Abstract
What makes polygamy visible as a family system? This is the question that many polygamous families asked themselves during the 1880s as the federal government began to enforce anti-Mormon laws in the 1880s. The intensity of federal enforcement meant that every polygamous family, both rank-and-file members of the Church and high-profile leaders alike, had to re-evaluate their visibility. This dissertation explores how polygamous families created strategies of secrecy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It follows a transitional period from when the federal government began enforcing anti-polygamy laws in the 1880s to when the Mormon religious community policed and excised polygamists in their midst in the 1910s. This dissertation focuses on the experiences of the people policed by institutions to understand how communities navigate legal pressure and institutional change. It shows a textured view of a community in transition and a church hierarchy at odds with one another using personal records including diaries, memoirs, and oral histories. Instead of emphasizing the coerciveness of the state or church institutions, therefore, this dissertation centers the strategies that people use to navigate constraints. Practices of secrecy go beyond the binary of truth and deceit. Instead of focusing on the content of polygamists’ secrets, this dissertation examines their calculated use of suggestive language, coded words, and even silence. Secrecy was also embedded in polygamists’ patterns of evasion and the ways that they imagined geography. Some places were dangerous, and others were “refuges.” Polygamist strategies of secrecy are reminiscent of other communities, past and present, that live under legal and cultural constraints. Mormons, ever famous for their prolific record keeping, can help shed light on the secretive practices of constrained communities. The difference, I argue, is that Mormons could capitalize on their privilege in unique ways even as they kept secrets. Polygamous husbands and wives could evade notice while growing their families because their deviance was not imprinted on their bodies. Their deviance was a result of their religious and sexual choices. Their polygamy was only visible through their family performances and their community reputation. Mormon whiteness allowed polygamists to blend into new communities. Mormon polygamy and secret-keeping, therefore, is a way to understand both privilege and precarity in a community that was structured by legal and religious constraints.