House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, 1835-1870

"Yes. Polygamy has always been and probably will always be a point of fascination for anyone who’s interested in Mormonism. Thankfully, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is the most prominent and skilled historian to address the topic. She is known for her great works in women’s history, most prominently her A Midwife’s Tale , which won the Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize in the early 1990s. She was raised in the LDS tradition, and so she turned to House Full of Females to do two things. One, to really unpack polygamy for a broader audience, to explain how polygamy actually operated and where it fitted into the world, but also to centre women in the history of Mormonism. Because what A House Full of Females does is ask the question, ‘What happens if we frame the first 50 years or so of Mormonism, not around Joseph Smith and the men who held ecclesiastical offices, but around the women who lived in their households and ran their cultural events and allowed society to function?’ “You can capture much of the American story when looking at the evolution of the Latter-Day Saints” So, while the book does exceptionally well at unpacking the nuances of how polygamy operated—from families where there’s just two wives connected to a struggling husband, to a commanding patriarch who has 50 wives—it really is also a social history of the day-to-day lives of the thousands and thousands of women who made Mormonism work. One of the great things about the book is that it shows the great variety of perspectives that women had toward polygamy: those who were staunch defenders of it, and who truly believed that it was of divine origin; and those who were on the other side, who were sceptical of the practice and ended up rejecting polygamy—as well as the many who fell in between those two poles, who maybe think it’s divine, but are struggling and not quite sure. One of the key feelings you get from reading the book is a sense of ambiguity from a lot of women trying to make sense of their religious world. That’s something that lots of people can connect to, because many people are ambivalent about their religious, political, and social connections. And to be able to see those same anxieties in place with the Mormon women, ensconced in polygamy, really brings that story alive and makes it much more relevant."