So in seminary, we have some anonymous questions where we write them down on a piece of paper and our seminary teacher will answer them.

In my anonymous question I asked, "Did Joseph Smith practice polygamy with a 14 year old?"

My seminary teacher replied that he had indeed practiced polygamy with a 14 year old, but that it was perfectly fine and acceptable because in the 1800's almost all girls got married at 14 years old.

He then said that if we had lived in pioneer times, every girl in the room would have been married by now (we're 14-15).

That isn't true. I looked up the average ages of marriage in the early 1800s and it was about 20. He basically told a blatant lie to apologize for Joseph Smith.

Also, even if it was true and every girl got married at 14, it doesn't make it right. This is so wrong on every level, I don't care who is doing it. These girls lives and potential would be wasted, and they would probably die very young because of how many children they are forced to bear.

He basically said that child marriage was ok because "everyone else was doing it!" And they weren't even doing it.

I am just so sick of TBMs (and others for that matter) justifying rape! Its F%#@ing rape!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 10:42PM by maddyb.

Good for you for working it out so early!

Hopefully your question will make the other girls in your class start thinking too.

When I was your age,it was in seminary that I started having doubts too. I confirmed that the bible myths that we knew were impossible - the global flood and tower of Babel and so on - were in the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham and Moses. So it became pretty clear they were just made up using bible myths.

If you look through the genealogical records of the Smith family, all the males' first marriages were to women in their 20s. One Smith sister married in her late teens. They didn't start marrying teenagers until they started practicing polygamy. The same is true of all polygamy-era saints.

Besides, in the rare cases where 14-17 year old girls married, it was to someone close to their age, not someone their fathers' age.

Yes it is rape. It is forceable rape. Those girls had no choice. They were told these men were "of God". Sickening....old perverts hitting on the young since older women were likely not falling for it as much.

Show this to him http://signaturebooks.com/2011/06/craig-foster-defends-joseph-smiths-underage-marriages/

My ancestors have been in central Illinois since 1832 and I have been working on my family history for the last 25 years. I can tell you that your seminary is full of crap - it was not common for creepy men in their 30's marrying 14 year old girls in Illinois.

I know, just another lie the church tells in order to justify the actions of a pervert!!

Like MB said, even if they were marrying at 14 it wouldn't be right...and that assumes less of an age disparity.
JS was almost 40 when he married HMK.
But, there's the coercion factor too, that he blatantly manipulated girls into terrifying proposals by pretending to speak for god. The details patly falsify Smith as anything but a charlatan. When one woman refused his proposal he defamed her.
Smith was a criminal. He was a rapist, a murderer, a conman, a liar, a charlatan.
F*ck him.
The only reason it's regrettable he was murdered was because it martyrized him and IMO helped the regime.

I've heard plenty of TBM's use that myth to justify Smith's polygamy, even though marriage records from the 1800's show that women were at least 18 when they got married, with many in their 20's. People reacted to Joseph Smith's polygamous marriages to teenagers in the same way those TBM's react to Warren Jeffs, with disgust.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/06/2013 11:30PM by adoylelb.

Here's one table that you might find useful. It is NIH approved data from the Journal of Southern History. Scroll down, and you will see census data for all areas of the U.S.

For the U.S. as a whole, the average age of first marriage for women in 1850 was 23.1 . Out on the frontier, the average age dipped just a bit lower, averaging about 20-22 depending on the location and year though the 1800's.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002115/table/T1/

Not even Mormon polygamists were typically married at 14. Almost every line of my mother's genealogy went through polygamy, and the youngest was married at 16 -- and even that was lied about in our genealogy. She was reported to be 17, but Danish birth records show otherwise.

In Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, she talked about a friend of hers who was married at a young age. IIRC it was 14 or 15. Wilder described how horrified she and her sister were by that. It was not typical at all.

BTW, Helen Mar Kimball wasn't the only 14 year old that Joseph Smith "married." Nancy Winchester was another 14 year old. Then there was Fanny Alger, who was 16, and there were other underage girls. Maybe your seminary teacher means that all the young girls were married to Smith.

There was a previous post about this some weeks ago.
Very few people that looked found any marriages at 14.
In my family history I found only 1 such marriage, though I found 6 or so 16 and 17 year olds that married. I went back to the year 1575.

I was going to mention Laura ingalls too. Almonzo Wilder was 10 yrs older than she was. She married him at 18 yrs of age, not 14 like smith was doing to girls. And he stayed with her, not adding more so girls like Helen lost their girlhood and chance to be with kids her own age.

It doesn't help that damn Michael Landon's revisionist history & rewriting of the books married Laura off at 16. & even had Mary married off, at 17 no less! That damn show made it all look legit. Other teen characters on that show got married too. In one early episode, they had Mary engaged at 13 to her 15 year old beau, John. At least they were close in age.

It's not true that almost all girls got married at 14. However, it is true that it was a lot more common to get married at that age back then than it is today.

My seminary teacher also told us about this. I already knew beforehand though. I was surprised he mentioned it tbh, So now all the youth in my ward know that Joseph Smith married a 14 year-old, and 7 years later, they're all still active (some are on missions).

I'm sure all kinds of perverse stuff went on back in those days that we may never know about. BTW, you're lucky to have heard about it. I didn't learn about Smith's screwing around with underage girls until after I graduated from BYU.

Anon212 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> It's not true that almost all girls got married at 14. However, it is true that it was a lot more common to get married at that age back then than it is today.

No, it wasn't. Look at the NIH data. In 1850 in the U.S. as a whole, only 12.2 percent of girls married between the ages of 12-19 (and I think we can assume that most of those girls were on the older end of that range.) That number fell to 11 percent by 1880.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002115/table/T1/

According to 2002 CDC data, the probability nowadays of being married before age 18 is 6 percent.

http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db19.htm

So *at best* there is only 6.2 percent difference. Given that at least some, and perhaps many of the girls in the 1850 NIH sample were probably 18 or 19, and that drops the difference even further.

In Mormonism truth has always been negotiable. Things are "true" when they serve the church.

And how many early Mormons were British?

The Marriage Act (England & Wales, 1837) set the age of consent at 16 (previously it had been 12 for girls & 14 for boys), but the average age for marriage was 23. I have a handful of girls on my family tree who married at 16/17, but they married 17/18 yr old boys.

That age of consent had little to do with marriage and a lot to do with prostitution and statutory rape.

So in the next anonymous question session, why not write on your slip "In the last session you said everyone got married at 14. But I looked it up, and according to the NIH, that's just not true. People didn't get married until their 20s. Why did you say what you did?"

+1

Was (I wouldn't claim was norm) went like water under the bridge..
We are talking Wild West, Law Enforcement was practically non existent. People like Joseph, Brigham were the Law....

and early 1800's....
That might not be widely practiced habit but it wasn't out of ordinary....
I find both sides defending/objecting irrelevant.
Bottom line was People like Joseph got away with it...
And not only that, people got away (far more often than that} with murder.

Surrounded by teachers which several would be males in their 30's.

It's not hard to see that she empathizes with the plight of these girls in the past.

They would have been like her, but forced to be married without choice.

It's odd you aren't understanding that.

"Not widely practiced...wasn't out of the ordinary."

That's funny. I won't argue the semantics of your self-contradictory statement, but it's worth noting.

Yes, we all need to be concerned about presentism, imposing modern ethics on past cultures, but we should also take care to avoid confusing the greater frequency of juvenile marriage in the 19th century with cultural acceptance.

Anyway, Helen Mar Kimball didn't seem to think that it was okay, and hers is the most relevant perspective in this context. She was manipulated into a relationship with a man more than twice her age, and was subsequently raped by that man.

Joseph institutionalized child rape by introducing children into polygamous relationships solemnized in the temples. That was never okay. Joseph purchased his child bride by selling spiritual gifts to her father; that there's child sex slavery, and was not okay. He extorted her into agreeing to be his wife, claiming that her entire family's eternal salvation was contingent on her giving herself up to him. NOT. OKAY.

Joseph knew that his sexual practices weren't okay, and that's why he kept them secret. He was tarred and feathered and nearly castrated for dipping his quill in a poor young woman; her family and friends clearly didn't think what he did was usual or right!

Come on, man, wake up and THINK. History shows that Smith and his pedophilic patriarchy were engaging in sexual practices that horrified and enraged the local populace, including the taking of child brides.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/07/2013 11:03AM by En Sabah Nur.

The idea runs rampant among Mormons just like stories about crickets and about elevator shafts in the temple. It's faith promoting drivel.

Even when a girl did marry that young she married someone closer to her own age, not a man more than twice her age.

She would not marry an already married man.

They couple would marry publicly and legally not in some bogus, secret ceremony and then keep the "marriage" a secret to their family and friends.

She would not misrepresent herself as a single woman. They would set up a household and live openly together as husband and wife.

This has been discussed in the past on RfM. I seem to recall someone posting another disturbing fact about the 14 year old brides. Females in the nineteenth century entered puberty several years later than they do now. So these young girls that Joseph Smith married were literally more likely to be child brides.

Maybe someone on here knows where to look up the data on female puberty in the nineteenth century?

According to a study cited by Wiki, the average age of first menarche in England in 1850 was 17 years of age. France in 1840 was over age 15 according to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menarche#Changes_in_time_of_average_age

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/09/19/changing-biology-age-at-first-menstruation/

I think that assuming an average age of at least 15 for first menarche is fair. So it is entirely possible that some of Joseph Smith's plural wives had not yet hit puberty.

Seminary teacher lied. What's new.????

For the working class of british origin marrying in your 20ies was the norm since way back before colonizing america. And most people are the working class. Just because there were no laws against marrying a 12-year old girl and some aristocrats in europe still did it in JS's time doesn't mean it was common or socially accepted in the US.