Copyright 2001-2002 © The Dark Side of Salt Lake  City

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.

The Women

I don't actually know who she is; she looks so much like the women in my family, and I feel she is so much like the women you meet by reading the diaries of early pioneer women. I found her on a cabinet card in the Salt Lake Valley and I adopted her. I look at her and think of women like Mary Haskin Parker Richards and her wonderful diary. She survived the early migration across the plains to the Salt Lake Valley despite having sever bouts of what was probably malaria.  All the while her husband, who she was desperately in love with, was away on a mission to England. Brigham Young sent the men there to collect converts and wives. So after having missed their husbands for months on end, their beloved would frequently return with one or more new women to share his affections with. This, of course, happened to Mary. The daughter of  one such pioneer woman , Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, wrote, "I had, in hours of temptation, when seeing the trials of my mother, felt to rebel. I hated polygamy in my heart."  

The early homes they lived in were often one or two small rooms that were added on to later, as is seen in this picture. The section to the right was all there was originally. A man would do his best to fill his house with woman and keep them all pregnant. It doesn't take too much imagination to realize this was a perverse situation. This is what happens when men let the little head do the thinking. 

So what kind of women marry other men's wives? In 1869 the Rev. John Todd visited the Salt Lake Valley and made this observation.

 "You will want to know how such a fifth or ninth part of a wife looks and acts. I reply, the elder women look sad and worn, as if the path had been very hard and is a weary one and when age creeps on, and they have to reap neglect, being not now necessary to the husband, even from habit solitary and alone, with nothing divine to support or cheer them. The young women look as they are, brazen-faced and stupidly bold very much as wrong-doers of their sex appear in every part of the world. As for that purity which William Hepworth Dixon ascribes to them, and which they claim, I have only to say that the Gentiles who dwell there and know them well, scout at the idea; and if you want further evidence, go into their market-house, and you will hear language from these young Mormon women, which, for obscenity and vileness, can hardly be equaled in the vilest alley in New York.”