The place of women in the history is the Latter-day Saints is very interesting. As we read over the last couple weeks, women could be either especially strong willed like Emma Hale Smith or they could bend to pressure like many of the young wives Joseph Smith married. Thus women had an important role within the church. Women also had a crucial role outside of the church, specifically in the opinions of outsiders. In fact all the while that the Federal government was trying to punish and disenfranchise the Mormons, public opinion was rather obsessed with Mormon women first seeing them as victims then as criminals. As Sarah Barringer Gordon puts it, “Indicted as fornicators, with no vote, these women had gone, in less than a decade, from being called victims to being labeled criminals” (181). Gordon’s book tracks the progress of public opinion which first saw the women as victims of abusive and capricious husbands then as complicit criminals who deserved punishment. Gordon claims this turn of opinion was caused by “Congress’s turn to coercion in the second half of the 1880s” (148).
The women also played a large role in the prosecution of polygamists. Many plural wives were taken to the stand in an effort to gain testimony. However this goal of the prosecution was not reached because often the witnesses would “simple ‘forget’ the material elements of the crimes associated with plural marriage” (Gordon, 162). The women especially would forget if the husband had other wives or where the other families lived. Here the victim became complicit in the crime.
Another striking part of the reading was the passage in which Justice Reynolds compared polygamy to human sacrifice and the practice of sati, in which bereaved wives were made to jump on the funeral pyre of their deceased husbands. To link polygamy with two such religious practices was a very strong statement which shows how the wider community felt about polygamy, that is was destructive, barbarous, and potentially violent. This view of the polygamy links back to the early public opinion concerning women, that they were victims. To combine the two would show that the public originally thought that polygamy was a disgusting and dangerous practice that endangered and abused women. As time went on only the latter half of the opinion changed because polygamy was always hated by outsiders.
Questions:
- Is it fair to link polygamy with sati and human sacrifice? Do the latter traditions have anything in common with the first? Does polygamy hurt anyone? Or was Justice Reynolds just exhibiting his prejudice when he compared the three?
- Concerning the women of the LDS, are they victims of monstrous polygamy or are they equal perpetrators of the crime? Are they a combination of the two?
The act of polygamy should not be equated with human sacrifice or sati. Often times the latter are not acts of choice but rather religious rituals that must be carried out at the pressure of a group. Additionally, they are violent in nature. Plural marriage, on the other hand, involves free will. The women is not coerced into matrimony, and after being wedded has the ability to petition for a divorce. She can extricate herself from the situation if she should want whereas the participants of human sacrifice and sati cannot resurrect themselves from death.
ReplyDeleteAlthough not the most laudable of practices, polygamy, if the parties involved willed it into being, is relatively harmless. It doesn’t physically harm anyone. In fact, legal acts such as smoking harm a lot more people. It is more the other customs associated with polygamy that make others deem it a crime. Issues such as adultery, domestic abuse and oppression are what actually constitute wrongdoing. I believe that plural marriage in itself is not a crime, just a highly undesirable practice.
Obviously the three practices are not of equal severity, considering that polygamy did not entail the death of individuals involved. However, in principle the three practices are the same. In conjunction with sati and human sacrifice, polygamy seems a mild offense that does not hurt anyone. However, that comparison does not make polygamy acceptable to mainstream Americans. Judge Reynolds was of definite bias when he made the comparisons; however that should not lower the value of his stance, which supports monogamy as the product of human evolution and civilization. The women of LDS are part of the polygamy issue, as they are willing participants in a practice unlawful and what many would call unmoral as well. They obviously have the right to choose what to do with their lives, however contrary their actions are to contemporary moral standards.
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