More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840-1910 | 
| Author: Kathryn M Daynes
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Category: Book
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 213420
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 328
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.1
ISBN: 0252075609
Dewey Decimal Number: 306
EAN: 9780252075605
ASIN: 0252075609
Publication Date: June 9, 2008
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Product Description
More Wives Than One offers an in-depth look at the long-term interaction between belief and the practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, among the Latter-day Saints. Focusing on the small community of Manti, Utah, Kathryn M. Daynes provides an intimate view of how Mormon doctrine and Utah laws on marriage and divorce were applied in people's lives.
Book Description
More Wives Than One offers an in-depth look at the long-term interaction between belief and the practice of polygamy, or plural marriage, among the Latter-day Saints. Focusing on the small community of Manti, Utah, Kathryn M. Daynes provides an intimate view of how Mormon doctrine and Utah laws on marriage and divorce were applied in people's lives.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Pathbreaking Study of 19th Century Mormon Polygamy April 3, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
Here is the review of MORE WIVES THAN ONE that I presented orally at the annual conference of the Mormon History Association in Tucson, Arizona, in May 2002:
As a non-Mormon historian and long-time member of the Mormon History Association who has devoted much of his scholarly life to trying to understand the development of 19th-century Mormon polygamy, I am very pleased to provide an assessment of Kathryn M. Daynes's remarkable new book, MORE WIVES THAN ONE: TRANSFORMATION OF THE MORMON MARRIAGE SYSTEM, 1840-1910. This extraordinary study clearly deserves the "best book of the year" award it has just received from this 1,000 member historical association.
For several decades now, first-rate scholarship has proliferated about Mormonism's most controversial 19th century social practice, plural marriage. Virtually every aspect of Mormon polygamy has been analyzed, discussed, and dissected from a variety of perspectives. Historians have explored the intellectual and social origins of the practice; how it worked in Utah during the second half of the 19th century; the crusade against Mormon polygamy that led to Wilford Woodruff's 1890 Manifesto ending public Latter-day Saint support for the practice; the post-Manifesto expressions of polygamy in splinter off-shoots from the Latter-day Saint movement; while comparative studies have analyzed Mormon polygamy within its larger American and world context.
These books have added immeasurably to our understanding of the remarkable complexity of Mormon plural marriage. No other study, however, can match Kathy Daynes's achievement in MORE WIVES THAN ONE.
Every time a new book about Mormon polygamy appears, I can't help wondering whether it will actually add anything new to what we already know. MORE WIVES THAN ONE, however, breaks new ground on many different fronts simultaneously. Overall, it provides the first comprehensive and fully convincing scholarly analysis of the origin, development, and dissolution of Mormon plural marriage during the 19th century. Daynes's analysis also shows how Mormon polygamy developed in relation to both monogamous Mormon marriage practices and mainstream American family practices of the time. Using the word "definitive" is always risky. But if this book isn't the definitive analysis of Mormon polygamy practice in 19th century America, we'll have to wait a long time before anyone surpasses this superb book.
The best shorthand way I can characterize Daynes's overall achievement is to remind you of an old Peanuts cartoon. In it, Linus and Charlie Brown are lying on their backs on a hill looking up at the clouds. Linus is saying something along the following lines: "Aren't clouds fascinating! I can see so many things in the clouds. Why, over there I can see the stoning of Stephen. And there is King John signing the Magna Carta. And up there is Napoleon just before the battle of Waterloo. What do you see in the clouds, Charlie Brown?" And Charlie Brown answers, "Well, I was going to say that I saw a doggie and duckie and a kittie, but I think I just changed my mind."
Compared to Daynes's MORE WIVES THAN ONE, most of the rest of us who have been studying Mormon polygamy might well have been describing doggies and duckies and kitties, metaphorically speaking. I'm exaggerating a bit here, of course; many of us have also written fine studies of our own. Yet Kathy Daynes's MORE WIVES THAN ONE stands out from all the other books on Mormon polygamy yet published in at least seven ways:
First, the book provides a balanced, nuanced, and convincing assessment of the entire sweep of the development of 19th century Mormon polygamy, beginning with its origins in Nauvoo, Illinois during the 1840s and continuing through to its dissolution among mainstream Mormons during the two decades after the Woodruff Manifesto of 1890. Virtually all previous scholarly studies of Mormon polygamy--even if they discuss the overall development of the practice--have focused on one specific time, location, or issue connected with polygamy. Daynes does analyze a specific Mormon town, Manti, Utah, and the changes in its family and kinship practices across three quarters of a century, but she uses this model case study of Manti to illustrate the development of plural marriage throughout virtually the entire period when polygamy was advocated and practiced within mainstream Mormonism in Utah.
MORE WIVES THAN ONE is exceptional, in the second place, because it skillfully places its analysis of the development of Mormon polygamy within the larger context of 19th-century American family values and practices. Daynes has mastered the rich and highly nuanced recent literature on 19th-century American family experience. She skillfully and unobtrusively makes comparisons with what was going on in mainstream American families, while focusing her attentions on the distinctive characteristics of Mormon families--especially polygamous Mormon families.
Third, this study combines a staggering amount of primary genealogical and quantitative research into family records, census data, and similar sources, with compelling anecdotes, resulting in an engrossing read throughout. Most scholars either describe their quantitative findings in mind-numbing detail or use a narrative approach. Daynes, however, skillfully combines both quantitative and qualitative approaches throughout her book.
Fourth, Daynes breaks new ground by creatively analyzing how the religious and social dimensions of Mormon polygamy were influenced by the American legal system. She explores how formal legal regulations in Utah (and in the rest of the United States) were related to the Mormon church's distinctive religious supervision of its own marriage and family practices. And she shows how the eventual Mormon loss of independent control over its marriage practices in Utah was closely related to the decline of the plural marriage system and the reversion of mainstream Mormonism to monogamy by the early twentieth century.
Fifth, this book analyzes how plural marriage helped Mormons address difficult economic problems, especially during the early years of Utah settlement. Daynes argues that polygamy helped redistribute scarce economic resources in early Utah because poor or even destitute Mormon women typically became plural wives of more well-off men. Utah's economic progress after the most difficult early days of pioneer settlement, Daynes argues, combined with other internal and external factors, gradually undercuttingthe appeal of plural marriage for Mormons by the end of the 19th century.
Sixth, Daynes argues that 19th-century Mormon flexibility in granting divorces--when combined with the church's concurrent encouragement of remarriage--contributed to the initial development of plural marriage. She emphasizes (and perhaps overemphasizes) the positive impact of such Mormon flexibility in dealing with divorce and remarriage, although her study also does include many negative example, as well.
Finally, this book's most striking overall achievement is in demonstrating how remarkably diverse polygamous practice actually was in early Utah. The Mormon plural marriage system--and Daynes shows that it was a system, rather than merely a form of anarchic individualism--was, nevertheless, almost staggeringly complex at times. Daynes helps her readers make human sense of the complexity of plural marriage practice during the last half of the 19th century in Utah by trying to analyze it as part of the larger goals that Mormon Church was trying to accomplish.
On a more personal note, I am pleased to see that this study elaborates and contextualizes some of the most complex and controversial issues that I broached more than two decades ago in my first book RELIGION AND SEXUALITY (Oxford University Press, 1981). Particularly intriguing is the evidence Daynes presents that some form of temporal "proxy husband" arrangements may have been used on a very limited basis during the earliest development Mormon polygamy in Nauvoo, Illinois, as well as in early Utah. Daynes also discusses the Mormon argument that the "alienation of affections" of the woman provided a "biblical" basis for both divorce and polygamy, showing how this may have been related to the strikingly similar use of such arguments in early Utah.
Overall, then, it is hard for me even to begin to express my admiration for Daynes's work. Let me simply conclude with the assessment of another distinguished Mormon historian, Dean May, who states: "This superb book is far and away the best study of Mormon polygamy ever to appear. Kathryn Daynes provides a feast of information and historical context, summarizing and analyzing intelligently and with admirable balance virtually every issue that has ever been raised in connection with Mormon polygamy. This is a gem." It really is.
--Lawrence Foster, author of RELIGION AND SEXUALITY (1981); WOMEN, FAMILY, AND UTOPIA (1991); and FREE LOVE IN UTOPIA (2001).
 A Solid Discussion of the Practice of Mormon Plural Marriage May 30, 2003
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Plural marriage was by far Joseph Smith's most controversial doctrine. The Mormon founder began the practice in the 1830s and established it as a central part of the Mormon religion in the 1840s. It defined the religion's distinctiveness until the beginning of the twentieth century. Accordingly, and appropriately, it has received considerable historical attention. Kathryn Daynes' "More Wives than One" offers an in-depth look at the long-term interaction between belief and the practice of polygamy among the Mormons in the central Utah town of Manti.Following the obligatory, and rather unsatisfactory, opening chapter on the origins of Mormon plural marriage in Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois, Daynes begins a sustained analysis of polygamy in Manti. She shows that plural marriage followed no monolithic pattern there, but that each approach had its own rights and responsibilities. Using biographical and demographic data she also demonstrates the factors shaping the practice, analyses the ingredients of plural marriage, and explores how it evolved over time. She discusses how Mormon marriage practices solidified a patriarchal model of society, one that diverged sharply from the "companionate" model of marriage and egalitarian social ideas then taking hold in mainstream America. This divergence prompted resistance from elsewhere in the United States, eventually forcing ending of the practice by the church. This is a well down work that provides important insights into the Mormon's "peculiar institution."
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