Book Response

I read A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture by Christine Talbot. Talbot produces compelling analysis about how polygamy crafted a unique Mormon culture that, in many ways, stood in direct conflict with broader American mainstream culture at the time. In particular, Talbot focuses a lot on how early Latter-day Saint practices dissolved the public/private divide, which is seen as extremely important among the broader American public. After spending the first half of the book explaining polygamy and how it created a unique culture in the Mormon community, she delves into anti-Mormon critiques and arguments against polygamy. Talbot also dives into the why behind anti-Mormon sentiment.

One section that particularly interested me was the creation of mostly or completely fictional anti-Mormon novels, focusing on the perceived plights of polygamous women. These novels portrayed polygamous women as victims of an abusive system that subjected them to conditions similar to that of (and sometimes worse than) slavery. They were often extremely dramatic, for example detailing how a woman died of a broken heart after her husband marries a second wife. The tie-in to slavery is very interesting, because it put pro-slavery southerners in the unique position of rejecting polygamy but accepting slavery. As we have discussed in class, the two were linked as "the twin relics of barbarism", and in the mind of abolitionist Republican northerners, both quite evil with similar justifications. Talbot discusses how pro-slavery but anti-polygamy southerners detangled the two concepts.

Anti-polygamy literature would also lean into the idea that women were being deprived of the 19th century ideal of romantic love. Mormon leaders deemphasized the "Gentile practice" of mutual affection in marriage and instead posited that marriage should be seen as a mutual commitment to God. Talbot suggests that anti-mormon authors would take this to the extreme, suggesting that husbands hated their plural wives and that there was no love in the marriage. They would also dramatize the relationship between sister-wives, proposing that there was only hatred and jealousy in those relationships.

Another interesting section in the book was a section on Utah women's suffrage. Here, Talbot suggests that, due to the communitarian nature of Latter-day Saint polygamous households, Mormon women did not really need to have as much of a movement for suffrage as in the East. Whereas the rest of the United States focused on the wife's role as being head of the domestic activities of a household, polygamy counterintuitively challenged this idea, freeing up women to pursue other things. The US political ideal was an independent, self-sufficient household ran by the wife and supported by the husband, the Mormon household took a more communitarian approach.

Overall, Talbot does an excellent job characterizing polygamy as the dividing factor between the Mormon community and the rest of the United States. I enjoyed learning the why behind much of the early church's persecution and how it relates to polygamy.