Women's Experiences in LDS Plural Marriages: What Their Own Words Reveal

A look at how Latter-day Saint women documented their lives in polygamous households through diaries and letters—what they reveal about hardship, agency, and faith.

By Garret Merkley · Explainer · Jun 4, 2026

Branched from Plural Marriage in Early Latter-day Saint History

Quick take

LDS women in plural marriages left detailed personal records that complicate simple narratives of victimhood or willing sacrifice.
Their accounts show real tensions: jealousy and loneliness alongside spiritual conviction and practical cooperation.
These primary sources are crucial to understanding how women actually experienced and negotiated polygamy, not just how church leaders framed it.

When the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints practiced plural marriage in the 1800s, the women living it left behind thousands of pages of personal writing—diaries, letters, reminiscences. These documents are the closest we have to women's own voices on what it felt like to share a husband, manage a household, raise children in a polygamous family, and navigate the social and legal consequences. They are not uniform accounts of suffering or acceptance, but rather complex, often contradictory records of real people making sense of an extraordinary circumstance.

What These Records Actually Document

The diaries and letters of LDS plural wives record everyday life: births, illnesses, financial strain, the logistics of rotating time with a shared husband, and the emotional weight of infidelity sanctioned by religion. Women wrote about preparing meals, managing children, attending community events, and worrying about money. But they also recorded their interior lives—moments of profound loneliness, anger at a husband's new marriage, jealousy toward sister wives, and also, sometimes, genuine affection for them. Some women documented their spiritual experiences and how their faith in the church's teachings helped them endure. Others expressed doubt, resentment, or pragmatic resignation. A few recorded quiet resistance: subtle ways they asserted control over their own lives and households.

These records are scattered across archives, family collections, and published reminiscences. The Utah State Historical Society, Brigham Young University, and the Church History Library hold significant collections. Not all women wrote, and those who did were often more literate and had more leisure time than poorer wives. This means the surviving record skews toward women of relative privilege, though even wealthy plural wives faced the core tensions of the system.

Key Themes That Emerge Across Accounts

Jealousy and hurt: Women frequently wrote about the pain of a husband taking another wife, the humiliation of public knowledge, and the raw emotion of sharing intimate life.
Economic pressure: Polygamy strained resources. Many wives worked—took in laundry, kept gardens, sold goods—to support their children, and documented this labor in detail.
Cooperation and pragmatism: Some wives developed working relationships with co-wives, dividing household tasks, childcare, and time with the husband in ways that reduced conflict.
Spiritual justification: Many women framed polygamy as a divine principle, writing about their duty to accept it and their hope for exaltation in the afterlife.
Isolation and loneliness: Wives recorded long periods alone while husbands were with other wives, or away on church business, and the emotional toll of that separation.
Ambivalence about children: Some women expressed deep love and pride in their children; others wrote of the heartbreak of raising them in secrecy or stigma, or of losing custody in divorce.

How These Accounts Complicate the Narrative

Church leaders at the time presented plural marriage as a woman's sacred duty and a path to spiritual honor. Modern critics have often framed it as exploitation or abuse. The diaries suggest something messier: women were neither passive victims nor willing saints, but agents navigating an impossible system with varying degrees of choice, belief, and resilience. Some women left their husbands and the church over polygamy. Others stayed, found meaning in it, and built lives within it. Many did both—they suffered and persevered, they resented and endured, they loved and grieved. The documents show women talking back to the official story, even as they lived within its constraints.

Why This Matters

These personal records are irreplaceable historical evidence. They show how ordinary women experienced a religious practice that shaped their families, their bodies, their legal status, and their futures. They reveal the gap between institutional rhetoric and lived reality—a gap that exists in any religion or community, but is especially stark in plural marriage. For LDS historians and members, they offer a more honest, human picture of the church's past. For historians of women, religion, and the American West, they document how women negotiated power, identity, and belief in extreme circumstances. And for anyone interested in how people justify or resist practices that cause them pain, these accounts offer raw, firsthand testimony.

A Note on Sources and Bias

Surviving accounts are not representative of all women. Educated, literate women who had time to write were more likely to leave records.
Some diaries and letters were edited or selected for publication by family members or institutions, which may have shaped what we see.
A few women wrote retrospectively, decades later, which can affect memory and tone.
The most dramatic or eloquent accounts tend to be cited more often, potentially skewing our sense of what was typical.

How to Engage With These Sources

Read multiple accounts from the same time and place to spot patterns and variation.
Pay attention to tone and emotion, not just events. What made a woman reach for her pen?
Consider what is not written. Gaps can reveal censorship, shame, or things too painful to record.
Look for the woman's own language and concerns, not just what modern readers expect to find.
Contextualize: understand the legal, economic, and social pressures she was under, and the religious language available to her.

Did all LDS women in plural marriages feel the same way about it?

No. Some embraced it as a spiritual principle and found ways to make it work. Others endured it with deep resentment. Most fell somewhere in between, with feelings that shifted over time. Age, temperament, economic security, the husband's character, and the quality of relationships with co-wives all mattered.

Can we trust what women wrote in their diaries?

Diaries are personal documents, not objective records, but they are valuable precisely because they capture what a woman thought and felt at the time. They may not be 'true' in a journalistic sense, but they are true to her experience. The key is to read them carefully, in context, and alongside other sources.

Did women ever refuse to enter plural marriage?

Yes. Some women left the church rather than accept polygamy. Others negotiated with their husbands or church leaders to avoid it. But in a community where the practice was framed as divine law and essential to salvation, refusal came at a real cost—social ostracism, loss of community, or family separation.

How many women's accounts survive from this period?

Hundreds of diaries, letters, and reminiscences exist, though many are fragmentary or held in private collections. Major repositories include the Utah State Historical Society, BYU's L. Tom Perry Special Collections, and the LDS Church History Library. New accounts are still being discovered and digitized.

Are these accounts used differently by LDS historians and secular historians?

Yes. LDS historians may emphasize women's spiritual conviction and resilience; secular historians may focus on the structural inequities and emotional costs. Both approaches can learn from the documents themselves, which contain evidence for multiple interpretations.

Sources

Utah State Historical Society and BYU Special Collections hold extensive diaries and correspondence from LDS plural wives, 1840s–1890s.
Scholars including Jessie L. Embry, Kathryn M. Daynes, and Sarah Barringer Gordon have analyzed these primary sources in peer-reviewed historical work.
The LDS Church History Library (now Church History Department) has published and digitized selected accounts, though access and selection reflect institutional priorities.