Item Detail
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18766
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0
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0
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English
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Mormons, Polygamy, and the American Body Politic : Contesting Citizenship, 1852-1890
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Ann Arbor, Michigan
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University of Michigan
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Ph.D. diss
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The Mormon practice of polygamy in the nineteenth-century American West sparked a series of conflicts over the centrality of marriage, home, and family to national identity. This dissertation contends that the controversy over polygamy was as much about conceptions of "Americanness" as it was about the practice of plural marriage itself, attempting to show why Mormonism so vexed nineteenth-century Americans. An intellectual history of the Mormon question, this study focuses particular attention on how the controversy over polygamy constructed ideas about American citizenship and the shape of the national body politic. It considers the importance of the public private divide to the consolidation of a distinctly American nineteenth-century culture built around a particular white, middle-class understanding of marriage and family. Nineteenth-century political ideology located distinctions between public and private at the center of an American identity that qualified American men for citizenship. This dissertation shows that under plural marriage the conceptual frameworks that separated private from public could not hold. Mormonism troubled the public/private distinction, disentangling citizenship from its relation to the family and cutting a path to understanding women's citizenship fifty years before the women's suffrage amendment. For anti-Mormons, polygamy marked Mormons as "unfit" for membership in an imagined national constituency. This dissertation also analyzes the logic behind the nearly ubiquitous conclusion among non-Mormons that polygamy was an anti-republican institution and Mormons were incapable of embodying an American identity. Anti-Mormons contended that the Mormon practice of polygamy corrupted both the private sphere, where filial affection grounded attachment to the nation, and the public sphere, where individuals debated and decided upon and enacted the meaning of good government. This study analyzes the ways anti-Mormons produced knowledge about Mormon homes, Mormon politics, and the "racial character" of the Mormon population. Anti-Mormon discourse grounded and justified broad reform and legal campaigns that affected the demise of plural marriage in 1890. Ultimately, while Mormons contested the visions of family order rapidly becoming hegemonic, anti-Mormon campaigns mobilized the tropes of family, republican government, and race to refine and assert their vision of American citizenship. [Author's abstract]