I think in our current affluent society where children are a life goal, and booed from many quarters now as making overpopulation a worse problem, we really struggle to understand that in harder times, you MUST have children or you as a people would die. You MUST have people willing to make hard decisions and risk offending people, as all uncertainties could lead to death.

The current patriarchy and male-women relations chafe us because we are so comfortable there is no need for harshness or someone to step up and make life-or-death decisions. Maybe they are irrelevant and should be done away with. But maybe they are a blueprint for survival being passed down like old family lace, with the expectation that someone may really need this again some day.

They say a dog is two meals short of a wolf. How many days of power outages are humans short of having to return to “repressive” survival tactics?

Happened in my family. Not only that, but the only happy polygynous family I know of is Abraham Owen Smoot’s. When I was studying anthropology at the U of U, I looked at polygynous (ok, I said “anthropology, so my acedemic vocabulary, such as it is, is kicking in), marriage ages. First marriage, 20ish. Second marriage, 40ish for man, 19ish for the woman. Third marriage, older for man, 19ish for woman, and so it goes.

With each successive marriage, the man gets older, the female is always about 19, though. Even Abraham Owen Smoot, whose marriages were pretty happy (mainly because they weren’t really marriages, as far as I can tell) took a 17 year old wife when he was in his 60′s and being prosecuted for polygamy. He kept her secret, and it took some ferreting for me to discover her. He lived with her. Pretty much all the men “lived’ with their youngest wives, no matter their age.

So, yes, the older women got essentially abandoned all the time. All the time.
All my friends with family memories of polgamy (I know it’s polygyny, but I’m going with the folk spelling) are sad, sad, sad. Including Brigham Young’s comment that his wives wanted him to divorce all the other wives but them.

Plus, couldn’t you get a divorce in Utah for 50 bucks? I seem to recall Utah was a haven for such activities in the latter part of the 19th century, for both men and women.

Ardis, I would like to see some documentation that my premise, that the

A couple of things occurred to me while reading the comments:

Not all polygamous fathers had many wives and tons of children; and not all of them were asked to travel frequently away from their homes. As I understand it, many men were like my great-grandfather, who lived his entire life in the Salt Lake Valley, had only two wives (djinnn, #26, gave another example of that), and only six of his eleven children lived past early childhood.

Also, a large proportion of people living in the 19th century were involved either full or part-time with farming, and that usually meant that all the boys (and sometimes the girls) often spent time with their fathers as they worked side by side on the farm.

But just as a thought experiement, let’s imagine it was the mother with 60 children, spread out over generations (maybe she had multiple births repeatedly, or went on an adopting spree). Certainly she should be capable of knowing all their names and birthdates. Do we imagine she’d be a “good parent”? If we’re suspicious, why is this situation different from fatherhood?

You have to remember that a polygamous father doesn’t have 60 children, all between the ages of 1-10. The children are usually spread out over decades. If you know how to manage your time, and don’t blow 10-20 hours a week watching T.V., then spending time with your children isn’t a problem.

A first grade school teacher has 30 children, all at the same age, and all at once, and I don’t think anyone would argue that the teacher is lacking in influence in those children’s lives. Is a father incapable of doing what the average elementry school teacher can do?