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Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society

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In the latter half of the nineteenth century the LDS (Mormon) Church, settled in what is now the State of Utah, authorized and encouraged men to take multiple wives. This was based on a belief that such marriages were the will of God. The practice led to intense opposition by the US government, causing the LDS Church to officially abandon this position in 1890. Some church members, convinced that plural marriage was correct and the official church leadership had fallen from the true path, separated and formed their own churches where the practice of plural marriage continued. Such practitioners are automatically excommunicated by the official LDS Church. Plural marriage is actually a criminal offense in Utah, but the state has not actively prosecuted it for several decades. The last major organized police raid on one of these churches occurred in the 1950s.

Beginning in the 1970s Joseph Ginat, then a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Utah, began building contacts with these Mormon fundamentalists, estimated to number between 20,000 and 60,000. This was a slow and delicate process because of the long history of oppression. Practitioners of plural marriage are still subject to various forms of discrimination so tend to be secretive. For this reason, it is effectively impossible to gather reliable statistics on these people, so any numbers quoted should be taken as very approximate.

Members of the Mormon fundamentalist churches share a belief in the patriarchal authority and duties of the husband, traditional gender roles, and having lots of kids. About 20% of their families are plural marriages. There are two main fundamentalist churches: one in a rural area on the Utah-Arizona border, and another in urban Salt Lake County. There are also a number of smaller groups and independent families. The rural church is more conservative than the urban church. A few radical or outspoken groups get most of the media attention, but the majority of fundamentalists are very quiet.

Drs. Altman and Ginat studied 26 Mormon fundamentalist plural marriage families by interviewing them in their homes and other locations. Most of those interviewed had been born or raised within the fundamentalist movement. This book is a report of what the authors learned about those families, with some comparisons to other societies with similar practices.

A fundamentalist Mormon plural marriage includes one husband and two or more wives. This is commonly called "polygamy" but is more correctly polygyny, since there are no plural marriages with more than one husband. About 2/3 of plural marriages are one husband and two wives. Frequently two or more wives are sisters. Most plural marriage families are in the middle to lower-middle socioeconomic class, with few members holding professional or managerial jobs. The combination of large numbers of children, middling job skills and the necessity of avoiding persecution places a great strain on the financial resources of many such families.

The addition of a wife to a family ideally occurs with the approval of the new wife's parents, the existing wife or wives in the family, and relevant church leaders. In the rural group, however, some marriages are arranged by the church leaders, perhaps to provide for a widow. In some cases, the addition of a wife is initiated by women who want to become family and so persuade the husband to go along. Failure to achieve consensus before a marriage can produce family turmoil, perhaps leading to divorce.

Weddings are generally officiated by church leaders, and are marriages between the husband and the individual wife. The other wives in a family may take part in the ceremony, but they are not considered to be directly wed to the new wife.

Each wife has a strong bond with her husband, while bonds between the wives are generally weaker. Most wives give each other mutual support, but some have conflicted relationships. The husband is expected to be fair and treat each wife equally; failure to do so sometimes leads to counseling by church leaders or even divorce. Often family members turn to their religious faith to sustain them through periods of family conflict. There is an expectation that the husband's patriarchal authority can be used to settle disagreements that can't be negotiated.

Normally, each wife has her own living space, whether a room or an entire house, where she is sovereign. In some cases two or more wives share a house but have their own rooms. The husband generally rotates among these homes by some arrangement, with the rotation system varying between families. Most husbands have little or no space of their own.

Child care practices vary between families. Most expect each child's mother to have primary responsibility for raising the child, but the actual work is frequently shared among wives in ways that adapt to changing circumstances. Many families house teenagers in shared rooms segregated by sex, with younger children kept closer to their mother. In most families the father has substantially less involvment with his children than does the mother.

Most husbands celebrate the anniversary of their marriage to each wife, generally by doing something special and personal with her. Relatively few holidays bring the entire family together for a celebration; in the largest families, this would be a major undertaking. Common family celebrations are Thanksgiving, Christmas and father's birthday. Several fundamentalist families decline to celebrate Christmas on the grounds that it has become too commercial.

Most plural wives must work, apparently out of economic necessity. A few have their own businesses. Although the husband is the nominal patriarch, most plural wives see less of their husband than a monogamous wife would and most are therefore independent and self-reliant. However, the husband is expected to be there when needed.

Both researchers are male, and most of the interviews were arranged through husbands. In fact, men were in practical control of the interview process with a few minor exceptions. It is interesting to speculate on what might come out if women were to interview plural wives in the absence of any men.

I bought this book not too long ago, and I gotta say it is probably the most comprehensive research-based book on polygamy in America. The polygamists that this book focuses on are modern-day or contemporary Mormon polygamists. Just looking at the topics mentioned in the table of contents for this book impressed me when I saw all of the signficant (and in some cases, interesting) topics that are covered and seeing how well those topics were presented in the book. I have not finished reading the entire book from cover to cover but from what I've read so far this book is well presented and informative.


In response to one reviewer who mentioned that the interview subjects were men, to that I will say that is in part FALSE and misleading. The interview configuration SOMETIMES involved the husbands alone, but other times the interviews involved the husband and one or more wife, other times the children, the relatives, and yes sometimes the wife or wives alone, etc. Now the authors do specify that they rarely met with a wife (or wives) ALONE, but my point in bringing this up is that that is far different than saying that the subjects of the interviews were only MEN, when you factor in that the wives, relatives, children, were involved and sometimes without the husband. This is clearly stated on pg. 451, the section titled "participants in meetings".

Another important point to make is that the authors obtained their information not from just interviews but also OBSERVATIONS even going as far as living with some of the families and participating in their social events for some periods of time (Pg. 447, 1st paragraph, 5th sentence; pg. 450-451, the section titled, "interviews and observations"; pg. 454-455, section titled, "Locations of meetings"). So even if the interview process was not enough, the authors also lived among these polygamists at times and observed their interactions with each other, especially the wives. The jealousies that some of these wives went through are clearly documented like on pgs. 353-357, and also "jealousy" is listed in the index with page numbers to show where some of the information on jealousy are covered in this book.

More can be said about the things this book covers, but I'd recommend reading this book if you're looking for a scholarly research-based look into polygamy in America, mainly Mormon polygamy since Mormon Fundamentalists are predominantly the ones who practice polygamy in America. Both of the authors are well-credentialed scientists and this book wasn't a hard read for me, and I'm not a scientist myself- I'm just a college student who's curious about polygamy.