Almost a year ago I completed a historical evaluation of the claim by anti-Mormons that the Prophet Joseph Smith was a pedophile and proved that this accusation false, just like so many of their other ones. At the end of that article I state that the anti-Mormons will not care about this though because their goals are not to actually arrive at a correct understanding of history, their goal is to try and destroy the faith of the Saints by attacking the character and legacy of the Prophet Joseph Smith. Once you disprove one of their accusations the anti-Mormons just move on to the next vile assertion to try and destroy the name of the Prophet in their overall effort to try and destroy the Restored Gospel. Well, a friend of mine has brought to my attention of just such a case in response to the aforementioned article disproving the charges of pedophilia against the Prophet Joseph Smith.
This new anti-Mormon response goes something like this: Whether Joseph Smith actually was a pedophile is irrelevant because the age difference between Joseph and some of his wives is so great that it is de facto abusive because the differences in ages lead to a difference in maturity and therefore differences in power in the relationship. This means that they aren’t equals in their relationship with the man having power to dominant his wife. The problem with this argument is that it is pure presentism, projecting the ideas and attitudes of the modern world onto the past. It is using a modern, post-Industrial Revolution feminist critique to judge a pre-Industrial Revolution male-oriented society. It ignores the fact that no marriage in antebellum America was an equal partnership no matter what the ages of the people involved. In this article I will address the main pillars of this claim – concepts of maturity prevalent at the time and the power dynamics between men and women in marriages during the era – and show that there is as much substance to this claim as there is to the claim that the Prophet Joseph Smith was a pedophile, namely none.
Maturity
The basis for the claim is that there is a difference in the maturity levels between Joseph and his younger brides. This difference is supposed to allow him, the older man, to control his younger wives, which renders their relationship abusive as they aren’t equals. Now, it is absolutely correct that in the present day we know for a scientific fact that humans do not completely mature until about the age of twenty-five. The problem with this anti-Mormon argument about maturity is that it ignores the different conception of maturity that was held in 19th century, antebellum, early 1800s America as opposed to now. Children were not children when they reached what today we call adolescence. They were not seen as children with an innocence that needed to be protected but people who were ready to take upon themselves adult responsibilities. This short documentary on the issue of how adolescents were not seen as children or teens but as being mature enough to make adult decisions and to have adult responsibilities before the mid-20th century, may help develop a further understanding of the issue. By the time you became what we think of as a teenager they thought you were an adult ready to take on adult responsibilities in terms of both labor and marriage.
This is not to say that they didn’t recognize any gradations of maturity, because of course they did. Older people were seen as having more wisdom than younger people just as we today recognize that a 65 year old is wiser and more mature than a 25 year old. But the thing to understand is that even when we recognize the difference in the latter example we still recognize them both as adults, so would be the case in Joseph’s era between him and his younger brides. The English jurist Dr. William Blackstone, whose Commentaries On The Laws of England, “became the major resource for American statutory and case law for more than a century after the Constitution was written,” (that would be 1787 to 1887, right when Joseph lived) says this about at what age men and women became mature enough to make decisions about their lives on such topics as work and marriage:
The ages of male and female are different for different purposes. A male at twelve years old may take the oath of allegiance; at fourteen is at years of discretion, and therefore may consent or disagree to marriage, may choose his guardian, and, if his discretion be actually proved, may make his testament of his personal estate; at seventeen may be an executor; and at twenty-one is at his own disposal, and may aliene [alien, that is to sell] his lands, goods, and chattels. A female also at seven years of age may be betrothed or given in marriage; at nine is entitled to dower; at twelve is at years of maturity, and therefore may consent or disagree to marriage, and, if proved to have sufficient discretion, may bequeath her personal estate; at fourteen is at years of legal discretion, and may choose a guardian; at seventeen may be executrix; and at twenty-one may dispose of herself and her lands.
Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books, Vol. 1. pg. 290, e-book edition.
Notice at which age women were considered to have reached the age of maturity and could make life altering decisions, such as whether or not to get married. Fourteen. (As a side note, the exact age Joseph was sealed to Helen Mar Kimball.) In an era where people argue that you shouldn’t get married until you’re thirty, the idea of a fourteen year old being mature enough to get married seems wild to us. But the point is that it wasn’t in 1843. You weren’t an adolescent “teenager” at fourteen, both men and women were considered mature enough to get married and begin managing their lands and properties. So to say that the maturity level between Joseph Smith and one of his younger plural brides was that of a teen and an adult and is therefore wrong is to ignore that in Joseph Smith’s era there were no teenagers. In the early 1800s the relationship between Joseph Smith and his younger brides was seen as being between mature adult and mature adult. Indeed, in an era were alcoholism was rampant and spousal abuse/rape was common (more on this momentarily), being married to an older temperance man who was well respected in the community and known to not be violent or abusive might be considered a feature in 1843.
Which may be why of all his young brides none of them ever attacked Joseph for it; rather they defended him, their relationships with him, and plural marriage in general for the rest of their lives, long after they became strong, intelligent, articulate adults who could have if they had wanted to do so. Even the ones who left the church, like Fanny Alger who joined a Universalist church after her parents moved west to Utah, never attacked Joseph for their relationship. Given the amount of money these women could have made on the anti-Mormon speaking circuit they might have even become prosperous by doing so (well, their families could have as the money would have been controlled by their husbands.) That they never did and instead defended the practice is a strong indication that whatever we think of it now, they never felt victimized or diminished by their relationships with the Prophet. After studying this, Dr. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, an emertia Professor of Early American History and Professor of Women’s Studies at Harvard University, said:
What amazes me, to me the most powerful finding — new to me — was the incredible loyalty, reverence and sanctification of Joseph by his former wives [after his death]. They continue to meet [in Utah] on his birthday to celebrate it or meet to read over the Nauvoo minutes. This little circle of women become a kind of spiritual core, almost an unrecognized quorum. They use that reverence to sustain themselves as some people are pushing back against them.
These were clearly women who did not feel taken advantage of by the Prophet Joseph Smith. Indeed, the effort by anti-Mormons to turn these incredible women into incapable idiots unable to think for themselves or believe anything less than what they’re told by religious leaders so that anti-Mormons can dismiss the witnesses of these women is at least as sexist and dehumanizing as those same anti-Mormons claim Joseph Smith was when practicing polygamy.
Power
The idea that a marriage is supposed to be a relationship of equals where both the man and the woman share the responsibilities and neither has more authority than or over the other is a very modern one. This was not the cause in antebellum America. In the early 1800s an unmarried woman was legally dominated by her father and had no control over herself or her property, even if she were in her 20s, and she stayed in her home under he father’s control until marriage. Once married she essentially became the legal property of her husband, with no right to control even her own wages. Husbands could legally rape their wives in the United States as society didn’t even consider spousal rape possible. It wasn’t until 1871 that any state made wife beating illegal. In American society in the 1840s a woman’s status was equal to that of a child and just above a slave. There was no such thing as an equal power dynamic and except for a very small minority no one considered that a concern. In fact it was usually the opposite case with efforts to involve women in society as equals being met with suspicion, distrust, and anger.
Take, for example, the American Anti-Slavery Society. It was founded in 1830 and quickly became the largest proponent for the ending of slavery in the nation. Women were involved in it from the very start. Yet a huge schism resulted in the founding of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 when AASS leader William Lloyd Garrison argued the radical notion that women should be allowed into its leadership position as equals with men. A large percentage of the people most radically dedicated to equality in the United States chose to divide the movement entirely rather than admit women as equals. That is just how engrained the gender divide and male power was into American society. To try and condemn Joseph Smith’s relationships for not having something that no relationship had and which society in general didn’t even consider a priority or necessity is nonsensical. Yes, his marriages to some of his wives may have had an uneven power dynamic, but so did his marriage to Emma, and so did the marriage of every man and woman in the United States.
Conclusions
Once again we see that the major problem in Joseph Smith’s marriages was neither the age nor power equality in the relationship, not for the people of antebellum America anyway. In fact, I cannot think of any publication from his lifetime where people said that the age of his wives was the problem. The problem for them was that they were polygamous. The problem today isn’t polygamy but ignorance. We live in a totally different world than our ancestors of only a few centuries ago. Our social, political, racial, and romantic dynamics are fundamentally different now than they were then. Industrialization has totally transformed how we live our lives, the structures of our societies, and the roles of men and women in our societies that few of us can even recognize those of our ancestral past because they were so different from our own. To attack these people of the past for not thinking and acting like people of the present is to attack them for something they simply could not be. You might as well attack people today for not being born on Mars.
The actual study of history involves discovering who they were in the context of their times and how the society they lived in enculturated those within it. When we do so we find that Joseph Smith’s relationships, if considered as individual monogamous marriages, would be considered neither radical, abusive, nor pedophilic in nature. They were in fact understandable and largely acceptable products of the era in which he lived. What made them controversial and radical was that they were polygamous and that is what earned him the ire and hatred of the people around him. We can recognize these things even as we are also glad that we better understand human development and have developed better social institutions that have taken the lessons of the past and applied them in different and healthier ways while also recognizing that those in the past didn’t benefit from the knowledge and experience we have now, to say nothing of the indispensable technological and scientific developments that have made such changes possible. And all of this is context which the anti-Mormons will ignore because they want to destroy his character and disproving their claims will not do that. As with the accusation of pedophilia, once this claim is trashed they will simply move on to the next bit of shocking slander they can come up with. To their ultimate frustration though the work of God continues despite their manifold efforts to bring all the rage of Earth and Hell against it.