Mormon Masculinity: Changing Gender Expectations in the Era of Transition from Polygamy to Monogamy, 1890-1920

Abstract

During the period from 1890 to 1920, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) perceived a crisis in the lives of their boys. Like their Protestant contemporaries, Latter-day Saints spent much time attempting to find a solution. At the same time, the LDS church was experiencing its own unique set of upheavals. In 1890, one of the central tenets of Mormonism – polygamy – had to be replaced with sexual practices that aligned the LDS with wider American society. It was during this transitional period that members and authorities of the LDS church sought to gain respectability in American culture by emphasising the morality and value systems they shared with their middle-class Protestant contemporaries. As Mormons restructured marriage around the practice of monogamy, they placed the burden of the refashioned religious identity almost exclusively upon men and their bodies. The new Mormon man ushered the LDS church into the American mainstream while maintaining an acceptable difference from that mainstream culture.