A Foreign Kingdom

It’s hard to imagine America’s model religious group being so despised. The cover of this book portrays the Mormons as hookah-smoking Arabs with scantily clad harems, despite the Mormons’ policy of no alcohol and no smokes. There was anti-Mormon sentiment in the 1800’s, but the Mormons were largely unaffected by it. Since they lived in Utah, which was half a continent away from Washington, there wasn’t much that the Federal government would do.

Christina Talbot has written this extensively researched and thorough work as a history of the USA’s attitude towards the Mormons in the 1800’s. She portrays them as undermining sexist attitudes of the time by allowing women to have more of a say in community affairs. She also postulates that polygamy was the result of a gender imbalance; there were more women than men in the community, so competition for husbands was fierce. Without polygamy, the women would have to settle for less decent men.

In the cover cartoon, we see that divorce was also an issue. At the time, men couldn’t divorce their wives if the marriage was unhappy, so the norm was to cheat (or get a hooker and give your wife an STD.) Harper’s weekly had a cartoon that portrayed women migrating to the USA as cooks and maids, which was the norm for women who travelled to the USA alone. But what about educated women who wanted careers and families at the same time? It didn’t work that way; a woman couldn’t have a career and a family of her own. It just didn’t work that way. Most women who had careers (usually teachers or nurses) ended up as old maids.