Item Detail
-
24541
-
0
-
0
-
English
-
"They Do Things Differently There" : Understanding a Polygamous, "Foreign Country"
-
University of Utah
-
"My perception of the Mormon practice of polygamy has been evolutionary. My desire to comprehend it comes from a need to understand not only the faith I espouse, but also my very being. Polygamy is in my DNA. My maternal, third-great grandfather, Willard Richards, was one of Mormonisms earliest polygamists, and my fraternal, third-great grandfather one of its most prolific -- Christopher Layton had ten wives and sixty-five children. When I was a child my dad sometimes told me about our polygamous ancestors. Somehow polygamy did not seem that surprising or strange to me then. Just a different, old-fashioned way of marriage, I thought in the simplicity of my young mind. When I matured, either because I understood more or because I was then entrenched in twentieth-century American society, polygamy became bizarre and even repulsive to me. How could anyone -- particularly women -- want to live such a lifestyle? Though plural marriage is an indelible part of my church and family history, as a modern, monogamous woman I look at it as an outsider." [Author's abstract]