University of Virginia Library

17. XVII.
VERY MUCH MARRIED.

Are the Mormon women happy?

I give it up. I don't know.

It is at Great Salt Lake City as it is in Boston.
If I go out to tea at the Wilkinses in Boston, I am
pretty sure to find Mr. Wilkins all smiles and sunshine,
or Mrs. Wilkins all gentleness and politeness.
I am entertained delightfully, and after tea little
Miss Wilkins shows me her Photograph Album, and
plays the march from Faust on the piano for me. I
go away highly pleased with my visit; and yet the
Wilkinses may fight like cats and dogs in private.
I may no sooner have struck the sidewalk than Mr.
W. will be reaching for Mrs. W.'s throat.

Thus it is in the City of the Saints. Apparently,
the Mormon women are happy. I saw them at
their best, of course—at balls, tea-parties, and the
like. They were like other women as far as my

observation extended. They were hooped, and
furbelowed, and shod, and white-collared, and
bejewelled; and like women all over the world,
they were softer-eyed and kinder-hearted than men
can ever hope to be.

The Mormon girl is reared to believe that the
plurality wife system (as it is delicately called here)
is strictly right; and in linking her destiny with a
man who has twelve wives, she undoubtedly considers
she is doing her duty. She loves the man, probably,
for I think it is not true, as so many writers
have stated, that girls are forced to marry whomsoever
“the Church” may dictate. Some parents no
doubt advise, connive, threaten, and in aggravated
cases incarcerate here, as some parents have always
done elsewhere, and always will do as long as petticoats
continue to be an institution.

How these dozen or twenty wives get along without
heartburnings and hairpullings, I can't see.

There are instances on record, you know, where a
man don't live in a state of uninterrupted bliss with
one wife. And to say that a man can possess
twenty wives without having his special favorite, or

favorites, is to say that he is an angel in boots—
which is something I have never been introduced
to. You never saw an angel with a Beard, although
you may have seen the Bearded Woman.

The Mormon woman is early taught that man,
being created in the image of the Saviour, is far
more godly than she can ever be, and that for her
to seek to monopolize his affections is a species of
rank sin. So she shares his affections with five or
six or twenty other women, as the case may be.

A man must be amply able to support a number
of wives before he can take them. Hence, perhaps,
it is that so many old chaps in Utah have young
and blooming wives in their seraglios, and so many
yonng men have only one.

I had a man pointed out to me who married an
entire family. He had originally intended to marry
Jane, but Jane did not want to leave her widowed
mother. The other three sisters were not in the
matrimonial market for the same reason; so this
gallant man married the whole crowd, including
the girl's grandmother, who had lost all her teeth,
and had to be fed with a spoon. The family were

in indigent circumstances, and they could not but
congratulate themselves on securing a wealthy husband.
It seemed to affect the grandmother deeply,
for the first words she said on reaching her new
home, were: “Now, thank God! I shall have my
gruel reg'lar!”

The name of Joseph Smith is worshipped in
Utah; and, “they say,” that although he has been
dead a good many years, he still keeps on marrying
women by proxy. He “reveals” who shall act as
his earthly agent in this matter, and the agent
faithfully executes the defunct Prophet's commands.

A few years ago I read about a couple being
married by telegraph—the young man was in Cincinnati,
and the young woman was in New Hampshire.
They did not see each other for a year afterwards.
I don't see what fun there is in this sort of
thing.

I have somewhere stated that Brigham Young
is said to have eighty wives. I hardly think he has
so many. Mr. Hyde, the backslider, says in his
book that “Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a
little chamber behind his office;” and if he has

eighty wives I don't blame him. He must be bewildered.
I know very well that if I had eighty
wives of my bosom I should be confused, and
shouldn't sleep anywhere. I undertook to count
the long stockings, on the clothes-line, in his back
yard one day, and I used up the multiplication
table in less than half an hour.

In this book I am writing chiefly of what I saw.
I saw Plurality at its best, and I give it to you at
its best. I have shown the silver lining of this
great social Cloud. That back of this silver lining
the Cloud must be thick and black, I feel quite sure.
But to elaborately denounce, at this late day, a
system we all know must be wildly wrong, would
be simply to impeach the intelligence of the readers
of this book.