Response to Brian Hales, “Joseph Smith’s Sexual Polyandry and the Emperor’s New
Clothes: On Closer Inspection, What Do We Find?” Sunstone paper, July 27, 2012
First of all, Brian deserves enormous credit for taking on this issue. He has pointed out
how the problem of Joseph Smith marrying women legally married to other men
(which I refer to as polyandrous, for convenience, though that term has been disputed
by Larry Foster on technical grounds) has been taboo among conservative Mormons for
a long time. He’s a very thorough researcher and has done his homework with both
primary and secondary documents. He and Don Bradley have done wonderful work
with the Andrew Jenson papers, a collection I did not have access to when I researched
and wrote In Sacred Loneliness. His forthcoming book will be a landmark in the
historiography of Mormon polygamy, as the first thorough examination of Joseph
Smith’s polygamy from an LDS writer who is somewhat in the conservative
mainstream. There are many Mormons, out there, and many of them in the structure of
the institutional church, who would prefer that the subject of Joseph’s polygamy would
continue to be taboo and avoided by historians. The fact that Brian’s account of Joseph
Smith’s polygamy will come from a conservative will be especially troubling to many
Latter-day Saints; it will see as a welcome, positive thing by other Latter-day Saints.
There are lots of new significant details about Joseph’s polygamy that are appearing
through Brian’s research, and one of them is the extremely important information that
Flora Woodworth married non-Mormon Carlos Gove on August 23, 1843. This changes
the dynamics of her marriage history significantly, and possibly pushes her into the
category of polyandrous wives. However, I’m wondering if this was a secret marriage;
it apparently took place outside of Nauvoo. If this was the case, then Joseph Smith
would not have known that he was one of multiple husbands in Flora’s life. In any case,
it is an interesting commentary on how Flora viewed her marriage to Joseph Smith. It
probably fits into the pattern of young women acceding to a plural marriage with an
older man, but then not being entirely committed to it. This is a common pattern
throughout the history of polygamy, and I discussed another example of it in my
Romney paper this morning. Maybe Brian will tell us how he views the Joseph-Flora
relationship in light of the new date for the Woodworth-Gove marriage.
Having said all of these positive things, I disagree with him on some issues, and
certainly, on the main subject under discussion here, as Brian notes in the paper.
I think for marriage in Joseph Smith’s culture, sexuality and childbearing was such an
accepted part of the institution that the burden of proof is on anyone who maintains
that any particular marriage did not include sexuality. LDS plural marriages in the
nineteenth century generally included sexuality and childbearing. I don’t think there is
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anything especially controversial or antagonistic about expecting sexual relations to be
part of a marriage. They are a normal, positive part of the great majority of marriages.
So Brian, in positing that the majority of Joseph Smith’s polyandrous marriages were for
eternity only and did not include sexual relations, is taking on a very imposing, difficult
burden of proof.
I accept one woman, Ruth Vose Sayers, as married to Joseph for an apparent “eternity
only” marriage. The passage that Brian read is an extremely important text, from the
Andrew Jenson papers. But it is a very unusual circumstance. The non-Mormon
husband of a wife apparently learns about Nauvoo polygamy and suggests that his wife
marry Joseph Smith for eternity and continue to live with him for time. You can’t really
generalize from this odd situation.
As we saw on one slide, some of Joseph polyandrous wives said that they were married
to Joseph for eternity, but they also said they were married to him for time. We can
either look at this as conflicts in their testimony, or as the woman emphasizing different
parts of a time and eternity marriage, and I lean toward the latter interpretation.
The main evidence arguing against Brian’s overarching theory is the case of Sylvia
Sessions, a polyandrous wife, who had a child, Josephine, who was accepted by Sylvia,
Josephine and other early Mormon polygamy insiders, as a child of Joseph Smith. To
deal with this case, Brian posits that Sylvia was divorced from her first husband,
Windsor Lyon; she then married Joseph and had Josephine (raised as Josephine Lyon);
then after Joseph’s death, Sylvia remarried Windsor. This is a complex argument, and
you need to read it in detail in Brian’s paper on Sylvia in Mormon History Studies or on
his website. However, there is no definite evidence for this divorce, to my knowledge.
This is such an important case that some positive evidence for a clear-cut divorce would
be necessary, I think. (Of course, you could argue that for Joseph Smith no divorce was
necessary, as civil marriages were not valid, in his view, in the eternal perspective.)
Some of the evidence Brian presents for Mormons not emphasizing polyandrous
marriages can be subjected to an entirely different interpretation than the one he uses.
For example, I agree with him that it is very significant that none of the polyandrous
wives were called to testify at the Temple Lot trial. But I belief that Joseph’s
polyandrous marriages had already become a taboo subject, and the case of Sylvia
Sessions and Josephine Lyon Fisher was well known to church leaders. (A descendant
of Sylvia and Josephine told me that Joseph F. Smith would invite Josephine Lyon
Fisher to Smith family reunions.) They knew it was entirely possible that polyandrous
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marriages included sexuality, and I think that would motivate them to shield the
polyandrous marriages from further scrutiny.
However, in at least one case, one faithful Mormon, Angus Cannon, brother of George
Q. Cannon and stake president of Eliza R. Snow, used the case of Josephine Lyon Fisher
to argue for sexuality in Joseph’s marriages (in order to emphasize that these were real
marriages, to refute RLDS arguments that these were just marriages for eternity only).
Talking to skeptic Joseph Smith III in 1905, he said,
I will now refer you to one case where it was said by the girl's
grandmother that your father has a daughter born of a plural wife. The
girl's grandmother was Mother Sessions...She was the grand-daughter of
Mother Sessions. That girl, I believe, is living today, in Bountiful, north of
this city. I heard prest. Young, a short time before his death, refer to the
report. . . The woman is now said to have a family of children, and I think
she is still living." [Angus M. Cannon, statement of interview with Joseph
III, pp. 25-26, CA]
But in conclusion, let me just compliment Brian that he is researching and discussing
these difficult issues, going through the evidence carefully, and I believe that the
Mormon historical community is in a much better place because of his efforts to do this.
I look forward to his published book.
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