The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Perpetuating the Caricature of Seduction

I full-contact tackled Ballerina Farms for being a caricature and a distortion of Latter-day Saint women. I would be remiss of I didn't point out how The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives are the same thing, just wearing different dresses. And this time around, I want to talk more about the lore of the Mormon woman in caricature.

Mormon women have been dealing with very specific flavors of misogyny for a very long time. It changes based on who it's coming from and who its intended audience is. We have our own established stereotypes and tropes, which entire media empires have been built on to perpetuate. The Real Housewives of Salt Lake and The Real Lives of Mormon Wives fit into this historical landscape of caricature that provides a larger cultural context for those who watch those shows.

The Origins of Misogyny Towards Latter-day Saint Women

Mormon women were treated with a great deal of suspicion and mistrust in the United States from the origins of the community in the 1830s. As time went on, that treatment became increasingly violent. Rape, murder, and abuse were not uncommon in early LDS women's experiences. One of the earliest leaders among our women, Eliza R. Snow, was gang raped in Missouri. It was open season on LDS women. The introduction of polygamy as early as the 1830s made it worse.

With the introduction of polygamy came a new form of misogyny that women had to deal with—this time, coming from within the community. It's very important to understand these two fronts of this misogyny, within and outside of the community, or how we got to now isn't going to make any sense.

Polygamy was a mixed bag in terms of misogyny. It was neither wholly positive nor whole negative to the community, or even to women, as a whole. The mileage varied greatly. Some women found a lot of freedom and support in polygamous family structures. Others did not. What emerged from that spectrum within the community are the expectations that many Latter-day Saint women still live with to this day. Mormon women were expected to be submissive and agreeable to everything they were subjected to by men in the community as plural wives. Examples I've encountered include, but are not limited to:

• Submitting to marriages they didn't want, as was the case with Emma Smith, first wife of the faith's founder, Joseph Smith. It is a well-known fact that Emma Smith resisted against the implementation of polygamy so strongly, she was among its strongest dissenters. The exact details of her dissension, however, are often unknown to those who do not specifically seek them out.
  
• Terminating marriages they already had to be sealed to those in leadership or prominence in the Church. Such a marriage was ultimately the downfall of Parley P. Pratt. His twelfth wife, Eleanor McComb McLean, was married to Hector McLean at the time she met Parley P. Pratt and agreed to become his plural wife. Eleanor characterized her marriage to Hector McLean as abusive and maintained that Pratt had rescued her from a violent relationship. Nevertheless, they weren't divorced at the time their relationship began and Hector McClean murdered Parley P. Pratt in Arkansas in 1857. While this story has also been sensationalized and remembered incorrectly by many, it's also one of the tamer examples of men in the early LDS church attempting to marry women who were already married to other men.
  
• The loneliness of being a plural wife to significantly older men who bred them for children and otherwise had no interest in them. Emmeline B. Wells, early suffragist and general Relief Society president was one of the staunchest public defenders of polygamy, while at the same time struggling with her own plural marriage as a seventh wife to Daniel H. Wells.
  
• Helping husbands avoid arrest for polygamy at whatever cost to themselves and their children. Charlotte and Maria Smart Parkinson were two sisters who became the plural wives to Samuel R. Parkinson when they were each 17. When the United States began prosecuting men who were practicing polygamy, it put the households of their wives and children into chaos as they would also go into hiding. Charlotte and Maria Parkinson moved with their children between Idaho and Utah several times, with and without Samuel, as the United States alternated between incarcerating polygamists and letting them go. After several arrests of little consequence, he was finally convicted and sentenced to jail in Idaho. Concealing himself, his wives, and his children became the norm for them. On the rare occasions when such stories are shared, even within the community, the sacrifices and struggles of women like Charlotte and Maria are rarely noted.
  

Latter-day Saint women needed to be discreet and submissive, tolerant and patient, accustomed to any amount of struggle or abuse without complaint. Keeping secrets and never making spectacles of themselves, more than their existence has already made of them, was the expectation their husbands and leaders had for them. They could be asked to do any task and they were simply expected to obey without resistance. They viewed compliance as a means of survival, the community's and their own.

Latter-day Saints today don't often like to think about how misogynistic that life was for the women in their family who experienced it. They struggle to call those experiences by that name. The refusal to complain or criticize where an outsider might hear you and bring violence and destruction as a result is bone deep within them still.

Perfection and Seduction: the Stereotypes for Mormon Women

So at this end of the spectrum, we've got a perfect wife and mother who is impossibly long-suffering and able to endure absolutely anything without complaint or resistance. At the other end, we have the reaction of the outside world when they encountered these women.

Once the Transcontinental Railroad came together in Utah, it was easier for government officials, writers, journalists, and travelers of every kind to come to Utah. They treated polygamy and the women who lived under it as a side show attraction. What they expected to find were women who were simpletons and victims who were too stupid to choose what was good for themselves, in need of rescuing from outsiders.

Hell Upon Earth! by W. Jarman

Instead, they found some of the most highly educated and articulate women they'd ever seen anywhere in the United States. They found a population of LDS women who had attended universities all over the country, were training as doctors and running for office, had the right to vote and were fully enfranchised citizens in their communities. Journalists who showed up to write scathing rebukes of polygamy and to make a mockery of these women realized their assumptions were wrong.

They wrote the stories they had come to write anyway.

Female Suffrage, Frank Leslie

 

Mormon women, in the minds of those outside their community, were infantile in their understanding of their own situations and were too stupid to destroy polygamy themselves. They needed someone smarter than them to tell them what was good for them. They surely couldn't handle having the vote in their current situation, so that was right out. This species of subjugation came from outside of the community, not inside of it.

Journalists created a market that others capitalized upon, writing sensationalist literature full of stories about jealous women made deranged by living in sexually deviant and unnatural ways. This literature is where the story that Emma Smith pushed Eliza R. Snow down the stairs came from. It's a manufactured piece of 19th century propaganda carefully created to make a spectacle of LDS women to readers back east who would never meet a Mormon to verify that any of it was true.

A Mormon and his wives dancing to the devil's tune, McGee Van Dusen and Maria Van Dusen

With this, we get the spectrum that LDS women having been living under ever since: The Perfect and Long-Suffering Homemaker vs. the Helpless Sexual Deviant. This is what we are within our communities and outside of them, respectively. We are not allowed to be anything outside of either one, according to the ones who created those roles for us.

Ballerina Farms builds her audience on the backs of women who were physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destroyed by the expectations and sacrifices to live up to the stereotype of the perfect homemaker. Everyone was surprised when her husband got her an egg apron instead of the trip to Greece she asked for, despite his family's apparent wealth and their ability to afford it. They shouldn't be. That's the Long-Suffering Homemaker stereotype she's playing into.

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is playing into the opposite end of the spectrum: sensationalist and salacious stories that make their sex lives (simultaneously encompassing the sheltered and perverse) and personal choices a spectacle to an audience who will devalue the entire community as a whole, on-demand. The show would not exist without the "soft-swinging" drama of Taylor Frankie Paul that inspired it. That there is an overlap with one of Mormonism's oldest stereotypes of poorly hidden sexual deviancy is no accident.

These are the women from Mormonism that the public has made famous. Predictably, they fit the only narratives LDS women have been permitted to fill for the past two hundred years. As a result, nothing in the Latter-day Saint women's status quo changes. We're still endless pools of low-cost domestic labor and baby machines to one group, and hopeless imbeciles who exist to be mocked and scorned to entertain the masses to the other. We exist to be used by them all as objects, with no respect for how we feel about it in either case.

What Latter-day Saint women continue not to be, to either group, are people.

The flavor of the dehumanization is different, but the outcome is still the same.