Comments on: Polygamy, Women’s Rights, and Marital Sexuality: Elizabeth Kane’s Theory

By: Adam Greenwood

Adam Greenwood — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:06:31 +0000

The Church Handbook rejects the idea that men and women have libidos that differ? Who knew?

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:34:14 +0000

Matt, I’ve learned that you can get just about anything through the COB filters as long as the title doesn’t include any one of about 3,219,324,667 verboten words. Including “mustache” for some (to me) unfathomable reason. Or “bust” (I tried to help someone yesterday search for information on the little 19th century statuettes of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, and learned that that word was on the no-no list).

Wonderful, wonderful love letter!

By: Matt Grow

Matt Grow — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:42:48 +0000

Ardis: I’ll try to tone down my posts so you can read them at the COB! Elizabeth didn’t talk much, if at all, about these health concerns in her critiques of polygamy. She primarily spoke about the sexual double standard and how polygamist wives would never know the type of love, companionship, and partnership she and Thomas shared.

By: Matt Grow

Matt Grow — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:39:54 +0000

All: Thanks for the comments. In honor of Valentine’s Day, I want to make clear that by all appearances Thomas and Elizabeth had a loving and devoted marriage. They exchanged affectionate letters with each other whenever one of them was away from home. Here’s the text of a letter that Tom wrote Bessie (as they called each other) on March 22, 1852, during their courtship. Tom was writing from “this low crowded business den” of Independence Hall, where he worked as his father’s judicial clerk. He had recently told his family of their engagement.

“I gave my Father your Message:
And I love you.
And he is content:
And I love you.
And I have told my Mother:
And She loves you.
And Bessie [Tom's younger sister]:
And She loves you.
But I shall not send the letters I have already written Walter & Charlotte [Bessie's siblings]:
For I love you.
You are a silly child:
And I love you.
And should not write to single gentlemen:
And I love you
Mrs. Ellis says so:
And I love you.
And I am sorry thats all:
For I love you,
And, And I love you so much that I begrudge every line of all this that does not tell you only and simply how much and how dearly I love you, my own dear darling, and will love you, now, and hereafter, evermore, forever and ever.
I am your Cousin no longer
I shall never again be your friend
I am your sweetheart.”

(Mrs. Ellis was a nineteenth-century author of etiquette books. This letter is found in the BYU Kane Collection.)

By: Mark Brown

Mark Brown — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 14:32:35 +0000

Hmmm. I guess I don’t see Elizabeth Kane as all that eccentric. As I understand the post, she based her views upon three points:

1. A rejection of the sexual double standard.
2. A realization that pregnancy and childbirth are very difficult for a woman, and that we ought to be concerned about a woman’s health and well-being.
3. A belief that women should have more control than they then did over the frequency of sex.

What’s so nutty about any of those things? Points 1 and 2 are right out of our church handbook now.

In the mid 19th century, childbirth was very dangerous. Mortality in childbirth occured at a rate of 400/100,000, compared to a rate now of 8/100,000. Abstention from sex for years at a time sounds odd to us now, but in a time when respectable people used no form of contraception whatsoever, that was the only way a woman could control the number of children she bore.

By: Alison Moore Smith

Alison Moore Smith — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 08:30:07 +0000

Wow. I don’t know how SHE lived with her “eccentricities.”

Read 12 MH years ago. Good read.

By: Hunter

Hunter — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 06:45:49 +0000

This was so interesting, thanks. What an interesting person, this Elizabeth Kane.

I don’t know about others, but *this* husband probably wouldn’t be dissuaded from the…ahem…marital act merely by my wife dressing with “nunlike plainness.” Good thing for the more widespread distribution of contraceptive options today. My heart aches to read her ask, “Must we die or drag on lives of pain–or submit to have our husband’s love cease for us, or he become unfaithful?”

By: Ray

Ray — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:31:08 +0000

Oh, and the following quote is hilarious:

“Nevertheless, her three new ‘print dresses’ seem to have sufficiently pleased Thomas, as they soon conceived their third son, Evan.”

By: Ray

Ray — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:26:05 +0000

I’m glad my wife and I live now and not then. My wife concurs – except on days when she wishes I had been both then.

By: Ardis E. Parshall

Ardis E. Parshall — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 01:23:41 +0000

I’m glad to be home, Matt, and finally able to read your post — it was blocked by the COB filters!

In whatever comments about polygamy that she may have recorded, did Elizabeth ever acknowledge that plural marriage could make it easier to preserve a woman’s health and all the other blessings she found in a woman’s abstaining without putting any hardship on the man? or did she so object to a double standard or a husband’s passion that she objected to polygamy on those grounds, too?