Comments on Life On Gold Plates: G. L. Smith's Experiences While Researching Plural...

Anonymous said: Did a 13-year old girl marry a 40...

2009-09-14T13:31:58.592-06:00

Anonymous said:

Did a 13-year old girl marry a 40-something man out of true love and her own free will? You'll have to convince me of that.

Each case would have to be assessed on its facts. Generalities aren't worth much. I'm not sure to which case you are alluding, if there is a specific one you have in mind.

Through most of history women have been marrying younger than we would think proper. (Age of consent was 10-12 in most U.S. states during the nineteenth century; in Delaware it was seven. - See Coontz, cited below, p. 172.)

In short, this concern--while understandable--probably partakes more of how we have come to see marriage and male/female relations than the people at the time did.

Importantly, the idea that "true love" governs marriage is a fairly recent idea. For most of history, marriage was far too serious a matter for social and economic reasons for it to be left to the vagaries of "true love." :-)

A good book to read on this evolution is Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History: from Obedience to Intimacy or How Love Conquered Marriage (Viking, 2005). ISBN 067003407X

A selection or two:

"For most of history it was inconceivable that people would choose their mates on the basis of something as fragile and irrational as love and then focus all their sexual, intimate, and altruistic desires on the resulting marriage...People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply.

"But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married. When someone did advocate such a strange belief, it was no laughing matter. Instead it was considered a serious threat to social order." (p. 15)

Interestingly, LDS plural marriage occurred in the midst of this type of revolution in America--the shift to a love- or romance-based marriage. I have wondered if it didn't seek in some ways to moderate those tendency, or protect us from its excesses and negative points. There's probably a PhD in there for someone.

A few more:

"Putting women on a pedestal [in the 19th century] was a way of forestalling a resurgence of 1790s feminism without returning to traditional patriarchy....Even as the cult of the pure woman and her male protector seemed to sweep all other values aside during the first half of the nineteenth century, the new concept that marriage should be based on love and deep intimacy was working beneath the surface to subvert the family hierarchy and destabilize the relations between men and women...

"By the middle of the nineteenth century there was near unanimity in the middle and upper classes throughout Western Europe and North America that the love-based marriage, in which the wife stayed at home protected and supported by her husband, was a recipe for heaven on earth....

"The people who took idealization of love and intimacy to new heights during the nineteenth century did not intend to shake up marriage or unleash a new preoccupation with sexual gratification. They meant to strengthen marriage by encouraging husbands and wives to weave new emotional bonds. In the long run, however, they weakened it." (pp. 160, 162, 178)

Greg

Also for Anonymous: http://en.fairmormon.org/Jos...

2009-09-06T14:22:10.156-06:00

Also for Anonymous:

http://en.fairmormon.org/Joseph_Smith_and_polygamy/Marriages_to_young_women

This article deals directly with the issue you are asking about.

Anonymous, motivations and experiences varied wid...

2009-09-06T12:53:08.364-06:00

Anonymous,
motivations and experiences varied widely. Some were for love, others for duty, still others for social or economic reasons or mixtures of these things and others. Considerably more 19th century Mormon polygamous unions failed than monogamous unions (perhaps 10 times more at different periods). Judging the institution by the extremes is tempting, but unfair.

In modern polygamous unions in groups claiming historical Mormonism as a background, there is more suspect behavior, and in my experience, *considerably* more abuse than I've found evidence for historically. [For example, some of my wife's relatives were married at very young ages and endured shocking treatment -- and this was in one of the more "mainstream" offshoots -- they rarely make the news.] But many of these unions appear to be satisfying and happy to the respective parties at least from the outside. And of course, abuse is not confined to underground religions.

Interesting, but I remain troubled by polygamy, es...

2009-09-06T08:30:00.750-06:00

Interesting, but I remain troubled by polygamy, especially that in my own family. Did a 13-year old girl marry a 40-something man out of true love and her own free will? You'll have to convince me of that.

WVS, interesting observations. I read Carolyn Jess...

2009-09-05T10:32:05.446-06:00

WVS, interesting observations. I read Carolyn Jessop's book a while ago and was interested in how powerful the "us vs. the world" mentality was found among that particular group according to her.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Much ...

2009-09-05T00:13:39.211-06:00

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us. Much appreciated.

Fascinating findings. Bravo.

2009-09-04T11:38:45.895-06:00

Fascinating findings. Bravo.

A few decades back some of my wife's family decide...

2009-09-04T11:36:19.873-06:00

A few decades back some of my wife's family decided to join one of the larger polygamist groups who claim a Mormon heritage. This caused me, a fledgling graduate student at the time, to take up a serious study of their claims and polygamy in general. Through the years, I've come to see members of these groups as less driven by common belief than common critics. Practitioners may hold a very wide range of dissonant beliefs, but still find themselves drawn together. Anyway, I think many in these groups would find themselves under the umbrella of Greg's (b), more precisely part a of part b I suppose. There are certainly legal and social issues that separate modern polygamist groups from the 19th century Mormons. But their discourse (and view of themselves) places them squarely in early Mormon rhetoric at least.

-WVS