First, I wanted to say how grateful I am to have you as my son’s
teacher. He is very happy after school and has wonderful things to say about
you and his classmates.
I have one concern though.
Preston was telling me he learned about polygamy in social studies and
he was under the impression that polygamy was instituted by Brigham Young to
help women find a husband because men were in short supply due to violence and
the extermination order placed on Mormons. I’m not exactly sure how he came to
this conclusion, but I just wanted to make sure he received accurate
information.
Polygamy is a very important part of our personal family history and
religion. I am sealed to Joseph Smith, via my paternal side. Drew’s fourth
great aunt is Joseph Smith’s first plural wife, Fanny Alger. We both come from
a very polygamous heritage.
Joseph Smith began the practice of polygamy in roughly 1833 when he
took on a second wife, 15 year-old Fanny Alger. (Plural Marriage in Kirkland
and Nauvoo, LDS.org) In the process of marrying 30+ more women, he ended up
lying to Emma and making a few mistakes along the way that contributed to his
unfortunate death. (Todd Compton, In
Sacred Loneliness)
Joseph Smith also married women who were already married to other men.
Zina H.D. Young, Joseph’s fourth plural wife, was already pregnant
with her husband’s child, Henry Jacobs, when she and Joseph were secretly
married. Polyandry, though less common, was practiced by some of Joseph Smith’s
wives. Men were not in short supply.
Once Joseph died, Brigham and Emma were in great disagreement about the
practice of polygamy. It caused Emma and Joseph many hardships in their
marriage. (Linda King Newell, Mormon
Enigma: Emma Hale Smith) Brigham left Nauvoo with the majority of the LDS
membership and settled the modern day LDS Mormon Church in what is now Utah.
Emma and her followers later started the RLDS Church, now referred to as the
Community of Christ.
Brigham strongly believed in the practice of polygamy. He married women
who were already married, including teenage girls. There were plenty of men in
supply, “Despite these observations and assertions, a close review of the
numbers of women and men in Nauvoo and later in Utah shows that it was never a
primary driving force in the practice. Concerning gender censes in the West,
historian Donna Hill wrote, ‘The claim of surplus women is not valid, since the
United States census from 1850 to 1940 and all available records of the Utah
church show that men outnumbered women in the church and in Utah.’ ” (Donna
Hill, Joseph Smith, the First Mormon (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1977), 360.)
Brigham Young, for whatever reason, ended polyandry and instituted
polygyny—meaning only men could have multiple wives and women could no longer
have multiple husbands, thus making polygamy much more patriarchal.
As the practice became more widespread, girls were being married off at
younger and younger ages. The youngest documented wife was 10 years old. The
youngest documented wife to become pregnant was 13 years old. These girls were
not in desperate need of male companionship, they had plenty of time to find a
husband. Census data also confirms that polygamous wives produced fewer
children than monogamous women. “The research also revealed that while
polygamous men had dozens of children, the practice of having multiple wives
(and thus sexual partners) had the opposite effect on women: For every wife
added to the fold, the average number of children per wife dropped by
one. The more wives a woman's husband has, the fewer children she is going
to have personally.” (Jacob A. Moorad, Daniel E.L. Promislow, Ken R.
Smith, Michael J. Wade, Journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society,
March 2011, Volume 32, Issue 2, Pages 147-155)
Polygyny and religious fanaticism perpetuated the mentality that the
more wives a man could attain the more godly he became. Monogamy was considered
a shameful practice.
Here are some quotes from prominent LDS sources on the practice of
polygyny:
Heber C. Kimball said “I have noticed 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 spritely. Why is this? Because God
loves that man, and because he honors his word. Some of you may not believe
this, but I not only believe it but I also know it. For a man of God to be
confined to one woman is small business…I do not know what we should do if we
had but one wife apiece.” (Deseret News, April 22, 1857)
Millennial Star, an LDS Church publication, “…the one-wife system only
degenerates the human family, both physically and intellectually, but it is
entirely incompatible with the philosophical notions of immortality; it is a
lure to temptation, and has always proved a curse to a people.” (Millennial
Star, Vol. 15, p. 227)
George A. Smith said, “We breathe the free air, we have the best
looking men and the handsomest women, and if they envy us our position, well
they may, for they are 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
dominion of one wife. They ought to be ashamed of such conduct…” (Deseret News,
April 16, 1856)
The motives of many of these men were not of an altruistic nature to
help lowly widows. They cared about how “handsome” the women were while
simultaneously believing the practice was assigned from God.
There is certainly nuance to each situation, but many church and secular
historians have confirmed polygamy was not a product of nice men helping widows
to produce more offspring. Polygamy was ultimately practiced because Mormon
theology teaches that polygamy is required to attain the highest degree of
glory in the Celestial Kingdom.
Preston and I have had a long discussion about the practice of plural
marriage and the differences among polygamy, polyandry, and polygyny. I’m sure
polygamy wasn’t a prominent part of the social studies lesson, however, I just
wanted to make sure that he is receiving an accurate account of early Utah
polygamy and his family heritage. Mormons certainly are a “peculiar people”.
Please let me know if you would like to discuss further or have any
concerns, thanks so much! I greatly appreciate you being such a wonderful
teacher to Preston.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Ostler
Mrs. Ostler
