Comments on: The Validity of Social Welfare Explanations of Polygamy http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/ A Mormon Blog Tue, 14 Feb 2012 07:52:28 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: JWL http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100052 Wed, 28 Mar 2007 05:42:24 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100052 I agree that social welfare is probably not at all an explanation for why Mormon polyandry began. However, I think we can safely say that it was continued at least partly for social welfare purposes. My one plural wife ancestor was a widow with many children who married her married brother-in-law for the explicitly stated reason (from her own statements in her diary) that she felt that as their uncle he could be counted on to support her children. Their marriage produced one child who is one of my great-great-grandmothers.

]]> By: Jen http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100051 Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:04:11 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100051 My great-great-grandmother was a second wife of a much older man. By all accounts she was a faithful, hard-working and dedicated Saint. She lived in a separate house with her children; the first wife lived nearby. There were 22 children between the two wives. What’s always interested me is what happened to her when polygamy ended– as the second wife, what was her status in the community and that of her children? Any insights?

]]> By: Sam MB http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100050 Tue, 27 Mar 2007 14:55:13 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100050 ardis, mostly people are going off that comment from wilford woodruff that no girl over the age of 14 was left. i would also be interested to see diaries involving complaints about lack of marriage options. it’s certainly been an assumed feature of polygamy, probably mostly during the retrenchment/reformation

]]> By: Bob http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100023 Tue, 27 Mar 2007 02:57:48 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100023 I think the reasons of Polygamy will never fit into one box. Why JS & BY did it was very different from the young girls who left Liverpool in 1863 for Salt Lake when they lost their jobs in the garment mills when the North cut off the South’s export of cotton to England. I have at least five of this girls in my family. I can show you another five, who left the poverty of Sweden for the ‘riches’ of Utah.

]]> By: Ardis Parshall http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100024 Tue, 27 Mar 2007 00:05:17 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100024 The social welfare explanation seems, to me, to founder on the evidence that a meaningful number of Mormon men during the polygamy period were unable to find wives — that there was a shortage of marriageable women, not of men.

I would be exceedingly interested in being directed to this evidence. One of my colleagues is making a study of Mormondom’s single men, and childless married men, during the 19th century. He has asked me to watch for examples.

]]> By: Proud Daughter of Eve http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100025 Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:16:21 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100025 As far as polygamy and family stories of it go:

My great-great-great grandparents left Denmark with a family of 11. This included both parents and numerous children. Many were lost on the journey: one son was lost on the boat (washed overboard by a rogue wave), a baby born on the plains was then buried on the plains and the father also died on the planes. By the time the family finally reached Utah there were only four left: the mother, two adult daughters and one young daughter. The eldest daughter married the wagonmaster who had saved her from drowning as they crossed the Platte River. The other three were unable to make it on their own, so the wagonmaster married the other grown-up daughter and they all (mother and youngest sister included) made a family compound of it.

]]> By: Sam MB http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100026 Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:16:06 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100026 JMH has a whole issue devoted to polygamy ca. 1980. As I recall one of the articles discusses historical apologetics of polygamy. Social welfare, as well as an inverted Victorian moralism (it prevents men from using prostitutes or committing adultery), and an Old Testament primitivism seem to have been the main reasons invoked by early apologists. Internal explanations were clearly related to establishing the celestial society (heaven on earth), but it is worth remembering how crucial Christian communism (projected back onto the immortal patriarch Enoch) was to that project.

So long way of saying, I think your impression is probably wrong. I believe that social welfare was implicated in early understandings of polygamy, although it was not maintained as the sole or primary reason. The reason it seems to prominent now is that the other explanations have been deemphasized.

]]> By: KyleM http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100027 Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:59:53 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100027 Peter,

Like Abraham?

]]> By: Peter http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100028 Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:30:28 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100028

I think that the social welfare theory is just an attempt to try to offer further explanation than merely to say “God commanded it”…. Brigham Young famously stated that when polygamy was commanded of him, he envied a corpse in a casket, which to his puritanical worldview was a better position to be in than to practice polygamy. How ironic that one of the things that is principally known about him today is that he practiced polygamy.

I think if there’s any irony here it’s not that a prophet overcame his sensibilities to become known for following God’s commands, but that a man who would rather be dead than follow those commands is venerated as a prophet.

]]> By: J.A.T. http://bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/26/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100029 Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:10:19 +0000 http://www.bycommonconsent.com/2007/03/the-validity-of-social-welfare-explanations-of-polygamy/#comment-100029 If economic factors were requisite, then one would suppose that elderly widows who became plural wives would have been more prevelent than younger plural wives, and yet they weren’t. We’ve got to remember that they were living in an agri-society and young women who had strong backs would have been more economically valuable than the elderly and sick.

Also, if economic factors were important and the poor were prioritized, then why was Eliza R. Snow a plural wife? She was an educated school teacher, talented writer, had an extended LDS family to provide for her, etc. She could have provided for herself. She’s just one of several other very highly talented plural wives (of yesteryear and the present) who are/were actually quite independent. Might I hypothesize that plural wives were/are acquired for THEIR value (spiritual, economic, and/or physical, etc.)

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