An interesting article by Mary Campbell, from a few years back, suggests that anti-polygamy laws were ultimately concerned with protecting an equitable distribution of mens’ property rights in women. The article is at 13 Yale J.L. & Feminism 29 (2001).
Campbell writes:
According to Congress, polygamy and democracy could never coexist because there simply were not enough women. . . . [A]s Representative Lyon of New York argued, “[it] has been demonstrated clearly by all political economists . . . that one man is just enough for one woman . . . that there should be no monopoly of the fair sex.” For Congress, polygamy threatened democracy because it led to an unequal allocation of women. Strassberg might be correct in arguing that monogamy promotes the personal and political growth of women, but such concerns did not occupy Congress at the time. Rather, compulsory monogamy sought to prevent Mormon men from “fill[ing] their houses with the blooming beauties of the North, and the witching women of the South . . . .” Or, in the language of the Peay court, from absconding with their chattel. “With the same propriety might a man who steals a horse ask how he can act in regard to other men’s horses and not lay himself liable to conviction for larceny. To tell him that he must simply cease stealing would not be at all satisfactory to him.” The polygamy acts mandated monogamy in order to prevent stealing. . . . The federal government viewed both polygamy and monogamy as a means of distributing women between men; it simply preferred the monogamous allocation.
Campbell’s thesis cuts against arguments made by Sally Gordon, Maura Strassberg, and others. While some modern feminist scholars have argued that anti-polygamy laws were a correct response to against an oppressive patriarchal practice, Campbell argues that the laws were instead just inteded to protect the right kinds of patriarchy.
I don’t think that Campbell’s arguments are a perfect explanation of anti-polygamy laws. My friend Nate Oman has critiqued Campbell on empirical grounds. As for me, I’m inclined to think that anti-polygamy laws sprang from a number of intellectual and political seeds. Sally Gordon’s focus on religious motivation seems like a good description of a major driving force. But a part of Campbell’s argument resonates with me, and I think that at least some actors may have been motivated by the women-as-property concerns that Campbell elucidates. (It’s pretty hard not to get that sense from the Peay case, for instance).
Posted by Kaimi Wenger on May 12, 2005 at 04:53 PM