Polygamy Case

English 102

Mr. Glays

Polygamy

Women were allowed to vote in Utah in 1886. This was back when it was a territory and polygamy was still legal there. They were one of the first areas of the countries to give women the unadulterated right to vote. Does this seem to not match up with the quote from Mark Goldfeder that states "But unlike traditional marriage, it has never been effectively regulated and so people, especially women and children, have suffered." Why would a location where a majority of the people practice this oppressive form of marriage be so willing to grant the right to vote to the very people they are trying to oppress in the first place?

The answer is simple. In a plural marriage the wife could not wholly count on the husband to always be there, spoon feeding them the answers to every single decision. There is an undeniable independence for the female in the relationship if the husband has other women to care for. He must divide the amount of time devoted to each one of his wives, so they all have plenty of time to pursue other interests besides home making.

In 1887 the Federal United States Government repealed the right of women to vote in Utah in an effort to limit the influence of the Latter Day Saints (Mormon) Church. They were responding to overwhelming pressure to end the practice of polygamy in the state. A monogamist society tried to restrict polygamy, to give the women in the polygamist society more rights (as they saw it), but their plan was to take away the Women's right to vote, to weaken the strength of the LDS church, lowering the acceptance of polygamy. That is pretty ass backwards. So it leads one to ask, is a monogamist society inherently more sexist then a polygamist one?

I am not trying to say that polygamy is without its faults. There are tons of social repercussions for the people that grow up in this abnormal societal structure. The question that arises is that are those societal repercussions worse then those that result from monogamist relationships?

In Utah there is a term for the young men cast out of Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints Church (the most famous of the traditional polygamist off shoots of the regular LDS church). The term is "Lost Boys." The reason is simple mathematics. When a society is polygamist it does not change biology. Half of