“Plural marriage,” as the Saints called it, emerged gradually and in secret in Nauvoo, Illinois, the utopian city the Saints built on the banks of the Mississippi River after being driven from Missouri. Joseph Smith took his first “plural wife” in the spring of 1841 and over the next three years was “sealed” to more than two dozen women (the exact number is uncertain). One historian refers to these early sealings as “protopolygamy” (proto meaning giving rise to or being ancestral to), to distinguish it from the later, more developed practice.16

The Female Relief Society also developed in Nauvoo. In a meeting above his redbrick store, Smith promised he would make of the society “a kingdom of priests as in Enoch’s day—as in Pauls day.” Within two years it had more than thirteen hundred members devoted to poor relief and support for construction of a massive temple. Shortly before his death, Joseph and his legal wife, Emma Hale Smith, prepared a select group of women and men to officiate in temple ceremonies, even though the temple itself was not yet complete.17

Polygamy and temple rituals flourished in the months after Smith’s death. The Relief Society did not. When Emma Smith, who was its president, rejected Brigham Young as her husband’s successor, he disbanded it. Although most of its members followed Young to Utah, roughly 15 percent stayed behind, among them Emma Smith, who raised her children to believe that their father had never had other wives.18 Thus, at the heart of the succession from Smith to Young was a division in the female community. Eliza Snow, who had been one of Smith’s plural wives, carried the Relief Society minute book with her to Utah. In the years to come, she used it to remind her closest associates of the promises they had received in Nauvoo.

For Latter-day Saints, plurality was not just a social system. It was a means of salvation. Joseph Smith shocked his contemporaries by teaching that human intelligences (he used the plural form) were co-eternal with God. “Moreover, all the spirits that God ever sent into the world are susceptible to enlargement.” Enlargement included but was by no means limited to biological reproduction. In a poem written to a female friend, Eliza Snow portrayed individual affinities as nodes in an interlocking web that connected “noble spirits” across the earth and “from earth to heav’n, / And still extending on from world to world / Unto creation’s undefin’d extent.” To her it did not matter whether a woman was the only wife or one among many, since all the righteous would eventually be bound together. She insisted that spiritual bonds produced “a holier feeling” than friendship, witnessing the possibility of an eternal network of souls “twin’d / And intertwin’d, combining and combin’d.”19

After Joseph Smith’s death, Eliza Snow joined Brigham Young’s household. In 1870, she was living with a dozen of his other wives in the Lion House, a gabled structure on South Temple Street that took its name from a stone lion that stood over the door. Although outsiders referred to it as Brigham’s harem, it could also have been described as an experiment in cooperative housekeeping and an incubator of female activism. For years, Zina D. H. Young, who gave the prayer at the indignation meeting, lived across the hall from Eliza. Harriet Cook Young, one of the more flamboyant speakers at the meeting, lived two doors down. As an architectural structure, the Lion House was unique. Most polygamous wives lived in houses that, whether large or small, looked like vernacular dwellings found elsewhere in the United States. Yet the concept of female cooperation was widespread.20

Mormonism reinforced and at the same time transformed patterns of association common to rural societies everywhere. Women banded together to spin, weave, and care for the sick, but also to participate in sacred rituals. The defining concept was not plural marriage but gathering, a belief that those who accepted the faith had a duty to join their fellow believers in building a new Zion. Plural marriage was pervasive but far from universal. Although by 1860 more than 40 percent of the territory’s inhabitants—men, women, and children—lived in plural households, the composition of those households varied widely. Two-thirds of polygamist husbands had only two wives. Another 20 percent had three. Those who had four or more were often members of high church councils or bishops of local congregations, and, as in any society, birth, death, and migration reshaped families. Over time, a monogamist might embrace polygamy or a polygamist, through death or divorce, find himself with one wife or none.21

A small oil painting completed in central Utah in 1872 portrays the interior of an ordinary Utah house shortly after the birth of a baby. The midwife and several female attendants have tucked the new mother into bed and are now weighing the infant. This is a classic gathering of women performing classic female work. There is nothing in the painting to tell us that the woman in the bed is twenty-nine-year-old Gunhild Torgerson Dorius, who has just given birth to a son named Hyrum. Nor, without family records, could we know that she and Kaia Frandzen Dorius, the tall woman in the center of the picture, were both married to the man at the door, Frederick Ferdinand Dorius, a Danish immigrant who was a friend of the painter C. C. A. Christensen.22

Gunhild and Kaia were plural wives who belonged to a more expansive sisterhood built through spiritual, social, and economic associations. In all likelihood, the midwife who was weighing the baby was empowered to bless and anoint the mother as well as to officiate at the birth. Years later, a granddaughter remembered Gunhild as “a quiet, gentle, little lady” who “carded and spun her own wool for cloth” and “believed polygamy to be a sacred principle.” When visitors came, she pointed with pride to a picture of her husband dressed in prison stripes with other Mormon men incarcerated during the anti-polygamy raids of the late nineteenth century. She said his imprisonment proved that he loved her because he could have avoided prosecution by renouncing their marriage.23

To outsiders, the Lion House represented the gothic strangeness of Mormonism. To an insider like C. C. A. Christensen, the Dorius house represented its comforting familiarity. Both kinds of houses were part of the Mormon story, as were the public buildings where Latter-day Saint women engaged in collaborative work and eventually in political protest.

. . .

This book has focused on the earliest years and on the writings of ordinary people who between 1835 and 1870 translated the dissenting religions of Lancashire, upstate New York, and the Ohio Valley into Mormonism and carried its principles to the American West. Latter-day Saint women built the Church that claimed their loyalty. They sustained its missionary system, testified to its truths, and enhanced its joyful, performative, and playful elements—its July 24 processions, its feasts and dances, its theatrical festivals, its quiltings and spinning bees, and its exchanges of poetry, locks of hair, and cut-paper works. Without earnest female converts, Mormonism’s meetings would have been less colorful and its revelations less intimate and personal. Mormon women blessed and healed one another in leaking log cabins, cried over unmarked graves left on plains and prairies, and wove motifs taken from sentimental annuals and the writings of upstart women into sacred discourse. They gave birth to the children who sustained the kingdom.

Certainly, there could have been no such thing as plural marriage if hundreds of women had not accepted “the principle” and passed it on to new generations. Some did so because they believed plural marriage was a glorious doctrine, others out of a hope for future exaltation or because conforming seemed a lesser evil than abandoning their homes and faith. Later generations of Latter-day Saints sometimes claimed that their pioneer ancestors lived “a higher law.” If so, that higher law was not polygamy but a constellation of virtues—patience, forgiveness, and love—that allowed them to live together in peace. When those virtues failed, divorce or a separate house let them try again.

Mormonism has always been a faith of second chances. How else did its early adherents persist in building one promised Zion after another, even when the early ones failed? In the same way, confidence in new beginnings allowed earnest female leaders to turn the other cheek when officious men disparaged their religious gifts or denied the promises they believed God had given them. Living their religion, they learned wisdom by the things that they suffered, and when the opportunity came in 1870, they defended the right to speak for themselves.