El Mormonismo y la poligamia/Prevalencia de la poligamia en Utah

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Prevalencia de la poligamia en Utah

Saltar a subtema:

• Temas del Evangelio: "Aunque algunos líderes tenían grandes familias polígamas, dos tercios de los hombres polígamos tenían sólo dos esposas a la vez"
• Pregunta: ¿Cuál fue la prevalencia de la poligamia en Utah y cuántas esposas tenían la mayoría de los varones polígamos?

Temas del Evangelio: "Aunque algunos líderes tenían grandes familias polígamas, dos tercios de los hombres polígamos tenían sólo dos esposas a la vez"

"El matrimonio plural y las familias en los primeros días de Utah," Temas del Evangelio en LDS.org:

Aun así, se pueden discernir algunos patrones, y ellos corrigen algunos mitos. Aunque algunos líderes tenían grandes familias polígamas, dos tercios de los hombres polígamos tenían sólo dos esposas a la vez18. Los líderes de la Iglesia reconocían que los matrimonios plurales podían ser especialmente difíciles para la mujer, por tanto, el divorcio estaba disponible para las mujeres que no eran felices en sus matrimonios; y además, también podían volver a contraer matrimonio si lo deseaban19. Las mujeres se casaban muy jóvenes en la primera década del asentamiento en Utah (16 o 17 años de edad e incluso, rara vez, más jóvenes), lo cual era típico de las mujeres que vivían en las áreas de la frontera en esa época20. Como en otros lugares, las mujeres se casaron a una edad más avanzada a medida que la sociedad maduró. Casi todas las mujeres se casaban y también un gran porcentaje de los hombres. De hecho, parece que en ese momento en Utah se casó un mayor porcentaje de hombres que en otros lugares de los Estados Unidos. Probablemente la mitad de los que vivían en el territorio de Utah en 1857 vivieron en una familia polígama como esposo, esposa o hijo en algún momento durante su vida21. Para 1870, entre un 25 y 30 por ciento de la población vivía en hogares polígamos, y parece que el porcentaje continuó decayendo durante los siguientes 20 años.

Pregunta: ¿Cuál fue la prevalencia de la poligamia en Utah y cuántas esposas tenían la mayoría de los varones polígamos?

  NEEDS TRANSLATION  

Nota: Esta sección wiki se basó en parte en una revisión del libro de G.D. Smith Nauvoo Polygamy. Como tal, se centra en la presentación de ese autor de los datos. Para leer la revisión completa, siga el enlace. 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.