Polygamy in the Millennial Star

Hey everyone,
Right now I'm kinda bored, sitting in the depths of the BYU library. I'm trying to focus on reading the Millennial Star. Honestly, it's pretty boring...but I'm finding some stuff on polygamy that's kinda interesting.

This first article was written 1853 and it's about providing female equality through polygamy:

It is high time that something was done for woman; she is treated bad enough in Christian England. We wonder the English women do not rise and assert their "right" like their American sisters. No reasonable man, knowing the cowardly manner in which many English women are treated, could blame them if they were to agitate the subject of "woman's rights."

But what are woman's rights? Ah! that's the great question before the nations--that's the grand problem for them to solve. More vital and eternal interests hinge upon it than most people are aware of.

In the first place, all good women (and we do not want to say there are any bad ones) have a right to good husbands; for woman was created expressly to be a helpmate for man--apart from him she is little more than a cipher. When a woman has this right secured to her, all other rights will be easily disposed of. If all the women in a nation were united to good and godly husbands, those women would find all their other rights come along naturally enough.

Wives are cheap in England--any man can obtain one; consequently, they are not prized as they should be. When you have made good behavior an essential condition of a man's obtaining a wife , then punish with severity (what if we say with death?) all departures from chastity...this will be the way to put an end to all cowardly assaults of savage men upon women. This is the Lord's remedy, and it is the only effectual one.

"But stay," says one; "your remedy would necessarily introduce the system of a plurality of wives, and that would be abominably blasphemous!" Ah! if we had but thought, we might have known that, in the remedy we propose, there is too much Bible for ungodly Christendom. It is too much like the practice of Abraham, and Jacob, and Moses, and other righteous faithful men.

You know the disease that is preying on the vitals of the people, we have prescribed the remedy--the only real remedy.

--Millennial Star vol. 15 pg. 267-78

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So, that's pretty crazy huh? Basically, the editor said that the only way to insure rights for women is for them to get married to good men, and since good men are in short supply, good men need to be polygamous.

Here is another one published Saturday, August 20, 1853:

How many hundreds of thousands of women there are, who, in consequence of having no opportunities of marriage, yield themselves up to a life of profligacy, and become notoriously immoral and unvirtuous. If these same females had not been deprived of the rights which all should enjoy under our glorious Constitution, they might have united themselves to some virtuous, good men, and been happy as their second or third wives, and thus been saved from the temptations and evils into which they have fallen. Look at the misery and wretchedness of thousands of females in almost every city in America and Europe, inquire into the causes of their shameful and criminal course of life, and it will be found that, in nine cases out of ten, they were driven to that state of degradation for the want of a protector--a husband in whom they could centre (sic) their affections, and on whom they could rely for a support.

Because of the vast numbers of unvirtuous females with which the nations are cursed, many young men neglect marriage, and seek to gratify their sexual propensitites by unlawful and sinful connexions (sic). If no public female prostitutes existed, or if they rarely could be found, the natural consequences would be, that young men, instead of abandoning themseleves to prostitution, would seek to unite themselves in honourable marriage with the partners of their choice.

Young men abandon themselves to vice and immorrtality in proportion to the amount of temptation and evil influnces with which they are surrounded. Diminsh the causes, and the effects are diminished also.

Allow plurality and it will be seldome the case that a female will yield to prostitution. The army of degraded females, receiving little or no accession to their numbers, would soon be diminished and eventually destroyed by their own folly and wickedneess, and thus, the causes of temptation, having in a great degree ceased, young men would walk in a more healthy atmosphere, and not be constantly allured as they are now from the paths of virtue.

Millennnial Star, vol 15. pg. 553-554.

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So, once again, marry off women, you have less prostitution, less prostitution, you have greater morality among men.

It's really strange reading this stuff. It's nice to get history without a historian getting in the way. I'm sure this is a long post by now so I'll stop. Hope y'all have a great day.