“Winnie,” asks Phylis Jones, “were you ever in love?” Phylis is the protagonist in Susa Young Gates's 1894–95 serialized novel, “Donald's Boy.” Winnie Selden, her older friend and mentor, has returned home to live with her mother after escaping a disastrous marriage. Phylis is engaged to a wealthy non-Mormon man and wavering about whether she should go through with it. “Did it seem to you that you could not think of the future without him?” she pleads.Winnie responds in unequivocal terms meant to shatter Phylis's illusions. “I have felt just like you do. I thought I couldn't live without him. I broke all bonds, disobeyed my mother; gave up everything for him and gloried in the thought that I could sacrifice everything on his altar,” she declares. “In less than four months after my marriage my idol lay shattered at my feet and at the end of a year, there was not a spark of love in my breast for him.”1Gates's story was part of the late nineteenth-century home literature movement meant to encourage young women to marry wisely in the wake of the Manifesto closing off the option of plural marriage.2 But the character of Winnie Selden, and her description of her miserable marriage, bear unmistakable resemblance to Gates's own life. In fact, given Gates's propensity to portray events from her life in her fiction, Winnie's speech may be one of the most revealing things Gates ever wrote about her own harrowing first marriage to and divorce from Alma B. Dunford—a subject she never directly addressed in her voluminous writings.3 Even when she had been happily married to Jacob Gates for almost fifty years and had built a successful career as a writer, editor, church leader, educator, and public figure, Gates referred only obliquely to herself as a “grass-widow” and left almost no mention of her divorce in the extensive autobiographical recollections she wrote in the last decade of her life.4 The pain of the experience haunted her for decades. Yet that crucible of trauma and injustice enabled her to become the estimable figure in the Latter-day Saint community she became.The story of Susa Young Gates's divorce illuminates much about her character and personal life. It also offers insight into how gender dynamics shaped the experience of divorce among nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints, who were thought to have relatively liberal attitudes and policies about divorce. Gates's story shows that those liberal legal provisions played out in a context of unforgiving gender norms.The primary sources that tell the story of the divorce are few but rich. First is a detailed but incomplete transcript of the proceedings of the divorce trial in Washington County probate court in April and May 1878.5 The other major source is a lengthy letter Gates wrote to one of her sisters, Zina Y. Williams, in the immediate aftermath of the trial.6 She clearly wrote this letter for others to read, laying out her side of the story in anticipation of the backlash she expected.7 Next, in the wake of the divorce, Erastus Snow—apostle and stake president in St. George—collected statements from some of those involved in the case. Adolphus Whitehead, clerk of the Washington County probate court, copied his statement into his journal. It provides helpful details about the trial and legal matters and conveys a male-centric view of the case.8 In addition, several letters written by Alma Dunford have survived. They do not give an account of the divorce proceedings but help fill out the picture of the Dunfords’ marriage and some of his feelings leading up to the divorce. A few letters written by Gates are also extant.As a prospective biographer of Gates, I am predisposed to tell the story from her point of view. As a feminist scholar, I cannot overlook the many ways in which her sex profoundly disadvantaged her. But I recognize that, as with any divorce, there are always two sides to the story. Gates herself acknowledged that her own shortcomings contributed to the failure of the marriage. I have tried to give an account that is fair and empathetic to both parties, while never losing sight of the fact that she and her children suffered violence and abuse at the hands of Dunford—and what can only be termed injustice at the behest of the male-dominated legal system.By her own account, Susie Young9 grew up with her head in the clouds, her highly imaginative and romantic tendencies fueled by novels and the theater and by watching her older sisters’ romances. Her childish ears, she said, ever listened for “the approach of the magic prince who would lift them on his snowy charger and bear them off in triumph to his castle.”10 Her elder sister Dora enacted a particularly dramatic story. Dora had been in love with a young man named Frank “Morley” Dunford for some time. He was known to have a fondness for alcohol, and Brigham Young had sent Dora to school in Provo attempting to break up the attachment. Finally, in the fall of 1870, just weeks before she was set to move to St. George with her mother and sisters, Dora slipped away from her mother's birthday party—fourteen-year-old Susie acting as lookout—and eloped with Morley. They were married by a Presbyterian minister.11Two years later, this connection to the Dunford family facilitated the introduction of Morley's cousin Alma Bailey Dunford into Lucy Young's family. At age twenty-two, Dunford was an enterprising young dentist, having trained with a Dr. Sharp in Salt Lake City. In January 1872, he borrowed money to purchase his own tools and set out on his own.12 By that summer, Alma Dunford was traveling through the southern Utah settlements to offer his services and earn money to pay off the cost of his dental tools. His ambition was high. “Pa,” he wrote in June, “I am doing just the best I can and I am going to make a mark in this world the Lord being my helper.”13Less than a week later, he encountered Dora and her family and soon had an invitation to visit at Sister Young's home. Within a few days, he reported to his parents that he was having a “happy time” visiting with Dora's sister Susie and “lots of others [sic] nice young ladies.” By October 4, he was referring to Susie as “my other half (or my wifey).”14When the young couple began planning to get married, Susie's mother, Lucy, opposed the plan. She asked Dunford to defer the marriage because Susie had not been “brought up to work” and needed time to learn.15 Lucy's concerns likely went beyond housework. It had been only two years since Dora recklessly eloped; her marriage may have already begun to deteriorate amidst Morley's drinking problem. Lucy had plenty of reason to worry about Susie, who was younger than Dora had been, likewise entering into a hasty marriage.Moreover, there were significant generational differences between Susie and her mother on the subject of romance and marriage. Lucy Bigelow had been brought up on the frontier in Illinois, her life shaped by the need for every family member to contribute to the support of the whole. Lucy definitely was “brought up to work.”16 Her life was also profoundly shaped by her choice, at the age of sixteen, to marry Brigham Young, a man thirty years her senior whom she hardly knew. Sealed in March 1847, the couple had little interaction for another two years; the marriage was not consummated until 1850. Lucy had her first child (Dora) in 1852, followed by Susie in 1856 and Rhoda Mabel in 1863.17Lucy established herself securely in the Young family through working hard and exercising great self-denial and sacrifice—what she called “rising above every jealous feeling.” She refused ever to say a word against her husband, any other family member, or plural marriage.18 Lucy developed an intensely spiritual approach to life and became close with Zina D. H. Young and Eliza R. Snow, two of Young's other wives who were likewise known for mighty faith and religious zeal.19These traits were perhaps psychologically and emotionally necessary for Lucy, given her marital situation. Gates recalled that her mother “feared romantic notions as she did riches and other worldliness,” and she tried in vain to suppress some of those notions in her daughters.20 She seems to have had little idea of how to deal with her daughter's intense imagination or with adolescent girls who had little responsibility and plenty of time and resources to indulge in “romantic notions.” Their experiences were completely opposite to the austere, hardworking life Lucy had led, and their notions were incompatible with the marriage to which she had committed herself at a young age. Lucy's opposition to the marriage of Susie and Alma was thus pragmatic but perhaps also temperamental.For her part, Susie expected to have romance and love as the basis for her marriage. She never said anything about whether she expected or would have been willing to participate in plural marriage. In the 1870s, of course, it was still a strong possibility. Given her family connections, there would have been no shortage of prominent men who could have sought alliance with Brigham Young by marrying one of his daughters. While this certainly happened in some cases, ultimately fewer than half of the Young daughters lived in polygamy. Six of Susie's twenty-nine sisters (most of them considerably older than her) became first wives to husbands who later married plural wives.21 Another six married for the first time as plural wives, with four of these—including her close confidant Zina—taking place in the three years before Susie's marriage. Perhaps Susie hoped, consciously or not, to forestall such a possibility by marrying an eligible young, single man. At the very least, she positioned herself to become the first wife should he enter into plurality.22Sixteen was indeed a young age to marry, significantly lower than the average for young women in Utah at the time. The most exhaustive study of Mormon demographics in this period found a mean age at marriage of 20.11 for women born between 1850–59.23 A study of patterns in St. George, where Susie lived, found a slightly lower average age at marriage of 19.4 for women marrying in the 1860s and 1870s.24 Either way, sixteen was young.When compared to patterns in the Brigham Young families, Susie's marriage is also something of an outlier. As a rule, Brigham himself did not marry young girls. Of the fourteen plural wives who later bore him children, the youngest was fifteen at the time she was sealed to Young, but as with Lucy Bigelow, the marriage was likely not consummated for a number of years.25 Susie's mother, Lucy, was the next youngest, at sixteen. Only two of Young's other plural wives were under age twenty when married.26 The average age for the other ten plural wives was 23.7; seven were twenty-one.27The marriage patterns of the Young daughters are also relevant. Of the twenty-nine who lived to adulthood and married, none married younger than sixteen. By the time Susie married in December 1872, seventeen of her sisters had married—a large majority (thirteen) between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. Overall, the age at marriage for the Young daughters (18.93) was lower than the average found in the demographic studies previously cited, but even so, sixteen was clearly younger than the large majority and put Susie at the very low end of marriage patterns for her family.28It is impossible to say what Brigham Young thought of Susie's engagement. He was over three hundred miles away in Salt Lake City, and no correspondence or other documentation of his involvement survives. He is not listed as officiator or witness on the sealing record.29 Alma and Susie were married in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City on December 1, 1872.30 The newlyweds settled in the city and rented a house in the Thirteenth Ward, one room of which served as a dental office.Writing to her in-laws in January 1874, Susie painted a picture of “happiness and contentment” between herself and Alma just over a year after their marriage. The young couple were expecting the birth of their first child, and Susie had been taking organ lessons. “He has the least faults of any man I have ever heard of,” she gushed. But then she added, “His faults injure himself more than any one else,” mentioning smoking in particular.31 Even if Susie was sincere in her loving expressions, by this time the picture was increasingly troubled.By her account, things had gone downhill rapidly after the wedding. Peace and love “never had been with us since the first few weeks of wedded life,” she said.32 Within a few months, she was spending evenings alone while her husband went out drinking, often with his cousin Morley, Dora's husband. Alcohol made him angry and violent. Once, when he came home and found Susie and Dora “talking the matter over,” he “talked very rough” to her about it. When drunk or angry, he screamed and swore, broke furniture, even set the carpet on fire by smashing a lighted lamp. When Leah was six months old, two and a half years after their marriage, Susie wrote a letter to her mother, detailing the abuse, but Dunford intercepted it.33The unhappiness was not always caused by Dunford's drinking. Susie was young, immature, and undisciplined in the kind of work required to run a household. She slept late, spent time visiting with other women, failed to have meals ready on time or keep the house clean, at least in Alma's estimation.34 To be fair, if this was the case, it would have been a frustrating situation for a young husband and father. Even so, Susie's domestic failures also represented an inability to live up to womanly expectations and deprived Dunford of services to which he felt entitled.The situation enraged him. When she would stay in bed late in the morning, he would scold her and “box her ears,” sometimes calling her “a bitch, a hoar [whore], &c.” He would ask her “if she loved him better than God,” and if she said no, he would scold her. Susie's sister Ina Maybert had lived with the family for an extended time and saw “a great deal of unhappiness” between them. Dunford broke dishes, windows, and lamps in his passion, she said, because “he thought things didnt go on as they ought to be.” He was angry that the meals were not well cooked, the children not kept clean, that Susie was away from home at meal time. She had “seen him kind to his wife but not very often[,] about once a day, never saw him kind all day.” He was not always drunk when he became angry.35As the children came along, the situation did not improve. Dunford loved and took pride in his children, but he also turned his temper and abuse on them. One time he dunked a child headfirst in hot water. He whipped one of the children in front of his mother-in-law, even as she pled with him to stop. On at least one occasion, Lucy heard Susie and the children screaming; running to their house, she found Alma “screaming and dancing” in anger.36In the midst of these conflicts, both Susie and Alma threatened divorce. There were plenty of women in the world, he declared, and he wished she would get a bill of divorce. He hoped he never would have another child by her. When Dunford threatened divorce, he taunted Susie by saying he would take the children. Importantly, Susie testified that Alma had asked her for a divorce before leaving on his mission, promising to give her the property, but she had refused at the time.37Both Alma and Susie tried to hide the extent of their problems. She testified that “when in company he would call her wifey and when alone would treat her very unkind”; her sister Rhoda corroborated this pattern.38 Susie told her sister Zina that she had “kept the door locked on the hideous skeleton, who had been my companion for years.”39 At the trial, Alexander Morris, the Dunfords’ St. George landlord, reported that he had heard Dunford “talk very kindly” to his wife and had seen him give her money. Morris “could not tell from general appearance that there was any trouble”—but he also admitted he had seen conflict in the family.40 Morris's account likely reflected perceptions in the community.There were some good times. Susie's mother and sister testified that they had seen the Dunfords act lovingly towards each other. Lucy acknowledged under cross-examination that Alma was “very kind to his children as a rule,” and she had heard him express love to Susie on some occasions; she also acknowledged that he had been drinking less since moving to St. George. But the accord was tenuous and always shadowed by Dunford's temper, with Susie bearing a disproportionate burden. He told her “to be a kind & loving wife and he would be a kind & loving husband.”41Frightened and desperate in the early years of her marriage, Susie turned to female relatives for help. Her own mother was in St. George, but in Salt Lake she lived near her “other mother,” Lucy's sister wife Zina D. H. Young, and Aunt Zina's daughter Zina Y. Williams. Susie was close to both women. “Carry your mind back to the first few months of my married life when I lived so close to you,” she wrote to her sister. “Can you recall the many evenings which I spent alone?” One evening she had knocked on Zina's door, “frightened out of my own house by the lateness of the hour and the lonliness of the whole atmosphere.” She was crying and “shaking from terror.” Another time, Susie went desperately to Aunt Zina and “begged her to let me stay with her as Alma had first abused me, then sternly ordered me from his roof telling me never to return.”42 Susie was still in her teens.In response, both Zinas could only offer gender-bound advice that served to reinforce women's powerlessness and cause Susie to further internalize the blame for the abuse. Her sister Zina offered “kindly words” of hope and “counseled me to coax Alma to stay home by reading to him, singing for him, anything, everything to induce him to spend evenings home.” Aunt Zina counseled her “to still bear and forbear hoping always for a change; advising me to wait till his anger has cooled, and then return, as it was my duty.” Following such counsel, Susie said, she would return “to take up my cross and seek to be ever more kind more forgiving.”43 Being submissive, patient, kind, forgiving, and “taking up her cross” quietly—all of these were undoubtedly Christian virtues worthy of cultivation. But they were also elements of the female ideal of suffering self-sacrifice Susie had inherited from her mother and the surrounding culture.44 In this and countless other cases, those ideals served to shield men's violent behavior and perpetuate domestic abuse.The Dunfords—Alma, Susie, two-year-old Leah, and nine-month-old Bailey—moved to St. George in May 1876, in an attempt to make a fresh start. Susie had “sincerly trusted that a change of life, and breaking loose from bad associations would alter Alma's evil ways.”45 These hopes did not last long.Brigham Young was undoubtedly aware of the troubles in his daughter's marriage and tried to help the Dunfords improve their situation. They traveled south in Brigham's company, and Alma's letters refer to regular interaction with his father-in-law around the time of the move. Young rented the Dunfords’ house in Salt Lake City (providing them some income), and he gave Susie and Alma a building lot in the center of St. George, worth at least $1,000, and $2,000 to help build on it.46 The “Prest,” as Dunford called Brigham, “treats me the best kind.” He had taken Alma and Susie for a tour of the nearly completed temple and assured his son-in-law that he would eventually have good business in the new location.47Dunford needed such reassurance given conditions in the much smaller, poorer town of St. George. “Well Pa since I have been here I have done very little business,” Alma wrote a month after the move. “I would do more in two or three days in the city.”48 By November Dunford had begun building a new house; Young continued to encourage him in the face of slow business.49 Christmas was especially difficult. “On Christmas,” he wrote to his parents, “I did'ent have a five cent piece and was'ent able to make the Wife or Babies a present not even of a stick of candy and you can imagine how I felt.” Fortunately, in the mail on Christmas eve he received a package from his brother William containing gifts for the children and some nice jewelry for Susie. “Pa, I get the blues and I feel discouraged quite often here, it is so different to what it was in the city.”50 Anxiety about the building project and about money in general undoubtedly added stress that could have exacerbated the drinking problem and domestic conflict.By spring 1877 business was picking up and the house was coming along nicely, but a new complication had arisen: Alma Dunford had been called to serve a mission to England. His name was announced by Apostle George Q. Cannon on April 8 in the general conference held in St. George in conjunction with the dedication of the temple. Dunford was one of dozens of missionaries called at the conference, including several members of the Brigham Young family.51 The idea of serving a mission was not entirely a surprise, but the timing of the call evidently was. “The Prest has spoke several times this last year or two about my going on a mission and now the time has come,” Alma wrote to his parents. “I suppose it is alright at least I think so, and feel pretty well over it.”52 There are no contemporary sources that state directly that Dunford's mission call was intended to help cure his drinking and marital problems, though it seems plausible. Susie told her sister retrospectively that “if ever he [Alma] would have a chance to reform it would be on his mission.”53Dunford's impending absence did not serve to improve relations in his marriage. Susie mentioned to Zina a “terrible time” they had just before his departure, and she admitted that she had been grateful for his mission call and looked forward eagerly “to the time when peace & quiet should come and rest in my heart.” Susie and the children accompanied Alma to Salt Lake City. While they were there before Alma's departure, one evening Susie and her sister Rhoda found Dunford lying drunk in the street. Wilford Woodruff helped Susie get him into the house.54It is not difficult to imagine the relief Susie felt when Alma was gone, and she soon decided that she simply could not go back to living the way things had been. “I found that the longer Alma and I were seperated the less like ever seeing him I felt,” she told Zina. By August she had written to her husband “trying to sound him some, on this point.”55 Given all the previous taunts and threats Dunford had issued about getting a divorce, she felt she had grounds to broach the subject. When Dunford replied in September, his letter was in no way conciliatory. The original does not survive, but Susie quoted from it in her letter to Zina. It is the only acknowledgment that survives in Dunford's voice of his drinking and the troubles in the marriage, including his deflection of blame to Susie: “Now wife, as far as my drinking, you know well enough how I talked to you before I left Dixie. You write as though I was a confirmed drunkard. Of course you can look at it as you please, but you know what kind of a home I had sometime before I left.”Dunford continued defiantly: “As long as the Lord blesses me with health and strength I can make money and enjoy myself, and I am not going to throw myself away for nobody; just write & let me know how you feel long about the time you think I will get released from my mission.” If he was not coming home to her, he said, he might just decide to stay in England and make money at his profession there.56It was the last straw for Susie. That “cool indifference and slurring reply,” she said, “just settled itself down in my mind as the key which firmly locked the door to all further intimacy between A. B. Dunford and myself.”57 She wrote what she termed a few short notes afterwards to keep him informed about the children, but she began to consider the situation and make plans. In the fall she learned that Alma's group of missionaries would be returning in the spring, and that caused her to act. On December 7, she sent another letter to her husband laying out her desire for a divorce and asking him how he would like to proceed.58 For several weeks, she awaited a reply, living in horrible suspense.59For his part, Dunford was laboring in England and barely making ends meet. Just a few days before he received the letter from Susie, he wrote to his parents and described the privations he had endured—shabby clothing, worn-out boots, very little food at times. “I have walked all day many times with just a little bread and scrape, and not enough of that for breakfast,” he lamented, though he affirmed that he was working hard and feeling the spirit of his mission. He rarely had money for stationery or postage and often had to “beg stamps and paper” in order to write home.60 This poverty may have in part accounted for the delay in his reply. In any case, when Susie finally received a letter from Alma, it expressed an entirely different spirit, “full of the love and repentance that should have been shown years before.”61It was not enough. Susie had already anticipated that Alma might do this, and she felt sure that if they did try to patch things up “it would not last a month.”62 In fact, she had already consulted with the clerk of the Washington County probate court in early January, and she filed the formal petition on February 1.63By this time she had received a spiritual confirmation of her plans. In a dream, she saw her father, who had died a few months earlier. In the dream, Brigham took no notice of Dunford but instead asked Susie to handle some business, something she felt was significant. She said as much (in the dream) to Eliza R. Snow, who replied, “he didnot understand then, but he does now.”64 Susie interpreted this to mean that her father would approve of what she was about to do.Meanwhile, Alma Dunford was going through his own emotional wringer. He received Susie's letter asking for the divorce on New Year's Day and he said he experienced it as a devastating thunderbolt from out of the blue. “It was such a blow I was nearly out of my mind for day's,” he told his parents. “This is some thing I never expected to see or hear of.” He did not write to them with the “sad, sad news” until mid-February, and even then, he wrote in an intense burst of emotion, pouring out his heart in a lengthy and seemingly sincere expression of shock and grief. “I feel so bad I can hardly hold my pen,” he wrote. In this account, he had received a letter from Susie (the first in some time, he said) dated October 27; it was “[w]rote well and well put together and full of love for me.” The next letter he received, dated December 7, was the one asking for the divorce. “I received it on New Years day,” he reported. “You will see what a new years gift it was.” He claimed to have no idea why Susie would do this: “Just think of that Pa, and me on a mission, and seven thousand (7,000) miles away from, and receive such news from the mother of my darling children whom I love best on earth (The Wife) next my children. God Bless them how I love them all and ever have done. Wifey gives no reason only that she dont love me and consequently dont wish to live with me.”He had tried to carry on with his missionary work, gaining sympathy from fellow missionaries and from the mission leaders. “They said they never seen such a change in there lives,” he reported. “[They] said she must be crazy.” One leader had counseled him to “write to her in the same strane” as usual; this appears to be the letter full of love and repentance Susie mentioned.65Dunford's account leaves out a lot, including Susie's August letter “sounding him out” on the subject of a divorce and asking him to quit drinking; the defiant reply he sent; and, of course, the drinking, abuse, and conflict that had been part of the marriage for years. His parents may very well have not known anything about these problems, and Alma's dismay and despair seem to be sincere. “Dear Parents I ask you to pray that Wifey and I may not be seperated,” he wrote.66 Still, there is no question that his account is based on an incomplete version of the facts, to say the least. What the letter does show is Dunford shaping the narrative that would serve him well in the divorce trial and its aftermath: he was the faithful missionary, thousands of miles away from home, blindsided by his wife's inexplicable, capricious cruelty.When Susie filed her divorce petition, she told the clerk that she wanted it done quietly.67 Permissible grounds for divorce included impotency, adultery, desertion, habitual drunkenness, felony conviction, and abusive treatment. Utah's relatively liberal divorce law provided for another, commonly known as incompatibility of temper, and Susie's petition invoked this cause, drawing on the statutory language in asserting that “the said Plaintiff and the said Defendant cannot live in peace and union together and their future welfare requires a legal separation.”68 In this time before no-fault divorce, Susie Dunford clearly had ample grounds to file her case based on both drunkenness and abuse, but instead she chose only to cite “incompatibility of temper.” She did this because, she told the clerk, “she did not wish to expose Almas faults too much,” reflecting how deeply she had internalized her culture's norms about preserving men's status and honor.69Susie consulted male church authorities and acted on their advice. She told Whitehead that Wilford Woodruff approved of her action and that John Taylor had advised her not to file for divorce in Salt Lake City. Woodruff later affirmed to Whitehead that he knew the Dunfords had never been happy together and that, in fact, Dunford had expressed a desire for a divorce before he left