When asked to write on the theme of “Big Love” for February, I couldn’t help but think about the television series Big Love – a modern take on the polygamous marriages practiced by 19th century Mormons.

Big Love (2006-2011) was the first of several contemporary television series to focus on modern Mormon women and their marital relationships. More recently Sister Wives, The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives have given plenty of airtime to women (and their spouses) who are or were part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), or one of its offshoots.

What can I say? The juxtaposition of conventional piety and unconventional marital relationships is apparently the stuff (some) fantasies are made of.

Since the 19th century founding of the LDS church, outsiders have been intrigued by Mormons and their marital relationships. The church was founded in upstate New York by an itinerate farmer and visionary named Joseph Smith. His wife, Emma, was integral to the church’s beginning – helping Joseph translate the faith’s central text, the Book of Mormon, and compiling its first hymnal.

Emma’s family was bitterly opposed to the marriage and the young couple eloped. One family friend insisted that “Jo stole his wife” and another said that “he had bewitched her.” From the get-go, Mormon women were seen as victims, though time would show that Emma was a strong, opinionated woman who chose to be with Joseph. At least until he started taking on multiple wives.

Emma fought the “restoration” of multiple wives as practiced by the Old Testament patriarchs in her marriage to Joseph. Though we now know he took multiple wives before he was murdered, Emma denied this ever happened. She also refused to follow Joseph’s successor, Brigham Young, to Utah Territory, where undoubtedly there would have been pressure to become one of his “plural” wives.

Other church members might have fled to an inhospitable Western enclave, but they couldn’t hide for long. Their unconventional relationships quickly drew the interest of 19th century travel writers.

Scholars note that travel writing of the time included several stereotypes about Mormon women. Christopher Jones and Stanley Thayne, say these fell into three categories. Mormon women were either “homely,” “immoral,” or “noble.”

None other than Mark Twain sarcastically shared the first stereotype in Roughing It (1872). He wrote: “The man who marries one of [these homely Mormon women] has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

Harsh! Though it appears that some of this criticism about their appearance has to do with Mormon women’s homespun way of dress and hardscrabble homesteader living circumstances, not their actual physical appearance. (Note how much physical beauty is played up in the contemporary reality series about Mormon women. Some things never change.)

As to their morality, Mormon leaders countered criticism that they were practicing a form of institutionalized prostitution by insisting Mormon men held the moral high ground since they openly claimed their sexual partners and took care of them and their children.

Regarding the nobility of Mormon women, these comments appear to be a generous perspective on what was clearly a difficult life. Some women writers, like Helen Hunt Jackson, said: “There has never been a class or sect of women since the world began who have endured for religion’s sake a tithe of what has been, and is, and forever must be, endured by the women of the Mormon Church.” These writers administered a generous dollop of pity when praising women in polygamous marriages.

Under legislative pressure from the federal government, LDS leaders renounced polygamy in 1890, though it took several decades before it was truly abandoned by church members. Fundamentalist offshoots continued to practice polygamy and that’s where you’ll find it alive and well today.

My own ancestors were polygamists — I’m a descendent of a second wife — and their story inspired my first novel (and ongoing WIP) The Casket Maker’s Other Wife. The few recorded stories about the marriage make it sound miserable. My great-great-grandfather Ulrich had immigrated to America from Switzerland in 1860, then returned to settle his family’s estate in 1869. While there he spent some time extolling the virtues of this newfound religion to potential converts. One of them was my great-great-grandmother, Elisabeth, a pregnant young mother recently abandoned by her husband.

Elisabeth  joined the Mormon church in a small village outside Zurich and emigrated with her children to America under the guidance of Ulrich who was charged with leading a small group of Swiss converts to America.

We don’t know when Ulrich asked Elisabeth to be his second wife, but church records show her marrying him in Salt Lake City just days after their arrival.
When he brought her home some 90 miles north to his first wife, Magdalena, she was not amused. Family stories say that she chased her husband out of their cabin with a broom! Within a few years’ time, Ulrich and Magdalena separated and their teenage son took over the care of his mother (a not uncommon outcome of men taking on younger wives.)

Elisabeth would bear eight more children to Ulrich and would live the rest of her life moving from one homestead to another. She became a frontier midwife and eventually died on her way home from delivering another woman’s child.

Going back to the western writers’ assessment of Mormon women in the 19th century, I would suspect they would call Magdalena “homely”—she was fifty-seven years old when her husband brought home a second wife thirty years her junior. She’d born three children and homesteaded for nearly ten years under difficult circumstances. The one photo available of her is not a flattering one.

These same writers would surely would have deemed Elisabeth “immoral”—what was she doing marrying another woman’s husband? I would argue she was in desperate circumstances with few options to feed her children and took the best opportunity that came her way. Still, I feel tremendous sympathy for Magdalena.

Were either of them “noble?” Given that Ulrich appeared to be a man with a temper and not all that solicitous of either his wives or his children (there are multiple stories of abuse), I would say they were noble in their willingness to press forward in a religious community that held polygamy up as God’s preferred way of marriage.
They were not the screeching harridans you see portrayed on television today, nor were they the pitiful victims portrayed by 19th century travel writers. They were women with limited options, doing the best they could to provide for themselves and their families while adhering to what they believed were divine orders.

I have a Big Love for both Magdalena and Elisabeth and for the rest of those 19th century women who saw polygamy as a path to salvation both here and in the great beyond.

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Interested in reading more about 19th century Mormon polygamy? For a short synopsis, I’d recommend Setting the Record Straight: Mormons & Polygamy by Jessie L. Embry. For a deeper dive, look to Pulitzer Prize-winner Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and her book A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870.