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| + | #REDIRECT[[Plural marriage/Divorce in the 19th century]] |
| − | {{Resource Title|some LDS members did not receive civil divorces before remarrying}}
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| − | {{PolygamyPortal}}
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| − | == ==
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| − | {{Criticism label}}
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| − | Some critics like to emphasize that some LDS members did not receive civil divorces before remarrying—either monogamously or polygamously. They either state or imply that this shows the Saints' cavalier attitude toward the law.
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| − | {{GLS-Nauvoo Polygamy-FARMS-Long}}
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| − | {{CriticalSources}}
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| − | {{Conclusion label}}
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| − | To remarry without a formal divorce was not an unusual thing in pre-Civil War America. The Saints were often poor and spent most of their time on the frontier, where the legal apparatus of the state was particularly feeble. Women who had joined the church and traveled to Zion without their husbands were particularly likely to be poor, and also unlikely to be worried about property rights. Critics usually tell us nothing of all this—with the result that some credulous readers might be horrified by the “loose” marriage practices of the Saints. It also should be remembered that because Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and other Latter-day Saint leaders exercised exclusive jurisdiction over celestial or plural marriages, marriages conducted under their supervision had as much (or more) formal oversight as many traditional marriages in America during the first half of the nineteenth century.
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| − | == ==
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| − | {{Response label}}
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| − | {{SeeAlso|Mormonism and polygamy/Parley P. Pratt's marriage and murder}}
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| − | “From the standpoint of the legal historian,” wrote one expert who is not a Latter-day Saint, “it is perhaps surprising that anyone prosecuted bigamy at all. Given the confusion over conflicting state laws on marriage, there were many ways to escape notice, if not conviction.” <ref>Beverly J. Schwartzberg, “Grass Widows, Barbarians, and Bigamists: Fluid Marriage in Late Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 2001), 51–52. </ref>
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| − | :Bigamy or, rather, serial monogamy (without divorce or death) was a common social experience in early America. Much of the time, serial monogamists were poor and transient people, for whom the property rights that came with a recognized marriage would not have been much of a concern, people whose lives only rarely intersected with the law of marriage. <ref>Hendrik Harlog, ''Man & Wife in America: A History'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 87</ref>
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| − | Nor, not incidentally, were their husbands available for a formal divorce.
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| − | ===Not a "free-for-all"===
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| − | Does this mean that marriage in America was a free-for-all? Hardly, notes Nancy Cott:
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| − | :When couples married informally, or reversed the order of divorce and remarriage, they were not simply acting privately, taking the law into their own hands. . . . A couple about to join or leave an intimate relationship looked for communal sanction. The surrounding local community provided the public oversight necessary. Without resort to the state apparatus, local informal policing by the community affirmed that marriage was a well-defined public institution as well as a contract made by consent. Carrying out the standard obligations of the marriage bargain—cohabitation, husband’s support, wife’s service—seems to have been much more central to the approbation of local communities at this time than how or when the marriage took place, and whether one of the partners had been married elsewhere before. <ref>Nancy F. Cott, ''Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 37.</ref>
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| − | ==See also==
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| − | {{:Mormon ordinances/Divorce/Nineteenth century}}
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| − | == ==
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| − | <references/>
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| − | {{FurtherReading}}
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| − | [[fr:Polygamy/Remarrying without civil divorce]]
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