The Polygamy Question

Janet Bennion, Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, Janet Bennion, Lisa Fishbayn Joffe

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780874219807
• eBook ISBN: 9780874219975
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The practice of polygamy occupies a unique place in North American history and has had a profound effect on its legal and social development. The Polygamy Question explores the ways in which indigenous and immigrant polygamy have shaped the lives of individuals, communities, and the broader societies that have engaged with it. The book also considers how polygamy challenges our traditional notions of gender and marriage and how it might be effectively regulated to comport with contemporary notions of justice.

The contributors to this volume—scholars of law, anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and religious studies—disentangle diverse forms of polygamy and polyamory practiced among a range of religious and national backgrounds including Mormon and Muslim. They chart the harms and benefits these models have on practicing women, children, and men, whether they are independent families or members of coherent religious groups. Contributors also address the complexities of evaluating this form of marriage and the ethical and legal issues surrounding regulation of the practice, including the pros and cons of legalization.

Plural marriage is the next frontier of North American marriage law and possibly the next civil rights battlefield. Students and scholars interested in polygamy, marriage, and family will find much of interest in The Polygamy Question.

Contributors include Kerry Abrams, Martha Bailey, Lori Beaman, Janet Bennion, Jonathan Cowden, Shoshana Grossbard, Melanie Heath, Debra Majeed, Rose McDermott, Sarah Song, and Maura Irene Strassberg.

Section I

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Identifying the Harms and Benefits of Polygamy

1
Polygamy in Nineteenth-Century America

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SARAH SONG

This paper examines how critique of minority norms and practices, even by well-intentioned reformers, can divert attention from the majority culture’s own inequalities, shielding them from criticism and perhaps even fueling discourses of cultural superiority within the dominant culture. Such a diversionary effect can be seen in the controversy over Mormon polygamy in nineteenth-century America as well as in contemporary debates over minority cultural practices, including arranged marriage and female circumcision within immigrant communities.¹

The movement against Mormon polygamy provides an early example of a minority group’s demand for accommodation—in this case, a demand for immunity from prosecution, an exemption from generally applicable law—and the dominant culture’s overwhelmingly negative response. As one legal historian put it, the federal government pursued the campaign against polygamy with “a zeal and concentration” that was “unequalled in the annals of federal law enforcement” (Linford 1964, 312, 585). Opponents of polygamy called for federal intervention to dismantle what was widely considered a deeply patriarchal practice. Some might look approvingly at the outcome of this case, pointing to it as a model for how liberal democratic states might deal with illiberal and nondemocratic groups. What they would miss, however, is not only how such intervention failed to improve the status of Mormon women but also how condemnation of polygamy helped divert attention from the majority culture’s own patriarchal norms. The focus on polygamy helped shield Christian monogamy and the traditional gender roles associated with it from criticism. It also served as a useful tool in the government’s assault on what was probably its bigger concern, the political power of the Mormon church.

In this paper, I examine the politics of the American antipolygamy movement to explore the intercultural dynamic of what I call diversion. Antipolygamy activists gave two main arguments against polygamy: that it violated Christian public morals and that it subordinated women. While antipolygamy activists expressed genuine concern for the plight of Mormon women in polygamous marriages, they did not connect their concern for these women with a broader concern for the status of women in all marriages, which is what leading woman’s-rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony sought to do.

The Rise and Fall of Mormon Polygamy

In 1830, Joseph Smith, a New York farmer, founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The Book of Mormon, as translated by Smith, described the Hebrew origins of Native Americans and established America as God’s chosen land. In 1843 in Nauvoo, Illinois, Smith had a revelation mandating “plural marriage,” but the revelation was not made public until 1852 after the Mormons had settled in Utah.² While Mormon leaders began practicing plural marriage in Illinois, it was on the western frontier that the practice grew, offering a systematic alternative to Christian monogamy. Responding to what they perceived to be the increasing secularization of marriage in the dominant culture, Mormon leaders solemnized marriages without state involvement (Foster 1981, 135–36; Hardy 1992, 6). Public outrage against the practice grew. The Republican Party condemned the “twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery” in its party platform of 1856 and asserted the sovereign power of Congress over the territories (Linford 1964, 312).

Efforts by Americans and by government officials to dismantle Mormon polygamy spanned from 1862 to 1890. In 1862, Congress criminalized bigamy in the territories (Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act).³ The law proved unenforceable since Utah did not register marriages and Mormon juries would not convict polygamists. In 1874, Congress followed up with the Poland Act, which transferred jurisdiction of criminal and civil cases from probate courts in the Utah Territory, whose judges were often Mormon bishops, to federal territorial courts and gave federal judges considerable power over selection of jurors (Poland Act).⁴ In 1879, the US Supreme Court upheld a bigamy conviction in Reynolds v. US, but the decision did not eliminate the practice since prosecutors could not easily prove plural marriage.⁵ Congress followed up in 1882 by changing the name of the offense described as “bigamy” to “polygamy,” which made it easier to procure polygamy convictions by criminalizing “unlawful cohabitation.” It also denied polygamists the right to vote and hold public office and required a man to swear he was not a polygamist and a woman to swear she was not married to one (Edmunds Act).⁶ Some Mormons who were denied the vote in the 1882 election because they refused to take the oath sued the registrar of ballots. Two years later, the US Supreme Court held that it was appropriate for Congress to make marital status “a condition of the elective franchise,” adding that a sovereign power could legitimately “declare that no one but a married person shall be entitled to vote” (Murphy v. Ramsey).⁷

In 1887, Congress stepped up the assault by repealing the incorporation of the Mormon church and directing the US attorney general to expropriate its property holdings over $50,000 (Edmunds-Tucker Act).⁸ The act also disenfranchised Mormon women, who had had the vote for seventeen years before that point. The Mormons resisted and continued to practice polygamy, but in 1889, the Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to dissolve and expropriate the church’s property against the church’s claim that it was a protected religious body.⁹ Finally, in 1890, Mormon president Wilford Woodruff issued a manifesto accepting the federal prohibition of polygamy and encouraged members to refrain from contracting any further polygamous marriages.

The Antipolygamy Movement and the Diversionary Effect

Why did American citizens, legislators, and judges in the nineteenth century deem polygamy to be intolerable? The leading arguments against polygamy were that it offended Protestant public morals and that it was deeply patriarchal. While patriarchal power was not unique to the polygamous form of marriage, citizens and government officials targeted it because it was seen to embody an extreme form of patriarchy inconsistent with democracy. If we examine the broader social and political context in which antipolygamy activism arose, however, we see that while motivated by a desire to improve the status of Mormon women, the antipolygamy movement was also fueled by a desire to protect traditional monogamous marriage and dismantle the political power of the Mormon church. The focus on polygamy served ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section I: Identifying the Harms and Benefits of Polygamy
• Section II: Regulating Polygamy
• Contributors
• Index