Wired Women: Helping to Survive Polygamy
May 16 -- It was, by any measure, an unusual family unit: Two sisters. One husband. Fourteen children. A life of secrecy and poverty in the Utah desert, just north of Salt Lake City.
In the name of God and eternal salvation.
"The theology is that you will become a goddess in eternity, and you and your husband and all his other wives will populate heaven," explains Rowenna Erickson, now 61. "You live in fear that you're going to go to hell, so you suppress your feelings and you keep your mouth shut.
"Stupid, huh?"
Erickson looks back with humor and anger on the years she spent as a "multiple wife" in a Mormon fundamentalist community. Her parents helped establish the "Davis County Cooperative" in the 1930s, she says, and she grew up "indoctrinated into that lifestyle."
Erickson and her sister married the eldest son of one of the group's co-founders. For decades, they took turns sleeping with their husband, and their children called him "uncle" for fear authorities would discover the truth.
That was standard operating procedure for polygamous groups, Erickson says. One clan she knew of included one husband and 34 wives, with whom he slept in alphabetical order.
"You're living a lie," she says. "It's a life of secrecy. And you learn that you are never to be critical of your husband; it's a sin to talk against him. It's a patriarchy and he's in charge."
In God's Name
Polygamy was introduced to Utah more than 150 years ago by Mormon pioneers. Joseph Smith, founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had five wives. His successor, Brigham Young, who led the faithful to the Utah desert in 1847, had 55.
But the practice went underground in 1890, when the Church buckled to federal pressure and banned multiple marriages as a condition of Utah statehood. Today, the Mormon church — to which about 70 percent of state residents belong — excommunicates polygamists.
That hasn't deterred the estimated 20,000 to 100,000 religious fundamentalists who continue to live in secret "plural marriages" under the radar of state and church authorities. Until recently, the state took a "don't ask-don't tell " approach. But nine months before the 2002 Winter Olympic Games arrive in Utah, officials appear to be cracking down on a lifestyle that makes most of its upstanding citizens — not to mention its politicians — cringe.
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