- Jack on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John C., I wasn’t clear. I meant to convey the notion that she didn’t know the trials she would suffer as a *result* of the sealing. The angels could see her (near) future–and the troubles she would endure because of being misunderstood by respectable society. That’s what they lamented–not the “fact” that she was being forced into an obscene arrangement. And I should add–for further clarification–that Helen seems to view her sealing to Joseph as just that: a sealing only. And so, while it is difficult to calculate an alternate future (e.g., what would’ve happened had Joseph had not been killed at Carthage) the whole thing seems to be the result of an effort on the part of Joseph and Heber to create an unbreakable link between them and their families. And so while the situation may seem to bear some of the earmarks that should raise our modern hackles–and being a father of five daughters I really do understand your concerns–she was not given to Joseph as a “child bride.” It was a “dynastic sealing” as some folks like to call it and nothing more–so far as I’m able tell.” May 25, 08:53
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “I appreciate this more than anything else written here. Child brides are sick and wrong, full stop. We don’t currently have a Journal of American Slavery dedicated to careful historiographic analysis of whether enslaved people’s later testimonies should be read ironically, or whether the complexity of the antebellum economy requires us to avoid “soundbites”, or whether we are being too modern in our moral judgments. That journal doesn’t exist because somewhere along the way we decided that some institutions are not neutral objects of analysis requiring careful suspension of judgment. The question of whether the sealing happened is only a scholarly question worth careful treatment if the institution that produced it is granted legitimate scholarly status. Slavery historiography exists. But nobody writes careful documentary defenses of whether a particular enslaved person’s “sealing” to their owner was historically verified. Or worse, that the enslaved person actually benefitted from being enslaved in some way. I genuinely don’t understand the goal here. Appreciate the respectful conversation nonetheless.” May 25, 08:09
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John C., I think that you are right in what you are saying, but I also think that you’re not quite speaking to what the original post was trying to say. Having child brides in Mormon polygamy (or anywhere else) is sick and wrong, no matter who the husband was and when it happened (or happens). I had to deal with this issue in the biography of an ancestor who married a 13 year old girl during the Mormon Reformation and got her pregnant right away. It’s hard to stomach and something we need to protect against today. I very much agree with your perspective and the point you are making. That being said, the argument Jonathan is making is against someone who is saying that Helen Kimball didn’t have that experience at all and the story was a fabrication to support a later polygamy structure. Given that he was answering a different question than the one you want the conversation to be about, it makes sense that the answer would be different than the one you want him to give.” May 25, 07:36
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “The angels weep because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through. A child who didn’t understand. An adult authority who did understand. A structure that reprocessed her distress as sacred sacrifice only recognizable through the institution’s own lens. That is a description of grooming. Not in the salacious and sensationalist sense this conversation has been careful to dismiss, but in the structural sense. The child doesn’t need to understand. That’s the point. Stephen C. says Helen doesn’t need anyone to speak for her. Correct, I agree. Jack just let her speak. The angels wept because she didn’t understand what was being done to her. The question this conversation has been avoiding is not whether Helen later found meaning in her sealing. It’s whether a child who didn’t understand what was happening to her was in a position to consent to it. I think Jack has answered that question. And I guess we’re expected to receive this as a faith-affirming reading, extend scholarly courtesy, and move on. The framework Jack has just described with perfect clarity continues to operate today. Not as history. The institutional structures that made a 14-year-old’s confusion into sacred sacrifice are intact. The interpretive machinery that converts a child’s distress into testimony is still running.” May 25, 06:37
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “I read Helen’s letter through–and it seems to me that when she transitions into the rhyming section she’s telling the story of her sacrifice. But interestingly it’s the angels who weep for her because she, as a tender youth, didn’t understand the difficulties she would have to pass through because of her sealing to Joseph. But when she transitions back into regular prose–then we get her clear and unequivocal witness that she had done the right thing by being sealed to Joseph and that she and thousands of others would continue to be blessed because of the sealing she had received. And so, let’s be careful not to misjudge what she had experienced — as some sort of horrific abuse — when she herself sees it as the very thing that would bless her and her loved ones with exaltation.” May 24, 23:04
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: ““They were people.” Right, people who are very capable of speaking for themselves, left their own accounts, and don’t need you to speak for them.” May 24, 21:31
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “Noting that a woman who refused a powerful man’s proposal had a son who rose to lead the institution that man founded is not complexity. It’s the system working as designed. And calling that observation a soundbite is the same move that has been made throughout this conversation treating clarity as a failure of sophistication. The women weren’t complex historical puzzles. They were people. You are importing elaborateness where the evidence is actually straightforward and glossing over the genuinely complex question of what meaningful consent looks like inside a total institution like 1840s Nauvoo.” May 24, 21:20
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: ““We know what happened to the women who refused.” Well, one of their sons became the President of the Church (Heber J. Grant)…So yes, your soundbites notwithstanding this was a complex thing going on at a complex time.” May 24, 21:04
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “A 14-year-old was sealed to a 37-year-old man who held total authority over her eternal salvation and her family’s standing. We know what happened to the women who refused. Nancy Rigdon refused. Her reputation was destroyed. This isn’t ancient history requiring careful contextualization. The framework that made this possible: that a religious authority can define the conditions of consent, that women who later defend the system are evidence it wasn’t harmful, that outside concern is unsophisticated or uninspired. That framework is intact and operational today. People are being harmed by it right now. You’ve told me you find temple marriage and eternal families meaningful. I don’t doubt that. But meaning purchased on these terms has a cost you didn’t pay. Helen Mar Kimball paid it at 14. The cost is paid by children and by the people with the least power to refuse and the most to lose by doing so. And the careful scholarship protecting that fact from plain description is not neutral. It is part of how the cost keeps getting paid by someone else.” May 24, 20:47
- on Historiography and Helen Mar Kimball: “John, the signal that there is some ironic distance between Helen Mar Kimball the adult writer, and the teenage perspective of the poem, lies in the contrast between the gloom expressed in poetic diction and the sober prose statement of her happy adult life in the same document. Helen did not think her for-eternity sealing to Joseph Smith was horrific. Personally, I think Brigham Young had a better approach to organizing and supervising the principle of plural marriage than Joseph Smith did, and the approach of Wilford Woodruff (with the encouragement of the federal government) is even better. Since plural marriage was the historical path through which we arrive at the current teachings and ordinances around temple marriage and eternal families, which are highly meaningful to me and many others, I try to understand plural marriage in Nauvoo and Utah for what it was and accept the sacrifices made by others that I do not have to make myself. It’s part of the package deal.” May 24, 14:59
