her mother to see Young’s devotion to his new wife, she replied, “Mother does not care. She is past being grieved by his conduct, but, on the other hand, it gives her most intense satisfaction to see Emmeline suffer as she does. She can understand now what mother had to undergo in past years. In fact, all the women are glad that Emmeline is getting her turn at last” (ibid.).
Phebe Woodruff, first wife of Apostle Wilford Woodruff, also shared the ambivalent feelings of Mormon women in polygamy. Called upon to defend the principle in a mass meeting of Mormon women, Phebe bore testimony that “If I am proud of anything in this world, it is that I accepted the principle of plural marriage, and remained among the people called ‘Mormons’ and am numbered with them to-day.” A few days later in a conversation with a long-time friend she was asked, “How is it Sister Woodruff that you have changed your views so suddenly about polygamy? I thought you hated and loathed the institution.” “I have not changed,” was her response: “I loathe the unclean thing with all the strength of my nature, but Sister, I have suffered all that a woman can endure. I am old and helpless, and would rather stand up anywhere, and say anything commanded of me, than to be turned out of my home in my old age which I should be most assuredly if I refused to obey counsel” (ibid., June 1882, 20).
Zina D. Jacobs Smith Young, plural wife of Brigham Young, was another strong public advocate of polygamy, who, like Phebe Woodruff, harbored private feelings different from her public posture. In the 1876 women’s mass meeting Zina proclaimed, “The principle of plural marriage is honorable. It is a principle of the gods, it is heaven born. God revealed it to us as a saving principle; we have accepted it as such, and we know it is of him for the fruits of it are holy. Even the Savior, himself, traces his lineage back to polygamic parents” (Jenson 1901, 1:698-99). However, when a woman whose husband had taken a second wife went to Zina in great anguish of mind to ask, “Does the fault lie in myself that I am so miserable; or is the system to blame for it?” Zina reportedly replied, “Sister, you are not to blame, neither are you the only woman who is suffering torments on account of polygamy. There are women in this very house [Brigham Young’s] whose hearts are full of hell, and in that room … is a woman who has been a perfect fury ever since Brother Young married Sister Amelia Folsom. Brigham Young dare not enter that room or she would tear his eyes out. It is the system that is to blame for it, but we must try and be as patient as we can” (Anti-Polygamy Standard, Jan. 1882, 75).
By this time Zina had nearly forty years of polygamous experience. Though she was an apologist for the system, she realized the practical difficulties in making plural marriages successful. “Much of the unhappiness found in polygamous families is due to the women themselves,” she was quoted in the 19 November 1869 New York World. “They expect too much attention from the husband, and because they do not get it, or see a little attention bestowed upon one of the other wives, they become sullen and morose, and permit their ill-temper to finally find vent.” Zina felt that “a successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy.”
Vilate Kimball, first wife of Heber C. Kimball, also recognized the value of romantic distance in a plural marriage. Counseling an unhappy plural wife, she advised the woman that “her comfort must be wholly in her children; that she must lay aside wholly all interest or thought in what her husband was doing while he was away from her” and be as “pleased to see him when he came in as she was pleased to see any friend” (Cooks 1884, 5-6). A polygamous wife basing her relationship on romantic love often found the emotional foundation of marriage weakened by jealousy. Women who were not overly fond of their husbands in a romantic sense seemed to make the easiest adjustment to the situation. As in Puritan society, where marriage and family ties were also important, “there were strong proscriptions against the development of very strong emotional bonds between spouses; husband and wife were supposed to like each other, but not too much” (Cohen 1959, 113).
Church leaders, recognizing the emotional trauma that polygamy could induce, encouraged plural wives to focus their attentions on their children and on church and community activities. But as the church sought economic independence from the gentile invasion of Utah territory, women were counseled to involve themselves in such projects as teaching, medicine, writing, telegraphy, agriculture, mercantile enterprises, and a wide variety of home industries including silk production as well. Though the demands of mothering and maintaining a household kept most women from pursuing employment outside the home, one researcher has pointed out that “some women may have welcomed polygamy as a great boon, as it decreased some of the demands and divided the duties of the wife role, allowing them more time to develop personal talents” (Casterline 1974, 80-81).
Martha Cannon once wryly commented on a seldom-noted advantage of being a plural wife: “If her husband has four wives,” she said of a hypothetical Mormon woman, “she has three weeks of freedom every month” (San Francisco Examiner, 8 Nov. 1896). Of course this apparent advantage was the flip side of polygamy’s major disadvantage. As Annie Clark Tanner concluded after thirty years as a plural wife, the “companionship between husband and wife in polygamy could not be so close as in monogamy. There was more independence on both sides in polygamy.… Monogamous marriages are by far the more successful. They give security and confidence, and these are the requirements for happiness” (Tanner 1976, 272).
Though polygamy reduced the exclusivity of marital relationships, it greatly improved the cohesiveness of the larger Mormon community. Group violation of what had been conventional behavioral norms served to weld the Saints into in a new fraternity of people—a “peculiar people,” as they were fond of calling themselves—united in their opposition to government interference in marriage practices. This militant separateness lasted nearly fifty years. In the end, however, federal government opposition to Mormon polygamy put a stop to plural marriage. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Saints began the tortuous process of re-emerging into mainstream American society.
1. Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton cite a lower figure. They estimate 5 percent of Mormon males (generally church leaders), 12 percent of Mormon women, and 10 percent of Mormon children were from polygamous households (1979, 199). Some statements have suggested that the number was as low as 3 percent, but these estimates are usually based on figures given during the Reed Smoot hearings when a lower percentage was politically advantageous to the church. Stanley S. Ivins in his analysis estimated 15-20 percent of Mormon families in Utah were polygamous (1956, 230).
2. These eighty-one failures in 400 marriages represent a 20 percent level (Quinn 1973, 248-91).
3. For treatments of Emmeline B. Wells’s life, see Madsen 1982, and Rasmussen and Dushku, in Burgess-Olson 1978, 457-78.
4. The Martha H. Cannon letters cited in this work are all from the Angus M. Cannon Collection. For a treatment of the life of Martha H. Cannon, see “Martha H. Cannon,” in Burgess-Olson 1978, 385-97.
5. The process for exempting a wife from the “law of Sarah” had been outlined in the 1843 revelation on celestial marriage (D&C 132:65). When cross-examined during the Reed Smoot hearings, church president Joseph F. Smith gave the official position on the necessity of a wife’s consent: “A. The condition is that if she does not consent the Lord will destroy her, but I do not know how he will do it. Q. Is it not true that … if she refuses her consent her husband is exempt from the law which requires her consent. A. Yes; he is exempt from the law which requires her consent. She is commanded to consent, but if she does not, then he is exempt from the requirement. Q. Then he is at liberty to proceed without her consent, under the law. In other words, her consent amounts to nothing? A. It amounts to nothing but her consent” (1:201).
Orson Pratt also explained this clause in his writings on celestial marriage: “When a man who has a wife, teaches her the law of God, and she refuses to give her consent for him to marry another according to that law, then, it becomes necessary, for her to state before the President the reasons why she withholds her consent; if her reasons are sufficient and justifiable and the husband is found in the fault, or in transgression, then, he is not permitted to take any step in regard to obtaining another. But if the wife can show no good reason why she refuses to comply with the law which was given unto Sarah of old, then it is lawful for her husband, if permitted by revelation through the prophet, to be married to others without her consent, and he will be justified, and she will be condemned, because she did not give them unto him, as Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham, and as Rachel and Leah gave Bilhah and Zilpah to their husband, Jacob” (1853-54, 41).
6. Though this revelation was not published in English versions of the D&C, it was included as section 137 in the German editions of 1893 and 1903 and also as section 137 in the Danish edition of 1900. For background on this revelation, see Heber J. Grant discourse in Conference Reports, Oct. 1922, 2-3, and Kenney 8 (13-14 Oct. 1882): 126-27.
7. Two years earlier on 24 October 1871, Young expressed what seems the opposite point of view when he explained that “a Man may Embrace the Law of Celestial Marriage in his heart & not take the Second wife & be justified before the Lord” (Kenney 7 [24 Oct. 1871]: 31).
8. Reynolds’s postscript adds this semi-official approval to his response: “I have read your letter to Pres. Taylor.”
9. New York Herald, 18 May 1877. Orson Pratt also discussed this situation in an 1878 letter to Sarah: “You once, professedly, believed in the sealing ordinances, according to the revelation on marriage for eternity. You, at several times, did put the hands of others into my hand, and did give them to me as wives, immediately before the marriage ceremony was pronounced. Those women I took with all confidence, and with your consent. After several years had elapsed, I proposed to you, to commence living upon principles of greater equality in regard to my attentions: this proposition you positively rejected; and you further said, that if I introduced this equality, you would never live with me again, in time, nor in eternity. This was a hard and grievous trial to me: but believing … my proposition to be, not only right, but duty, I firmly concluded to follow my convictions, though it should be at the sacrifice of life itself.”
10. Brigham Young married Miriam Works in 1824. She died in 1832, and two years later he married Mary Ann Angel. Though Brigham Young is usually depicted as the husband of twenty-seven wives, he was actually married to fifty-six and fathered the same number of children. Many of the wives, however, were spiritual charges with no connubial relationship (Jessee 1979).