Friend or Foe: Mormon Women's Suffrage as a Pawn in the Polygamy Debate, 1856-1896

Summary

In 1830 Joseph Smith established Mormonism. Thirteen years later, he disclosed a revelation from God calling for polygamous marriage. For Mormons, marriage and procreation were central to salvation. Men were considered to be the spiritual centers of each household. Faithful women, believing that polygamy would free them from Eve's sin and give them a chance to overcome their flaws, accepted their inferior place in this order. In accordance with the widespread nineteenth-century belief in women's pure nature, polygamy justified a limited sexual obligation for women and solved problems created by male sexual impulses. Polygamy also benefited poor women and allowed male missionaries to marry women they met on their travels. The high birth rates produced by the practice also supported an agrarian society and created a strong political base for Mormons to insist on a high level of integration between church and state. After Smith and his brother were killed in 1847, his successor, Brigham Young, led the Mormons to the territory of Utah away from persecution in the east.

For many Americans the politics of slavery and polygamy were linked. While Northerners wished to eliminate both, Southerners opposed measures to prohibit polygamy in the territories because they feared such measures would set a precedent to ban slavery. As a result, no anti-polygamy laws were passed before the Civil War. In 1862, the Morrill Act, the first federal law attacking polygamy, was passed. The Act prohibited plural marriage in the territories, disincorporated the Mormon Church, voided territorial laws that established or supported polygamy, and restricted the holdings of religious organizations in the territories to $50,000. Due to the Civil War, Utah's isolation, the difficulties of proving polygamy, and a three-year statute of limitations, the Act was virtually impossible to enforce.

When the Morrill Act proved ineffective, people considered granting women suffrage in Utah to eliminate polygamy. Since Mormons approved of women suffrage, the Utah legislature enfranchised women in 1870. Contrary to the hopes of some legislators, women in Utah did not vote to outlaw plural marriage. The 1874 Poland Act gave federal courts more control over polygamy cases. This law and the Morrill Act were upheld in Reynolds v. U.S. The government bolstered its attack on Mormons with the 1882 Edmunds Act, the first law to link polygamy with the vote. The Act made "unlawful cohabitation" a crime, disqualified polygamists from jury service, and disenfranchised them. The Utah Commission required voters to take an oath that they neither practiced nor supported polygamy. Such loyalty oaths were upheld in Murphy v. Ramsey and Davis v. Beason. The Beason court also ruled that disenfranchising polygamists and barring them from public service was a legitimate exercise of territorial legislative power.

Finally, the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 declared wives to be competent witnesses against their husbands in polygamy and cohabitation trials, allowed the State to institute adultery prosecutions, required marriages to be certified and filed with the probate court, denied inheritance to illegitimate children, disenfranchised women in Utah and required loyalty oaths to vote. The Act disenfranchised women but not men for polygamy, and denied political rights to all women, even those who did not practice polygamy. For the federal and territorial governments, woman's suffrage was a pawn in the polygamy debate rather than a fundamental right.

In 1896, six years after the Mormon Church banned polygamy, Utah obtained statehood. Its state constitution granted women suffrage.