Harriet Beecher Stowe described Mormon polygamy as slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood, family. 1 Other nineteenth-century women agreed polygamy destroyed the family and woman's unique place in it and deprived [her] even of domestic rights.2 These women fought the Mormon institution of plural marriage as one of the twin relics of barbarism. They formed and supported an Anti-Polygamy Society in the territory of Utah that published a newsletter and books on the evils of polygamy and incorporated an Industrial Christian Home Association of Utah to provide refuge for plural wives.3 Mormon women, in turn, fought against this popular interpretation of polygamy. Although the majority of women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) were not polygamous wives, they rallied in support of the Church's belief. They congregated at public meetings to protest the passage of anti-polygamy legislation and signed petitions sent to the U.S. Congress that expressed their opposition. When the territorial legislature granted them the vote, the women flocked to the polls in defense of their Church. When the vote was taken away from them as part of the crusade against polygamy, Mormon women voiced strong protest and sent representatives to Washington, D.C., to lobby for their cause.4 Today, in the era of the women's movement, feminists encourage women to expand their traditional roles. These women leaders often look to the past for models, and although they do not preach plural marriage, they applaud what they see as the independence of polygamous wives from the Victorian ideal of the homemaker. Unlike the nineteenth-century women who spoke out against polygamy, they do not see plural wives as slaves to an institution that prevented them from fulfilling their role as women. Instead, the modern feminist sometimes views the traditional wife as the slave and the wife in a plural marriage as a master over her own destiny.5 These groups of women paint three different pictures of the effects of polygamy on Mormon women. Nineteenthcentury women with a strong belief in the female sphere considered the Mormon principle of plural marriage a degrading influence that destroyed women's place. Some modern women imagine polygamy as a creative plan that freed females from a limiting role. Mormon women, however, understood it as a religious rite that did not destroy but enhanced their traditional sphere and provided the road to their eternal salvation. Although each group had its own viewpoint on the effects of the institution of polygamy, it is impossible to stereotype the individual Mormon polygamous wife. Mormons did not practice polygamy long enough to