One Husband, One Wife, Whaddya Got?
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In January 1855, Parley Pratt wrote a loving letter from San Francisco to Belinda Marden Pratt, his wife. He told her about a woman he believed— correctly—that his wife would sympathize with, because both women had suffered through difficult first marriages. “She is the very counterpart of your self,” Parley wrote. As Belinda once had, she “is groaning under a bondage,” but one “tenfold more terrible ... than yours once was” (p. 279). Their stories would take a happier turn, though, with both women finding a safer home and a kinder husband. Both would become wives of Parley Pratt. Parley’s tender words and Belinda’s appreciation of them are pretty much the opposite of what most of their American contemporaries thought of plural marriage. Critics of women who defended plural marriage would call them an “infernal minister of the devil,” a “duped drudge,” and a “martyr to unbridled lust” (p. 3). Just the year before Parley sent his letter, a U.S. official in Utah had written that polygamy “belongs now to the indolent and opium-eating Turks and Asiatics, the miserable Africans, the North American savages, and the Latter-Day Saints” (p. 284).
That sentence alone reveals a great deal about the 1850s, and a lesser book focused on polygamy in early America would have found plenty of material by centering only on ignorant critiques like that one, starting with Spanish priests coming to North America to change the continent’s heathen ways. Sarah Pearsall’s marvelous new study does analyze these many critiques and uses them to illuminate the long history of early American thinking about marriage, gender, sexuality, and power.
Even more significantly, though, Polygamy introduces us to people like Belinda Marden Pratt who lived in—and sometimes purposefully chose— plural marriage. Parallel to more prominent nineteenth-century reformers, she scrutinized marriage, and she came to the conclusion that polygyny (one husband and multiple wives) was the best system for children and for women. In her experience, “by mutual and long continued exercises of toil, [End Page 13] patience, long-suffering sisterly kindness” as they maintained a household and mothered children together, sister-wives created the best kind of family (p. 277). Through this kind of close look at polygamy in practice, this breathtakingly ambitious and successful book analyzes power in early America “as seen through households, which is where most people actually lived” (p. 1).
As Pearsall’s diverse and compelling chapters on polygamy took me from the seventeenth-century Pueblos of New Mexico to the palaces of eighteenth-century Dahomey to 1850s Utah, I found myself surprised at just how useful polygamy was. Polygamous marriages, like monogamous ones, served many purposes: production and reproduction, legitimizing lineages and inheritance, forging diplomatic ties, building and broadcasting power, and providing long-term love, sex, and companionship. Sister-wives lightened Belinda Marden Pratt’s work both physically and emotionally at the same time as they bolstered their husband’s prestige among other men and into future generations (including Mitt Romney, a great-great-grandson of Parley and his fourth wife).
In addition, as Pearsall repeatedly proves, plural marriage is (to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss) useful to think with, for historians as much as for theologians, politicians, and reformers. By de-normalizing monogamy, the book contextualizes all marriage and brings new insights to women’s history, family history, and the study of sexuality. Pearsall’s tenacious research in archaeology, language, and astoundingly wide-ranging primary and secondary writings uncovers polygamy in all kinds of places, often where it was hidden in plain sight. As she did in her previous book, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (2009), Pearsall connects the intimate to the grandest scales of power, colonialism, and race, showing that gender, family, and sex are hardly sidebar subjects but instead are key to understanding just about everything men and women do.
First of all, polygamy “was as much about economics as it was about sex” (p. 40). In...
