Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has kindly shared with us a preview of her Presidential Address, “Runaway Wives 1840-60,” to be delivered next weekend at the Mormon History Association conference in Provo. In 1995, Ulrich joined the history department at Harvard University, where she is now 300th Anniversary University Professor. Register here for the conference if you haven’t already.
I have just finished A House Full of Females: Mormon Diaries, 1835-1870, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in about a year. It is a narrative history exploring the relationship between plural marriage and female organizational life from Kirtland to the passage of woman suffrage.
My Presidential Address picks up on an unexpected discovery in my research—the phenomenon of wives leaving husbands. As I said in the abstract, some women ran away from polygamy, but others left legal husbands to enter plural marriages. To understand that phenomenon, one needs to know more about the nature of monogamy and laws governing it in the same period. Contrary to popular assumptions, marriages were far from stable in this period, either in the United States or in Britain. Extra-legal forms of separation persisted even as legislators began to address the problems of divorce, bigamy, and adultery, and a relatively new concept: “seduction.” When women’s rights activists defined marriage as a form of slavery, they were sensationalizing aspects of household law that acknowledged a husband’s property interest in his wife’s labor and person. In myriad ways, wives (like slaves) exemplified their personhood by running away.
Situating Mormon stories alongside this larger history (instead of in relationship to an idealized “Victorian” ideal), helps us to see progressive as well as conservative elements in early Mormonism and helps explain how after 1870 some plural wives could make common cause with radical feminists.
There are several takeaway messages for the present in these stories. The simplest is that debates over the nature of “the family” were as intense in the nineteenth century as today. A more surprising conclusion is that Latter-day Saint ideas were actually more “modern” in some of their attitudes than their antagonists. Their support for divorce, for example, was surprisingly liberal and would surprise most practicing Mormons today. For historians, the takeaway is that there is still a great deal to be learned about the nature of early Mormon marriages if we begin to think comparatively. Given the wealth of data available on Mormon families, it is surprising how little we actually know about the economics of plural marriage, the overall incidence of divorce and remarriage, and the success or failure of informal methods of conflict resolution in the face of alcoholism or domestic violence. Although some of the information we need is as yet inaccessible, there are many topics worth pursuing, not just in the nineteenth century but beyond. If families are at the heart of our theology, it is time we began to look more seriously at how they actually operated.