Why does such Mormon marital recounting matter? For the dignity of the women involved, and the value of truth in history.įor some 180 years the church has discouraged any kind of discussion of Smith’s plural marriages despite the historical evidence – letters and affidavits, temple records and family trees, diaries and deeply personal testimonies. What we do know, and what the LDS church recently acknowledged after nearly two centuries, is that, by the time he was assassinated in a Carthage, Illinois, jailhouse in June 1844, Joseph Smith had married an unknown ( and maybe unknowable) number of women – possibly 40, and quite possibly more.
In the case of others the documentation is more circumstantial or completely absent. Some of the evidence about the relationships these women had with Smith is indisputable. The exact chronological order of the Smith wives is unclear. There are probably other women whose names never made it into the historical record.
There are incomplete accounts about Jane, Sophia, Phoebe, Vienna and Clarissa. The list of Smith’s plural wives continues: Hanna, Elvira, Rhoda, Desdemona, Olive, Melissa, Nancy, two more Fannys. Not long after – or was it before? – Helen became one of Smith’s wives at age 14. When Smith told Lucy that God had commanded him to take her as a plural wife she said, “my astonishment knew no bounds.” Maria and Sarah, another pair of sisters, were sealed to Smith in the spring of 1843. Sisters Emily and Eliza both married Smith, but whether or not they squabbled over him, we cannot know. Martha, Ruth and then Flora married Joseph between the summer of 1842 and the spring of 1843. Initially Eliza found the idea of marrying Smith “repugnant” – the idea of plural marriage was so foreign to her – but eventually assented. There was Marinda, and probably Elizabeth. At 84, Mary swore in an affidavit she had married the Mormon leader as a teen. Sylvia’s mother, Patty, followed her daughter by a month.
Presendia married Smith while still married to another man, and speculated that the prophet, Smith, might be the father of her son (a photo suggests she was right). Then Fanny, who, when asked by her brother about the rumors that she was also married to Smith said, “That is all a matter of my own.” Fanny was followed by – we think – Lucinda, Louisa and Zina. The first of Joseph Smith’s wives was Emma: no one disputes her place on the list.
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