“However Satisfied Man Might Be”: Sexual Abuse in Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Communities

Abstract

Since the midnineteenth century, Mormon polygamy has been intimately tied to women's struggles to control their own domestic, social, and political lives. Suffrage, marriage, and the protection of women and children from sexual exploitation have been key issues in debates about plural marriage. Jean Bickmore White notes, for instance, that Women's Suffrage . . . won twice in Utah. It granted first in 1 870 by the territorial legislature but revoked by in 1887 as part of a national effort to rid the of polygamy. It restored in 1895, when the right to vote and hold office written into the constitution of the new state (White). White notes as well that Brigham Young believed that granting women the right to vote change the predominant national image of Utah women as downtrodden and oppressed and could help to stem a tide of antipolygamy legislation by Congress (White). As Mari Grana points out, enfranchising women was largely the instrument of men, who brought it about for opposing reasons. Antipolygamists and government officials believed that the franchise would give Mormon women the opportunity to vote themselves out of polygamy; the patriarchal Church members reasoned correctly that the women would defend polygamy for religious reasons, and the women's vote would strengthen LDS hegemony throughout the territory (77). Perhaps ignorant of the fact that obethence to the church is among the most powerful tenets of the Mormon religion, some antipolygamy suffragists saw Utah women's suffrage as a means of eradicating polygamy. Hence, many official actors viewed Utah women's suffrage- and more generally, Utah women's right to control the material conditions of their own lives- as extraneous to the women themselves. Suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Gage were less concerned about polygamy itself than about patriarchal institutions like religion and marriage. They argued that polygamy only one manifestation of systemic patriarchy whose core function to relegate women to inferior social status. After meeting with a group of Mormon women, Stanton made this comment: We all agreed that we were still far from having reached the ideal position for women in marriage, however satisfied man might be with his various experiments . . . and the Mormon women, like all others, . . . are no more satisfied than any other sect (Iversen 9). In Women, Church, and State, Gage asserted that doctrines accepted as truth by devout Mormon women are not more degrading to them, not more injurious to civilization, than is the belief of orthodox christian women in regard to the frailty and primal sin of her sex and the curse of her Creator upon her in consequence (419). Elsewhere, Gage's argument- that marriage's patriarchal and religious origins are at the core of women's oppression-is even more strongly stated: Where marriage is wholly or partially under ecclesiastical law, woman's degradation surely follows; but in Catholic and Protestant countries a more decent veil has been thrown over this sacrifice of woman than under some forms of the Greek Church, where the wife is delivered to the husband under this formula : Here, wolf, take thy lamb! and the bridegroom is presented with a whip, giving his bride a few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots as a symbol of her subjugation to him. With such an entrance ceremony, it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits of the most revolting tyranny. (773) Mostly, though, this global critique of marriage fell on deaf ears; critiques of the specific practice of polygamy were much more common. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for instance, wrote a call to action, which appeared in every issue of the Anti-Polygamy Standard, a periodical published by the Anti-Polygamy Society from 1880 to 1883: Let every happy wife and worker who reads these lines give her sympathy, prayers and efforts to free her sisters from this degrading bondage [of polygamy]. …