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Book Review
Canada and the United States
| Kathryn M. Daynes. More Wives than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840–1910. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2001. Pp. x, 305. $34.95.Sarah Barringer Gordon. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. xiv, 337. Cloth $49.95, paper $19.95.
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| Kathryn M. Daynes's book is the most important study to date of plural marriage in nineteenth-century Utah and is especially significant for its detailed analysis of the demographics of Mormonism's "peculiar institution." Sarah Barringer Gordon studies the same institution from a national perspective, and her comprehensive treatment of Congressional debates and court proceedings makes a path-breaking contribution to American constitutional history. Taken together, these books constitute a well-balanced view of a practice that has always evoked controversy. |
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Daynes takes a fresh look at all aspects of plural marriage, or polygamy (the terms are used interchangeably in both books), including its origins, the nature of church regulation, Utah marriage law (which left control in the hands of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the variety of marriage practices, demographics, divorce, and the decline of the practice. Her most significant new research is reported in section three, "Numbers: An Analysis of the Marriage Patterns of Manti Women." She points to several factors that make Manti, Utah, an ideal community upon which to base generalizations: the completeness of the available data set; the fact that Manti was settled early, making it easy to study changes over time; the fact that it remained small, making feasible a complete study of its families; and the fact that it was typical of the rural villages where about seventy-five percent of Utah's Mormons lived in the nineteenth century. |
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Daynes divides her demographic analysis into three periods: 1847 to 1869, Utah's frontier period; 1870 to 1890, years that encompassed the consolidation of settlement and the abandonment of polygamy; and 1890 to 1910, when Mormon marriage patterns moved closer to those of mainstream America. She also classifies the women whose first marriages took place in Utah into three "cohorts," according to the years they were born. Her findings include the fact that the percentage of Utah women who married at all was always significantly higher than the national average, the age at which women married was significantly lower than the national norm, and immigrant women were more likely to enter plural marriages than American-born women. A surprising 36.9 percent of all women's first marriages during the initial period were into polygamy, but this declined to 10.6 percent in the second period. Daynes also found that 24.9 percent of Manti's population lived in polygamous families in 1850, 43.1 percent in 1860, 36 percent in 1870, 25.1 percent in 1880, and 7.1 percent in 1890. |
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The rules associated with plural marriage were general in nature but, Daynes contends, were followed consistently enough to constitute a marriage system. Among other things, the first wife must consent before her husband could marry another, and there were guidelines for courting a prospective plural wife, including the approval of her parents. Sexual passion was not a major motive for polygamy, but Daynes asserts that the system tended to keep such passions within the bounds of recognized marriage relationships. Premarital and extramarital affairs were condemned in the strongest manner possible, and church courts often meted out more severe punishment to men than to women. |
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