What I found was that plural wives were not simply victims, even as their lives so easily support a feminist critique of profoundly inegalitarian household practices. Many plural marriages have and do involve the grotesque exploitation of women, another reason most Americans continue to believe they should not be legalized. Polygamy has had so many disadvantages for women that they hardly need rehearsing, It seems uniquely patriarchal and unfair to wives, all of whom are supposed to serve the husband. It also seems likely to lead to women's smoldering resentments and jealousies, and chaos and dissipation of resources for everyone. It has mostly been grossly unequal, since it is almost always one man with many wives (polygyny), and only rarely the reverse (polyandry). Yet if polygyny oppressed women—which it did and which it does—early modern monogamy also had its shortcomings. Euro-American laws of this era enshrined inequalities. Most women forfeited property rights at mariage. They also had little access to divorce. If they did divorce, they lost rights to their children. In European colonies, the ideal for wives was cheerful obedience. In the nineteenth century, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that great campaigner for women's rights, contended, "Until men and women view each other as equals, marriage will be in most cases a long hard struggle to make the best of a bad bargain." Stanton, along with fellow campaigner Susan B. Anthony, supported plural wives in Utah in their struggles, partly because they saw all American marriage forms as bad bargains for women. Many women in systems of allegedly exclusive monogamy also suffered from being perceived as "nasty wenches," not fit for civilized marriage, thus sexually available to men. Poorer women, especially women of color, often did not benefit from systems centered around an ideal of monogamy at least sometimes subverted by a grimmer reality of adultery and sexual violence.