Pedogamy--Marrying girls to old men

[_Maksutov]

http://www.theutahbee.com/2018/11/13/se ... ds-church/

Most members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“LDS”) are likely aware that founding prophet and church president, Joseph Smith, had some 33 wives, including Helen Mar Kimball whom he married when he was 37 and she was 14. Several other wives were under 18 as well when he married them, such as Sarah Ann Whitney (17), Flora Woodworth (16), Lucy Walker (17), and Nancy Winchester (14 or 15). Mormon apologists have noted that Smith had no known progeny by any of his plural wives. Therefore, sex may have not played a part in these “celestial marriages” or spiritual-wifery, as it was called back then. We are now all appropriately horrified to hear of the sexual outrages that Warren Jeffs and members of his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) have committed, such as marrying very young girls to much older men. But in doing so, the FLDS church is doing exactly what the mainstream LDS church did from the 1840s through at least the 1870s.

In the data I have collected over many years, I have found that a significant number of girls aged 11 to 16 were married in Utah to men at least a decade older than they were; some men were even in their 60s when they married these girls. These girls were giving birth to children within a year or so of marriage, proving that these marriages to child brides included sex. Apologists respond to this by claiming that this was not uncommon in America back then, and that we have no right to place our modern ethics on a time and culture so far removed from us. However, the data that I have collected on American marital practices of the mid-1800s does not bear this out at all. Child brides marrying significantly older men were very rare everywhere I investigated, except in Utah. There are also plenty of contemporary indications that it was these pedogamous marriages, a neologism I coined for much older men marrying young girls, that were especially noxious to non-Mormons, not necessarily polygamy per se. They clearly transgressed the mores of those days as well, bringing down the ire of the world on Mormonism.

I have known since I was 12, when I began doing my own genealogy, that my Mormon ancestry included some child brides. My third great-grandmother, Phoebe Augusta Hubbard, turned 15 the day she polygamously married 46-year-old Abiah Wadsworth, LDS bishop of the East Weber Ward in northern Utah. This means she was being courted at 14 by a man three times her age. However, I had no idea just how prevalent this was.

[_Stem]

Very cool. Thanks for your efforts and thanks for sharing.

I mean very cool work, not very cool news about child brides.

[_Maksutov]

Very cool. Thanks for your efforts and thanks for sharing.

I mean very cool work, not very cool news about child brides.

Not my work but thanks anyway.

[_Lemmie]

Thanks for the link, maksutov, it's fascinating. A great insight into the family dynamics that shaped a lot of my ancestors' lives as well.

[_toon]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2LQMElLoLs

I think this is going to be in the new hymnal.