UtahJakey
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Posts posted by UtahJakey
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Judging history by today's standards is not only wrong, it really is very foolish - you do not have the perspective the people involved did which makes you reach poor conclusions. I can think of a number of what we refer to as 'May-Dec marriages' today that actually work for the people involved.
Is it really a big leap to think a 15 year old girl might not want a sexual relationship with a man 42 years older than her? Would you have been interested in such a relationship when you were 15 years old?
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I'm in a marriage that has about a 20 year age gap and I find this topic still uncomfortable. Anyway, as previously noted, courtship and marriage in those days does not reflect the same culture as today.
20 years is still a lot closer that a 42 year age difference. That's probably about the same as you marrying your husbands father. With 2 generations between a couple it would probably take quite a while to feel comfortable romantically. Especially for a girl 15 years old.
I feel like the world is moving in a good direction in regards to marriage. Marriages are made by choice(mostly) and are viewed as equals and fathers take a much more active role in the home matters for a family.
UJ
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I don't know the answer to your question but maybe you could give this book a try.
M.
Thanks
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Another interesting point about this subject came up when my daughter and I were talking again last night. It was around dating and polygamy. She asked me "are polygamist men allowed to actively date to find new potential wives. Like when Pres. Snow was courting Minnie Jensen, did they go on dates prior to their engagement and marriage? What kind of a date does a 57 year old man and a 15 year old girl go on? "
I have to say I was a bit tongue tied. Does anyone know the dating rules that were observed when practicing polygamy?
UJ
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UtahJakey, you say you've provided links to the distribution? I'm not seeing your link. I see you've linked to findagrave.com, and an archived page from the NYTimes.
Could you point me to this link, or post it again please?
The statistics I cited are from US Census data used in the FAIR link finrock posted.
You can find specific details for each census like the 1850 on here.
UJ
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Interesting, didn't President Snow also married Sarah's sister? Sarah was certainly not the youngest wife of Lorenzo. IF I am not mistaken, Eleanor was his youngest wife ( she was 14).
The story is that President Snow approached Eleanor when she was 14 and asked her to promise to one day to become his wife. They weren't actually married until 3 years later when she was 17. Eleanor was the younger sister of Mary Elizabeth Houtz Snow one of President Snows earlier plural marriages.
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Sorry - I'm not explaining myself very well. I sit at a computer all day and play with numbers. You are right - you're talking about first marriages only. I misspoke. It still comes down to what the bell curve looks like.
For first marriages, the average age was 21-22. This is an interesting statistic, but meaningless until we know std deviation. Because going from your statistic, any of these could be true:
Case A: Half the first marriages were at 14, half were at 29. Therefore, the average age was 21-22.
Case B: A third of the first marriages were between 14-17, a third were at 26-29, and a third were somewhere between . Average age was 21-22.
Case C: One percent of first marriages were younger than 18, one percent were older than 25, everyone else got married between 19-24. Average was 21-22.
See, any of those three cases could be the true case. I don't know which case it is - do you? Until we figure it out, I guess we don't really know what to tell your daughter, do we.
I don't know if you're being deliberately obtuse but the distribution of the first marriage ages were on the links provided by myself and the other participants in this thread.
I'm asking you a question. Do you believe Mormons in frontier America married girls younger than the rest of the USA? If so, why?
Yes I do. It's a simple matter of numbers. From similar census data we know there were slightly more Mormon men than women in the Utah territory. The disparity is even greater if you included non-Mormons in the area. Assuming similar mortality between men and women the only way men can take 10/20/30 wives is by stepping out of the natural demographics and marrying younger and younger women. For that reason polygamy was going to be unsustainable from a population standpoint. It's the same reason why the FLDS have "lost boys".
UJ
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Interesting, UJ! From what I've read, the NYT really turned the corner in the early 20th century with its reporting of, among other things, the Titanic disaster (Ironically, by publishing a guess--the Titanic's radio signals were being listened to in New York, then abruptly stopped. Other papers conservatively noted that the ship had gone silent; the Times went out on a limb and reported it sunk.)
The article you provided earlier, IMHO, surely wasn't of a piece with Raymond's expressed values.
I haven't gone searching but I would imagine that we would see similar one sided reporting from the newspapers in Chicago, Boston, or DC. I suspect the standard for objectivity for reporting on the polygamist dealings of the Mormons was pretty low. If you comparted the Times to Hearst's and Pulitizer's papers of the day even articles like the one I listed seem controlled.
UJ
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There are plenty more examples.
Tell me UJ, are you of the impression that we cultish Marminz married 'em younger than everyone else in the USA? If so, could you give us your source?
I think you're confused. The US Census was reporting first marriages and the statistics I reported and the one others have linked to in the FAIR article all show the same thing.
And what's up with the "cultish Marminz" thing. Are you reading along? Do you realize my daughter and I are LDS and are descendants of the very people we're talking about?
UJ
(unless this loudmouth_mormon person is just playing a character and I shouldn't take their responses seriously?)
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As for your NY Times story: It contains a number of histrionic claims (some of which culminated in Buchanan's Utah Expedition the next year), and academics could write a book about the latent racism and sexism in that single article alone. ("They're polluting our women!" was a common accusation, whether applied to Mormons, Irish immigrants in the Northeast, blacks in the South . . . ad nauseum). With regard to the specific claim about ten-year-old Mormon brides (or even the routine marriage at ages fourteen or fifteen), I say: Name 'em, or it didn't happen. Prior to the early twentieth century, the Times didn't have the respect it commands today--it was just another member of the yellow press, with an unidentified journalist two thousand miles away from the scene working to juice up a story submitted by an anonymous correspondent who knew darned well he could never be fact-checked.
The historical context for the condemnations of polygamy and the buildup to the Utah war is interesting. This is right after the 1856 election where the Republican platform was "to prohibit in the territories those twin relics of barbarism: polygamy and slavery."
Now your characterization of the NY Times that it "didn't have the respect it commands today--it was just another member of the yellow press" is surprising to me and contrary to the history I've read. From the point when Raymond founded the paper the history I've read was that the Times enjoyed a solid reputation and was not considered in the same company as the actual "yellow" papers the New York World and the New York Journal.
UJ
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As someone in this thread suggested maybe something in her own words would be helpful. I found this quote from her.
"Had I traveled the world over or devoted a lifetime in the search of an ideal [suitor], I could not have found a more congenial companion-a better husband and father. In twenty years of our married life I have proven him to be a man of superior intellect, taste and culture, of a highly appreciative nature, pure and chaste in all his habits, in a word, a thorough gentleman, and an unkind word has never passed between us."2
It's from Latter Leaves in the Life Of Lorenzo Snow. I don't have access to the footnote but I suspect it is a interview or some sort of direct quote from his wife.
This continues to get more interesting.
UJ
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UJ,
Finrock provided you a link with information regarding people who married women in their teens. Thus I am unsure about your statement regarding, "nothing with actual sources backing the idea."
We know it was "more common" than previously that women married earlier. The link provided by Finrock, in 1850 shows the age of women higher between 15-20.
I am beginning to wonder if this is a real concern? Your last statement appears to ignore Finrock's and others statements.
Finrock just provided a link to FAIR, which uses that same US Census information data that I quoted above. You'll notice that is shows a mean age of marriage for women of 22.5 years of age and that "For young women, marriage in the early to mid teens was rare". Specifically less than 2%.
I'm beginning to think you just post links without reading them and offering off the cuff criticism. If you read the FAIR without examining the data you'll see that they are implying it's not big deal and a common occurrence for such marriages but the actual data they cite doesn't show that.
I wish people would stop using FAIR to defend the church. It's embarrassingly bad.
UJ
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I decided to take the advice from posters here and prepare some good statistics to backup the idea that big age gaps and teenage brides were a common type of marriage in the 19th century. What I found actually said the opposite.
The US census bureau published their statistics of the average age of of first marriage from 1790 until the present. In the 1800's the average age of first marriage was 21-22 years old. (U.S. Census Bureau, Table MS-2, “Estimated Age at First Marriage, by sex")
Another example of the prevailing acceptance of such marriages would be in contemporary writings of the times. I found a article titled "Graphic Narrative of Mormon Outrages", The New York Times, May 19, 1857. One of the outrages about Mormon Polygamy in the article was the age of the marriages
It was only a few days ago that two little girls, between 10 and 11 years of age, were "sealed" to old men. It is a very common occurrence for girls of 14 to be taken as wives. One object seems to be to get these children into the horrible system of polygamy before they are old enough to think for themselves, or the natural delicacy of their sex shall be aroused and rebel against it.
I've found plenty of people express the idea that this type of marriage was commonplace but nothing with actual sources backing the idea.
I'm going to try to find some family resources and see if their is a journal entry or letters showing Sarah's thoughts on the marriage.
UJ
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Well, having all the information upfront would have been nice. :)
Is Sarah her grandma and President Snow her grandpa?
Yes if you add a bunch of great great greats in there. She knew she was related to one of the Presidents of the church through one of his plural wives and wanted to make it the basis of a historical figure essay. The hard part is all of the official biographies of President Snow on LDS.org don't list background on any of his plural wives so she had to go to secondary sources. As you can imagine this marriage in particular has been one of the examples of negativity around polygamy.
UJ
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My first question would be to ask your daughter where she discovered this information and in what light they share this information. How a site twists truth or presents truth, even if it is true, can be deceiving.
The next thought is that she is deciphering history from her perspective and not from what this other 15 year old thought. We have women today in their twenties marrying men and dating men who are 60 years and older. Also, marrying younger was not uncommon in these days.
The other thought, I haven't discovered any person Lorenzo Snow married that was younger than 17. Thus, again, discover the site and whether or not it is an anti-Mormon site.
Last thought, introduce her to fairlds.org.
It's not a "site" but our family genealogy. We're related to Sarah Minnie Ephramina Jensen. She married him in 1871, when she was 15 years and 8 months old. They had 5 children together one of which is a relative of ours.
My daughter is a bright girl and I can't see her falling for the "maybe your great great great Grandmother was attracted to 57 year old men at 15" explanation. She sees it as a stolen childhood for this girl and is angry that she never got to have a "real" marriage of her own.
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My teenage daughter recently asked me a tough question. She said she found out that Lorenzo Snow took a 15 year old wife when he was 57 years old and they had 5 children. Being the same age she was mortified and said there is no way a 15 year old girl wants to enter into a romantic relationship with a 57 year old man and that the only way something like this happens is with a forced marriage like Warren Jeffs and his wives.
How would you explain these marriages?
UJ
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I find it funny when people have trouble with the current endowment just because the pre 91 endowment & initiatories were so much more interesting. The take the parts that seem weird and uncomfortable to you now and multiply that by 3 and you'll have a appreciation of the endowment I had.
As I understand it the version I went through had been toned down a couple times before.
UJ
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In many ways the MLM business mirrors the missionary program. People are recruited in their own homes. The relationship with the recruiter is important. Feelings and emotion are used in the decision making process.
I've noticed converts tend to be the type that end up participating in a lot of MLMs.
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I had the audio tape and booklet of Floyd Weston telling the story. I was basically a fireside but I noticed the strangest thing. The stories related two different endings of the story. The first was that the friends all independently joined the LDS church and met years later. The other was that Floyd joined and later they discussed it and agreed that his church matched the 17 points. I didn't think anything of it at the time but years later on a LDS board I read a few others had looked into the story. Apparently the dates of him being at Cal Tech doesn't match the events he describes and the one friend he mentions by name had never heard of the 17 points and had not joined the church.
Apparently the 17 points belong on the shelf with the collected works of Paul H. Dunn
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I don't know if I consider that "explicit", at least on the "become gods" part. I believe we will be exalted. Does "become gods" mean we will be creating our own worlds? I don't recall seeing that in any gospel manual, those please correct me if I'm wrong.
Here is a quote directly from the manual.
Those who receive exaltation in the celestial kingdom through faith in Jesus Christ will receive special blessings. The Lord has promised, "All things are theirs" (D&C 76:59). These are some of the blessings given to exalted people:
1. They will live eternally in the presence of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ (see D&C 76).
2. They will become gods.
3. They will have their righteous family members with them and will be able to have spirit children also. These spirit children will have the same relationship to them as we do to our Heavenly Father. They will be an eternal family.
4. They will receive a fulness of joy.
5. They will have everything that our Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ have--all power, glory, dominion, and knowledge. President Joseph Fielding Smith wrote: "The Father has promised through the Son that all that he has shall be given to those who are obedient to his commandments. They shall increase in knowledge, wisdom, and power, going from grace to grace, until the fulness of the perfect day shall burst upon them" (Doctrines of Salvation, 2:36).
I don't understand how you say the teaching isn't explicit especially with the "becoming gods" part. It says you will become gods and you will have everything that Heavenly Father and Jesus have including their power, glory, dominion, and knowledge.
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Many spoke on it, yes. But they did not add any revelatory info on it that has found its way into our modern manuals, etc. They were speculating on what Joseph said, just as many do today. Note will you not find the King Follett Sermon in our D&C, and that is for the same reason: it isn't defined well enough.
Brigham Young taught many things. Today we accept much of it, but there are things we also reject. As a Church, we reject Adam-God theory, God's progression includes always learning new things, polygamy required for exaltation, etc.
Just a decade or so ago, in a television interview, Pres Hinckley was asked about this concept. He basically said, "yes, things have been taught on it in the past, but there is not enough information to really know what all that was taught." I tend to go with what Pres Hinckley said, as it is the most current statement by a prophet. There is what Joseph Smith said, and it was all written by a few different people, each version being somewhat different. One version we use that Joseph F. Smith included in the Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, and so that is the one most are used to. Yet, there are other versions that may be just as accurate or more accurate. We just don't know.
So in the current Gospel Principles Manual there is Chapter 47 on exaltation. It that chapter it says "God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth, the same as Jesus Christ himself did" and people who receive exaltation "will become gods" Gospel Principles
Yet in your opinion this is ambiguous doctrine. If is wasn't supposed to be clear wouldn't they say so in the manual rather than explicitly teaching it's true?
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The concept of God being man comes from only two sermons of Joseph Smith. It is not a core doctrine of the Church, and is not a requirement of faith in order to be a faithful LDS member. It is not well defined nor understood.
We do know that Jesus came to earth and was a mortal. Some suppose that God the Father did the same thing: God as man.
Not just Joseph Smith. Also Brigham Young, Heber J Grant, Joseph F. Smith and just about any priesthood or student manual actively published by the church. The current first presidency reviews all correlated material in the manuals and magazines. It's not just 2 comments from Joseph.
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Your question reminds me of this. From Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
It's also very similar to Aristotle's unmoved mover concept.
Jakey
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Many Youtube links go under moderator review. It is currently under review.
Should I assume now a day later my benign post and link did not pass moderator review? I could understand deleting something anti-mormon or offensive but this baffles my mind.
Jakey
Explaining polygamy to children
in LDS Gospel Discussion
Posted
I didn't realize there were goal posts involved here. I was responding to mnn727's comment that some how presentism is influencing our view of the situation. I can't find a rationale to believe that a teenage girl 100 years ago would find the situation somehow less "icky" as my teenage daughter calls it now.
Even with your link to the fair post on the subject matter we see that a marriage of someone so young was rare back then and a 42 year age gap was staggeringly rare. The combination of the two means that this wasn't a typical everyday frontier marriage.
UJ