Page 240 - Confronting Race Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1815 - 1915

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a woman who agreed to her husband taking additional wives after
twenty-eight years of monogamous marriage, explained that she was
"freer" and able to do "herself individually things she never could have
attempted before; and work out her individual character as separate fr om
her husband." 108
Other Mormon f e male migrants to Salt Lake also railed against
Gentile prejudice. They were against laws that would, in their view, fo rce
Mormons to flee the United States so they could f o llow the sacred pre­
cepts of their religion. 109 Others could not understand why Latter-day
Saints were so widely maligned. lID They explained that a man took an
additional wife only with the f u ll approval of his other wives; there was
nothing secretive, corrupt, or underhanded about it. III Moreover, some
Mormon women contended that the children of plural marriages were
happier, healthier, and "brighter intellectually and physically than those
born under the restricted law of Monogamy." II2
Mormon wife Margaret S. Smoot could not f a thom why plural
marriage, if all its advantages were conceded, was so "unjustly con­
demned by the world." In r847, Smoot came to Salt Lake City as one
of two wives. In Salt Lake, she lived what she called a "poor but happy"
life among virtuous people. "Vice and prostitution were things unknown
to our society," she recalled. The only "houses of ill f a me" in the area
were those established by "Monagamists, Interlopers and defamers of
women." According to another Mormon woman, abortion and infan­
ticide were also unknown among them because extended Mormon
f a milies were not like Gentiles, who sought "to destroy the life of an
infant before it is born and after because their deeds have been evil." 1I3
W a s it only fr om the outside that plural marriages of the Latter-day
Saints seemed so reprehensible? Did Gentile women misconstrue plural
marriage? Did Gentile women invent unhappy confessions of Mormon
wives? Did they perhaps dismiss the f e elings of women who f a vored
plural marriage? I I4 Recently , one scholar, who was raised as a Mormon,
argued that Mormon women were so indoctrinated by the church that
they publicly supported controversial issues. According to her, when
Latter-day Saints were attacked f o r plural marriage as they sought state­
hood during the I870s, male church leaders encouraged women to
defend the practice and assert their right to chose their own style of