Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Polygamy: A Descendant Thinks On It
Posted on September 6, 2003 in Ancestors Anthropology Morals & Ethics Partnership
The 1864 National Unity Party platform listed two practices as the principal evils against which they stood: slavery and polygamy. The latter came as a shock to the Mormons who’d stood by the Union in its struggle for the South. They could understand why they had been singled out.
Polygamy is one of those cross-cultural issues which causes the veins in some people’s temples to bulge up. I believe that this is mostly because it is different from what we do here in the West. Christ said nothing about having more than one wife (though he spoke out against divorce — see Matthew 19:1-12]. Paul said:
To want to be a presiding elder is to want to do a noble work. That is why the president must have an impeccable character. He must not have been married more than once, and he must be temperate, discreet and courteous, hospitable and a good teacher; not a heavy drinker, nor hot-tempered, but kind and peaceable. [1 Timothy 3:1-3]
It’s not exactly clear whether he is speaking against divorce or polygamy or both in this passage.
The Old Testament declares no limit on the number of wives that a polygamist may have. Many Old Testament heroes — Solomon being the most ambitious — had multiple spouses. The Koran stops believers at four. The belief that multiple marriages are sinful appears to come out of Western culture rather than the religion heritage that it adopted.
The feelings against polygamy run strong enough that it was invoked as a reason for going to war in Iraq. I have not heard, however, of American forces attempting to break up multiple marriages, nor would I approve of it unless the wives asked to be so liberated.
Western men do not keep multiple wives, but they dream about it quite often. In her book Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, Morrocan feminist Fatema Mernissi reports being appalled by the lust Western men reported when discussing the institution. They talked of the harem as a kind of brothel where they could select the most delectable items from a silk-lined menu. Many confided their envy of Muslim men and the “easy lifestyle” they lived. To be a polygamist was to be the unchallenged master of a land of rippled skin forested by pubic hair.
Mernissi who was raised in a harem had bad news for them: most Muslim men dreaded the idea of having more than one wife. For one thing, you had to have the resouces to feed them and all their children. Few did. The husband was cast into an unhappy role as head of the household: it was he to whom the wives turned when they fought. He had to play no favorites, perform every night no matter how much the previous night’s lovemaking had exhausted him. When Mernissi talked to Muslim men about polygamy, they expressed relief that they had only one wife. No one wanted to deal with a household full of demanding women. Princes and kings married for alliance. The common man thanked Allah for allowing him more choice and reasonable limits in his marriage.
Marriages happen for one of three reasons:
- Love/Lust: This is the classic, romantic model. You see someone you like, you discover they like you, too, and you marry them. Polygamy seen in this light becomes a personal bordello, a sexual supermarket.
- Alliance: A marriage makes a tie to another family. Historically, leaders of state and economic leaders have sought to use marriage to develop such ties. Arranged marriages are based on this model: you build connections for your family’s betterment and place in the community. The spouses can get to feeling like prisoners of those who arrange the marriages.
- Charity: A man may take in a wife and her children because without him they are economically destitute. Of the three forms, this is the one with which I have the most sympathy.
All three kinds of marriage occur in polygamous units. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire found himself so trapped by arranged marriages with other country heads and officials within his own country that he became the principal prisoner of his own seralgio. The women fared worse, but it is important to remember that polygamy is not always the joy for the man that the Western porn industry and clientele imagine it to be.
I am writing on this topic for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to explore this after writing my piece about the morality of cultural relativism the other day. Polygamy is as good a topic as an avenue for exploring alternative moralities as any and, in my opinion, decidedly less brutal than other practices such as female c*rc*c*sm — if an appropriate morals and regulations are established to govern the exchange.
Second, Lynn and I have a game that we play from time to time where we consider alternative partnership styles. The question here was “are there any conditions under which Lynn might accept my taking a second wife?”
Third, I have in my family tree a Mormon polygamist by the name of Jorgen Smith. Jorgen had three wives. The first he married while he still lived in Denmark. She came with him to Zion when they converted to Mormonism. Jorgen worked hard and became an elder of the church which entitled him to marry a second and a third wife.
My ancestor Fidsel — Jorgen’s first wife — was none too happy when her man showed up with a 22 year old German girl. She announced that if he brought “that woman” through the front door, she would leave through the back with the children. Jorgen built a second house for Mattie and went back and forth between the two houses. It was the custom among the Mormons to give the wife who lacked the man the use of a feather bed. Jorgen preferred the younger Mattie to his first wife. Once he overstayed his time at her house. Fidsel showed up carrying the feather bed, threw it through the front door, and screamed “Here’s your damned feather bed! I want my man back!”
Jorgen married a third wife, a Swedish woman named Wilhelmina. If there was conflict between Fidsel and Wilhelmina, it is not recorded. Jorgen. Following her conversion to Mormonism, Wilhelmina left her alcoholic husband for the new paradise. When she arrived in Utah, she was one of the handcart women who moved their households across the Great Plains by pushing it in front of them. This was clearly a marriage of charity: Jorgen had no children by her. He simply accepted the responsibility of caring for her and her sons and daughters.
When polygamy was outlawed, Jorgen was legally entitled to choose which wife would continue with him in monogamy. He selected Mattie over Fidsel and Wilhelmina. Love/lust won out over previous engagement and charity.
When you have Mormon roots such as I have, you acquire through family lines a mythology suggesting persecution for the faith and intense feelings within the community over what behaviors seem right and wrong.
Utah is covered by hidden groves and canyons where polygamists hid out from U.S. Marshals. Cohab Canyon in Capitol Reef National Park is one such place. Many Mormons and nonMormons like myself with origins in the region have polygamous ancestors. (My Catholic mother likes to point out that I am descended from Jorgen’s first wife.) Rumors of polygamists lurking in the backwater towns and on remote ranches still pepper discussions. When we visited Moab on vacation two years ago, our guide pointed out a homestead where a notorious polygamist had settled with his dozen or so wives.
Today, the remote Arizona Strip is said to be America’s last stronghold of polygamous marriage. The Short Creek settlement was raided several times, the last in 1953:
The [Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints] set up shop in Short Creek, largely due to its isolation. Buffered by the Grand Canyon and with a hundred miles of barren desert between them and the nearest law enforcement in Kingman, Arizona, they felt comfortable there. These polygamists also knew they were near a Stateline, which could easily be strategically crossed if there was trouble.
The Short Creek polygamists brought in more men with their wives by pickup truck to their growing kingdom, which they called “The First City of the Millennium.” A “charitable philanthropic trust” was set up called the “United Effort Plan,” which controlled much of their assets. But Short Creek was a burden to the welfare system of Arizona’s Mohave County. Many polygamist women and children collected welfare and whatever was available through government relief.
In justifying the 1953 raid of Short Creek, Arizona Governor Howard Pyle declared the end of “the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become mere chattels.” Pyle lost the next election and Short Creek merely changed its name to Colorado City. Word is that it is business as usual there:
“Brigham Young! Brigham Fast!”
The main criticism against polygamy is its sexism and the way that young girls are brought into plural marriages with much older men. The case of my ancestors suggests another problem: what if the present wife does not consent to this enlargement of the household?
These might seem simple to remedy. You could restrict marriages with young girls by age of consent laws. You could require spouses to approve any new marriages that the polygamist takes on. You could allow women as well as men to have multiple spouses.
Alas, polygamy cannot function nonsexistly. Either you allow husbands to marry several women or you allow wives to have several husbands as is the case with the Nayar of India’s Malabar Coast. What you get when both sexes enjoy polygamy is chaos, systems of relationship which could entangle courts in family litigation for years and years. Purely for the reason of utility, even a libertarian must rule out formal systems of polygamy though informal ones may continue to thrive unpersecuted.
If polygamy were legal, would I do it? When Lynn and I considered the question in our bed last night, we both agreed that the most moral cases we could think of would be either the case where I marry two lesbians so that they could have a family relationship or the case where I would marry a single mother so that her children could have me as a father.
But then I got to thinking about the nightmare that Middle Eastern men report, where they come home to the multiple voices of demanding wives, the several children, and the headache of making peace. I sat up on the edge of the bed, stared at the digital alarm clock, and came to the conclusion that the vast majority of Muslim men have arrived at: No way! No way would I choose this insanity over the monogamy I now have with Lynn.
Some links to sites about polygamy in the West:
- Tapestry – an organization that rescues women from polygamous marriages
- Apologetics.Com – A well-researched index featuring links to sites and articles both for and against Christian polygamy
- Christian Polygamy – A site that argues that polygamy is a legitimate Christian practice: “Polygamy is legal! You can have many wives in Christian Polygamy simply by marrying one at a time in the traditional manner. You get a marriage license, and then civilly marry her. You then civilly divorce her. You then get another marriage license for the next wife, and then civilly marry her. You then civilly divorce her. You then continue to do this with each additional wife. If you do not provide any of these civilly divorced wives with a Bill of Divorcement, which is required by the Bible to be divorced, then the “civil” divorce will have no affect on your marital status. You will still be married according to the Bible to each of these wives.” – OK….
- Polygamous Groups – A listing by the Ross Institute for the study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups, and Movements
- Voices in Harmony: Contemporary Women Celebrate Plural Marriage – This book claims that there are 30,000 people living in polygamous households in Utah.
