A History of the Wife (39 page)

A twenty-seven-page diary remains from the pen of Maria Abagail Henry Adams, who stayed with her small son in Dublin, New Hamp- shire, after her husband, Charles Wilson Adams, went to California. Between January 1860 and July 1861 she carefully noted the daily vicissitudes of the weather (“pleasant,” “rained,” “snowed,” “bluster- ing,” “another cloudy dull day”) along with the humdrum details of small-town life in New England (church attendance, weddings, funer- als, blueberrying, drying apples, occasional sicknesses, visits to and from her relatives and friends).

Yet punctuating these sober entries are cries of longing for her dis- tant husband. “Oh if I could only see him tonight. I feel so lonely. I feel as though I had not a friend in the world” (April 15, 1860). “Oh, I have felt so lonesome today, how I wish Charles was here” (May 16, 1860). “Oh! How I wish I could be with him but I cannot” (July 21, 1860). “It is two years today since I last saw Charles” (February 21, 1861).

What was the fate of this loving wife, separated from her husband by three thousand miles when she was still in her early twenties? Because her diary and a portrait of Charles and Maria Adams were bequeathed to the California Historical Association in San Francisco, one has rea-

son to believe that she made the long journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast and was eventually reunited with her husband.

MORMON PLURAL MARRIAGES

Any account of wives in the West must not overlook the special situ- ation of Mormons practicing polygamy. Contrary to the popular view, not all Mormon families were polygamous—indeed, estimates suggest the figure was only 15 to 20 percent.
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And of these, about two-thirds contained only two wives and 20 percent, three. Men with four or more wives were usually prominent church leaders, who indicated their adherence to Mormon theology by their conspicuous display of numer- ous wives and children.

Mormon doctrine professed that the more wives a man had and the more children a woman had, the more they would be rewarded in heaven. Marriages performed in Mormon temples were (and are) sup- posed to continue after death. Polygamy—or plural marriage, the pre- ferred term—was a fundamental tenet of the sect between 1852, after the Mormons had settled in Utah, and 1890, when the president of the church bowed to U.S. anti-polygamy laws. For at least forty years, even wives who admitted to a personal preference for a monogamous union defended the system of plural marriage because it had been ordained by the church and was, in the words of one wife, “necessary to . . . sal- vation.” “If polygamy is the Lord’s order, we must carry it out,” declared another plural wife.
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The typical polygamous family began with a man of about twenty- three marrying a woman three years his junior; this would be his only legal marriage. A dozen years later he would take as his second wife a woman eleven years younger than his first wife. If he took a third wife, she too would be in her early twenties at the time of marriage. Whether they were in polygamous or monogamous unions, Mormon wives had a high fertility rate, averaging seven to eight children.
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According to the husband’s means and preferences, he would settle his wives in different rooms of the same house, or in different houses, sometimes quite far from each other. Mormon wives often found them- selves in situations where they had to learn to live communally and cooperatively under the same roof with a co-wife or co-wives and chil- dren from various beds. This could create strong ties of sisterhood,

especially in cases where a pair of sisters shared the same husband, as well as the potential for friction and jealousy.

If she was settled at a distance from her husband’s headquarters, a Mormon wife was often remarkably independent. She had considerable autonomy in raising her children—indeed, the mother-child bond usu- ally took precedence over the conjugal bond, since the husband was shared with other wives, often lived at a distance, and was frequently away on religious missions. It was not uncommon for a Mormon wife to work outside the house—the Mormon church encouraged women to be financially entrepreneurial and self-sufficient. Unlike Victorian middle-class wives of the larger society, Mormon wives were by no means restricted to domesticity; they worked as farmers, seamstresses, and businesswomen, and some even became nurses and doctors. Many were active in the Relief Society, an organization founded in 1842 as a support organization for religious, charitable, and cultural works. Later, between 1872 and 1914, some of the most progressive women pro- duced a newspaper called the
Women’s Exponent,
which expressed a wide range of concerns, including those associated with the fin de siè- cle “New Woman.” Clearly nineteenth-century Mormon marriages were more complex than the popular view of them as “harems” catering to male lust.

The memoirs left by Mary Ann Hafen for her descendants give a vivid picture of her life as a plural wife in Utah and Nevada.
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After the loss of her first husband (for whom she had been a second wife), she was urged by her parents to accept the offer of John Hafen. But he, too, had a first wife, Susette, who was not happy with the idea. Because of Susette’s objections, it was only with the greatest reluctance and an abundance of tears that Mary Ann consented to the marriage. John Hafen was to take two more wives, and Mary Ann Hafen was to have seven children.

After the birth of her sixth child in 1891, Mary Ann moved to Nevada, while her husband and his other families remained in Utah. As she tells the story:

Because Santa Clara [Utah] had so little land for so many settlers, we decided it would be best for me to take my young family and move to Bunkerville [Nevada], where a settlement had been started and

where there was more and cheaper land. . . .

I knew I was going to something of the same hardships I had known in childhood days; that my children were to grow up in a strange land with scarcely a relative near; and that they too would have to share in the hardships of subduing a new country. . . .

As soon as we could we planted corn, cane, cotton, squashes and melons in the field; and vegetables in the town lot. The brush fences were but poor protection from the stray animals that went foraging about. However we got a pretty good crop from everything planted that year. Albert [her son] dug up three young mulberry trees from Mesquite and planted them around our shadeless house.

Mary Ann initially missed the larger family in Santa Clara, and man- aged to make a trip back every year. At first, her husband visited regu- larly. “But being Bishop of Santa Clara,” she tells us, “and with his other three families, he could not be with us much. So I had to care for my seven children mostly by myself.” At the birth of her seventh child, “a fine husky boy, weighting 12
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⁄
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pounds,” she was assisted by the wife of the local Mormon Bishop, who came for the customary ten days. And where was her husband at this time? He came for a visit only after the baby had been born. The author volunteered with feisty pride: “I have never had a doctor at the birth of any of my children, nor at any other time for that matter, and I have never paid more than five dollars for the services of a mid-wife.”

Mary Ann Hafen’s story continues with an account of her work as a de facto head of family.

I did not want to be a burden on my husband, but tried with my family to be self-supporting. I picked cotton on shares to add to our income; would take my baby to the fields while the other children were at school, for I never took the children out of school if it could possibly be avoided. That cotton picking was very tiresome, back-breaking work but it helped to clothe my children.

I always kept a garden so we could have green things to eat. Keeping that free from weeds and watering it twice a week took lots of time. With a couple of pigs, a cow, and some chickens, we got along pretty well. . . .

This straightforward narrative attests to the self-sufficiency shown by

many Mormon wives. There is scant self-pity, and only the slightest hint that polygamy could be stressful for both spouses. Other women expressed more jealousy and pain. For example, the plural wife Annie Clark Tanner wrote in her autobiography:

I am sure that women would never have accepted polygamy had it not been for their religion. No woman ever consented to its practice without great sacrifice on her part. There is something so sacred about the relationship of husband and wife that a third party in the family is sure to disturb the confidence and security that formerly existed.
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Similarly, Jane Snyder Richards, first wife of the Mormon apostle Franklin D. Richards, recounted the trials she endured as a first wife obliged to welcome into her family ten other wives. Mrs. Hubert Howe Bancroft, who recorded Richards’s story for her historian husband in 1880, concluded that Mormon women considered polygamy “a reli- gious duty and schooled themselves to bear its discomforts as a sort of religious penance.”
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Brigham Young, the religious leader who brought the Mormons to Utah, admitted that “women say they are unhappy” and that some men recognize the unhappiness brought into a first marriage by a second wife. Young insisted that Mormon men and women “embrace the Gospel—the whole of it,” including plural marriages.
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If not, there was the alternative of divorce. The Utah divorce law of February 4, 1852, was one of the most liberal in the nation, and was especially favorable to women. In addition to the usual reasons, divorces were granted to plaintiffs “when it shall be made to appear to the satisfaction of the court, that the parties cannot live in peace and union together, and that their welfare requires a separation.”
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Women finding themselves in intolerable marital situations often initiated divorce proceedings, whereas a husband had more difficulty obtaining a divorce, if his wife was opposed to it. But he did have the option of taking another wife.

Love does not seem to have been a major criterion in the choice of a Mormon husband or wife. If romance played a part, it is certainly not highlighted in women’s reminiscences. Instead, Mormon women were taught to choose husbands with an eye toward family compatibility, financial responsibility, and the greater good of the community. In these ways, Mormon society departed from the ethos of romantic love and

exclusive domesticity that was promoted for mainstream American women.

The case of Hannah Crosby exemplifies this marital philosophy. Her decision to marry into a plural family in Utah during the 1870s was greeted with disbelief by her nonpolygamous Mormon family. She admitted to them that she did not really love her intended husband “as lovers love, though I loved his wives and the spirit of their home.” And indeed, it was the spirit of sisterhood among the co-wives that she prized most in her marriage. “We wives,” she wrote, “had our work so systematized and so well ordered that we could, with ease, do a great deal. One would for a period superintend the cooking and kitchen work with the help of the girls, another make beds and sweep, another comb and wash all the children. At seven thirty all would be ready to sit down to breakfast.”

During their pregnancies and confinement, all “stepped into the breach and helped each other.” “For many years,” she insisted, “we lived thus, working together cooking over the same large stove with the same great kettles, eating at the same long table without a word of unpleasantness. . . .” She spoke so little of her husband that he almost seems superfluous, though he was the patriarchal linchpin around which the marriage revolved. Still, when she contemplated the life promised her by Mormon theology, she thought only of her relation- ship with the two other wives. “To me it is a joy to know that we laid the foundation of a life to come while we lived in that plural marriage, that we three who loved each other more than sisters, will go hand in hand together down all eternity.”

Hannah Crosby was an articulate spokesperson for the merits of plu- ral marriage. “No one,” she argued, “can tell the advantages of that sys- tem until he has lived it. We enjoyed many privileges that single wiferey never knew.”
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A FEW GUARDED GENERALIZATIONS

Given the enormous diversity of Victorian women’s lives, generaliza- tions about marriage, such as I presented at the beginning of the last chapter, must always remain open to question. Did the ideology of sep- arate spheres for husbands and wives prevail from London and Wash- ington to Iowa and California? Did it regulate the lives of a New York

proponent of women’s rights, a Georgia plantation mistress, a cook in a California mining town, and a toll-keeper’s wife in Nevada? It is obvi- ous that the doctrine of separate spheres, with its associated corollary of domesticity for women, did not exist uniformly across class and geo- graphical lines. The further one descended downward on the economic and social ladder, the less likely one was to discriminate between “men’s” work and “women’s” work. When it was a matter of survival, women, married or not, took whatever jobs they could to keep them- selves and their families solvent. Similarly, the further one moved west- ward, the more likely one was to share work with one’s husband, at least initially. Husbands and wives worked side by side as farmers in Kansas, as ranchers in Wyoming, and as boardinghouse operators in California. The frontier-breaking spirit that inspired many pioneer men and women in the first place often led to a subversion of gender bound- aries as they moved westward.

Nonetheless, the ideology of separate spheres and the cult of domes- ticity did not give up ground so easily. Even on the overland trail, work was divided by gender: men drove the oxen and repaired the gear, women cooked, washed, sewed, and minded the babies.
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Although women were often required to assume nontraditional activities—most notably, collecting buffalo dung for fuel—they were also expected to provide all the services that wives and mothers traditionally provided, without reciprocity from the men. Each day they had to “hurry scurry to get breakfast” and each evening they cooked “enough to last until the next night.”
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