How Common the Principle? Women as Plural Wives in 1860

Abstract

This essay examines how common the practice of polygamy was in the Salt Lake Valley in 1860.We use census data, Ancestral File information, and data from family histories and biographies to estimate the number of women who were plural wives and the typical living arrangements for these women.We also ask if any differences existed based on ward characteristics.Three LDS wards are examined, the Thirteenth Ward (a well-to-do ward whose members formed the elite of Mormonism), the Twentieth Ward (a moderate income ward whose members were almost all immigrants), and the Mill Creek Ward1 (which covered the rural area of the valley and where members lived in farming households).Estimates of the number of women and men who actually practiced polygamy in nineteenth-century Utah are plentiful.2But most available research is based on non-random samples or data from the 1880s, a period of great turmoil for Latter-day Saints and at least three decades after polygamy was openly practiced in the west.3Our interest in estimating the number of women in plural marriages in 1860 is primarily sociological.Contemporary scholars have wondered why women participated in a practice so apparently contrary to their own best interests.Certainly religious doctrine and devotion to "building the Kingdom" encouraged devout Mormon women to enter into "the principle."But 1. Mill Creek Ward was the appropriate name and spelling for many years.However, by the time the history of the ward was published in pamphlet form, the spelling had changed to Millcreek Ward.