Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - A house full of females: plural marriage and womens rights in early Mormonism, 1835-1870

L ight snow obscured the view of the mountains on January 13, 1870, as masses of Mormon women crowded into the old peaked-roof Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. The pine benches were hard, the potbellied stoves inadequate against the cold. No matter. They would warm themselves with indignation. The news had come by telegraph a week before. The much-feared Cullom Bill had passed the United States House of Representatives. If the Senate concurred, the government would soon have the power to confiscate Mormon property, deprive wives of immunity as witnesses, and imprison their husbands.

This wasnt the first time Congress had attempted to outlaw the Mormon marriage system. Calls for federal action had begun fourteen years before with the Republican Party platform of 1856, which linked polygamy in Utah and slavery in the South as twin relics of barbarism. Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont enunciated the essential argument: Under the guise of religion this people has established and seek to maintain and perpetuate, a Mohammedan barbarism revolting to the civilized world.

What nonsense! Eliza Snow exclaimed from the platform of the Old Tabernacle. She and other leaders among Salt Lake City women had acted quickly to organize an indignation meeting, a well-recognized form of protest in the nineteenth-century United States. Indignation was more than anger. It was sympathetic outrage directed at an injustice. The goal was publicity in its broadest sense.

The reporter for TheNew York Herald, disgusted at the sight of infatuated females speaking in favor of a system repugnant to women of finer feelings, nevertheless produced a full-page account of the speeches. The San Francisco Evening Bulletin pronounced the meeting one of the most remarkable, perhaps, that has ever congregated on the Continent. To see a mass of between 3,000 and 4,000 women, nearly all Anglo Saxon, many of them American born and raised, meeting together to advocate the claims of polygamy and defend the men who practice it, is food for reflection and moralizing. For TheDaily Cleveland Herald, the explanation was obviousthe women were as strongly attached to their peculiar and unpopular faith as the men can be.

The Mormon-dominated legislature in Utah soon demonstrated their confidence in their wives and sisters by passing a bill granting women the vote. Although the question of woman suffrage had been raised in Washington during debates over granting rights of citizenship to freed slaves, only the most radical among Eastern reformers were prepared to embrace it. When the tiny Wyoming legislature passed a woman suffrage bill in December 1869, most people considered it a stunt, since there were so few white inhabitants in Wyoming Territory and six times as many males as females. The situation in Utah was different. Females composed a slight majority of the territorys eighty-six thousand nonnative residents.

The spectacle in Utah soon attracted the attention of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, two of the most powerful advocates for woman suffrage. Still smarting over the refusal of Congress to embrace their cause, they added Utah to the itinerary for a journey west in 1871. After several days in Salt Lake City, Stanton told the press that antagonists on the Mormon question had missed the point. Polygamy and monogamy were both oppressive systems. She argued that those who opposed the Latter-day Saints were every bit as befuddled as the Saints themselves: The condition of women is slavery to-day and must be so long as they are shut out of the world of workhelpless dependents on man for bread. She was nevertheless pleased that Utah women had the vote. Eventually, she accepted polygamous wives as allies.