Book Review

Kathryn M. Daynes has transformed her dissertation from Indiana University into this well-crafted publication that analyzes the Mormon marriage system of nineteenth-century America. The text retains a dissertation earnestness of tone and density of notes, but makes more widely available Daynes's fine work. She has joined the previous studies of Mormon polygamy with the recent revisionist scholarship in family history and tested them all against her stunningly rich data set. The set includes the complete marital history for 153 men and 436 of their 444 wives who lived in Manti, Utah, from 1849, when the town was established by Mormon settlers, to 1910, the era after the 1890 Manifesto in which Mormon leaders advised followers to obey congressional laws forbidding plural marriage. This depth of detail enables Daynes to, sometimes smugly, disagree with the conclusions of, and fill in the gaps left by, previous scholars.

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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—otherwise known as the Mormons—was founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 in Upstate New York. Today Mormonism is by far the largest and richest of the indigenous religious movements to have arisen in the United States. In addition, Mormons were important in the Euro-American settlement of the American West and created a distinctive subculture that continues to dominate Utah and the Intermountain region. Daynes argues that this makes the Mormon marriage system a significant case study in the impact of law and religion on patterns of marriage and divorce in the United States.

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