In Sacred Loneliness

Status: Currently reading (as of September 2026). Moves back to wiki/books/ with a year_read when finished.

Todd Compton’s 1997 study of the thirty-three women he documents as plural wives of Joseph Smith, one biography per wife. It sat in wiki/books/ as a 2026 read from 2026-07-31 to 2026-09-05, because the Roam “Books Read” 2026 bucket mixed finished and in-progress titles; Kyle confirmed it is still in progress, so it moved here.

Connections

• Joseph Smith — Rough Stone Rolling and An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins — the other Joseph Smith histories in the library.
• Mormonism

Highlights

• This book tries to celebrate early Mormons in a responsible, balanced way–all of its characters, female and male, Relief Society president and prophet, had weaknesses as well as strengths. Those who would portray Mormon history as carried on by superhuman men and women, without flaws, would turn them into inhuman automatons, which in fact betrays a deep disrespect for the real humanity of our foremothers and forefathers.
• This is the methodology used by Richard Bushman in his Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism: “My method has been to relate events as the participants themselves experienced them, using their own words where possible. Insofar as the revelations were a reality to them, I have treated them as real in this narrative.
• my central thesis is that Mormon polygamy was characterized by a tragic ambiguity. On the one hand, it was more than secular, monogamous marriage–it was the new and everlasting covenant, having eternal significance, a restoration from the prophetic, patriarchal milieu of Abraham which gave the participant infinite dominion in the next life. On the other hand, day-to-day practical polygamous living, for many women, was less than monogamous marriage–it was a social system that simply did not work in nineteenth-century America. Polygamous wives often experienced what was essentially acute neglect. Despite the husband’s sincere efforts, he could only give a specific wife a fraction of his time and means.
• The more women a man married, the greater the danger for serious problems in the family, for the husband’s time and resources became more and more divided. By an almost cruel irony, the greater the number of women married, the greater the man’s exaltation, according to nineteenth-century Mormon theology.
• Thus the title of this book, In Sacred Loneliness. Often plural wives who experienced loneliness also reported feelings of depression, despair, anxiety, helplessness, abandonment, anger, psychosomatic symptoms, and low self-esteem. Certainly polygamous marriage was accepted by nineteenth-century Mormons as thoroughly sacred–it almost defined what was most holy to them–but its practical result, for the woman, was solitude.
• Historians Fawn Brodie, D. Michael Quinn, and George D. Smith list forty-eight, forty-six, and forty-three, respectively. Yet in problematic areas it may be advisable to err on the side of caution. Unless further evidence surfaces, I regard the “possible” wives as subjects for additional research rather than as women whose marriages to Joseph Smith can be conclusively demonstrated.
• Nauvoo stake president William Marks suggested in 1853 that Smith came to have doubts about polygamy before his death: When the doctrine of polygamy was introduced into the church as a principle of exaltation, I took a decided stand against it; which stand rendered me quite unpopular with many of the leading ones of the church … Joseph, however, became convinced before his death that he had done wrong; for about three weeks before his death, I met him one morning in the street, and he said to me, “Brother Marks … We are a ruined people.” I asked, how so? he said: “This doctrine of polygamy, or Spiritual-wife system, that has been taught and practiced among us, will prove our destruction and overthrow. I have been deceived,” said he, “in reference to its practice; it is wrong; it is a curse to mankind, and we shall have to leave the United States soon, unless it can be put down and its practice stopped in the church.” Smith then reportedly told Marks to excommunicate all polygamists. This testimony seems to reflect a slight RLDS partisan coloring; furthermore, Marks was not in the inner polygamy circle in Nauvoo. However, the eight-month cessation of plural marriages before Joseph’s death might support Marks’s story.
• As he developed the principle of sealing ordinances that connected families for eternity, this doctrine was inextricably bound up with plural marriage. Later nineteenth-century Mormons taught that a monogamist could not gain complete salvation, a belief that was clearly based on Smith’s teachings.
• Early Mormons taught that the doctrine of plural marriage was revealed to Smith “while he was engaged in the work of translation of the Scriptures,” and historian Danel Bachman concludes that it was specifically the translation of Genesis, the Abraham passages, that caused Joseph to pray about polygamy in February 1831 and receive his first revelations on the topic.
• Thus the Mormon practice of polygamy, influenced strongly by these two scriptures, is an example of the early American biblical primitivism that shaped Joseph Smith and early Mormonism. The Old Testament, with its prophets and temples and polygamy, is a central thread running through Joseph’s life and is clearly a primary source for his sense of prophetic mission and for his doctrine.
• Thus in Smith’s Nauvoo ideology, a fullness of salvation depended on the quantity of family members sealed to a person in this life. This puts the number of women Joseph married into an understandable context. This doctrine also makes it clear that, though Joseph’s marriages undoubtedly had a sexual dimension, theological concepts also drove his polygamy, as well as the related purpose of gaining the highest possible exaltation by linking elite families to him for both earthly and eternal reasons.
• The teenage representation is the largest, though the twenty-year and thirty-year groups are comparable, which contradicts the Mormon folk-wisdom that sees the beginnings of polygamy as an attempt to care for older, unattached women. These data suggest that sexual attraction was an important part of the motivation for Smith’s polygamy. In fact, the command to multiply and replenish the earth was part of the polygamy theology, so non-sexual marriage was generally not in the polygamous program, as Smith taught it.
• He said, “I am informed that Eliza Snow was a virgin at the time of her death.” I in turn said, “Brother Heber C. Kimball, I am informed, asked her the question if she was not a virgin although married to Joseph Smith and afterwards to Brigham Young, when she replied in a private gathering, ‘I thought you knew Joseph Smith better than that.’”
• A common misconception concerning Joseph Smith’s polyandry is that he participated in only one or two such unusual unions. In fact, fully one-third of his plural wives, eleven of them, were married civilly to other men when he married them.
• The totality of the evidence, however, does not support this theory. In the eleven certain polyandrous marriages, only three of the husbands were non-Mormon (Lightner, Sayers, and Cleveland) and only one was disaffected (Buell). All other husbands were in good standing in the church at the time Joseph married their wives. Many were prominent church leaders and close friends of Smith.
• These data suggest that Joseph may have married these women, often, not because they were married to non-members but because they were married to faithful Latter-day Saints who were his devoted friends. This again suggests that the men knew about the marriages and permitted them.
• This is a radical, almost utopian rejection of civil, secular, sectarian, non-Mormon marriage. Civil marriage was even a “sin,” unless a higher “affinity” “cemented” spouses together.
• Stone’s story, like Joseph Smith’s, was the product of the Burned-over District in New York, where a Protestant revival atmosphere served as a seeding ground for a great deal of religious and marital experimentation. The “Spiritual Wives” polyandrous doctrine, so foreign to twentieth-century Mormons, was part of Joseph Smith’s Zeitgeist. Though the system was clearly subject to the danger of extremist abuse, it was developed by sincerely religious men: “The advocates of Spiritual wifehood are, and have been, for the most part ministers of the gospel, men of thought and learning,” wrote Dixon.
• The importance polygamy was given in Mormonism is surprising, however. Smith and other nineteenth-century Mormons taught that plural marriage was necessary for complete salvation, while such a theological connection is never made in the Old Testament.
• Fawn Brodie’s 1946 biography of Smith presents his and Alger’s relationship as an affair, not a marriage, and other scholars have accepted this interpretation. This position follows the earliest contemporary reference to the Smith-Alger relationship, an 1838 letter written by Oliver Cowdery at a time when he was estranged from Smith. He wrote, with vehement hyperbole, “A dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger’s was talked over in which I strictly declared that I had never deviated from the truth.” Nineteenth-century Mormons, however, regarded the Smith-Alger relationship as a marriage. Benjamin Johnson reports in his 1903 letter that church leader Heber C. Kimball once introduced an Alger family member as the brother of Smith’s first plural wife. Johnson affirmed: “Without doubt in my mind Fanny Alger was at Kirtland the Prophets first plural wife.” In 1890 Andrew Jenson listed her second on his tally of Smith’s wives. He listed Louisa Beaman first, probably because her marriage date was solidly documented. Brodie felt that these references superimposed a later understanding of polygamy onto a sexual liaison. However, she does not mention that former Kirtland resident Chauncey Webb and his daughter Ann Eliza Webb Young, who were unsympathetic ex-Mormons, referred to the relationship as a “sealing.” Ann Eliza reports that Alger’s parents were proud of their connection to the prophet, which would hardly have been the case if the relationship had been merely a furtive affair.
• Eliza R. Snow’s diary contains only an oblique reference to her wedding to Smith on June 29, 1842, but in her autobiography she dates the marriage and explains her inner conversion to polygamy. Zina Huntington’s Nauvoo diary never mentions her marriage to Smith, though her autobiography tells the story of their union.
• Therefore Brother Joseph said [“]Brother Levi I want to make a bargain with you – If you will get Fanny Alger for me for a wife you may have Clarissa Reed. I love Fanny” “I will” Said Father. “Go brother Levi and the Lord will prosper you”
• There is much to comment on in this extraordinary passage. Very prominent is the theme of exchange of women, which anthropologists have noted in many cultures. The polygamous marriage proposal is indirect, a remarkable combination of the romantic and the non-romantic. “I love Fanny,” Smith tells Hancock, yet he does not profess his love to Fanny face to face. He uses an intermediary, a male relative, to propose to her. Despite the indirection, this is entirely consistent with Smith’s later method of approaching prospective plural wives in Nauvoo.
• Clarissa told Levi to ask Fanny herself and Fanny agreed to marry Smith. She was not forced into the marriage.
• Such relationships also provided powerful stimuli to keep the secret. Noble, by taking a plural wife after marrying Smith to his sister-in-law, became part of polygamy’s inner circle, committed to its goals but vulnerable to its consequences if discovered.
• I see Webb’s statement as more primary and consistent than McLellin’s. But whether Emma saw her husband in the barn or discovered evidence of Fanny’s pregnancy, her reaction was the same.
• the circumstantial evidence is strong that Cowdery’s respect for Joseph diminished after that point. This reaction would be understandable if Cowdery knew nothing of polygamy until he was confronted with a double offense: Joseph’s behavior with Fanny and his possible mishandling of the domestic crisis with Emma. In contrast, Levi Hancock, involved at the beginning of the marriage, would have had a different perception of it.
• William Law, of the First Presidency, and Austin Cowles, a counselor in the powerful Nauvoo Stake, both left the church to publish the Nauvoo Expositor, dedicated in part to publicizing Smith’s extramonogamous activities. Smith’s infallibility was an important issue, and polygamy was seen as evidence against it. Even in this aspect, the marriage of Smith and Alger was a troubling precursor to the future.
• Feminist historian Gerda Lerner, referring to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, writes that the “exchange of women,” which is common in tribal societies, was “the leading cause of female subordination” in human history, and she makes theoretical reconstructions from prehistory.
• Joseph’s and Levi’s mutual success strengthens the bond between them. It is a good example of what Lerner calls the “commodification” of women.
• Nauvoo polygamy was so secretive that it almost had a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere–perhaps its very secrecy, giving participants a sense of being in the center of the innermost church, helped infuse it with its sense of sacrality.
• Soon afterwards she was brought further into the inner circle of Nauvoo ritual practice. She received her endowment on January 26, 1845, and joined the Holy Order, or Quorum of the Anointed, also known as “the Priesthood,” an elite group that met frequently to perform Joseph Smith’s endowment rituals and pray together.
• I had fondley hoped I should raise them they looked verry much alike indeed, there eyes were jest of a colour, I called them Alvah and Alma but they are gone, and I must be reconsiled to the will of God; and I desire ever to acknowledge his hand in all things
• Feminist historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has written insightfully on the intense bonding felt by women in nineteenth-century Victorian America. Mormon polygamy, which by definition required an absentee husband much of the time, would only serve to heighten that bonding between women.
• That Young (the president and prophet of the church) would send a carriage to take three women to administer to another is a striking contrast to modern-day Mormon practice, in which only men are allowed to perform administrations for health.
• In both Nauvoo and Utah polygamy, there is rich evidence for close relationships between sister-wives who even helped initiate young women into the enlarged family. If interfeminine relationships were important in Victorian America, in this respect Mormon women were more Victorian than the Victorians proper.
• The early Mormons were not just Bible readers, they were living the Bible.
• He likened the modern Mormon experience to the Old Testament model. “The Lords House! Solemnly exclaimed every one, as we were trudging along in a confused flock. It makes me think of tribes going up to Jerusalem to worship, anciently.”
• She was grieving for her mother and asked Joseph if she would know her as her mother in the next life. “Certainly you will,” he answered. “More than that, you will meet and become acquainted with your eternal Mother, the wife of your Father in Heaven.” “And have I then a Mother in Heaven?” exclaimed the astonished teenager. “You assuredly have. How could a Father claim His title unless there were also a Mother to share that parenthood?” the Mormon leader replied. Eliza R. Snow learned of this doctrine soon afterward and wrote what became the Mormon hymn “Oh My Father,” in which she addressed the Heavenly Father and Mother in prayer.
• If polygyny offended against the American cult of true womanhood, polyandry offended even more. Nevertheless, if polygyny and polyandry offended against domesticity, piety, and purity, submissiveness required her to obey. Disobeying Smith would also be an offense against Mormon piety. So polygamy divided the cult of true womanhood against itself. If a woman interpreted Smith’s polygyny and polyandry as sacred, she would become entirely devoted to the new system. It is well documented that American women of this period were intensely pious, much more so than their male counterparts.
• Zina later wrote of her decision to enter polygamy: When I heard that God had revealed the law of celestial marriag that we would have the privilige of associating in family relationships in the worlds to come I searched the scripture & buy [by] humble prayer to my Heavenly Father I obtained a testimony for myself that God had required that order to be established in this church. I mad[e] a greater sacrifise than to give my life for I never anticipated a gain [again] to be looked uppon as an honerable woman by those I dearly loved [but] could I compremise concience lay aside the sure testimony of the spiret of God for the Glory of this world after having been baptized by one having authority and covenanting to be obedient at the waters edge to live the life of a saint[?] … Zina’s choice, as she explains it, was a choice to honor her conscience. She did not merely bow to Smith’s pressure; she obtained her own testimony of polygamy by scriptural study (Smith usually pointed to Old Testament patriarchs when preaching polygamy) and by personal revelation.
• Almost nothing further is known about Zina’s marriage to Joseph Smith. The problems and enigmas of all of Smith’s marriages apply here. Nothing specific is known about sexuality in their marriage, though judging from Smith’s other marriages, sexuality was probably included. We do know that Zina and Henry continued living as husband and wife, though Henry was often absent on missions. Zina’s emotional reaction to the marriage was one of awe: “It was something too sacred to be talked about; it was more to me than life or death. I never breathed it for years.”
• As Zebulon put it, “We staid there [Nauvoo] till the spring of 46, when we had a polite invitation from our Parrental government, in the shape of musket and saber with a good supply of bayonets to make it plainer understood to mozey on or in other words pick up and leave.”
• The final episode in Henry’s marriage to Zina was approaching. Zina now knew that she was going to live as Brigham’s earthly wife, not as Henry’s, but Henry apparently did not understand this fully. On June 20 she wrote a letter to Oliver’s wife in New York, Mary Neal Huntington, which has been lost, but in it she apparently told Mary that she was living with Brigham Young and was no longer married to Henry. In July Henry and Oliver left England, arriving in New York on August 12. Henry visited relatives in New York, then stayed with the Neals and Oliver in Cambria. While he was there, Mary read Zina’s letter aloud to Oliver and Henry. The two men were stunned, and Henry was left feeling depressed and resigned. Oliver immediately sat down and dashed off a letter to Zina, which she preserved. He wrote: “I got the letter you wrote to Mary dated June 20th day before yesterday. All is well. Henry is here and heard the letter. He sayes all is right, he dont care. He stands alone as yet. I have had allmoste as much trial about you as he has. I have had to hear feel and suffer everything he has–If you only knew my troubles you’d pitty me … Henry will tell you all my mind.” Before this Henry may have seen Zina’s marriage to Brigham as ritual only; she would continue to live with him. Now he probably realized that she had in effect divorced him completely. However one might understand Zina preferring Brigham to Henry, one has to sympathize with Henry, considering how the divorce was effected–while he was far away, and after the polyandrous “second” husband himself had sent him on a mission.
• ‘You are nothing but a proxy wife. Brigham doesn’t love you and neither does anybody else.’” Zina replied, “I love you Sister Harriet and you can’t help yourself.” Though Zina was secure enough not to be hurt by this taunt, the fact that Harriet would use the term “proxy wife” to try to diminish her shows that she saw such women as occupying a lower status in the family. One wonders if Brigham saw himself as providing for someone else’s widows throughout his life, despite the fact that such women as Zina and Emily Partridge bore his children.
• Henry certainly still has a deep belief in Mormonism, and he seems to have no idea why he was disfellowshipped. According to family tradition, he was disciplined because “he proceeded to try to win Zina back. Because of his persistence, he was excommunicated from the church by the High Council.”
• In October 1879 she became the first woman to speak in the traditionally all-male general conference sessions; her subject, in part, was sericulture.

  Kyle: Baller.

• The Relief Society that began in Nauvoo had been discontinued there because of Emma Smith’s opposition to polygamy. However, in early Utah local Relief Societies began to emerge and Eliza R. Snow became the informal leader of these groups.
• Zina’s views on polygamy are found in the 1869 New York World interview. The journalist, “H.,” described Zina as “a tall, thin lady, apparently about fifty years of age” who ascribed much of the unhappiness in polygamous families to women who expect “too much attention from the husband and because they do not obtain it, or see a little attention bestowed upon one of the other wives, they become sullen and morose, and permit their ill-temper to finally find vent.” First wives are a particular problem, as they have a tendency to look upon the husband with a “selfish devotion” that desires to claim all his time and attention for themselves. The successful polygamous wife, as her marriage develops, “must regard her husband with indifference, and wits no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment; a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy.” By “love” Zina meant romantic love only, not Christian love, and in this interview she was repeating conventional Mormon rhetoric disparaging romance.
• Clearly, linkage to Joseph Smith was seen as necessary for complete salvation.
• In October she attended the Woman’s Congress at Buffalo. Zina and Ellen were at first asked to speak on behalf of Utah women, but when it was found out that they were polygamists they were denied speaking privileges. Zina returned to New York to attend the N.W.S.A. convention but again was not permitted to speak.
• Also in October, aged seventy-one, Zina directed the first Relief Society general board meeting with the combined Relief Society stake presidents.
• As a final irony, Zina was buried in the Jacobs family plot in the Salt Lake Cemetery not far from Henry, perhaps because she wanted to lie next to her sons when they died. When Zina Card died, she was buried not by her husband but beside her mother.
• Zina returned twice to visit her daughter; her message, in part, was for Zina Card to do the genealogy work for Henry Jacobs and his side of the family. The believer will see this as an act of compassion performed from across the grave, an otherworldly gesture of inclusion for Henry and his family, while more skeptical readers may explain this revenant as an expression of Zina Card’s sensitivity to feelings of guilt that Zina Diantha felt for abandoning Henry during her life.
• As Henry had remarked, God would sort out the tangled webs of our earthly relationships in the eternities.
• In early 1849 a man named Joseph Hovey helped Presendia Kimball through a period of depression and discouragement, perhaps during a difficult pregnancy, and on March 4 she felt impressed to give him a blessing. Placing her hands on his head, she spoke the following words: “Inasmuch as you have comforted me when I was weighted down in the days that are past and now, I also say in the name of Jesus Christ that you shall be blessed … Yea, you shall have your exaltation, for I will see to it for your goodness towards me. Yea, I will tell Joseph Smith of your good works and you shall come on Mount Zion with the hundred and forty four thousand.” So Presendia the plural wife acted as an intermediary to Joseph Smith, a prophetess to the prophet. She even felt she had the authority to promise Hovey exaltation–she would “see to it.”
• Sister Presendia prayed earnestly to the Lord for her companion, that he might return to the faith, but his mind had grown very dark and it was useless to reason with, or entreat him to see the error and doubt which had misled and confused him.”
• Though the Mormon historical record has viewed Norman unsympathetically as “a bitter apostate,” he was a husband and father with real feelings, and this reference shows how he suffered when he suddenly lost his wife and youngest son.
• Once again we see the curious distance between a polygamous husband and his wife. He is content to have the plural wife live in a different city, but his first wife finds that distancing intolerable. The ties between two sister-wives seem stronger than those between husband and wife.
• She and Joseph F. Smith stood proxy on October 26, 1876, to seal her recently deceased son, Oliver Buell, to six dead women, making him a posthumous polygamist.
• “Never in my life, in this kingdom, which is 44 years, have I doubted the truth of this great work, revealed in these, the last days. I have buried seven of my children, all in their infancy, but 2 living. I hope to honor My God, my religion & myself, & be prepared to meet the many loved ones behind the vail.
• So her life exemplifies the tragic ambiguity of Mormon polygamy, which in her case was compounded by the repeated blows of losing eight of her nine children to death or apostasy.
• Joseph married her as the widow of his brother, so this was a strict Levirate marriage–a typical Mormon restoration of a practice from ancient Israel.
• The Masonic code shows that something significant and esoteric happened involving both Joseph and Agnes on this day, and a plural marriage is the most likely event. Smith’s diary emphasizes the importance of the day. His scribe writes, “Truly this is a day long to be remembered by the saints of the Last Days; a day in which the God of heaven has began to restore the ancient of his Kingdom unto his servants & his people: a day in which all things are concurring together to bring about the completion of the fullness of the gospel.” The marriage to Agnes is the reasonable explanation for this otherwise enigmatic entry.

  Kyle: The excitement over Old Testament restorationism from this Levirate marriage

• Smith was interested in the restoration of all biblical doctrine and practice in this, the “Dispensation of the Fullness of Times,” and he therefore may have seen great significance in the modem performance of such an ancient custom.
• Joseph continually urged Ina to return to Utah, but she wrote that she would never do so as long as she had “one particle” of common sense left. She critiqued polygamy in lively terms: “I think I see myself, vowing to love and honor, some of old driv driveling idiot of 60, to be taken into his harem and enjoy his fav the pleasure of being his favorite Sultana for an hour, and then thrown aside, whil’st my Godly husband, is out Sparking another girl, in hopes of getting another victim to his dep despotic power. Pleasant prospect. I must say … I don’t believe in polygamy and never will.” It is possible that Ina’s views reflected those of her mother. Agnes added a brief message to this letter. The contrast between Ina’s forceful, incisive sentences and Agnes’s homespun prose is striking:
• If Pickett deserted her, polygamy was almost an institutionalized form of marital neglect.
• Recent research has shown that however unjustifiable and cowardly the persecutions of the Missouri mobs were, Mormon extremism, authoritarianism, and militarist rhetoric helped fan the flames of persecution.
• All of Sylvia’s three children had now passed away. Like Louisa Beaman, Presendia Huntington, and her mother, she was fated to lose many children. One can only imagine the emotional toll this would take on a woman.
• On the 24th Patty’s non-Mormon nephew, Enoch Tripp, unexpectedly appeared in Nauvoo. Having fallen upon hard times, he decided to visit Patty and her family and ask for help. He entered the Mormon city in fear and trepidation, as he had heard stories that Latter-day Saints often murdered non-Mormon visitors. He found Windsor’s store and introduced himself to Sylvia in a back room. “Is this cousin, Enoch B. Tripp?” she exclaimed. “She greeted me with a kiss and thanked the Lord that he had preserved her life to behold some of her blood relatives from Maine … Her father, mother and brothers were sent for and all greeted me with a most hearty welcome. The fear of being killed had now to a great degree left me.” In the following months, he was surprised to find that Mormons were hospitable, friendly, and devout, saying grace at all meals.
• Heber Kimball was the second most authoritative man in the Mormon hierarchy, de facto first counselor to the acting church president–yet he asked Patty to perform an ordinance for his wife.
• She constantly knitted socks, but there were “so many dropped stitches and other errors in the stockings … that they were unraveled each evening (without her knowledge …) and the yarn given back to her” the next day.
• Now I say to you do as I have done and as much better as you can and the Lord will bless you as he has me Patty Sessions
• Miracle and prophecy were the neo-biblical psychic environment in which the early Mormons lived.
• Her interpretation predicted that the Saints “would be driven” from Jackson County by mobs. The High Council and Oliver Cowdery protested stridently and even wrote to Joseph Smith in Kirtland concerning the matter, but Smith answered that Mary had interpreted correctly: “Interpretations belonged to the Priesthood, but, as they had not asked for the gift, and I had it was taken from their Shoulder and put onto mine.”
• So we have the doctrine of spirits matched in the pre-existence, a concept that gives important insight into Smith’s practice of polyandry. It fits him into the context of the broader “spiritual wife” doctrine of the Burned-over District, in which spiritual affinities between a man and a woman took precedence over legal but nonsacral marriage. Perhaps the Mormon doctrine of the pre-existence derived in part from this influence.
• She did not agree to the marriage at first–she was married to and presumably in love with another man, and was skeptical of Smith’s doctrine. She asked why, if an angel came to him, it had not appeared to her? She asked pointedly, wasn’t it possible that the angel was from the devil? Smith assured her that it had come from God. She replied that she would never be sealed to him until she had a direct witness from God. He told her to pray earnestly, for the angel had told him that she would have a witness.
• Divine vengeance on persecutors of the Latter-day Saints is another persistent theme in Mormon folklore.
• Many Mormons felt that the noteworthy part of their lives ended when they reached Utah and settled down to a peaceful life untroubled by “gentile” mobocracy.
• This letter gives a rich sense of the community that Joseph Smith’s wives shared, and shows how focused they were on Smith–commemorating his day of death, wondering which of them, aging as they were, would be called to join him next “in the other Land.”
• That night, as she walked into the meeting room, “The Prophet, raising his head, looked her full in the eye. With the greatest feeling of shame ever experienced, she felt her very soul laid bare before this man as she realized her thoughts concerning him. He smiled and her anger melted as snow before the sunshine. She knew he was what he claimed to be and never doubted him thereafter.” So once again we see Smith’s enormous psychic presence. Mary Rollins Lightner had almost precisely the same experience when she first met him: a feeling that he understood her every thought.
• Remarkably, a non-Mormon source gives an even fuller account. The Johnsons were visiting at Joseph Smith’s home when conversation turned to “supernatural gifts” in the apostolic church: Some one said, “Here is Mrs. Johnson with a lame arm; has God given any power to men now on the earth to cure her?” A few moments later, when the conversation had turned in another direction, Smith rose, and walking across the room, taking Mrs. Johnson by the hand, said in the most solemn and impressive manner: “Woman, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command thee to be whole,” and immediately left the room. The company were awe-stricken at the infinite presumption of the man, and the calm assurance with which he spoke. The sudden mental and moral shock–I know not how better to explain the well attested fact–electrified the rheumatic arm–Mrs. Johnson at once lifted it up with ease, and on her return home the next day she was able to do her washing without difficulty or pain. It was at this point that Marinda was called home from school, reluctantly met Joseph Smith, and soon converted.
• A second child, Laura Marinda Hyde, was born on May 21, 1837, and happily lived. Less than a month later Hyde left for England with the apostles, “leaving me with a three-weeks-old babe,” wrote Marinda. He would be gone for more than a year. As always, we can only imagine what her life was like while he was gone.
• As often, there is a striking contrast between the male general authority missionary distinguishing himself on an important, if difficult, mission, well remembered by history, while the wife, overlooked by history, endured hardships at home.
• We can only guess at the shock this exposure to polygyny and polyandry must have given Marinda; nearly everyone who has commented on their first introduction to polygamy wrote that they at first looked at it with revulsion and shock, and fought the idea for a time. Some Mormons, male and female, had suicidal feelings when they were first told that they were required to practice polygamy. As Marinda was apparently sincerely in love with Orson Hyde, polyandry must have been enormously difficult for her. Perhaps she, like many women, had a spiritual, revelatory conversion to polygamy that allowed her to live with the severe cognitive dissonance it would have caused.
• For unknown reasons, Marinda was sealed to Orson Hyde, not Smith, for time and eternity on January 11, 1846. This is an extremely anomalous marriage, as no other polyandrous wife of Smith was sealed to her first husband for eternity (though some widows whom Joseph married, such as Agnes Coolbrith Smith and Delcena Johnson Sherman, were sealed to their former husbands in the temple rather than to Smith).
• Perhaps the best explanation for this puzzling series of sealings is that Orson was reluctant to give up his two daughters to Joseph Smith for eternity and he convinced Marinda to choose him instead of Smith as an eternal partner.
• Biographer Myrtle Hyde explains the divorce thus: “[Orson was] a very kind husband, precise, but not domineering … I feel that because Marinda was sealed to Joseph for eternity the time came when she could see no reason to remain married to Orson for time.
• This is an ironic development, as Joseph Smith III was waging a crusade of sorts to prove that Joseph Smith, Jr., his father, had never practiced polygamy. Now the “Josephites,” as they called themselves, had unwittingly baptized one of the prophet’s former plural wives into their community.
• I believe Religion when Connected with Reason is the Only Source from which true happiness is Derived.
• In this environment the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo received its genesis in 1842. While the Mormon woman’s society was never oriented toward reforming men, and has always been publicly supportive of the male ecclesiastical hierarchy, it also had its proto-feminist elements. As a separate community of women within Mormonism (just as the male priesthood hierarchy was a separate community of men within Mormonism), it developed its own culture and history. The publication of the Woman’s Exponent alone, a magazine printing women’s essays, speeches, poems, and autobiographies, was a landmark in the history of Mormon feminism.
• At the third Relief Society meeting, “Councillor Cleveland remark’d that they had [better] put their shoulder to the wheel and exhorted them to do with their might–we have entered into this work in the name of the Lord let us boldly go forward.”
• Emma used the Relief Society to combat rumors that her husband practiced polygamy, which put Sarah in an awkward, ambiguous position. A close friend of Emma, she nevertheless was Joseph’s plural wife and could not tell Emma about it. On April 14 Sarah cautioned “the Society against speaking evil of Prest. J. Smith and his companion–that it would not be a light thing in the sight of God–that they had prov’d themselves; and the case of C.M. [Clarissa Marvel] should be a warning, how we hear and how we speak–express’d her fears that the Lord would cut off those who will not take counsel &c.” Sarah thus joined Emma in trying to keep polygamy rumors from circulating, though with a contrasting motive: while Emma wanted to quash polygamy, Sarah wanted to keep it secret.
• On the first of May a farewell letter from Sarah “To the Presidency, and Ladies of the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo” appeared in the Times and Seasons: “I shall necessarily be absent from your pleasant society, for a season, my husband not having succeeded in business in Nauvoo as he anticipated.” Fawn Brodie concludes that John took his family away because Joseph Smith was cohabiting with his wife, but this interpretation seems unlikely.
• Pomfret he describes as a “wild and almost frontier region, with heavy primeval forests.” The Mormons had often had considerable experience pioneering before settling Utah.
• Julia sent Joel and David a letter cautioning them against the delusions of the new religious movements, and they wrote back informing her that they had recently been baptized Mormons.
• “Brother Joseph This is Something I did not Expect & I do not understand it–You know whether it is right. I do not. I want to do just as you tell me, and I will try. But if I [ever] should Know that you do this to Dishonor & debauch my Sister I will kill you as Shure as the Lord lives = and while his eye did not move from mine He Said with a Smile, in a soft tone “But Benjamin you will never know that. But you will know the principle is true & will greatly Rejoice in what it will bring to you.” But.how I asked. Can I teach my Sister what I mySelf do not understand … “But you will See & understand it”
• Benjamin’s initial response to the whole affair was one of disgust and severe depression. “To me there was a horror in the idea of speaking to my sister upon such a subject, and the thought of which made me sick.” This is not an untypical Mormon first response to the idea of polygamy. Latter-day Saints were of New England, Puritanical stock, from a cultural tradition that had been living monogamously for millennia. Thus Benjamin, like many Mormons faced with polygamy, probably experienced severe cognitive dissonance. Either he would have to accept the repulsive doctrine of polygamy or give up Smith as a prophet, as well as his family, his new culture and community, and all that he had been persecuted for. But since many early Mormons viewed Smith as infallible, it is understandable that there was often, as here, a conversion to the doctrine that originally caused shocked horror. After all, polygamy was found in the Bible, where it was practiced by Smith’s prophetic predecessors.
• So when Almera was eighty-one, she was given the melancholy duty of burying the last of her five daughters.
• Her life was dominated by the pain of loss, but it was nevertheless a life filled with warmth in the spaces between repeated blows of death and parting.
• Among other things, this story shows Eliza’s visionary, enthusiastic side, but she was also a precise, careful thinker and writer, and she became the dominant female intellectual in early Utah. No less a strong-willed individual than Brigham Young was known to defer to her occasionally on matters of church policy. She is, after Emma Smith, the most famous Mormon woman. A poetess, her “O My Father” is the only hymn that approaches the status of scripture in the Mormon tradition.
• She is the only plural wife of Smith who has had a scholarly book devoted to her life, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher’s insightful volume of essays, Eliza and Her Sisters.
• Oliver and Rosetta were Baptists, though “free from bigotry and intolerance,” and welcomed representatives from all religions into their home, which exposed the young Eliza to great religious diversity.
• Eliza, despite many opportunities for romance, remained single. Perhaps potential suitors were intimidated by her educated, strong-minded intelligence. Wells wrote, “Many of her friends were extremely anxious to see her well settled in life, but she was happy in herself and would not submit to any interference in this matter.”
• “As he sat warming himself,” she wrote, “I scrutinized his face as closely as I could without attracting his attention, and decided that his was an honest face.” So she decided to investigate this new religion.
• However, their stay would be short-lived, for Governor Lilburn Boggs’s extermination order and the state militia forced them to leave Missouri that winter. Eliza’s autobiography, as is typical of Mormon reminiscences, lingers over the hardships of this forced winter journey: “A few days before leaving Adam-ondi-Ahman, the former owner of the house … came in and impudently enquired how soon we should be out of it. My American blood warmed to the temperature of an insulted, freeborn American citizen as I looked at him and thought, poor man; you little know with whom you have to deal–God lives.”
• Her autobiography records her reaction to the doctrine: “In Nauvoo I first understood that the practice of plurality was to be introduced into the church. The subject was very repugnant to my feelings–so directly was it in opposition to my educated prepossessions, that it seemed as though all the prejudices of my ancestors for generations past congregated around me.” Despite this initial revulsion, typical of Mormons first introduced to polygamy, she was gradually converted to it. “But when I reflected that I was living in the Dispensation of the fulness of times, embracing all other Dispensations, surely Plural Marriage must necessarily be included.” Polygamy was a biblical practice, and to those interpreting the Bible literally, polygamy could easily be seen as a righteous practice that needed to be restored.
• Accepting polygamy was a matter of integrity for both Latter-day Saint men and women, given the restorationist underpinnings of their faith and their acceptance of Smith as a direct conduit of revelation.
• The multiplicity of versions inclines one to suppose than an authentic incident lies behind them, but they are so late and second-hand that one mistrusts their details. However, they do point to a possibility–and if Eliza did lose a child, the experience would have been psychologically devastating for her.
• As the most intellectually gifted of Brigham’s many wives, and as a woman of faith and devotion, she exerted a significant influence on him–he was not well-educated, though he was a man of practical brilliance and force.
• As she joined the drama of the exodus to the Far West, she began keeping one of the most literate and keenly observant of Mormon overland journals. Very much the product of a poetess, it is filled with occasional poems; though it has self-conscious literary tendencies, it is remarkably frank and has moments of sharp humor. It provides a comprehensive view of the network of elite Nauvoo Mormon women scattered across the wilderness and in early Utah. Beecher’s recent publication of this diary is a landmark in Mormon studies.
• Much of her time there was spent reading Walter Scott’s Rokeby,
• The women viewed their blessings to each other as prophetic revelations–early Latter-day Saint women often functioned as prophetesses for each other.
• So the Winter Quarters experience came to an end. It had been a time of hardship, cold, living in makeshift shelters; a time of sickness and death. But it was also a time of feminine blessing, healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy, a high point in Mormon spirituality. In addition, it brought Eliza Snow to the forefront among Mormon women. Her intellectual gifts and poetic talent, her zealous devotion to the Mormon cause, her prophetic gifts in tongue-speaking and blessing, and her marriages to Joseph Smith and Brigham Young–all of these combined to distinguish her. Beecher writes, “In Winter Quarters the women who would lead out in women’s affairs in Utah identified themselves, set their standards, re-established certain rituals, and thus cemented the ties which held their group.” Eliza led the group of leaders.

  Kyle: Where Zion’s Camp had hardened the men of the church, Winter Quarters would harden the women.

• Before he departed, Brigham came to the carriage and blessed Eliza and her “family,” the Pierces. Eliza asked him, “Who is to be my counsellor for the year to come?” “Eliza R. Snow,” he replied. “She is not capable,” bantered back Eliza. “I have appointed her president,” said Brigham, smiling.
• Like other Mormons in Utah, Eliza began life from scratch. On October 11, she wrote, with wry humor, “I made a cap for sis. J. Young for which she paid me in soap, 1 lb. & 15 oz. so much I call my own. I now begin once more to be a woman of property.”
• Her 1848 journal mentions weather, community events, food, but not her inner life.
• On Christmas Day Eliza was probably sick: “Christmas, I staid at home & read news:papers which Prest. Y. sent me, he having call’d last eve: br. F. Richards at that time presented me with copy of an Address written by Lyon.”
• In 1852 Lorenzo Snow, who had been called to be an apostle in 1849, and William Eddington organized the Polysophical Society, a weekly meeting for gospel and cultural refinement.
• When the Endowment House was dedicated in 1855 Brigham asked Eliza to preside over the sisters’ ordinances in this small de facto temple. She pointed out that her poor health would not allow her to serve in this capacity, but Brigham assured her that her health would improve if she agreed. Taking this promise to heart, she accepted and presided over women’s temple work for the rest of her life, spending many days in the Endowment House
• Less happily the same year, during the height of the Mormon Reformation, an outbreak of zealotry that swept Utah, the Polysophical Society was repressed by Jedediah Grant (who called it “a stink in my nostrils”) and by Heber Kimball (who followed Grant, “and in mine!,” and added that there was an “adultrous spirit in it!”). Two members of the First Presidency outranked Apostle Lorenzo Snow and plural wives of Smith and Young, so the meetings were discontinued. This is an early example of “intellectual” Mormonism being interpreted as a threat by high-ranking church leaders who were themselves poorly educated. The tension between the Latter-day Saint church hierarchy and intellectual and academic pursuits (which are both valued and suspect) is a fascinating thread in Mormon history. Eliza herself is an example of how the church attracted and prized intelligent, well-educated converts, while the demise of the Polysophical Society shows how ambivalent members of the hierarchy could be about the intellectual quest, which necessarily includes breadth and freedom of thought and inquiry. The marriage of Eliza and Brigham was itself a curious combination of practical intelligence and poetic, sophisticated intelligence, though husband and wife were both thoroughly devoted to the Mormon cause.
• Susa also described the intellectual Eliza, the book-reader, the nurturer of young literary talent: “In the Lion House Aunt Eliza R. Snow seemed a little set apart. She was said to be cold and proud but I never found her so. She was my patron saint and under her control and encouragement all my few literary and organizing fits blossomed early into fruition.” Eliza spent nearly all her time studying, wrote Gates, reading the Bible and Book of Mormon and the classics of all ages, but “To relieve the nervous pressure of too much study she embroidered temple aprons or made burial clothing. She was an exquisite needle woman and her embroideries were real works of art.”
• Though a writer, she bemoaned the limitations of corresponding through the mail: “I often think of the short but very pleasant visit you paid me when in the City. To think how much we said in that little time, makes letter communication seem very dull indeed & yet this medium is a great blessing.”
• in 1872 she helped establish the Woman’s Exponent, the semi-official voice of Mormon women.
• One of Eliza’s less sympathetic sides was a doctrinaire tendency, evidenced both in her unquestioning obedience to male priesthood leaders and in an occasional tendency to overpower dissent. One unsympathetic voice, John Hyde, perhaps exaggerated when he described her and her friends “crushing” backsliding women, but Eliza and her network were nevertheless a powerful regularizing force in Utah.
• Once Brigham publicly corrected the doctrinal content of an article on resurrection that Eliza had published in the Woman’s Exponent. Her doctrine “has just one fault and that one fault is, it is not true,” he wrote bluntly in the next issue. Half a year later Eliza printed a small retraction: “Permit me to say that I fully concur in the views expressed by Pres. Young … and trust that no Latter-day Saint may be led into erroneous doctrine through anything written by me.” One senses a hint of ironic tension in this tight-lipped statement, but obedience to the priesthood was too ingrained in Eliza’s Mormonness to allow real confrontation.
• Beecher’s evaluation of Eliza: she was not the original creative spirit in many enterprises but was a genius at organization and implementation.
• Eliza R. Snow, the most prominent woman in Utah Mormon history, presents the modern historian with a number of perplexing tensions and polarities. Sometimes she seems a distant, cold, intellectual figure, yet she was beloved by her fellow-sisters, both for her spiritual and intellectual leadership as well as for her enormous capacity for service. Sometimes she seems preachy, doctrinaire, and judgmental; at others times we remember her kindness and tenderness to the sick and her wry, incisive humor. Modem feminists will remember that she penned the hymn that made the Mormon doctrine of a heavenly mother influential; that she was a remarkable, dominant female figure in patriarchal Utah; that she was an important woman writer, poet, diarist, and nurturer of other women’s writing. On the other hand, they will remember her tireless preaching of polygamy, her counseling other women to accept it and live it, and her repeated statements that complete obedience to the male leadership of the church was all-important.
• One way in which Eliza stands out from nearly all the other women in this book is her childlessness. Though she may have had a miscarriage, she was never a mother in the sense of raising a child. This is a remarkable fact, given that women in Mormon culture were and are valued as mothers above all else. Yet she was widely known as a spiritual “Mother in Israel,” showing that motherhood is a spiritual gift, not merely a matter of physical biology alone. Hence the title of a Susa Gates essay, which I have borrowed: “Childless Mother of Mothers in Israel.” Eliza’s life wordlessly strikes a blow for Latter-day Saint women who are single and/or childless, a group that is repeatedly marginalized in Mormon culture by the typical emphasis on motherhood as the highest life path for women.