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Webster’s: Polygamy

1. the state or practice of having two or more wives or husbands at the same time; plural marriage.                 

Polyandry

1. a woman with more than one husband.

 The Mormons hide the dark side of Salt  Lake City from the world. This is the Mormon way. Polygamy is a practice that makes slaves of young girls who are married off to older men and there is no help for them from the LDS church.. Neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young cared about the long term effects this practice of polygamy would have on helpless girls and women.

Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith Jr., founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, was born in 1805 and died on June 27, 1844.

His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, was a surprisingly confident woman for her time and financial status. She came from a family that had enjoyed a period of high social standing but had fallen on hard times largely due to Joseph Smith seniors drunkenness. She wrote a book about the history of her life and her family; her father had actually written a book of his experiences in the Revolutionary War. This gave her a dignity and standing, even within her own family, that I believe her son Joseph imitated. I feel that because of this he offered to women he fancied an appreciation irrisistable and scarce in those times. 

Life was a rural affair for most people of that day and farm women were usually managed like farm hands by their husbands. Add to this, women usually didn’t last very long. Consumption, 'tuberculosis,' sepsis from infection after childbirth and the fact that women cared for the sick, caused women to have very short life spans! If you research your genealogy you will find, with in family generations before 1900, a large number of men who had more than one wife but not at the same time. 

My impression is that Joseph Smith was kind, cute and attentive with women. They gladly accepted his overtures of marriage even though he was already married and so were they. This is something that most people don't know, for it has been hidden by the later church -- many of the woman Joseph Smith took to him as wife were already married and still living with their husbands. In fact, of Smith's first 12 wives, nine were polyandrous; none of these woman divorced their husbands during Smiths lifetime. Imagine, as prophet and leader of his church, his followers would naturally give the wife -- a wife of the prophet -- greater respect, this would include her husband.

This also translated into women's participation and stature in the early church. In March 1842 Joseph organized the Female Relief Society. He stated that: "The Society should move according to the ancient Priesthood." and that he "was going to make of this society a ‘kingdom of priests' as in Enoch's day." As in the origional Christian Church and in Paul's day women were indeed apostles and priests.

Here is a good example of the difference in attitude that completely reversed after the death of Joseph Smith Jr. and then under the leadership of Brigham Young.

Actually it is Brigham Young himself that related this story.  He states that Joseph Smith's head men met regularly at his house in a room above the kitchen. Emma Smith, Smith’s first wife, "the wife of my youth" complained bitterly about having to clean up the filthy floor. She said, "the first thing they did was to light their pipes, and, while smoking, talk about the great things of the kingdom, and spit all over the room." This made the profit Prophet think upon the matter, and he inquired of the Lord relating to the conduct of the Elders in using tobacco, and the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom was the result of his inquiry." Now you can bet that Brigham Young was there spitting on Emma’s floor along with those other brutes. Any one of them would probably have admonished her to keep a mop handy. Joseph outlawed their tobacco.

Even though he started the abominable practice of polygamy, there are some other things he didn’t do. He didn’t move them into a house together where they had to fight and claw for what attention they could get and they didn’t have to listen to him making love to one of their sisters in the next room. 

However, a courageous saint, he wasn't; a month previous to his death, he lied in a speech he made before a crowd saying, "What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one." Yet 14-year-old, Helen Mar Kimball, the daughter of Heber C. Kimball, recounted that after initially refusing when her father proposed marriage on Smith's behalf, she finally relented. "I knew that he loved me too well to teach me anything that was not strictly pure, virtuous and exalting in its tendencies; and no one else could have . . . brought me to accept of a doctrine so utterly repugnant and so contrary to all of our former ideas and traditions."

How very sad.