Mormonismo e Poligamia/Prevalência de em Utah

Índice

Prevalence of polygamy in Utah

  NEEDS TRANSLATION  

Tópicos do Evangelho: "Embora alguns líderes tenham tido grandes famílias polígamas, dois terços dos homens polígamos tinha apenas duas mulheres de cada vez"

"O Casamento Plural e as Famílias Polígamas nos Primórdios de Utah," Tópicos do Evangelho em LDS.org:

Ainda assim, alguns padrões são discerníveis, e corrigem alguns mitos. Embora alguns líderes tenham tido grandes famílias polígamas, dois terços dos homens polígamos tinha apenas duas mulheres de cada vez .18 Os líderes da Igreja reconheceram que o casamento plural podia ser particularmente difícil para as mulheres. O divórcio estava, portanto, disponível para as mulheres que eram infelizes no casamento; um novo casamento também estava prontamente disponibilizado.19 As mulheres se casavam em idades relativamente jovens na primeira década do estabelecimento em Utah (16 ou 17 anos, ou, raramente, mais jovens), que era típico de mulheres que viviam em áreas remotas na época.20 Em outros lugares, as mulheres casavam em idades mais avançadas à medida que a sociedade amadurecia. Quase todas as mulheres se casavam, bem como uma grande porcentagem de homens. Na verdade, parece que se casava uma porcentagem maior de homens em Utah do que em outros lugares nos Estados Unidos na época. Provavelmente a metade das pessoas que viviam no território de Utah em 1857 passaram pela experiência de viver em uma família polígama como esposo, esposa ou filho, em algum momento da vida.21 Por volta de 1870, de 25 a 30 por cento da população vivia em lares polígamos, e parece que o percentual continuou a diminuir nos 20 anos seguintes.

  NEEDS TRANSLATION  

Question: What was the prevalence of polygamy in Utah and how many wives did most polygamist males have?

Nota: "Esta seção wiki foi baseada parcialmente em uma revisão do livro de G.D. Smith Nauvoo Polygamy. Como tal, ele se concentra na apresentação desse autor dos dados. Para ler a resenha completa, siga o link. Gregory L. Smith, A review of Nauvoo Polygamy:...but we called it celestial marriage by George D. Smith. FARMS Review, Vol. 20, Issue 2. (Detailed book review)

About 15-20% of families were polygamous, and most had only two wives

G. D. Smith’s desire to correct underestimates in some Latter-day Saint publications should not be license to exaggerate the norm—whether in reference to groups or individuals (such as Johnson)—in the other direction.

Most polygamists in Utah had only two wives. About 15-20% of families were polygamous, though the impact on the LDS experience was profound:

Excluding inactive men, “over a third of all husbands’ time, nearly three-quarters of all women-years, and well over half of all child-years were spent in polygamy before 1880.”

G. D. Smith provides considerable statistical information, but he exaggerates even there. Benjamin F. Johnson, “representative of the mainstream in LDS practice,” he tells us, “eventually married seven wives—a few short of the model of ten talents” (p. 166). Is seven wives really the “mainstream” for the Latter-day Saint practice of polygamy?

Both Stanley Ivins and Kathryn Daynes have made estimates of the number of plural wives with Utah polygamists. Their data are summarized in the table below:

Number of wives	Ivins (%)	Daynes (%)
2	66.3	66
3	21.2	21.3
4	6.7	8
5	3	4.7
6 or more	<3	Included in "5"

The claim that seven wives represents some type of “mainstream” is erroneous

The claim that seven wives represents some type of “mainstream” is erroneous—such prolific espousers were well below 5 percent overall. He later claims that “since institutional [LDS Church] histories have minimized the incidence and profile of polygamy . . . , it is easy to imagine that most men who entered polygamy did so in a cursory way. In reality, the typical Utah polygamist whose roots in the principle extended back to Nauvoo, had between three and four wives” (p. 289; see p. 286). G. D. Smith’s analysis disguises, however, that polygamists with Nauvoo roots were a tiny minority. “Most men who entered polygamy” had only two wives, and a large majority (>80%) had no more than three. Even these would probably not think of their participation as “cursory,” since a majority of men never practiced plural marriage at all. Probably 15 to 20 percent of Latter-day Saint families were polygamous, “with variations from place to place and from decade to decade.”

G. D. Smith even knows about these data from Ivins (though he ignores Daynes) but places them several chapters away, in a completely different context (see p. 535–536).

Johnson exceeded even the average of Nauvoo’s “early adopters,” who had far more wives, on average, than the vast majority of Utah polygamists. Johnson may have been “mainstream” among polygamists at Nauvoo—but polygamy was restricted to a relatively small core in Nauvoo. It was not “mainstream” for the entire church at all. And most Utahans never approached the number of wives achieved by those men who began the practice in Nauvoo. Any attempt to extrapolate patterns in Nauvoo to the rest of Latter-day Saint history is fraught with pitfalls.

In short, Johnson was extraordinary except among the highly selected group of Nauvoo-era polygamists. G. D. Smith insists elsewhere that before 1890 “the number of [polygamy] practitioners had expanded exponentially.” In support of this, we are told that Orderville, Utah, had 67 percent of its members in plural households (pp. 535–36). Mathematical quibbles about whether the adoption of plural marriage was truly “exponential” aside, this figure is misleading. G. D. Smith leaves unmentioned the study’s observation that Orderville was somewhat unique because “one suspects that membership in Mormondom’s most successful attempt to establish the United Order may have required a commitment to plural matrimony. Unlike the pattern that usually prevailed in Mormon towns, many young men of Orderville entered the celestial order when they first married or soon thereafter.” Nearby Kanab was less successful in its communal economy and had less than half as many polygamists. Furthermore, all of southern Utah was more likely to be polygamist than Utah as a whole, for similar reasons.