ULRICH: I think it is more appropriate to refer to them as refugees. These were leaders, but their pioneering wasn’t chosen. They certainly were powered from homes in Missouri. They certainly were pushed from houses in Illinois.
GROSS: Because of polygamy?
ULRICH: maybe not because of polygamy alone. In Missouri, polygamy was not an issue. In Illinois, it actually was an aspect. But the bigger factor try group didn’t like communities that banded collectively and chosen alike and cooperated economically.
As well as endangered her next-door neighbors politically because they could out-vote all of them. Generally there weren’t a lot of them in numerical terms and conditions when you look at the country or perhaps in the whole world. But there had been an awful lot of them in small, early settlements in very unstable boundary communities. And therefore triggered a lot of conflict.
GROSS: Thus anything i came across quite interesting, your quote a reporter from nj whom wrote, what’s the utilization of women’s suffrage when it is used to bolster upwards an institution therefore degrading into the intercourse and demoralizing to community? And he’s referring, indeed there, to plural wedding. But then, two famous suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, assistance suffrage in Utah and state, you are sure that, polygamy and monogamy, they truly are both oppressive techniques for women.
And Stanton claims, the condition of females try bondage today and must be very, provided these are generally shut out around the globe of services, powerless dependents on guy for bread. Therefore I consider it is interesting to see both of these suffragists basically state, oh, you imagine plural wedding was oppressive? Better, take a look at your own wedding. Your monogamous matrimony is oppressive to girls, also.
ULRICH: Yes, positively. They’re discussing regulations
GROSS: So she had no legal rights over the woman revenue, the lady residential property. She didn’t come with ownership over all of them.
ULRICH: their money, the girl – their money, the lady belongings – she couldn’t sue and take a case to judge except under a father or a spouse – therefore addiction. The right to divorce – although splitting up statutes comprise significantly liberalized from inside the nineteenth millennium in most parts of the country, it was definitely – you’d to prove either adultery – they got a bit for real punishment to be reasons for splitting up.
Utah didn’t come with fault split up from the beginning. It had been most, most available and pretty usual. And specially, In my opinion that produced plural relationship workable. If you don’t like it, you could potentially set. There had been no real stigma, that is what’s interesting. Really, i cannot claim that. Without a doubt, there should have come. Individuals could have seemed down on other people. But people that happened to be higher government for the church got several divorces. Women that had been divorced went on to get married anybody higher-up for the hierarchy. It is a really various globe than we think about. Therefore instead of evaluating plural relationship during the nineteenth century to your notions of women’s legal rights these days, we must compare plural marriage, monogamy immediately after which additional institutions that actually distressed folks in the nineteenth millennium, like 
prostitution including, different varieties of bigamous relationships.
Therefore Mormons would argue, many American boys need several intimate lovers. They’re not responsible. They do not acknowledge them. They do not provide them with self-respect. They don’t legit kids. So polygamy is an approach to the terrible licentiousness of more Americans. Seems like a strange debate to you nowadays, but in this age, they made feeling to some anyone.
GROSS: Well, another thing about the early split up laws in Utah – didn’t which also allow easier for women in monogamous marriages – and perhaps monogamous marriages outside the Mormon belief – to divorce her husbands and enter into a plural wedding with a Mormon household?
ULRICH: Yes. We imagine wedding during the nineteenth century as a really stable establishment sustained by rules – rigorous statutes, difficult become divorced, etc, et cetera. Although significant method of splitting up in 19th century got most likely just making community.
ULRICH: And guys performed more easily than women. But bigamy was rather common inside nineteenth 100 years. What is actually fascinating about the Mormons is that they sanctified brand-new connections for women that has fled abusive or alcoholic husbands. Several these partnered both monogamously and polygamous on the list of Latter-day Saints. In addition they had been welcomed inside people and not stigmatized.
One lady said that when Joseph Smith hitched this lady, despite the fact that she was legitimately partnered to a person in sc – you understand, it absolutely was a long ways aside – it actually was like receiving fantastic oranges in bins of sterling silver. This is certainly, she wasn’t an outcast woman. She ended up being a lady who’d generated her own possibility and had leftover a bad situation, and from now on she would enter a relationship with a man she could respect.