Joyce Senders Pedersen

Book Review: The Maternal Voice in Victorian Fiction: Rewriting the Patriarchal Family

Around the same time, the social purity crusade faltered, and assumptions about marriage and sexuality, which had animated the women’s antipolygamy crusade, were increasingly called into question. Defending monogamous marriage from polygamy no longer appeared necessary. The women who had united to outlaw plural marriage had not been alone; their actions were part of a broad cultural distrust of the Mormon church. Iversen acknowledges this larger context yet views almost all actions against Mormons as part of women’s crusade against polygamy. The weakness of this approach becomes apparent in Iversen’s analysis of a series of campaigns to prohibit Mormon men from taking office in Congress. An 1898 campaign that was launched by ministers, for example, is presented as a female campaign against plural marriage. Yet, this effort was initiated and largely organized by men who focused more on the power of Mormon church hierarchy than on a marriage practice already officially disavowed. This campaign is fascinating from the perspective of gender, but analyzing it primarily as a women’s crusade against polygamy is inaccurate and prevents Iversen from examining the complex political alliances within anti-Mormon campaigns and the ways in which women’s concerns were sometimes exploited in the service of diverse political interests. The late-nineteenth-century debate over Mormon marriage practices and its connection to women’s movements and specifically suffrage is intriguing. Antipolygamy provided a means for women (and men) to discuss sexuality, marriage, the family, and women’s domestic power. A number of scholars such as Peggy Pascoe, Sarah Gordon, and Lola Van Wagenen have analyzed various aspects of this topic along with Iversen. 1 The Antipolygamy Controversy in U.S. Women’s Movements, 1880-1925 provides a broad outline of antipolygamy and women’s activism that can guide other scholars to analyze further this fascinating story.